Apr 13

New Evidence to the Creation of the Grand Canyon

Tag: General Blog Post — User Imageadmin @ 4:24 pm
clipped from www.nature.com

Visitors are often told that the Grand Canyon formed 6 million years ago, when the Colorado River assumed its current course. But a new study indicates that a large chunk of the Grand Canyon may have taken its shape from a far more ancient gorge, carved out 55 million years ago by a river flowing in the opposite direction.

The results sketch out a dramatic history of the Colorado Plateau, which was pushed up by geological forces as long as 80 million years ago. An old river flowed across the plateau creating this ‘proto-canyon’, and then many different streams eroded away the top 2,000 metres of the entire plateau, bringing it to its present elevation.

“We’re seeing a record of an ancestral Grand Canyon that was incised in rocks above the Grand Canyon and subsequently lowered to its present state,” says Rebecca Flowers of the University of Colorado, Boulder. The results will be published in the May issue of Geological Society of America Bulletin 1.

Simply incredible to thing that after all these years of scientist stating the Colorado river is responsible for the Canyon. That new science has emerged to perhaps state the very opposite of what we have all learned to be fact growing up. Just goes to show that if you wait long enough someone will come along and prove the facts different than they are. So what do you think, leave a few comments at the end.

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