A new study suggests that the Grand Canyon's formation could be tied to a meteor strike that created the Meteor Crater in Arizona. While traditionally attributed to tectonic shifts and erosion from the Colorado River, this research proposes that the meteor impact triggered landslides in the Grand Canyon, blocking off the Colorado River and potentially forming a paleolake. An unresolved question remains regarding the presence of driftwood in Stanton's Cave, which may indicate a significantly larger historical flood or ancient deposits influenced by geological changes in the area.
'It would have required a 10-times bigger flood level than any flood that has happened in the past several thousand years,' one of the authors of the study, University of New Mexico Professor Karl Karlstrom wrote in a statement.
Researchers connected another Arizona geographical feature, the Meteor Crater to the Grand Canyon's formation. The Meteor Crater, located about 130 miles southeast of the Grand Canyon's South Rim, was formed more than 56,000 years ago by a large iron-nickel asteroid.
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