In his essay “Glen Canyon Submersus” Wallace Stegner writes “In gaining the lovely and the usable, we have given up the incomparable” (509). In this quote he is talking about the loss of Glen Canyon during the creation of Lake Powell, and more broadly, talking about how national parks often destroy wildernesses despite their apparent usefulness. Glen Canyon is only one of thousands of examples of an environment being destroyed by a government funded park system. There are several theorized reasons for why parks are often harmful to the environment as well as many possible solutions for this problem as well. But so far, the majority of national parks in the world are harmful to both the natural environment…
Gneiss rock that is foliated and dark in color with bandings measuring up to 0.2cm, and the light bandings measuring up to 2cm. Minerals located within the dark bandings consists of Biotite (40%)…
Sedimentary rocks can be layered with sandstone, limestone, and shale: The oldest are on the bottom…
Record your answer to Lab Exercise, Step 2, Question 12. How long ago was the…
The world works in mysterious ways. This class has determines that people must be able to adapt to environmental changes if they are to survive. The inability to adapt has proven to be the collapse of a particular society time and time again. This essay traces the rise of Cahokia and Chaco Canyon and the developments of each culture to each cultures end.…
Chaco Canyon is located in northwestern New Mexico. Around 700 they started building rectangular houses above the ground. There was higher rainfall and higher groundwater levels and this caused an increase in population. What was so remarkable about this period was the Chaco phenomenon, which is the construction of fourteen Great houses in Chaco Canyon. These houses were multistory, and made from stone-and-timber pueblos. One of the houses, known as Pueblo Bonito, had more than six hundred rooms, forty ritual enclosures and it was as high as five stories. Large caches of rich ceremonial artifacts have been discovered and so it is believed that it served as ceremonial functions.…
Author Amanda Rose has taken it upon herself to bring to light the horrific experiences of modern day immigrant’s flight to freedom through the Sonoran Desert. In addition to addressing the immigrant’s plight, she calls into question the immigration process or lack thereof, the United States legislative broken immigration policy, religious leaders and their roles, US Border Patrol and US citizens. Her intent is to open up a dialogue on US immigration policies and educate the American public on the devastating consequences of a hapless built dividing wall between two countries which are felt not only by the immigrants but by the people that live in and around the border. Rose illustrates the conflicts that everyday Americans citizens living on the border face in trying to help and solve border issues with their personal solutions. Do they work? Are they…
They even have a tour and they got the park ranger guided tour. They even have back country camping spots that people who like to explore even more at night. The visitors can only walk around the rim or they can go to the floor of the canyon, but when go down on the canyon floor you could see the different layers in the Little Grand Canyon. The Little Grand Canyon even has a book that has the names of the different types of soil. But what really made the Little Grand Canyon so special that the soil was deposited all the sediment. But the ocean was the one who deposited of the different types of soils. The Little Grand Canyons has 43 different types of sands. Before the Little Grand Canyons top soil use to be soft and very sandy. When the Little Grand Canyon first started forming it had started off as small little ditches. But every time it rained the the little ditches started growing deeper and then they started to get…
I feel that the federal government should make Providence Canyon a national park. There are many reasons at why I feel this way. For one it has been in the Coastal Plains for a very long time. It is also an historic land mark many people visit. There are many more reasons at why I think the federal government should make Providence Canyon a national park.…
The once untamed Colorado River was set to be cultivated in 1931 by the Bureau of Reclamation. It was to be tamed by the Hoover Dam, the biggest man made thing in the whole world. The place of this great achievement was in between two hulking masses of sedimentary rock at Black Canyon, Nevada. The dam intentionally had its purposes, for example its production would supply jobs in the time of the Great Depression. As well as, curb the rapid floods that frequently deluded Southern California(?). Then in return the Dam would reply with a clean source of electricity to neighboring states as well as distribute water. Though, some unanticipated effects the Dam caused are still marked vaguely into the canyon years later. Despite that, the Hoover…
The Great Smoky Mountains landform is mostly sedimentary rocks that were formed by the accumulation of sand, clay, silt, sand, gravel, and minor amounts of calcium carbonate in flat-lying layers. According to The Great Smoky Mountain’s website, about 545 million years ago the sediments were formed and large amounts of those sediments were washed down into lowland basins from adjacent highlands. The colliding between the edge of the North American tectonic plate and the African tectonic was a huge cause of the creation of The Great Smoky Mountain landform. It was discovered that incredibly long and active geologic events were found in the rocks of the smoky mountains. There was a specific…
This research is done to bring together data found by other parties concerning the Womble Shale Formation. The Womble Shale Formation is located in Arkansas, the Ouachita Mountains, and Southern Oklahoma; it was named however for its outcrop seen in Norman, Arkansas (Used to be known as Womble, Arkansas). The age of the Womble Shale Formation has been correlated to Middle Ordovician in age due to fossils found within its shale and limestone layers. The two fossils found in these layers were the graptolites and conodonts. The lithology of this formation from outcrops that have been examined shows evidence that the top layers of this formation are chert, followed by a rather large middle section of fissile shale, with thin beds of limestone…
Situated north of Grand Canyon National Park, the Glen Canyon Dam serves a multitude of purposes: it controls the distribution of sediment and water, generates $50 to $100 million worth of hydroelectricity, maintains a cold-water trout fishery, and allows for recreational activities in Lake Powell (NRC 1). However, it has also incurred damages to the surrounding environment, which holds cultural significance for the indigenous tribes. In 1988, former Secretary of the Interior Manuel Lujan initiated the Glen Canyon Dam Environmental Impact Studies (EIS) to examine the downstream impact of dam operations. The USBR was first to join the EIS, followed by the National Park Service and state agencies (Austin and Drye 288). However, tribal involvement…
The author and his colleagues specifically chose to focus on 375 million year old rocks in their search for fossils because this was the time frame that provided fish that would be useful to study from. The 385 million year old rocks provided fish that look too similar to the ones we have now and the 365 million year old rocks have fossils that don’t resemble fish. The 375 million year old rocks, however, provide fossils that show the transition between fish and land living animals. Sedimentary rocks are the type of rock that preserves the fossils. Limestone, siltstone, shale, and sandstone are examples of this. The reason why these rocks are the best at preservation is because they are formed by a process that includes the movement of lakes, rivers, and seas. A rock in a body of water has the potential to fossilize because after the gradual compression on the layers in the body of water forming, chemical processes are still happening.…
4. a. If specimens 3-C and 3-D came from the same rock bed, the most precise age of the rock would be lower Ordovician. This is because the specimen in 3-C, Phyllograptus, lived from the lower to middle Ordovician period while the specimen in 3-D, Dictyonema, lived from the Cambrian to the Carbinferous periods. In order for the specimen to be fossilized the rock could not have formed yet and therefore the rock must have formed after the Phyllograptus came into existence.…