Ranger Minute - Rockarena Dance (wmv)

Ranger Minutes are short audiocasts or videocasts in which a park ranger shares interesting stories and information about Grand Canyon National Park.

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i-Pod owners, The Quicktime version is available here.

 

Grand Canyon How Did It Form ? We've got a fun, exciting way to help you remember how the Grand Canyon got here. Today, the Grand Canyon Elementary School third graders are going to help you learn the Grand Canyon Dance, the Grand Canyon "Rockarena." Click on the player to activate it, then, press the play button. It may take a minute for the video to start.

 

If your playback is uneven and you would rather download the file to your computer,
cut and paste this link into your media player: (7.38MB WMV File)http://www.nps.gov/grca/photosmultimedia/upload/Rmin00804gcdance.wmv
Download the transcript (11kb PDF File)

 

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The Grand Canyon Dance

First of all we’re going to start off with the oldest rocks down at the bottom, that hard metamorphic rock. So let’s get squished under heat and pressure. We’re getting metamorphosed, and as we’re getting squished, we’re getting cracked and faulted, and cracked and faulted. And through those cracks we’re getting magma oozing, and it’s flowing then it freezes.

On top of all that we get limestone, sandstone, shale; ancient oceans, ancient deserts, ancient beaches, ancient swamps; limestone, sandstone, shale; ancient oceans, ancient deserts, ancient beaches, ancient swamps.

And then look out, the North American plate is going to collide with the Pacific plate. Collision…the two plates colliding and we get uplift. One thousand, two thousand, three thousand, four thousand, five thousand, six thousand, seven thousand feet into the sky. We have the Colorado Plateau.

But then look out, the next powerful force, the Colorado River, and the river cuts down, the walls fall in, the river cuts down, the walls fall in, the river cuts down, the walls fall in, and we end up with … Grand Canyon!

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Related Information

How Old Is the Grand Canyon?
In this Ranger Minute, Ranger David Smith describes how the rocks exposed within the Grand Canyon range from the fairly young to the fairly old. (geologically speaking) If we could compress the geological age of the earth into one calendar year, on what day would the Grand Canyon have been formed?

An Introduction to Grand Canyon Geology

The Grand Age of Rocks: The Numeric Ages for Rocks Exposed within Grand Canyon
Allyson Mathis and Carl Bowman, 2006