The History Of Yosemite S El Capitan
El Capitan was born of fire. The 3,000-foot-tall granite cliff that rises up from the present-day Yosemite Valley in central California started forming roughly 220 million years ago, when ancestral North America collided with a neighboring tectonic plate under the Pacific Ocean. The slow, grinding impact forced the Pacific plate beneath what is now California, igniting a subterranean pressure cooker that liquefied the earth’s deepest rock layers into red-hot magma....