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The Colorado Plateau is a physiographic and desert region of the Intermontane Plateaus, roughly centered on the Four Corners region of the southwestern United States. This plateau covers an area of 336,700 km 2 (130,000 mi 2) within western Colorado, northwestern New Mexico, southern and eastern Utah, northern Arizona, and a tiny fraction in ...
The Colorado Plateau which includes the Grand Canyon is the result of broad tectonic uplift followed by river erosion. [ 4 ] When mountains rise slowly, either due to orogenic uplift or other processes (e.g., rebound after glaciation ), an unusual feature known as a water gap may occur.
The entire Colorado Plateau then started to uplift from near sea level to several thousand feet (over a kilometer) in elevation. [14] An alternate theory is that the Laramide orogeny uplifted what is today the Basin and Range and the Colorado Plateau and that the tensional forces that formed the Basin and Range caused that region to subside ...
The uplift possibly acted on a buried fault to form the area's Waterpocket Fold. 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 ...
Geology of the United States. Shaded relief map of the United States, showing 10 geological provinces. The richly textured landscape of the United States is a product of the dueling forces of plate tectonics, weathering and erosion. Over the 4.5 billion-year history of the Earth, tectonic upheavals and colliding plates have raised great ...
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] The rift extends from central Colorado in the north to the state of Chihuahua, Mexico, in the south. [2] The rift zone consists of four basins that have an average width of ...
Geology of Colorado. Coordinates: 38.9972°N 105.5478°W. Clockwise from upper left: Garden of the Gods, Rocky Mountain National Park, Pikes Peak, Wheeler Geologic Area. The bedrock under the U.S. State of Colorado was assembled from island arcs accreted onto the edge of the ancient Wyoming Craton. The Sonoma orogeny uplifted the ancestral ...
Along the southern boundary of the park, tectonic displacement along this fault is about 3,600 ft (1,098 m). [20] Several other normal faults also developed on the plateau. Subsequent uplift of the Colorado Plateau and tilting of the Markagunt Plateau started 13 million years ago. [13]