In a channeled episode of the world traveling series Amazing Places, host Tom Scott visits Providence Canyon, a picturesque site known by many as “Georgia’s Little Grand Canyon” to marvel at its beauty, examine the soil and to posit a question about what is considered to be a natural wonder. While the canyon itself is a natural phenomenon, its accidental formation by settlers in the 19th century who didn’t understand the nature of the soil, was not.
This whole area was flat forest and none of these canyons were here. Settlers cleared the area of its trees and plowed the soil for agriculture. Either they didn’t know about crop rotation and soil management or perhaps they didn’t care. seeing a whole continent laid out before them soon the little drainage paths that rainwater took after storms started to erode and become bigger and bigger and bigger. With soil like this, it only took a few decades before this landscape formed.
