An extraordinarily beautiful river canyon lay where today’s Lake Powell shimmers. There was nothing else like it on earth with its isolation, twisting and mysterious side canyons, Indian ruins, and gentle, idyllic landforms. But, in the mid-1950s, …
Monoclines
The Colorado Plateau is characterized by a thick sequence of mostly sedimentary rock layers that have been uplifted thousands of feet by plate tectonics movements. The uplift began about 70 million years ago, thus ending almost all sedimentary rock …
Glen Canyon’s Prominent Rock Units: The Aeolian Sandstones Plus One
Throughout the middle and downstream sections of Lake Powell about a dozen rock units can be seen. All are sedimentary in origin. Of these, only about four are exceptionally prominent, and three of them are Aeolian (wind-deposited) sandstones. The …
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Continued Deposition, Uplift, and Erosion
Although rocks of dinosaur age are not present in the Sedona area today, geologists believe that they were once present here. No less than 5,000 feet of this younger strata and perhaps as much as 10,000 feet was once present here before it was eroded …
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One Amazing Read
During a visit to the Heartland over Christmas I brought along Craig Childs' latest book "House of Rain." It's a sprawling read that covers the rise and fall of the Anasazi—ancestral puebloan people that inhabited the Four Corners region of the …