Great Unconformity

The proposed national monument is located at the edge of East Las Vegas for entering Lake Mead National Recreation Area.

It would include Frenchman Mountain, Rainbow Gardens, and the Great Unconformity.

And really, it houses a lot of really unique geological formations, Patty said.

The Great Unconformity is a rare geological site where erosion has exposed ancient layers of granite and other types of metamorphic rocks right next to newer deposits of sandstone.

The event will also promote indigenous ecological knowledge.

National Public Lands Day is the nation's largest single-day volunteer event dedicated to public lands.

On that scale, the oldest rock at the bottom of this canyon, the Vishnu Schist, would form sometime in early June.

The Great Unconformity, that missing billion years we will get to, would represent losing most of the summer.

The canyon itself, the actual carving by the river, would not begin until the final hour of December thirty-first.

And every human being who has ever lived, every civilization, every war, every national park, all of it happens in the last few seconds before midnight.

These rocks tell the story of ancient coastlines, shallow seas, and the layered muck of tidal flats laid down over hundreds of millions of years and then tilted by later mountain building.

And then, this is one of the strangest features in all of geology, there is a gap.

Geologists call it the Great Unconformity.

Directly above those ancient tilted layers, the rock record simply skips forward more than a billion years.

Or, in some places, touch the Grand Canyon supergroup.

It's called the Great Unconformity.

I don't know what to tell you.

Geologists don't like take a class on how to name stuff.

In some spots, the Great Unconformity skips about 250 million years of the geological record.

And in others, as much as 1.2 billion years of history are just missing.

That's about 25% of the Earth's biography either erased or never recorded.

And still others theorize that what looks like one global event actually took place over multiple periods of massive erosion or little sediment deposition.