Grand Canyon ‘Trail of Time’ Developed by UMass Amherst Geoscientist Lets Visitors Walk 4.6-Billion Years of History

Oct. 27, 2009

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Janet Lathrop 413/545-0444

AMHERST, Mass. – Most of the 5 million annual visitors to the Grand Canyon leave with plenty of photographs of the 2-billion-year-old northern Arizona landmark, but with little knowledge of its geologic history. Mike Williams, a geoscientist at University of Massachusetts Amherst, is aiming to change that by creating a walkable trail that teaches visitors about the vastness of geologic time.

After all, the Grand Canyon “is our great geology national park,” he says.

UMass Amherst’s Williams and colleagues at the University of New Mexico, Arizona State and Northern Arizona University have developed a nearly 3-mile (4.6-kilometer) walk called the Trail of Time to represent Earth’s entire 4.6-billion-year history. About half of that time period is visible in the Grand Canyon’s rock formations, and the other half of the trail will document the pre-canyon history of life using panels, rock samples, and maps.

The walk along the most-visited South Rim introduces visitors to the immensity of geologic time with short descriptions of rock formations and 45 touchable representative rocks marking the point in time at which they were formed. The construction team, aided by the National Park Service, has collected a wide variety of rocks from within the Canyon to give visitors a physical sense of their age and composition, Williams says. One more collecting mission is planned for November. The official opening of the trail is set for next Spring at the start of the 2010 tourist season.

On some sections of the trail, simple pipe telescopes are aimed at areas of the canyon to show rocks whose formation corresponds to trail time where the viewer is standing. The Grand Canyon lends itself especially well to such understanding because it is “one of the most complete time sections in North America of every part of geologic time,” says Williams.

The Trail of Time uses existing paved and accessible walking paths between the Yavapai Observation Station and Grand Canyon Village, drawing walkers from the overwhelming percentage of visitors who never venture down into the canyon. Williams wants to bring the canyon experience to those who remain on the rim. “If you walk in, you get it — the feel of it and the time,” he says. But if you never do that, he wants you to be able to experience an awareness of its vast age anyway.

Geology education at the Grand Canyon also serves as a counter claim in a place where creationists bring families and students to teach an anti-evolution version of Earth’s history. Williams and colleagues want to meet this challenge head on at the South Rim and make the case that there’s persuasive scientific evidence for evolution. “The approach is to help people become more comfortable with deep time and with the geologic evidence for when things happened, so they can make their own decisions,” he adds.

The trail is designed to give billions of years, so hard for our minds to comprehend, a physical reality. “Here we have illustrated it with examples of the rocks we describe, taken from out of the canyon,” Williams explains. Bronze markers placed every meter along the trail tell visitors how far they’ve come in time.

An adjoining Million Years Trail provides a transition between human time scales — with markers for individual years, centuries and major events in human history — to geologic time. That transition — from centuries to millions of years — allows visitors to grasp the enormous time scale over which the canyon was formed.

Williams says that understanding time enables people to have “a sense of the place and be able to understand the origin and evolution of landscapes, plants, animals, and ourselves.”

Besides Williams, project collaborators include Steve Semken of Arizona State University, with Karl Karlstrom and Laura Crossey of University of New Mexico. It is funded by an approximately $2 million grant from the National Science Foundation’s Informal Science Education Program.

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