Stories about earth science have all the transformations and power struggles of a fairy tale. When I asked my friend Tyler Auer—a photography blogger who studied geoscience in college—to tell me the story behind a favorite photo, he sent me a tale that’s part Princess and the Pea and part Jurassic Park.
Tyler took this picture at Zion Canyon, one of the many national park areas (including the Grand Canyon) within the 130,000-square-mile formation known as the Colorado Plateau.
“Around the time the dinosaurs roamed the western US, the Colorado plateau was a giant sea of sand dunes,” Tyler says. Over millions of years, these sand dunes kept forming on top of one another and compressing into layered sandstone. You can see the outlines of the ancient dunes, like so many stacked mattresses, in the striations of the canyon walls.
While the sand dunes were turning to rock, they were ...
