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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 ...
The Columbia Plateau covers part of three states. The Columbia Plateau province is enveloped by one of the world's largest accumulations of lava. Over 500,000 km 2 (190,000 sq mi) of the Earth's surface is covered by it, an area roughly the size of the country of Spain. The topography here is dominated by geologically young lava flows that ...
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.
On a map showing only volcanic rocks, the west coast of North America shows a striking continuous north–south structure, the American Cordillera. The North American Cordillera extends up and down the coast of North America and roughly from the Great Plains westward to the Pacific Ocean , narrowing somewhat from north to south.
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]
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.
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