True origin story of the Grand Canyon revealed in new study
While the stunning northern Arizona national park has become an iconic tourist attraction among nature-loving visitors, its history is not widely considered.
In the past, the creation of the steep-sided canyon was mainly attributed to tectonic plate shifts and erosion from the Colorado River, according to the National Parks Service (NPS).
The Grand Canyon runs 277 miles along the river, which has been 'carving away rock for the past five to six million years,' the NPS wrote.
But a new study by Geology published on Tuesday proposes a bold new theory that explains where that flooding may have came from.
Researchers connected another Arizona geographical feature, the Meteor Crater to the Grand Canyon's formation.
The Meteor Crater, located about 130 miles southeast of the Grand Canyon's South Rim, was formed more than 56,000 years ago by a large iron-nickel asteroid.
The study hypothesizes that the impact triggered landslides in the Grand Canyon that accounted for a hefty portion of its shaping.
These landslides supposedly blocked off the Colorado River and formed a 'paleolake,' which is ancient lake that no longer exists, in the canyon.
A unanswered question about the canyon has been how and when driftwood ended up in Stanton's Cave, a formation within the national park, as the head of the cave is roughly 150 feet above the river.
'It would have required a 10-times bigger flood level than any flood that has happened in the past several thousand years,' one of the authors of the study, University of New Mexico Professor Karl Karlstrom wrote in a statement.
'Or maybe they are very old deposits left as the river carved down, or maybe they floated in from a paleolake caused by a downstream lava dam or landslide dam? We needed to know the age of the cave deposits.'
His research proves the age of the driftwood to be the same age as the Meteor Crater and the landslide dam - 56,000 years old.
Ultimately, researchers deemed that since all of these timelines appear to match up, the asteroid that created the massive crater also caused the landslide.
The landslide led to the paleolake, which created a dam in the Colorado River.
This dam allowed for water to build up and eventually cause surging floods that flooded caves in the canyon, causing further erosion.
This study comes as the North Rim of the Grand Canyon sustained significant damage from the Dragon Bravo Fire that reached the area on Monday.
Buildings belonging to the historic Grand Canyon Lodge, along with several other structures, were destroyed.
'The North Rim is CLOSED for the remainder of the 2025 season because of losses resulting from the Dragon Bravo Wildfire,' the NPS announced on Tuesday.
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