How many times did the Grand Canyon flood?

A sequence of flood deposits left by the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon, Arizona, provides evidence of at least 15 floods with peak discharges greater than 5500 m3sec-1 over the last 4500 yr. Ten floods during the last 2000-2300 yr had discharges greater than 6800 m3sec.



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If we ignore the suicides, only 123 people have accidentally fallen to their death at the Grand Canyon, making it almost a tie with environmental deaths.

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Knowledge of all water sources within Grand Canyon is incomplete. A partial inventory was done in 1979 over a 1,881 square mile area of the park which found 57 perennial water sources, 21 of which are streams and 36 which are seeps.

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This natural landmark formed about five to six million years as erosion from the Colorado River cut a deep channel through layers of rock. The Grand Canyon contains some of the oldest exposed rock on Earth. The mile-high walls reveal a cross section of Earth's crust going back nearly two billion years.

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Impress Your Friends With These Fun Facts!*
  • We don't really know how old it is. ...
  • Grand Canyon creates its own weather! ...
  • There are no dinosaur bones in the canyon. ...
  • But there are lots of other fossils in the area. ...
  • There's a town down in the canyon. ...
  • We're missing 950 million years worth of rocks!


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It is also a rich source of fossils, containing a diverse collection of ancient plant and animal remains. Among the most renowned fossils discovered in the Grand Canyon are trilobites, which are extinct marine arthropods that lived over 500 million years ago.

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Largest canyons The Yarlung Tsangpo Grand Canyon (or Tsangpo Canyon), along the Yarlung Tsangpo River in Tibet, is regarded by some as the deepest canyon in the world at 5,500 metres (18,000 ft). It is slightly longer than the Grand Canyon in the United States.

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This natural landmark formed about five to six million years as erosion from the Colorado River cut a deep channel through layers of rock. The Grand Canyon contains some of the oldest exposed rock on Earth. The mile-high walls reveal a cross section of Earth's crust going back nearly two billion years.

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The Grand Canyon is 277 miles (446 km) long, up to 18 miles (29 km) wide and attains a depth of over a mile (6,093 feet or 1,857 meters).

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The Tribes of Today Together with the National Park Service, they help to care for Grand Canyon. The Havasupai live in the last remaining tribal village inside the canyon. Navajo, Southern Paiute, and Hualapai communities lie along the edge, or rim, of the canyon. Hopi, Zuni, and Apache also live nearby.

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The Canyon Will Change Its “Clothes” As it becomes warmer and drier, you'll see vegetation that is more classic to those environments: piñon-juniper will shift more into just juniper and maybe some grasses, which is the vegetation zone that falls below it.

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