About this site

Central New Mexico sits on a continental rift. The crust is being pulled apart, the valley between the ranges is the gap it has opened, and the same word — rift — covers this ground and the floor of East Africa. Everything on this site is either a piece of that break or something that came up through it.

Seven sections carry twenty-one entries. The Rift covers the structure itself: the Albuquerque Basin, the faults that bound it and the fill that measures its depth. Fault Blocks takes the ranges on its margins, the Sandias, the Manzanos and Ladron Peak. Volcanic Fields and Ash and Tuff deal with what came up through the thinning crust and the sheet it laid down. Basalt and Record covers the escarpment west of the river and the images cut into it. Ground in Motion is the part that has not stopped, and Field and Record is how any of it is actually measured.

Naming and stewardship

The images along the West Mesa escarpment were made by Ancestral Pueblo people, with some cut by Spanish settlers. The Pueblo nations of the middle Rio Grande — among them Sandia, Santa Ana, Zia, Cochiti and San Ildefonso — are the communities whose ancestors made them, and Petroglyph National Monument is managed jointly by the National Park Service and the City of Albuquerque. Kasha-Katuwe Tent Rocks stands on Pueblo de Cochiti land and carries the Keresan name the Pueblo gave it.

The published record

The mapping this material rests on is public. The New Mexico Bureau of Geology and Mineral Resources at New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology publishes the state's geologic maps and open-file reports; the United States Geological Survey covers the rift in quadrangle sheets and runs the ground-motion programme; continuous positioning across the rift is maintained through the geodetic networks now held by the EarthScope Consortium. Valles Caldera National Preserve and Cibola National Forest administer much of the high ground.

All twenty-one entries are listed here.