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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.
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]
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.
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.
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.
The Chinle Formation is part of the Colorado Plateau, Basin and Range, and the southern section of the Interior Plains. [1] A probable separate depositional basin within the Chinle is found in northwestern Colorado and northeastern Utah. The southern portion of the Chinle reaches a maximum thickness of a little over 520 meters (1,710 ft).
The formation is notable both for its petroleum resources and for its salt tectonics, which are responsible for many distinctive geologic features of the eastern Colorado Plateau. In addition to the anticline valleys, these include the grabens of the Needles District of Canyonlands National Park and the fins and arches of Arches National Park.
Topographic map of the western United States (and part of Canada) showing the Bighorn Basin (highlighted in orange), formed by the Laramide Orogeny In the United States, these distinctive intermontane basins occur principally in the central Rocky Mountains from Colorado and Utah ( Uinta Basin ) to Montana and are best developed in Wyoming ...