A new exhibit at the Museum of Northern Arizona in Flagstaff will showcase the Ancient Landscapes of the Colorado Plateau based on the recent book of the same name by Ron Blakey and Wayne Ranney.Ancient Landscapes of the Colorado Pl...

A friend was asking about some interesting places to visit on the Colorado Plateau. I gave her some names of trails, canyons, drainages and ridge lines that I thought were fun. When it came time for directions I didn't use the typic...

From the World Heritage inscription: A great concentration of ancestral Pueblo Indian dwellings, built from the 6th to the 12th century, can be found on the Mesa Verde plateau in south-west Colorado at an altitude of more than 2,60...

The 3,853' deep well drilled near Cholla Power Plant [right] on the Colorado Plateau failed to find enough permeability at total depth to make it a viable reservoir to sequester carbon dioxide (CO2) from power plants in the region. ...

Geoblogger "Geotripper" (aka Garry Hayes, right. Credit, Geotripper blog) has compiled the links to his extensive set of posts that cover a "Brief" History of the Colorado Plateau. As Garry noted, it appears to be the equival...

Please forgive me for filling the feeds with such a long post, but I wanted to pull together an annotated list of the blog posts of my just completed journey through the geological history of the Colorado Plateau. It turned into a ...

Picking up from the ecologic trauma of my previous post, there was, in fact, a significant addition to the collection of animals living in the Colorado Plateau region in the last 10,000 years or so. It was different than any creatu...

...the massive creature wandered slowly through the dry grasslands. It had been a long hot year, something that had been all too common during the decades the animal had been alive. Foraging was difficult, and the creature was near ...

I went to the College of William and Mary for my undergraduate geology degree. One of the cherished rights of passage in that department was the "Geology 310" trip -- Regional Field Geology, often of the Colorado Plateau, but in rec...

Two essentially unrelated events were happening underground in Grand Canyon National Park in 1976. A precious paleontological resource was burning away in the newly established western part of the park, and in the eastern part of t...

Geotripper, written by California geology teacher Garry Hayes, is a first-class geology blog that brims over with information, enthusiasm and great imagery. ‘Time almost not beyond imagining: recent volcanism on the Colorado Plateau...

1.15 million years ago, a massive explosion shook the New Mexico landscape, and some sixty cubic miles of ash shot into the atmosphere in a catastrophic rhyolite caldera eruption. The collapse of the magma chamber produced the Valle...

Top picture of the Valle Grande by Garry Hayes. Bottom image of the Valles Caldera courtesy of the New Mexico Bureau of Geology and Mineral Resources.I will probably get a bit of geographical argument about today's geological featu...

photo by Doc Searls via http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:VulcanUinkart.jpgPhoto by J.R. Balsley, taken in 1950, courtesy of the USGSWe continue with my long-running exploration of the geological history of the Colorado Plateau...O...

Top photo shows the San Francisco Peaks looming over the ancestral Sinagua ruins at Wupatki National Monument near Sunset Peak. Bottom diagram is a digital topographic map of the San Francisco Peaks Volcanic Field from the USGS Fac...

And a river runs through it...This is a continuation of my long-running exploration of the geological history of the Colorado Plateau which has been going on now for more than a year. If you've been a glutton for punishment, take h...

The final chapters of the geological history of the Colorado Plateau involve huge changes, and a true scrambling of the landscape by tectonic movements, and by erosional activity. Volcanism has been an ever present entity during th...

We are continuing a march towards the end our narrative on the geological history of the Colorado Plateau, one of the most unique regions on the planet. We've traversed nearly two billion years of strange events culminating in the ...

In our last exploration of the Cenozoic story of the Colorado Plateau, we were looking at a sort of mystery canyon, where a deep gorge had been cut into very tough Proterozoic rocks, but where no river exists today. The name of thi...

It's kind of strange, what's happened to the Colorado Plateau. For more than a billion years, the region was one of the most stable areas on the planet, lying submerged under shallow seas, or lying exposed as desert dunes or river f...