From: The Atllas......
525 million years ago, Arizona was not a desert. It was a warm, shallow sea.
Trilobites crawled across its muddy floor. Brachiopods filtered the warm water. Strange worms burrowed through the sediment. Layer by layer, their world was buried — compressed into rock by the weight of hundreds of millions of years.
The sea came and went. Again and again. Each time it returned, it left another chapter. Shallow seas became desert dunes. Desert dunes became river floodplains. Floodplains became deep oceans. Every environment is preserved in a different colored stripe of rock.
Then, 70 million years ago, tectonic forces pushed the entire Colorado Plateau upward. And 5 to 6 million years ago, the Colorado River began cutting downward through all those ancient layers — one grain of sand at a time.
One mile down. 277 miles long. 1.8 billion years of Earth's history are exposed in a single gorge.
The rock you stand on at the rim formed at the bottom of a sea 270 million years ago. The black rock at the canyon floor is 1.8 billion years old. Between your feet and the river, you are looking at a third of Earth's entire history.
You are not looking at a canyon. You are looking at time itself — with its skin peeled back.
We just released a free chapter from The Lost Atlas ( Ancient Supercontinent )— Earth's oldest continents, mapped and explained. Link in bio.
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