(Tribune File Photo) Rock formations and scenery changes each day while hiking along the Paria River on Wednesday, Sept. 28, 2016.
The Salt Lake Tribune has an article about the recent Presidential to free up parts of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument for development. There are many concerns that this change will imperil one of the world's richest paleontological areas. Some of the researchers are now suing in federal court to halt the move. The Grand Staircase was declared a National Monument in 1996 by then President Bill Clinton.
A 1,650 square-mile triangle bounded by the Straight Cliffs on the east and the Cockscomb on the west, the Kaiparowits contains an unbroken fossil record spanning about 25 million years of the Late Cretaceous, from 100 million to 75 million years ago — an era when ecosystems first emerged that we would recognize today, filled with flowering plants and familiar backboned animals like lizards, snakes, amphibians, turtles and mammals.
“It has really transformed how we understand the Late Cretaceous and its extinction events and what happened after the extinction events,” says David Polly, president of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology.
On Monday, Trump flew to Utah and signed proclamations breaking the once 1.35 million-acre Bears Ears National Monument into two monuments, totaling 201,876 acres. He also trimmed the Grand Staircase-Escalante from 1.9 million acres to about 1 million, segmenting it into three smaller monuments, including a new Kaiparowits National Monument covering 551,034 acres.
The redrawn Kaiparowits preserve resembles a jigsaw puzzle piece with large areas carved out. Maps reveal that some of those carve-outs, such as Alvey Wash, overlap with mineable coal seams and old mineral leases. According to analyses by the environmental group Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance and others, retired oil and gas leases on the plateau also match up neatly with areas excised from the monument by Trump’s decree.
