Rocky Point Airlines

 
This is one of the Pinacate craters. The Pinacate area is a mix of Lava craters, Lava flows, cinder domes and meteor strikes. Below are shown some of the various color changes as the ambient light changes. The geology has changed little over the past thousands of years. One of the preserving factors of being in the desert. The veins on the outside of this crater shows the signs of erosion when there was an abundance of water about 15,000 years ago.

These pictures were taken from an altitude that gives a panoramic view. The flights also take a pass much lower

Most of the black areas of the craters and cinder domes are of a soft very light pumice. you can see the string of cinder domes and get a feeling for how the chain of events occurred. You do not get this perspective from the ground.

This light weight pumice is formed when there is a lot of gaseous materials in the molten lava.

 

The lower passes give you the feeling of seeing the untouched geographic panorama virtually untouched in the past 15,000 years..

Morning or afternoon flight the view is spectacular

Here is where we can see an uninterrupted moment in geological time. With the lack of rainfall and freezing conditions the metamorphosis of the areas geological conditions is very slow. These climatic conditions have been relatively constant over the last 15,000 years. Before that the sea level was high enough to have deposited the remains of marine life in the area. If you dig in some of the undisturbed sands in the area you can still find seashells. After the last ice age the polar caps were small and sea level was up to 600 feet higher than it is now.

See all this and more for just $65 per seat. Come to the Rocky Point Activities center or call 044 638 107 9754 or 044 638 384 0409.

Pinacate National Park and Biosphere Reserve is a 770-square-mile (2,000-square-kilometer) volcanic field in the Sonora province of Mexico, near the Arizona border. Surrounded by the Sonora Desert, this field contains more than 300 volcanic vents and cinder cones, including at least 10 maar craters. Maar eruptions are a rare form of volcano that erupts violently when rising magma meets underground water, producing a pocket of highly pressurized steam that blows a nearly circular hole in the crust above. The largest crater in the Pinacate Field is Cerro Elegante, a maar crater about a kilometer in diameter. Though parts of Pinacate are so barren and other-worldly that the area served as a training ground for moonward-bound astronauts, many places do support plant and animal life, including creosote bushes, prickly pear cactus, ironwood trees, the Gila woodpecker, and the Rufous hummingbird. This image of the park was captured by the Landsat 7 satellite on December 5, 2002, using bands 7, 5, and 2. The dark cinders covering the lava plain dominate the center of the scene, and numerous circular craters are visible. To the south, the sands of the Sonora Desert are carved into sinuous dunes. At top center, a diagonal gray line marks a road that runs toward the Mexico-U.S. border. Image courtesy the USG S Landsat Project.

Pinacate from Space courtesy of NASA with hundreds of interesting anomalies.