Right in the middle of the flattest, most perfectly layered rock landscape on the planet, there is a giant circle, almost a mile across. The rock inside it is twisted, crumpled, shoved in every direction at once. Everything around it? Flat. Perfectly flat. Four miles. Scientists have been arguing about what made it for over 100 years. Was it a meteor? A rock from outer space that hit the earth at 40,000 miles per hour and blew a hole in Utah 60 million years ago? Or was it something underground? An ancient blob of salt left over from a sea that dried up 300 million years ago. Slowly pushing up through the rock like a bubble rising through thick syrup. Today, we're gonna look this mystery right in the face, and you get to make the call. Let's go! Welcome to National Park Scouts, the show where curious kids discover America's wildest places. I'm Jenny. Today we're starting a brand new park, and this one is in a category all by itself. This park is not trying to be easy. It is, on purpose, one of the most raw, remote, and untamed places in the entire country. People who have explored every national park in America will tell you, Canyon Lands is different. It's the one that still feels genuinely wild. Utah is already famous for its national parks. You may have heard of Zion with its towering red cliffs, or Bryce Canyon, full of orange spires called hoodoos, arches, just up the road from here, with its famous red rock arches. Utah has five national parks total, and people call them the mighty five. Canyonlands is the biggest, the least visited, and the most remote of them all. It's the one that makes even experienced hikers and outdoors people stop and say, okay, this is serious. In today's episode, our very first Canyonlands episode, we're going to figure out where we are, what we're looking at, and solve a geologic mystery, the one I mentioned at the beginning. It has stumped scientists for over 100 years. Most national parks have one famous thing. Yellowstone has Old Faithful, Yosemite has El Capitan. But Canyonlands doesn't have one big landmark. The whole thing is the landmark. 527 square miles of canyon country carved by two rivers, divided into three completely separate worlds with no roads connecting them. That's where we'll spend most of our time today. A flat mesa, like a giant table made of rock, sitting 2,000 feet above the canyon floor. Paved roads, viewpoints, a visitor center. This is where most families go. World two, the needles. Hundreds of red and white, striped rock spires shooting straight up out of the ground. It's hiking country, it's incredible. World three, the maze, one of the most remote places in the entire country. No paved roads. Trails are unmarked. Rescues can take days. Even experienced explorers think twice. It is genuinely and intentionally wild. Three worlds, no connecting roads, all of it was carved by two rivers over millions of years. That's canyon lands. Okay, let's pretend we're on top of Island in the Sky, that flat mesa we just talked about. And in front of us, the ground just stops. It drops straight down. 2,000 feet of canyon wall falling away below our feet. That's taller than the Empire State Building? Twice. And those canyon walls? They're not just one color. They're striped. Red, orange, white, brown, layer after layer, stacked on top of each other like the world's biggest sandwich. Each one a different color because each one is made of different rock. And each one is a different chapter in Earth's history. The top layers are the youngest. The deeper you go, the older it gets. Way down at the bottom, the oldest rock visible, was laid down when this entire place was covered by a warm, shallow sea. Utah, right in the middle of Utah, completely underwater, with ancient fish swimming around. Now, if you were here, you would see a bright white stripe, about a third of the way down the canyon wall, running as far as you can see in both directions. Scientists call it the White Rim Sandstone. 250 million years ago, that white layer was a sandy beach sitting at the edge of a warm ocean, right here in Utah. Everything in these canyon walls is older than the dinosaurs. Every single layer. And underneath all of it, buried miles below Island in the sky, there is a massive layer of ancient salt left over from one of those old seas. Still down there, still moving. That salt is about to become very important. Wow, what a cliffhanger! Are you wondering what weird thing we'll talk about? You'll have to wait because right now it's time for guess that park sound. Let's hear it. Here's a clue. It's an animal. It's very small. It lives in Canyonlands, and the place it lives would surprise you. Because Canyon land gets less than 10 inches of rain per year. It's one of the driest places in the American Southwest. What kind of animal thrives in a place that dry? I'll tell you the answer right after the break. Okay, what was your guess? That sound is a canyon tree frog. Yes, a frog living in one of the driest canyons in North America. Canyon tree frogs are pretty incredible. They spend most of their lives hiding in cracks in dry rock. Just waiting. No water, no swimming, no splashing around. They go into a kind of survival waiting mode. Then, when it rains, even just a little, they come out and sing their hearts out and find water wherever they can. Puddles in a rock, little pools and low spots. Scientists call those pools potholes, which honestly sounds like a road problem, but in canyon country, it means a little pool that forms in a dip in the rock. And here's the fun part. Canyon tree frogs, they have sticky toe pads, kind of like little suction cups. They can climb straight up a smooth rock wall in a desert where it almost never rains. That's a very determined frog. Thank you to Michael Just for providing us with our park sound today. You can find more of his work at Dawntodawnphotography.com. Okay, now back to our mystery. Canyonlands has thousands of flat, perfectly layered rock strata. So those are nice horizontal bands of different colors and ages of rock, all stacked neatly on top of each other, like pancakes. For millions of years, layer after layer was laid down flat, like a pancake. And then in one spot, about three miles across, the pancakes they go completely haywire. Picture a giant blanket laid flat on the floor. Now imagine there's a bowl underneath the blanket right in the middle. You can kind of imagine how a blanket rises up in the circle, peaks at the edges of the bowl, then dips back down toward the center. That's what upheaval dome looks like, our mystery. Except the blanket is solid rock, and the bowl is three miles wide, and nobody can agree what the bowl is made of or how it got there. Everything about upheaval dome is flat and perfectly layered, those nice horizontal rock bands we talked about, all stacked neatly. But right here in this one circular spot, those layers go haywire, twisted, folded, pushed in all directions at once. From the air, or from the International Space Station, where NASA actually photographed it, it looks like a crater on the moon, which brings up a very big question. Scientists call this place Upheaval Dome, and for over 100 years they've been arguing about what made it. Here are the two main theories. Theory one, salt. Yes, I'm really mean salt. Here's how this one works. Deep underground, underneath pretty much all of southeastern Utah, there's a massive layer of salt, like table salt, but thousands of feet thick, left over from the ancient sea that dried up millions of years ago. When enough rock piles on top of it, the pressure makes the salt flow. Not like water, but more like slow-motion toothpaste being squeezed out of a tube. So over millions of years, a blob of salt could push upward through the rock. Think of it like a bubble rising through thick syrup, and it can dome everything above it into that circular shape. Scientists think that the salt bubble and all the rock above it has been completely eroded away, gone. What we're looking at today is just the stem underneath, like finding the bottom of an ice cream cone after someone ate everything on top. If that's true, a peval dome would be the most deeply eroded salt structure on Earth. That's the first theory, and it made sense until the second one showed up. Theory 2, meteor. In 2008, German geologists were studying rock samples from a peval dome. And they found something very specific: a mineral called shocked quartz. Here's why that matters. Shocked quartz can only form under one condition, extreme sudden pressure, the kind of pressure you get when a meteorite slams into Earth at tens of thousands of miles per hour. Regular geological processes, even volcanoes, cannot make shocked quartz. Only meteor impacts can. Finding shocked quartz in all those rocks was a big deal. The theory is that about 60 million years ago, a meteorite, roughly one-third of a mile across, hit the earth right here. It created a huge explosion. It sent debris miles into the sky and left a crater. Since then, 60 million years of erosion have worn away the surface and exposed the deep, twisted rock structure underneath, which is what we're looking at today. The National Park Service says both theories are still on the table. Most planetary geologists, these are scientists who study craters on other planets, they lean toward the meteor impact theory. But it hasn't been totally proven. So what do you think, Scout? You've heard both sides, the salt theory and the meteor theory. What do you think made upheaval dome? Salt moving underground for millions of years? Or a space rock hitting the earth at 40,000 miles per hour? Hold that thought, we'll come back to it. Alright, scouts, it's wild card time. Today we are playing Who Would Win? I love this game. Round one. Who is better built for desert survival? Answer The Frog. A camel needs water every week. The canyon tree frog can wait out an entire dry season, sometimes longer, with no water at all. The camel is impressive and the frog is just ridiculous. Round two, the white rim sandstone versus the Grand Canyon. Which one took longer to make? Answer The White Rim. It's not even close. The Grand Canyon is impressive, but it's basically brand new compared to a quarter billion year old seafloor sitting right here in Utah. 250 million years ago, dinosaurs didn't even exist yet. My name is Graham and I'm eight years old. My question is why haven't scientists officially said it's a meteor crater? What would it take to prove it for sure? Great question. And here's the honest answer. Science doesn't work on one clue alone. Yes, shocked quartz is a major piece of evidence. It's the kind of evidence that really points toward a meteor impact. But scientists are careful. They want multiple lines of evidence all pointing to the same answer before they say something is definitely true. They're looking for other specific marks that only a meteor leaves behind. And the problem is 60 million years of erosion has worn away a lot of evidence. It's like trying to solve a puzzle when half the pieces have been swept away. Science works by accumulating evidence, like building a case in court. Right now, Upheaval Dome has enough evidence to make most geologists lean toward meteor impact. But the case isn't fully closed yet. And honestly, that's what makes it exciting. Okay, what did you learn today that most adults don't know? I learned that inside Canyonlands National Park, an actual U.S. national park that anyone can visit, there is a section so remote that if something goes wrong and you need help, a rescue can take days. It's called the Maze, and it's one of the most genuinely wild places in the entire country. Every scout needs a mission. Here's yours. If you're at home, go outside and find a patch of soft dirt, sand, or mud. Somewhere you can make a mess. Find a rock, any rock. Now drop it straight down from as high as you can. Look at what it leaves behind. See that little crater? See the way the dirt splashed outward in all directions? That's exactly what meteor impact looks like. Just scaled up a million times. Try it from different heights. Does a higher drop make a bigger crater? What happens if you try a really small rock versus a bigger one? You just did real impact science. If you're visiting canyon lands, your mission is the grand viewpoint overlook. Find the white rim, that bright white stripe in the canyon walls. You're looking at an ancient seafloor. Then drive to the upheaval dome overlook. Stand at the rim, look down into that circle. Make your call. Salt or meteor? There's no wrong answer yet. You're thinking like a scientist's. Next time, we follow two rivers to the heart of Canyonlands, where the Green and Colorado meet. And we get to meet the man who first floated through these canyons in a wooden boat in 1869 with absolutely no idea what was around the next bend. Scouts, your next adventure is waiting.