Carving a Canyon cover art

Carving a Canyon

Carving a Canyon

Listen for free

View show details

About this listen

 The Grand Canyon is so grand it can be seen from space. At more than a mile deep and nearly 300 miles long, it could hold all the world’s river water and still be only half full. And its colossal size is an evolving mystery. Early geologists could not believe such a comparatively small river could carve something so immense. So they looked more closely… And discovered that a myriad of geological processes have combined to form the canyon through time. One of the more dramatic is giant floods, vastly larger than anything we see today. Floods from melting ice sheets. From enormous lakes overflowing their boundaries. From lava dams forming within the canyon, which held back water until they failed spectacularly. Floodwaters can carry hundreds of times more rock material than a normally flowing river. These superfloods likely dragged house-sized boulders through the canyon, battering the softer lower rock layers until they collapsed, bringing all the rock above them crashing down, to be carried away in the next superflood. Geologists suspect these processes happened repeatedly in several smaller canyons, which finally linked together to become the Grand Canyon we know today. In 1919, the U.S. Congress and President Woodrow Wilson set aside the canyon as a National Park for, as Theodore Roosevelt had said years earlier, “your children, your children’s children, and all who come after you.” If you haven’t seen it with your own eyes, you owe it to yourself to go and be awed by the Grand Canyon.
No reviews yet
In the spirit of reconciliation, Audible acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of country throughout Australia and their connections to land, sea and community. We pay our respect to their elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples today.