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Location Information:
Grand
Teton National Park is a United
States National Park located in
northwestern Wyoming, south of
Yellowstone National Park. The park
is named after the Grand Teton,
which, at 13,770 feet (4,197 m), is
the tallest mountain in the Teton
Range.
The
name "Tetons" originally was
intended to describe several hills
near the town of Arco, Idaho. They
were named by a French trapper who
thought that they resembled the
female body. Many years later the
name was mistakenly applied to the
mountains of present day Grand Teton
National Park due to the poor
map-making and map-reading standards
of the time.
The
rock units that make up the east
face of the Teton Range are around
2500 million years old and made of
metamorphosed sandstones, limestones,
various shales, and interbeded
volcanic deposits. Buried deep under
Tertiary volcanic, sedimentary, and
glacial deposits in Jackson Hole,
these same Precambrian rocks are
overlain by Paleozoic and Mesozoic
formations that have long since been
eroded away from atop the Tetons.
The
Paleozoic-aged sediments were
deposited in warm shallow seas and
resulted in various carbonate rocks
along with sandstones and shales.
Mesozoic deposition transitioned
back and forth from marine to
non-marine sediments. In later
Mesozoic, the Cretaceous Seaway
periodically covered the region and
the Sierran Arc to the west provided
volcanic sediments.
A mountain-building episode called
the Laramide orogeny started to
uplift western North America 70
million years ago and eventually
formed the Rocky Mountains. This
erased the seaway and created fault
systems along which highlands rose.
Sediment eroded from uplifted areas
filled-in subsiding basins such as
Jackson Hole while reverse faults
created the first part of the Teton
Range in the Eocene epoch. Large
Eocene-aged volcanic eruptions from
the north in the Yellowstone-Absaroka
area along with later
Pleistocene-aged Yellowstone Caldera
eruptions, left thick volcanic
deposits in basins.
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