{"id":96294,"date":"2025-10-23T10:49:08","date_gmt":"2025-10-23T10:49:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/96294\/"},"modified":"2025-10-23T10:49:08","modified_gmt":"2025-10-23T10:49:08","slug":"meteor-crater-impact-may-have-triggered-ancient-floods-in-the-grand-canyon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/96294\/","title":{"rendered":"Meteor Crater Impact May Have Triggered Ancient Floods in the Grand Canyon"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\" <\/a>Aerial view of the Grand Canyon. Image via Wikipedia.<\/p>\n

When it comes to famous holes in the ground, northern Arizona has two: Grand Canyon and Barringer Meteorite Crater.<\/p>\n

New research now suggests that these famous depressions might, in fact, be linked\u2014the impact that created the crater roughly 56,000 years ago might also have unleashed landslides in a canyon that\u2019s part of Grand Canyon National Park today. Those landslides in turn likely dammed the Colorado River and temporarily created an 80-kilometer-long lake, the team proposed. The results were\u00a0published in\u00a0Geology<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Driftwood Then and Now<\/p>\n

\u201cThese are two iconic features of Arizona.\u201d<\/p>\n

Karl Karlstrom<\/a>, a geologist recently retired from the University of New Mexico, grew up in Flagstaff, Arizona. Grand Canyon and Barringer Meteorite Crater were both, therefore, in his proverbial backyard. \u201cThese are two iconic features of Arizona,\u201d said Karlstrom.<\/p>\n

Karlstrom\u2019s father\u2014also a geologist\u2014used to regularly explore the caves that dot the walls of Grand Canyon and surrounding canyons. In 1970, he collected two pieces of driftwood from a cavern known as Stanton\u2019s Cave. The mouth of Stanton\u2019s Cave is more than 40 meters above the Colorado River, so finding driftwood in its recesses was unexpected. Routine flooding couldn\u2019t have lofted woody detritus that high, said Karlstrom. \u201cIt would have required a flood 10 times bigger than any known flood over the last 2,000 years.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\" <\/a>Ancient driftwood found in Stanton\u2019s Cave, hinted at a catastrophic landslide occurring more than 50,000 years ago. Image credits: Nate Loper\/Flickr, CC BY 2.0.<\/p>\n

The best radiocarbon dating available in the 1970s suggested that the driftwood was at least 35,000 years old. A colleague of the elder Karlstrom suggested that the driftwood had floated into Stanton\u2019s Cave when an ancient landslide temporarily dammed the Colorado,\u00a0raising water levels<\/a>. The researchers even identified the likely site of the landslide\u2014a wall of limestone in Nankoweap Canyon.<\/p>\n

But what had set off that landslide in the first place? That\u2019s the question that Karl Karlstrom and his colleagues sought to answer. In 2023, the researchers collected two additional samples of driftwood from another cave 5 kilometers downriver from Stanton\u2019s Cave.<\/p>\n

A \u201cStriking\u201d Coincidence<\/p>\n

Modern radiocarbon dating of both the archival and newly collected driftwood samples yielded ages of roughly 56,000 years, with uncertainties of a few thousand years, for all samples. The team also dated sand collected from the second cave; it too had ages that, within the errors, were consistent with the sand having been emplaced 56,000 years ago.<\/p>\n

The potential significance of that timing didn\u2019t set in until one of Karlstrom\u2019s international collaborators took a road trip to nearby Barringer Meteorite Crater, also known as Meteor Crater. There, he learned that the crater is believed to have formed around 56,000 years ago.<\/p>\n

That coincidence was striking, said Karlstrom, and it got the team thinking that perhaps these two famous landmarks of northern Arizona\u2014Meteor Crater and Grand Canyon National Park\u2014might be linked. The impact that created Meteor Crater has been estimated to have produced ground shaking\u00a0equivalent to that of an\u00a0M5.2\u20135.4 earthquake<\/a>. At the 160-kilometer distance of Nankoweap Canyon, the purported site of the landsliding, that ground movement would have been attenuated to roughly\u00a0M3.3\u20133.5.<\/p>\n

\"\" <\/a>Image of the Barringer Meteorite Crater. Image via Wikipedia.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s impossible to know for sure whether such movement could have dislodged the limestone boulders of Nankoweap Canyon, Karlstrom and his colleagues concede. That\u2019s where future modeling work will come in, said Karlstrom. It\u2019s important to remember that an asteroid impact likely produces a distinctly different shaking signature than an earthquake caused by slip on a fault, said Karlstrom. \u201cFault slip earthquakes release energy from several kilometers depths whereas impacts may produce larger surface waves.\u201d<\/p>\n

But there\u2019s good evidence that a cliff in Nankoweap Canyon did, indeed, let go, said\u00a0Chris Baisan<\/a>, a dendrochronologist at the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research at the University of Arizona and a member of the research team. \u201cThere was an area where it looked like the canyon wall had collapsed across the river.\u201d<\/p>\n

An Ancient Lake<\/p>\n

Using the heights above the Colorado where the driftwood and sand samples were collected, the team estimated that an ancient lake extended from Nankoweap Canyon nearly 80 kilometers upstream. At its deepest point, it would have measured roughly 90 meters. Such a feature likely persisted for several decades until the lake filled with sediment, allowing the river to overtop the dam and quickly erode it, the team concluded.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey\u2019re certainly close, if not contemporaneous.\u201d<\/p>\n

The synchronicity in ages between the Meteor Crater impact and the evidence of a paleolake in Nankoweap Canyon is impressive, said\u00a0John Spray<\/a>, a planetary scientist at the University of New Brunswick in Canada, not involved in the research. \u201cThey\u2019re certainly close, if not contemporaneous.\u201d And while it\u2019s difficult to prove causation, the team\u2019s assertion that an impact set landslides in motion in the area around Grand Canyon is convincing, he added. \u201cI think the likelihood of it being responsible is very high.\u201d<\/p>\n

Karlstrom and his collaborators are continuing to collect more samples from caves in Grand Canyon National Park. So far, they\u2019ve found additional evidence of material that dates to roughly 56,000 years ago, as well as even older samples. It seems that there might have been multiple generations of lakes in the Grand Canyon area, said Karlstrom. \u201cThe story is getting more complicated.\u201d<\/p>\n

This article was originally published in EOS Magazine<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Citation:\u00a0Kornei, K. (2025), An asteroid impact may have led to flooding near the Grand Canyon,\u00a0Eos, 106,\u00a0https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1029\/2025EO250391. Published on 22 October 2025.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Aerial view of the Grand Canyon. Image via Wikipedia. When it comes to famous holes in the ground,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":96295,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[71198,32766,71199,71200,71201,56662,111,139,69,71202,147,38469],"class_list":{"0":"post-96294","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-science","8":"tag-arizona-geology","9":"tag-asteroid-impact","10":"tag-barringer-crater","11":"tag-colorado-river","12":"tag-grand-canyon","13":"tag-landslide","14":"tag-new-zealand","15":"tag-newzealand","16":"tag-nz","17":"tag-paleofloods","18":"tag-science","19":"tag-seismic-activity"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96294","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=96294"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96294\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/96295"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=96294"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=96294"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=96294"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}