Grand!
January 19, 2019 8:44 PM   Subscribe

What if the Grand Canyon were inverted?
posted by Chrysostom (29 comments total) 23 users marked this as a favorite
 
That is so cool
posted by not_the_water at 9:20 PM on January 19, 2019


Well, it’d sure change my hikes there. The south rim is at 7000 and the north 8000, and this would put the inner gorge at around 11,000 feet.
posted by azpenguin at 9:45 PM on January 19, 2019 [2 favorites]


What if the Grand Canyon were inverted?

Well for one thing, all the water would fall out! Whitewater rafting businesses would go belly-up as well, for that matter.
posted by Greg_Ace at 9:47 PM on January 19, 2019 [14 favorites]


What if the Grand Canyon were inverted?

No matter how many photographs and videos you saw of the place before you got there, when you stood there in person for the first time and took a good look you still wouldn't be able to believe it.
posted by LeLiLo at 10:37 PM on January 19, 2019 [7 favorites]


Oh, neat? I love The Ol' Switcheroo.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 11:15 PM on January 19, 2019


I spent last January in the Grand Canyon, and living in mountainous regions where you look at the peaks and go "aha, snowing in the higher elevations" it was very weird to look up towards the rim and go "aha, snowing in the higher elevations."

Also, I could not get a grasp on how weather and clouds and storms and stuff work in the canyon, because we were very blessed with mostly amazing sunny days, but like...what do storms DO when they encounter an inverted mountain range?
posted by Grandysaur at 12:18 AM on January 20, 2019


¡uoʎuɐɔ puɐɹפ
posted by Joe in Australia at 12:46 AM on January 20, 2019 [15 favorites]


what do storms DO when they encounter an inverted mountain range?

It rains
posted by not_the_water at 1:01 AM on January 20, 2019 [1 favorite]


Would the arch-like structure support itself? Or would you need two Grand Canyon-sized pits nearby for fill dirt?
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 5:47 AM on January 20, 2019



What if the Grand Canyon were inverted?


first - wouldnt be much of a canyon
posted by lalochezia at 6:05 AM on January 20, 2019 [6 favorites]


Now do Zion and Bryce. Angel's Landing becomes Demon's Pit? What's it like to peer down into a hoodoo?
posted by Edward L at 6:26 AM on January 20, 2019 [2 favorites]


Very cool.
I haven't been to the Canyon yet, so one detail surprised me. I assumed the thing would be a single line, straight or curved. Instead, it sprawls in several directions, almost rhizomatically.
posted by doctornemo at 7:32 AM on January 20, 2019 [2 favorites]


Doctornemo, those are tributaries, like the Little Colorado, and some "creeks" that are pretty big when flowing.

As for the the meanders of the main river, the Colorado River was there before the ground rose up. Sort of, holding the knife still and pushing the cheese up into it to cut.
posted by notsnot at 7:43 AM on January 20, 2019 [1 favorite]


Bike ridin' for the win!
posted by Afghan Stan at 7:55 AM on January 20, 2019


> ¡uoʎuɐɔ puɐɹפ
posted by Joe in Australia at 12:46 AM on January 20


[insert lazy joke here]
posted by Reclusive Novelist Thomas Pynchon at 8:43 AM on January 20, 2019 [10 favorites]


first - wouldnt be much of a canyon

I’m sure we can agree it would make up in grandness what it would lack in canyonosity.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 9:09 AM on January 20, 2019 [5 favorites]


Right. Now invert Mt. Everest.
posted by happyroach at 9:15 AM on January 20, 2019


look that’s what the grand canyon really is like. it’s a big ridge. everest is a very large hole. the marianas trench is a vast ridge even taller than the grand canyon. The only reason anyone says otherwise is because they’ve fallen prey to sinister propagandists who insist that the earth isn’t hollow and that we’re living on the outside of it rather than the inside.
posted by Reclusive Novelist Thomas Pynchon at 11:14 AM on January 20, 2019 [6 favorites]




look that’s what the grand canyon really is like. it’s a big ridge. everest is a very large hole. the marianas trench is a vast ridge even taller than the grand canyon. The only reason anyone says otherwise is because they’ve fallen prey to sinister propagandists who insist that the earth isn’t hollow and that we’re living on the outside of it rather than the inside.


WAKE UP SHALEPLE!
posted by lalochezia at 1:19 PM on January 20, 2019 [4 favorites]


Geology puns ftw...
posted by Windopaene at 2:34 PM on January 20, 2019


Gneiss one, guys.
posted by biogeo at 3:45 PM on January 20, 2019 [4 favorites]


I love how this looks like the sort of super fakey fake terrain that a videogame would use to mark the edge of the playable world.
posted by rokusan at 4:49 PM on January 20, 2019 [2 favorites]


What if the Grand Canyon were inverted?

/cough “Bullshit!”
posted by Ghidorah at 5:05 PM on January 20, 2019 [1 favorite]


How often do we look at actual mountains/rolling hills like this and say "Wow, that's really grand". I mean, the non-Irish among us.

I just think if it were inverted nobody would give it a second thought. There's big old hills like this all over where I live. I mean I like them a lot, and actually that's probably why I will never leave the Bay Area. But I think "Grand" wouldn't be in the name anymore. Just like "Dan Smith's Hills" or whatever.
posted by bleep at 5:40 PM on January 20, 2019


Thank you, notsnot. I need to get there.
posted by doctornemo at 7:56 PM on January 20, 2019


As for the the meanders of the main river, the Colorado River was there before the ground rose up. Sort of, holding the knife still and pushing the cheese up into it to cut.

Well, there was a river there, but it wasn’t the Colorado:
Geologists have found evidence that some 55 million years ago a river as big as the modern Colorado flowed through Arizona into Utah in the opposite direction from the present-day river. Writing in the October issue of the journal Geology, they have named this ancient northeastward-flowing river the California River, after its inferred source in the Mojave region of southern California.

Lead author Steven Davis, a post-doctoral researcher in the Department of Global Ecology at the Carnegie Institution, and his colleagues* discovered the ancient river system by comparing sedimentary deposits in Utah and southwest Arizona. By analyzing the uranium and lead isotopes in sand grains made of the mineral zircon, the researchers were able to determine that the sand at both localities came from the same source -- igneous bedrock in the Mojave region of southern California.

The river deposits in Utah, called the Colton Formation by geologists, formed a delta where the river emptied into a large lake. They are more than 400 miles (700 kilometers) to the northeast of their source in California. "The river was on a very similar scale to the modern Colorado-Green River system," says Davis, "but it flowed in the opposite direction." The modern Colorado River's headwaters are in the Rocky Mountains, flowing southeast to the river's mouth in the Gulf of California.
I just found another paper that discusses and attempts to resolve the paleohydrological [new term to me, but I like it] record, but it’s a 29 page PDF.
From Paleogene through late Miocene time, the interior of the Colorado Plateau was a closed basin separated from the Arizona River drainage by an asymmetrical divide in the Lees Ferry–Glen Canyon area, with a steep SW flank and gently sloping NE flank that drained into large interior lakes, fed primarily by Cordilleran/Rocky Mountain sources to the north and west, and by recycled California River detritus shed from Laramide uplifts on the plateau. By Oligocene time, the lakes had largely dried up and were replaced by ergs. By mid-Miocene time, a pulse of unroofing had lowered the erosion level of eastern Grand Canyon to within a few hundred meters of its present level, and the Arizona River drainage below modern Grand Canyon was deranged by extensional tectonism, cutting off the supply of interior detritus to the coast.
Scuse me while I enroll in some college level geology courses so I can summarize all of that.
posted by fedward at 8:39 AM on January 21, 2019 [1 favorite]


Gneiss one, guys.

My sediments exactly.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 9:47 AM on January 21, 2019 [2 favorites]


Gneiss one, guys.

My sediments exactly.


I needed a laugh and you all granite my wish.
posted by azpenguin at 6:04 PM on January 21, 2019 [2 favorites]


the Arizona River drainage below modern Grand Canyon was deranged by extensional tectonism

I totally misread that as existential and had this image in my head of a deranged river anguishing over the existence of tectonic forces.
posted by LizBoBiz at 11:43 PM on January 21, 2019 [2 favorites]


« Older Walter Chandoha’s cat models […] must be alert...   |   Creating While Clean; 9 sober musicians Newer »


This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments