Please LIKE and SUBSCRIBE.  I also appreciate your continual support of these geology education videos. To do so,  go here: https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=EWUSLG3GBS5W8  

or: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/shawnwillsey

or go to my website and click on Donate button: https://www.willseygeology.com/

I don't know if it's an indicator of the geologic history of Baja California and the Gulf of California, or whether it's just coincidental, but the fact that the Salton Sea area and Salton Butte is  volcanic in nature gives a hint real or  accidental, of the area's past.

A few years ago I flew to Ciudad Chihuahua and traveled across the Sierra Madre Occidental to the coast on the Barrancas del Cobre train.  It transits the Cañon del Cobre, in many ways bigger than the Grand Canyon of the Colorado.  Its walls are made of thousands of feet of extrusive volcanics representing hundreds and hundreds of overlapping Yellowstone-type volcanic calderas and their deposits.  In the same way that the Cascades have volcanoes built on ghost volcanoes, the Sierra Madre Occidental is made up stacked chains of ghost volcanoes.  The western side of those volcanic terranes was rifted away from mainland Mexico to become this area in Baja.

An excellent way to fit the puzzle pieces together! Salud!

This is so interesting! The changes in the geology of northwestern Mexico is amazing. Latest volcanism in the region might be represented by Las Tres Virgenes volcanic complex along with shield volcano such as Isla Tortuga.
Look forward for your next video professor Willsey!

Thx Shawn...interesting geologic history of Baja  California...
Appreciate your travels to show and tell how our earth was created formed and sculpted by natural forces.
Stay safe.

So great, illustrations, human narration, clear and concise. I saw Cabo San Lucas, San Jose Del Cabo, and Todos Santos just before covid-19 and wondered about the geology. You don't think about slabs moving west since the US California and west coast was built of subducting slabs moving east with accretion wedges building up the west coast. Interesting that the angle of the subduction can effect volcano location. I need to go back to BCS and look at the rocks this time. It is magical down there, especially Todos Santos. And I'd love to paddle around Loreto and Mulage.

As always a wonderful class. You always explain in detail but very interesting.

Ned zinger has done videos on the north, nice to hear about the south.

Neat.  This part of North America is very complex.  The exotic terranes that make up Baja (and San Diego County and parts of Orange County) are much older than these young (!) volcanics in this video.  Many people may not be aware of just how much transformation this part of the world has undergone since the Jurassic.

Thanks for this. I would never have guessed the volcanic history there. Fun stuff again.

2:29 - Parts of the lower group conglomerate also look like mudflow/lahar as well, at least just seeing a few seconds in the the video. Great stuff, thanks Shawn!

Very interesting. Thanks for explaining so clearly!

Great explanation of the volcanic arc migration illustrated by field videos. I didn’t know that story.

Shawn! Thank you so much for doing a Baja series. It’s my favorite place on Earth. It’s got everything, geology, paleontology, old missions, great food and people but most of all..fishing!

Thanks friend, 💯🇺🇲🙏

When we lived in San Diego we did a lot of Baja travel. Loreto was my first stop in Baja for a fly-in fishing trip and later my wife and I drove there several times in out Land Cruiser and later in our pickup camper. We drove and camped to Cabo and back, bot most trips never got much further south than Loreto.  Is McLulu's still in Loreto? San Xavier was a favorite destination but our focus was more on scenery and vegetation than geology. Thanks for an insight on a place we enjoyed and likely will never see again, as we now live in North Idaho and I am closing in on 80.

Super cool! Thank you!

Thanks Shawn!  Neat video.  Looking forward to the one on the opening of the Sea of Cortez.

Very informative. Thank you. 😊