It is a place of wonder…and dark conspiracies. The peak of Navajo Mountain, at approximately 3,148 meters (10,388 feet) elevation, is comprised of uplifted Dakota Sandstone deposited during the Cretaceous Period (approximately 66-138 million years ago).Southern California-sunny days, blue skies, neighbors on flying bicycles…ghostly submarines…mermen off the Catalina coast…and a vast underground sea stretching from the Pacific Ocean to the Inland Empire where Chinese junks ply an illicit trade and enormous creatures from ages past still survive. The igneous rock at the core of the mountain is wrapped in sedimentary layers. This oblique (from-the-side) astronaut photograph highlights Navajo Mountain in the center of the image, surrounded by light red-brown Navajo Sandstone (also visible in the canyon at bottom of the image). Navajo Mountain is one of several of these rock formations, called laccolith by geologists, in southeastern Utah’s portion of the Plateau. Navajo Mountain in southeastern Utah is a dome-shaped chunk of igneous rock that intruded into the sedimentary layers and lifted up the overlying layer. The Colorado Plateau of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah is made of mostly flat-lying layers of sedimentary rock that record paleoclimate extremes ranging from oceans to widespread deserts over the last 1.8 billion years. Geological Survey (2021) Beryllium: Mineral Resources of the United State-Economic and Environmental Geology and Prospects for Future Supply. Geological Survey Slides of the Flourspar, beryllium, and uranium deposits at Spor Mountain, Utah. NASA Spinoff (2019) Beryllium Blazes New Trail for Telescopes.NASA (2011, January 13) Not so heavy metal.NASA (2014) The Amazing Anatomy of James Webb Space Telescope Mirrors.Materion Before and After Apollo: Materion’s 60 Years in Space.(2018) Origin of the fluorine-and beryllium-rich rhyolites of the Spor Mountain Formation, Western Utah. Journal of Geochemical Exploration, 209, 106401. (2020) SHRIMP U-Pb zircon geochronology of volcanic rocks hosting world class Be-U mineralization at Spor mountain, Utah, U.S.A. After excavation, the bertrandite ore gets shipped to a nearby plant, where it is crushed into a powder and mixed with water as part of a process to separate the beryllium out. In the rocky ground around Spor Mountain, most beryllium is found within minerals such as bertrandite and beryl that formed 25 million years ago as lava cooled after a volcanic eruption. The Operational Land Imager (OLI) on Landsat 8 acquired this natural-color image of open-pit mines in the area on July 8, 2021. The beryllium used in JWST came from the area shown here - the Spor Mountain mining area in Utah. Those mirrors are made of beryllium, a relatively rare metal that is one-third lighter than aluminum but has six times the specific stiffness of steel. When the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is launched into space later this year, it will carry 18 gold-plated hexagonal mirrors that will help astronomers see back more than 13 billion years-a time when the first stars and galaxies were forming from the darkness of the early universe.
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