English: Cretaceous sedimentary rocks intruded by a Miocene granite laccolith (Cuernos del Paine, Torres del Paine National Park, Andes Mountains, Chile)

This stunning mountainous scenery is in southern Chile's Torres del Paine National Park. The cliffs making up the prominent mountain peaks have a thick band of light-colored rocks with dark colored rocks above and below.

The dark-colored rocks are structurally deformed (tilted & folded), Cretaceous-aged sedimentary rocks. They are mostly turbidites, which are deep seafloor deposits formed by underwater sediment slides (turbidity currents) cascading down the ancient continental slope.

The light-colored rocks are granite, a felsic, intrusive igneous rock dominated by quartz and potassium feldspar. The granite is part of a widespread laccolith, which is a lens-shaped intrusion resembling the top of an umbrella or a mushroom or toadstool. This unit, the Torres del Paine Intrusion, dates to the Middle Miocene (~12.4 to 12.6 million years ago).

The dark rocks above and below the granite intrusion have been contact metamorphosed. Some large, dark-colored xenolith blocks detached from the roof of the intrusion are visible in the cliff faces here (click on the photo to zoom in and look around).

Locality: Cuernos del Paine, Torres del Paine National Park (Blue Towers National Park), far-southern Chile, far-southern South America

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Geologic info. summarized from:

Baumgartner et al. (2014) - The Torres del Paine intrusion as a model for a shallow magma chamber. European Geosciences Union General Assembly 2014 (adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2014EGUGA..1615626B)