Wet and Dry, Fire and Ice:
Visiting Seven of America’s Natural Wonders
VOICE TWO: As we continue west we also take a sharp
dive south. We want to see the huge hole in the Earth,
called the Grand Canyon in the state of Arizona. The first
sight is breathtaking. The Grand Canyon stretches for
hundreds of kilometers before us and hundreds of meters
below us. It is about twenty-four kilometers across at its
widest point. Its deepest point is almost two thousand meters down.
The Grand Canyon is a series of deep long cuts in rock. There are many passages and large
raised areas. There are forests on the top level and desert areas down below. They provide support
for several different ecosystems. The Colorado River flows through the Grand Canyon.The Canyon
offers a lot of information about the physical history of Earth. There is a huge amount of fossil
evidence. And its walls provide a record of three of the four major periods of the Earth’s geologic
time.