Future of Arches NP

Arches National Park is an arid region of Utah considered to be a “high desert” due to the 25 % lack of plant cover and water.  Back in the Triassic- Jurassic period the area was underwater.  Slowly the area dried up leaving a massive salt plane along with several thousand feet of sediment that over time has turned into sandstone.  A unique feature in this area, are the arches that are created using mechanical and chemical weathering.  The process is very slow and takes several hundred if not thousands of years to take place.

  The park will look fairly similar to what it does today.  That being said some of the current arches might have collapsed and new arches would have had time to form.  This is based of the theory of Uniformitarianism in that deserts age slower due to lack of weathering and erosion being limited. The transport (flashfloods few and far between) and weathering is limited (wind is whimpy).

It is hard to say what it would be like ten thousand years from now but I hypothesize that there would be more extensive stony areas like the Sandstone Organ, Fiery Furnace, and Tower of Babel (inselbergs).  Evidence for this is that there are erosional landforms that have already shown up in the region of Arches national park.  This landscape changes very slowly but in this time period more of the softer materials would be carried away to reveal more stony areas.

In a million years the arches will probably be gone completely and the area might slowly turn back into a giant lake such as it was during the late Jurassic period. This might occur based on the earth’s pattern of climate change and the fact that as of right now we could be heading into an interglacial period, which could potentially drastically change the current environment in Arches National Park.

Arches National Park is an environment that changes very slowly due to its status as a desert. For this reason, this landscape could remain in a similar state to how it is now for a long period of time. However depending on environmental factors the landscape could change drastically within a million years.