A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1068 entries
batholith
An enormous body of igneous rock that cooled slowly at depth instead of erupting and is now exposed at the surface only after everything above it has been stripped away. By convention, a batholith covers more than a hundred square kilometers; the Sierra Nevada batholith runs the length of the range. What you are standing on is a magma chamber that decided to chill.
Etymology
Coined in German in 1892 by the Austrian geologist Eduard Suess, from Greek bathos, depth, plus -lith, from lithos, stone — the deep stone. It reached English by about 1899. Bathos also gives bathymetry and bathyscaphe, and it is a close relation of Greek benthos, the depth of the sea.
Notes
Half Dome, El Capitan, and the granite of Joshua Tree are all exposed batholith. Because the rock cooled slowly, the crystals had time to grow large enough to see, which is why granite sparkles in the hand and basalt does not.