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Geological Formations

Mount Kinabalu

Inselbergs and Crystalline Monoliths

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Mount Kinabalu rises on the island of Borneo in Sabah, Malaysia, reaching an elevation of about 4,095 meters, the highest peak in Malaysia and all of Maritime Southeast Asia. It is a massive granodiorite pluton that intruded into surrounding sedimentary and ultrabasic rock as molten material millions of years ago, with the granodiorite itself cooling and hardening only about 10 million years ago, geologically young for a mountain of its size; the mountain continues to rise by roughly 5 millimeters a year through ongoing uplift. During the Pleistocene epoch about 100,000 years ago it was extensively glaciated, and those ancient glaciers carved the 1,800-meter-deep Low's Gully on its northern slope, still visible today. This entity documents Mount Kinabalu specifically as a geological formation, a young granodiorite pluton still actively rising.

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