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History of Grand Canyon


01 Sep 2022 00:00:00 | Update: 01 Sep 2022 04:39:44
History of Grand Canyon

The Grand Canyon is a mile-deep gorge in northern Arizona. Scientists estimate the canyon may have formed 5 to 6 million years ago when the Colorado River began to cut a channel through layers of rock. Humans have inhabited the area in and around the canyon since the last Ice Age. The first Europeans to reach the Grand Canyon were Spanish explorers in the 1540s. President Benjamin Harrison first protected the Grand Canyon in 1893 as a forest reserve, and it became an official United States National Park in 1919.

The Grand Canyon is located in northern Arizona, northwest of the city of Flagstaff. The canyon measures over 270 miles long, up to 18 miles wide and a mile deep, making it one of the biggest canyons in the world.

This natural landmark formed about five to six million years as erosion from the Colorado River cut a deep channel through layers of rock.

The Grand Canyon contains some of the oldest exposed rock on Earth. The mile-high walls reveal a cross section of Earth’s crust going back nearly two billion years. These rock layers have given geologists the opportunity to study evolution through time.

The oldest known rocks in the canyon, called the Vishnu Basement Rocks, can be found near the bottom of the Inner Gorge. The Vishnu rocks formed about 1.7 billion years ago when magma hardened and joined this region—once a volcanic ocean chain—to the North American continent.

Today, tourists to Grand Canyon National Park can trace the canyon’s geologic history on the Trail of Time, an interpretive exhibit on the park’s South Rim.

Archaeologists have discovered ruins and artifacts from inhabitants dating back nearly 12,000 years. Prehistoric humans first settled in and around the canyon during the last Ice Age, when mammoths, giant sloths and other large mammals still roamed North America. Large stone spear points provide evidence of early human occupation.

Hundreds of small split-twig figurines made between 1000 and 2000 B.C. have been discovered in caves in the canyon wall. The figurines are shaped like deer and bighorn sheep. Anthropologists think that prehistoric hunters may have left the figurines in caves as part of a ritual to ensure a successful hunt.

Ancestral Pueblo people—followed by Paiute, Navajo, Zuni and Hopi tribes—once inhabited the Grand Canyon. The Havasupai people now claim the Grand Canyon as their ancestral home. According to tribal history, the Havasupai have lived in and around the canyon for more than 800 years.

Almost all of the Havasupai ancestral land was taken for use as public land with the creation of the Grand Canyon first as a reserve and later a national park. In 1975, the Havasupai regained a large portion of their land from the federal government after influential newspapers including the Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times and the San Francisco Chronicle took up their cause.

The Havasupai today make most of their money from tourism. The cerulean pools and red rocks of Havasu Falls, located near a remote portion of Grand Canyon National Park, draw about 20,000 visitors each year.

 

History

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