The Grand Canyon’s rocks appear to be detached from the passage of time as they are located below the tourist lodges and stores selling incense and keychains, past windy arroyos, and in the brown valleys that are dotted with agave, juniper, and sagebrush.
The oldest ones were discovered 1.8 billion years ago, eons before humanity ever saw them and eons before evolution gave any living thing on this planet eyes.
Exploring the Grand Canyon Ancient Rocks
If you spend enough time in the canyon, you might begin to experience a slight sense of timelessness.
Your isolation from the modern world, with its phone signal, light pollution, and disappointments, is created by the enormous walls, which act as a kind of cocoon.
They forcefully direct your gaze skyward, much like a cathedral. You might believe you have a clear view of the top.
Yet, there are more walls above and above those, which are hidden from view save for sporadic glimpses.
As a result of the canyon’s greater depth. It is also quite large; it spans 18 miles across from rim to rim.
Not another stone cathedral, this one. It is a kingdom—a sizable, autonomous, and exquisitely realized alternate reality standing in contrast to our own.
But in one crucial way, the Grand Canyon continues to be bound to the present.
Its untamed force carved out the canyon over millions of years. Little snowpack is starving the river at its source in the Rockies as the earth warms, and warmer temperatures are stealing more of it through evaporation.
While a wet winter and a recent agreement between governments have prevented the river’s collapse for the time being, its long-term health is still very much in doubt.
The seven states that depend on it use pretty much every drop it can provide.
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Exploring the Interplay Between the Colorado River, Glen Canyon Dam
The assumption underlying the vast exodus of our species to the West was that resources, technology, and tenacity on the frontier could support civilization in a desolate, arid region.
Many of the 4 million visitors who come to the national park each year only see Colorado as a faint thread glinting in the distance because it flows so deep below the rim of the Grand Canyon.
Nonetheless, the fate of the river has a significant impact on how future generations will perceive the 280-mile-long canyon.
A group of scientists and graduate students from the University of California, Davis recently set out to see the sweeping changes that our subjugation of the Colorado River has already brought about in the canyon’s ecosystems and landscapes by raft: a slow journey through deep time at a time when the Earth’s clock appears to be speeding up.
Since 1963, the Glen Canyon Dam has been storing water in Lake Powell, the country’s second-largest reservoir, to back up Colorado for approximately 200 miles.
The amount of river water to be allowed through the dam’s structures and out the other end, first into the Grand Canyon, then into Lake Mead, and eventually into crops and residences in Arizona, California, Nevada, and Mexico, is regularly evaluated by engineers based on water and electricity needs.
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