Granite Laid Bare: Twelve Domes, Monoliths and Spires

Sugarloaf Mountain rises about 396 meters from the edge of Guanabara Bay. It is a granite and gneiss body that intruded roughly 600 million years ago, left standing when softer metamorphic rock eroded away, and its smooth profile is a classic case of exfoliation.

Pedra da Gavea comes from the same roughly 600 million year old rock complex as Sugarloaf, but stands about 844 meters high within Tijuca National Park. Its near-vertical seaward cliff shows how the same erosion of weaker surrounding rock can leave a far taller monolith.

Half Dome in Yosemite is granite of the Sierra Nevada Batholith that crystallized about 87 million years ago. Its rounded shape comes from exfoliation, while its sheer northwest face was cut by glacial ice plucking jointed rock, and geologists estimate erosion removed at most twenty percent of the original dome.

El Capitan rises about 900 meters from Yosemite Valley and is cut from the El Capitan Granite. Repeated glaciations steepened the valley walls, and the rock's unusually sparse jointing left the unbroken face that made it a celebrated big-wall climb.

The Stawamus Chief is a granodiorite monolith of the Coast Mountains Batholith, about 700 meters above Howe Sound, that cooled underground roughly 100 million years ago. Valley glaciers of the last ice age scoured around it, and the Squamish Nation knows it as Siyam Smanit.

Enchanted Rock is a pink granite dome in the Llano Uplift of central Texas, formed from magma that crystallized about 1.1 billion years ago. Unlike the glaciated stops before it, its smooth profile comes from ongoing exfoliation as pressure is released from once deeply buried rock.

Wave Rock near Hyden in Western Australia is a curling granite cliff about 15 meters high and 110 meters long, from granite about 2.7 billion years old. Groundwater weathering at the base, called flared-slope weathering, undercut the rock, and algae and mineral staining add the wave-like bands.

Karlu Karlu, the Devil's Marbles, shows granite split along a grid of joints and then rounded by groundwater weathering while still buried, a process called spheroidal weathering. Once the soil around them eroded, the boulders were left balanced or split in two, and the site matters deeply to several Aboriginal groups.

Spitzkoppe is a group of bald granite peaks rising as much as 700 meters above the gravel plain of the Namib Desert. The granite crystallized roughly 120 million years ago during the opening of the South Atlantic, and wind-blown sand and exfoliation have since sculpted the exposed inselberg.

Brandberg is a granite massif and, at about 2,573 meters, the highest point in Namibia. It is a pluton about 132 million years old exposed as the softer surrounding rock eroded, and its slopes also hold thousands of San rock paintings.

Zuma Rock, about 725 meters high near Abuja, is an inselberg of igneous and metamorphic rock rather than a glaciated peak. Deep chemical weathering under a hot, humid climate across the West African craton stripped away the softer rock around it.

Cerro Torre ends the path with a granite spire of about 3,128 meters in the Southern Patagonian Ice Field. Intense glacial erosion removed the softer surrounding rock and carved the hardest granite core into an almost vertical needle, often capped by rime ice.