51�Թ�

He describes them as “something like a backpacker’s air mattress,” except “four hundred and fifty miles long,” with individual “blobs called plutons” that are “lumped together like party balloons.”

Called a pluton by geologists, the Barre granite formation is calculated to be four miles long, two miles wide and 10 miles deep.

My own house sits directly on top of one of the state’s enormous granite plutons, the Meredith Porphyritic Granite.

The group also suggested a new classification, “pluton,” for bodies like Pluto whose orbits around the sun took 200 years or more.

The granite's chemical boundaries mark different plutons, or plugs of magma that cooled underground.