The Amazing Colorado

A picture of the continental divide and a simple
example of the watersheds.

Colorado has a lot of interesting physical geographic features but the two that we will talk about are the continental divide and the Colorado plateau. The Colorado mountains are included in the continental divide, the high elevation of the mountains located in central Colorado separates the continent’s watersheds. “A region's watershed is the area of land where all of the water is under it or drains off of it and goes into the same place" (Epa.gov). Colorado’s high elevation will determine if water in North America will flow west to the Pacific or east to the Gulf of Mexico via the Mississippi basin. Another interesting physical landform in Colorado is the Colorado Plateau. This plateau is the biggest plateau in the world covering a total area of 130,000 square miles. This plateau also has a very geologically intriguing feature of being extremely stable. This has kept it around for about 500 to 600 million years with very little movement or breakdown.

An educated guess looking a thousand years into the future for the landscape of Colorado would lead one to conclude that Colorado itself will not experience much change. Due to geologic time, a thousand years is too short to notice any measurable landscape shifts in this region. We can hypothesize this because Colorado does not lie on any faults or any plates. Therefore a landscape change in a thousand years is not probable.

After ten thousand years however, you could probably start to see some sort of measurable difference in the height of our Rockies. This difference would not be big at all but since the Rockies are growing at a rate of about 5 to 10 millimeters a year. You could calculate that they would’ve grown about two inches in the ten thousand year period. The Rockies are growing due to the subduction, going under and sinking, of the Farallon plate under the North American plate. This event happened around 70 million years ago to get the Rockies close to what the are now and the Rockies are growing now because of the isostatic rebound of that event. The surface tends to rise or sink as the lithosphere rises or sinks in the asthenosphere trying to reach an equilibrium of pressure between the two layers. Right now the lithosphere is rising in its attempt to get to equilibrium.

In one million years if the growth of the Rockies, it continues at the rate it is currently going, you will have estimated that the Rockies will have grown about 16 feet. This is due to the influence of the isostatic rebound going on that was explained in the paragraph above. The Rockies are the only thing in all of Colorado’s landscape that are having a significant change going on. Also you can assume that the Colorado plateau will not see any change at all in this time period due to its extreme stability.

Wrapping it all up you can say that in time the Rocky Mountains will keep growing and keep expanding at some rate and our unique physical geographic features will keep staying sexy.

A picture of the beautiful Colorado Plateau showing a
small portion of its true size. 

Works Cited http://water.epa.gov/type/watersheds/whatis.cfm 

http://www.umich.edu/~gs265/isost.html#Isostatic

http://geomaps.wr.usgs.gov/parks/province/rockymtn.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorado_Plateau

http://clasfaculty.ucdenver.edu/callen/1202/