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The Colorado Plateau is largely made up of high desert, with scattered areas of forests. In the south-west corner of the Colorado Plateau lies the Grand Canyon of the Colorado River. Much of the Plateau's landscape is related to the Grand Canyon in both appearance and geologic history.
Yet for some reason not fully understood, the neighboring Colorado Plateau was able to preserve its structural integrity and remained a single tectonic block. Eventually, the great block of Colorado Plateau crust rose a kilometer higher than the Basin and Range. [11] As the land rose, the streams responded by cutting ever deeper stream channels.
The divisions of regional geology are drawn in different ways, but are usually outlined by a common geologic history, geographic vicinity or political boundaries. The regional geology of North America usually encompasses the geographic regions of Alaska, Canada, Greenland, the continental United States, Mexico, Central America, and the ...
The Colorado Province took shape as a mobile belt—an area of thinner, orogeny related continental crust lacking the deep "keel" of rock, which stabilized the neighboring Wyoming Craton and other cratons like it. Throughout Colorado's geologic history, rocks have often been deformed, metamorphosed and overprinted, obscuring the ancient record.
NASA satellite photo of typical Basin and Range topography across central Nevada. The Basin and Range Province includes much of western North America.In the United States, it is bordered on the west by the eastern fault scarp of the Sierra Nevada and spans over 500 miles (800 km) to its eastern border marked by the Wasatch Fault, the Colorado Plateau and the Rio Grande Rift.
Locality map showing the Rio Grande rift extending from southern Colorado to Chihuahua, Mexico. The Rio Grande follows this rift for much of its course. The Rio Grande rift is a north-trending continental rift zone. It separates the Colorado Plateau in the west from the interior of the North American craton on the east. [1]
Physiographic regions of the U.S. Interior; the Intermontane Plateaus are marked 20 (Columbia Plateau), 21 (Colorado Plateau) and 22 (Basin and Range). In the context of physical geography, the Intermontane Plateaus is one of eight physiographic regions of the contiguous United States.
More recent uplift of the entire Colorado Plateau and the resulting erosion has exposed this fold at the surface only within the last 15 to 20 million years. Ice ages in the Pleistocene increased the rate of precipitation and erosion. The cracked upper parts of the Waterpocket Fold were especially affected and the fold itself was exposed and ...