Liberty Hill Essay

The Liberty Hill pluton of South Carolina is one of twenty-four known granitoid bodies along the southern Appalachian Piedmont which possess the properties of a supergroup as described by Pitcher. The country rocks surrounding the plutons are at least mid-Paleozoic in age. Liberty Hill lies within country rocks of the Carolina Slate belt which consists of “primarily intermediate to felsic pyroclastic debris and hypabyssal intrusive bodies.” (Speer et al. 1980). The isotopic ages of metamorphism from the granitoids suggest that the oldest activity occurred in the northwest while the latest activity took place in the eastern portions of the piedmont. The Liberty Hill is one of a number of these granitoids where we see an early coarse grained facies intruded by a more recent fine grained facies. There is a gradational boundary present between these separate facies. The Liberty Hill has a total of three facies which differ both in minerology and texture. Internal igneous flow features on the granitoid suggest the three-dimensional shape to be a nearly circular asymmetric funnel which has steeper dips towards …show more content…
As mentioned above this is the fine grained facies that intruded the older coarser grained rock. Sample LH-15 was taken from this facies. Even though the rock is more fine grained than surrounding facies it still has a phaneritic texture. The facies is a biotite-muscovite granite (Speer et al. 1980). Our hand sample from this location shows an inequigranular hypidiomorphic texture. Black grains of biotite and white grains of plagioclase are dominant in the hand sample. We also see signs of myrmekite forming within this facies. Since this facies consists of considerably smaller grains than the surrounding units it is safe to assume the magma that formed this facies rose to the surface at a faster pace which did not allow the crystals to grow as large as the rest of the