February 25, 2019

Arizona’s spectacular Grand Canyon National Park celebrates its 100th birthday in 2019. Credit: © Digital Vision/SuperStock

To mark the anniversary, the park worked with Arizona State University and other partners to create the Grand Canyon Centennial Project—also known as “100 Years of Grand”—a series of programs at the park and online throughout 2019. On February 26, a special Founder’s Day Centennial Celebration at the park will include cultural, educational, and musical programs. In the following months, special events will highlight President Theodore Roosevelt (who created the Grand Canyon National Monument in 1908), the past and present efforts to map the massive canyon, and the history of the park. Traditional Native American arts and crafts will be demonstrated and presented all year long by the Desert View Cultural Demonstrators, members of the Grand Canyon’s 11 traditionally associated native peoples.

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Grand Canyon National Park Celebrates its centennial on Feb. 26, 2019. Credit: National Park Service

Various Native American cultures have lived in the Grand Canyon during the last 4,000 years. Today, about 450 members of the Havasupai people live on a reservation in a side canyon called Havasu Canyon. Other main Native American groups of the Grand Canyon include the Hopi, Navajo, Paiute, and Zuni. In 1540, a group of Spanish explorers led by García López de Cárdenas became the first Europeans to see the Grand Canyon. They were part of Francisco Vásquez de Coronado‘s expedition to the area. In 1869, the American geologist John Wesley Powell led a river expedition through the vast canyon, which he named the Grand Canyon. A forest preserve was created in the Grand Canyon in 1893.

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This map shows the location of the Grand Canyon National Park in northwest Arizona. Credit: WORLD BOOK map

About 5 million people visit Grand Canyon National Park every year. The majority of visitors drive along park roads and stop at scenic viewing points about the Grand Canyon. Visitors may also walk along the canyon’s rim. Many tourists hike along trails in the park. Some people ride mules into the canyon, and others enter by boat or raft on the Colorado River.

Grand Canyon National Park is home to a wide range of mammals, including bats, desert bighorn sheep, American bison, coyotes, elk, mountain lions, mule deer, and skunks. More than 450 species of birds live in the park, and reptiles such as gila monsters, short-horned lizards, and several species of snakes are commonly seen. Varied plant populations thrive in the park’s desert scrub, grassland, meadow, woodland, and high elevation communities.

July , 2012

A huge canyon nearly as deep as the Grand Canyon has been discovered beneath a remote area of the West Antarctic ice sheet, a team of British scientists has reported. Scientists think that the canyon, which lies buried under nearly 1 mile (1.6 kilometers) of ice, may be a major reason for the dramatic loss of ice from West Antarctica over the past 20 years. The previously unknown canyon, named the Ferrigno Rift, lies beneath a massive glacier known as the Ferrigno Ice Stream, located just west of the Antarctic Peninsula. Satellite data collected over several decades has documented both a significant drop in the depth of the ice stream as well as an increase in the amount of ice breaking off into the Southern Ocean, which surrounds Antarctica. Scientists have calculated that melting ice from West Antarctica is responsible for nearly 10 percent of the current rise in global sea levels.

(World Book map; map data © MapQuest.com, Inc.)

The canyon was discovered by scientists from the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, who spent a brutal nine weeks measuring the topography of the ice stream’s rocky base using ice-penetrating radar devices hitched to snowmobiles. Glaciologist Robert Bingham of Aberdeen said that the dropoff in his measurements of the depth of the ice was so startling that he drove over the area two or three times to confirm his data.

Antarctica's rugged coast features jagged mountain peaks and glacier-filled valleys. Ice and snow cover 98 percent of the continent. Antarctica is the world's coldest region. (© Rod Planck, Photo Researchers)

An analysis of the data by Bingham and colleagues from the British Antarctic Survey indicate that the Ferrigno Rift is about 6 miles (9.6 kilometers) wide and at least 62 miles (100 kilometers) long. The Grand Canyon is more than 1 mile deep, 277 miles (446 kilometers) long, and from less than 1 mile to 18 miles (29 kilometers) wide. Unlike the Grand Canyon, the Ferrigno Rift was created when sections of Earth’s crust in what is now West Antarctica separated, creating a valley. Erosion likely deepened the valley, which probably formed tens of millions of years ago when Antarctica was ice free. The Grand Canyon was created chiefly through erosion by the Colorado River.

Bingham reported that the rift may be speeding the movement of the Ferrigno Ice Stream to the sea in several ways. Glaciers move more quickly over sediments like those found near the bottom of the rift. In addition, water from the Southern Ocean, which appears to be warming faster than any other ocean, may be flowing into the rift, causing erosion of the glacier from below.

Additional World Book articles:

• Global warming
• Ice formation
• Icecap
• Science in Antarctica (a Special Report)
• The Great Meltdown (a Special Report)