The Grand Canyon has been a geological mystery

"Landep News"

The Grand Canyon has been a geological mystery for a very long period of time. According to livescince.com, the geologists have recently discovered a giant anomalous structure on the underside of the plateau which might be able to solve this mystery.

One thing is clear: its age is pretty mysterious. For a very long time it was believed that the Grand Canyon is 6 million years old. Then, the geologists stated that its age is much older than that, of about 17 million years. In the past 70 million years, the Colorado Plateau of the southwestern United States, which is a 30,000-square-mile region that spans across Colorado, Utah, Arizona and New Mexico, rose up with about 2 kilometers. Then the region was affected by magma and it was eroded into numerous deep valleys. That was the way in which the Grand Canyon as formed. The tectonic uplift is the reason why the walls of the Grand Canyon have an orange color. The reason why the formation of the canyon was a mystery for a very long time, was because this sort of behavior usually happens in the case of the mountain belts and not of plateaus. Alan Levander, a structural seismologist at Rice University, said that the majority of the people assume that the Grand Canyon was shaped by water and that it has this form because of the erosion.

However, that theory does not make sense because water could not have influenced the height of the Grand Canyon. Levander analyzed various data from the Earthscope Transportable Array of seismic stations in order to find out more about the rise of the Colorado Plateau. The main focus of the researchers was the lithosphere, which is the strong upper mantle of the planet that extends to a depth of 90 miles. The lithosphere is located on top of the asthenosphere, which is the weaker and the hotter part of the mantle. The scientists discovered beneath the Grand Canyon, in the lithosphere, a very cold and dense region which sinks into the Earth. Because of this anomaly, the lower part of the crust is raised up. The geologists believe that this is the main reason why the Grand Canyon got the shape it has today. There are various theories about the cold region located beneath the Grand Canyon, one of them being that the asthenosphere invaded the lithosphere. The material which invaded the lithosphere then cooled down and sent the lithosphere downwards. The asthenosphere then filled the gap and it caused the plateau to uplift.

The scientists believe that this drip, the descent of the lithosphere occurred about 6 million years ago. However, they are certain that many other similar events took place at the Grand Canyon in the past 30 million years. As I said, there are lots of theories about the age of the Grand Canyon. Some researchers have stated that the Grand Canyon is about 17 million years old, that being the time when a river started carving the western end of the canyon. They also believe that about 6 million years ago, the eastern and the western portions of the Grand Canyon connected and that is when the Grand Canyon was formed in the manner in which it looks nowadays. The history and the formation of the Grand Canyon have created lots of debates. They gave birth to the Grand Canyon Wars, represented by numerous papers published by various geologists in which each of them explains his own theory about the formation of the canyon.

Some believe that the water carved it, and they base their theories on the mammillaries, which are formations that can be found in the caves, and which indicate the fact that they were brought there by the water. The researchers have stated that the Grand Canyon was not eroded by the Colorado River but by a smaller river which no longer exists. After the Grand Canyon was formed the Colorado River started flowing through it. Regarding the age of the Grand Canyon, there isn’t a valid and official date yet. However, it seems that the majority of the experts in the domain seem to favor the younger date, consider it to be more accurate. It is unknown which of these theories are true.

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