Llano Estacado

The Llano Estacado ( Spanish pronunciation [ ʎano estakaðo ], English [ jano ɛstəkaɾo ] ), also Staked Plains, is a region in the United States. It is located in the southeastern part of New Mexico and in the northwestern part of Texas and is in this area of ​​the southern foothills of the Great Plains, the great prairie areas.

The Llano Estacado was first described by the Spanish conquistador Francisco Vasquez de Coronado on October 20th of the year 1541 in a letter to the Spanish king. The cliffs and inaccessible rock formations of the Mescalero and Caprock - steep slopes that surround the plateau were designated by the first Europeans as a way of palisade, which led to the naming.

Geography

It is a relatively flat treeless and dry tableland ( mesa ) whose boundaries lie between 101 ° and 104 ° west longitude and between 31 ° and 35 ° north latitude to 760 up to 1200 m above sea level. With approximately 100,000 km ², it is one of the largest table lands of the Americas. There is a semi-arid climate. The average rainfall in the area is 500 mm per year.

Llano Estacado of west and is bordered by the Mescalero escarpment of the Rio Pecos, east by the Caprock escarpment to the Hill Country in Central Texas. In the north it is separated by the valley of the Canadian River from the prairies and southeast it passes into the Edwards Plateau. The level is often affected by tornadoes.

Geology

The oldest layers of the plateau have emerged towards the end of the Paleozoic Era around 251 million years ago. Towards the end of the Mesozoic Era, about 70 million years ago when the Rocky Mountains began to form and during the Cenozoic, as the elevation of the Rocky Mountains about 30 million years ago has been completed, the overlying strata of the Llano Estacado formed.

While the erosion of the Rocky Mountains, more and more debris was carried into the plains eastward past due to weather conditions. By erosions and new rivers canyons and rock formations that limit the Llano emerged.

Economy

The most important cities of this region are very sparsely populated Amarillo, Lubbock, Midland and Odessa, Texas and Hobbs, New Mexico.

Because of the climate farming is possible only with irrigation. Large amounts of water are removed from the underlying Ogallala Aquifer the plateau, mainly for the cultivation of cotton. More recently, the region was economically interesting by oil and gas deposits.