Info about Mt. Rushmore?

Question

I need extra credit by doing a paper about Mt. Rushmore. Especially needed facts are; what type of stone, how they carved it, and any other interesting facts that are FACTS.

Answer 1

Here are some sites that may help you:

http://travel.yahoo.com/p-parks-398908-mount_rushmore-i
http://www.nps.gov/moru
http://www.mountrushmoreinfo.com/
http://www.mtrushmore.net/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mt._Rushmore

Answer 2

Did You Know?
That there is a cave in the mountain behind the heads on Mount Rushmore? It is called the Hall of Records. Gutzon Borglum and his workers started the drilling in July of 1938 and work was halted in July of 1939.



Mount Rushmore National Memorial is carved in the granite core of the Black Hills. There are no caves in the Memorial, however there is a ring of limestone around the Black Hills. This limestone layer was laid down at the bottom of an inland arm of the sea that covered the area around the Black Hills spreading east during the Cretaceous Era, 65 million years ago. In this limestone ring there are several caves, two of which are National Park Service sites, Wind Cave National Park and Jewel Cave National Monument.

Soils vary based on attributes of the parent material or bedrock, elevation and climate. The parent material for soils in the central Black Hills is mostly granite or mica schist. The granite is very hard and slow to break down. The mica schist is a metamorphic rock that breaksdown more readily. The mica schist develops into a well-drained soil. Except where parent materials are of recent igneous origin, deep zones of fractured bedrock usually underlie soils. Joints and fissures in this rock admit and store soil water that has percolated down through, and they are often penetrated deeply by roots-particularly those of ponderosa pine.

Mount Rushmore is a project of colossal proportion, colossal ambition and colossal achievement. It involved the efforts of nearly 400 men and women. The duties involved varied greatly from the call boy to drillers to the blacksmith to the housekeepers. Some of the workers at Mount Rushmore were interviewed, and were asked, "What is it you do here?" One of the workers responded and said, "I run a jackhammer." Another worker responded to the same question, " I earn $8.00 a day." However, a third worker said, "I am helping to create a Memorial." The third worker had an idea of what they were trying to accomplish.

The workers had to endure conditions that varied from blazing hot to bitter cold and windy. Each day they climbed 700 stairs to the top of the mountain to punch-in on the time clock. Then 3/8 inch thick steel cables lowered them over the front of the 500 foot face of the mountain in a "bosun chair". Some of the workers admitted being uneasy with heights, but during the Depression, any job was a good job.

The work was exciting, but dangerous, 90% of the mountain was carved using dynamite . The powdermen would cut and set charges of dynamite of specific sizes to remove precise amounts of rock.

Before the dynamite charges could be set off, the workers would have to be cleared from the mountain. Workers in the winch house on top of the mountain would hand crank the winches to raise and lower the drillers. If they went too fast, the drillers in their bosun chairs would be dragged up on their faces. To keep this from happening, young men and boys were hired as call boys. Call boys sat at the edge of the mountain and shout messages back and forth assuring safety. During the 14 years of construction not one fatality occurred.

Dynamite was used until only three to six inches of rock was left to remove to get to the final carving surface. At this point, the drillers and assistant carvers would drill holes into the granite very close together. This was called honeycombing. The closely drilled holes would weaken the granite so it could be removed often by hand.

After the honeycombing, the workers smoothed the surface of the faces with a hand facer or bumper tool. In this final step, the bumper tool would even up the granite, creating a surface as smooth as a sidewalk.

Answer 3

Mount Rushmore National Memorial, near Keystone, South Dakota, is a monumental granite sculpture located within the United States Presidential Memorial that represents the first 150 years of the history of the United States of America with 60-foot (18 m) sculptures of the heads of former U.S. Presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln. The entire memorial covers 1,278 acres (5.17 km²), and is 5,725 feet (1,745 m) above sea level. It is managed by the National Park Service, a bureau of the United States Department of the Interior. The memorial attracts approximately 2 million people annually.

Known to the Lakota Sioux, on whose land the monument was built, as Six Grandfathers, the mountain was renamed after Charles E. Rushmore, a prominent New York lawyer, during an expedition in 1885. At first, the project of carving Rushmore was undertaken to increase tourism in the Black Hills region of South Dakota. After long negotiations involving a Congressional delegation and President Calvin Coolidge, the project received Congressional approval. The carving started in 1927 and ended in 1941 with a few injuries and no deaths.

Mount Rushmore is largely composed of granite. The memorial is carved on the northwest margin of the Harney Peak granite batholith in the Black Hills of South Dakota, so the geologic formations of the heart of the Black Hills region are also evident at Mount Rushmore. The batholith magma intruded into the pre-existing mica schist rocks during the Precambrian period about 1.6 billion years ago. However, the uneven cooling of the molten rock caused the formation of both fine and coarse-grained minerals, including quartz, feldspar, muscovite, and biotite. Fractures in the granite were sealed by pegmatite dikes. The light-colored streaks in the presidents' foreheads are due to these dikes.

The Black Hills granites were exposed to erosion during the late Precambrian, but were buried by sandstones and other sediments during the Cambrian Period. The area remained buried throughout the Paleozoic Era, but was exposed again to erosion during the tectonic uplift about 70 million years ago. The Black Hills area was uplifted as an elongated geologic dome which towered some 20,000 feet (6 km) above sea level, but erosion wore the area down to only 4,000 feet (1.2 km). The subsequent natural erosion of this mountain range allowed the carvings by stripping the granite of the overlying sediments and the softer adjacent schists. The contact between the granite and darker schist is viewable just below the sculpture of Washington.

Borglum selected Mount Rushmore as the site for several reasons. The rock of the mountain is composed of smooth, fine-grained granite. The durable granite erodes only 1 inch (2.5 cm) every 10,000 years, indicating that it was sturdy enough to support sculpting. In addition, it was the tallest mountain in the region, looming to a height of 5,725 feet (1,745 m) above sea level. Because the mountain faces the southeast, the workers also had the advantage of sunlight for most of the day.

Answer 4

Start by naming the four guys whose faces are on it; Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Teddy Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln.

Otherwise, just go to www.wikipedia.org for the rest.