Weekly Photo Challenge – Sea

Evidence of an Ancient Sea

For those of you who have been following this blog for a while, I’m sure you were expecting to see an underwater shot from one of my scuba adventures. Surprise! I decided to take this challenge in a totally different direction! You see, I’ve been visiting Moab, Utah for the past few days and when I learned of this week’s challenge, I thought it might be more appropriate to share a photo from this beautiful place.

The challenge is to share something about the sea. So what does a photo of red rock cliffs in the desert have to do with the sea? Well, millions of years ago, Utah was covered by an inland sea. The sediment from that large body of water produced the raw materials for the sandstone that you see here. A geological journey through time, the red rock canyons throughout southern Utah tell the story of those inland seas, their ebbs and flows, and of the life that thrived in and near those waters. One can see dinosaur tracks, dinosaur bones embedded in rock, petrified wood and the evidence of the silt deposited in the multicolored layers of rock here.

This shot was taken this morning from Cane Creek Road looking west across the Colorado River to the rock walls on the other side.

To learn more about the Weekly Photo Challenge, click here.