This piece is part of a special project on deep time examining what the Western U.S. was like thousands, millions and even billions of years ago, and how that history is still visible and consequential today.
If you traveled back in time, you wouldn’t recognize Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. More than 250 million years ago, this place was an ocean. Over time, the churning of Earth’s crust raised the seabed, and it became dry land. Dinosaurs reigned on the young plain as it toggled between desert and tropical climes, then stood witness when an invading ocean severed the continent. The channel receded after 34 million years, and the continental plate continued to rise to form the high deserts of today.
The landscape has been a meticulous archivist, and its stratigraphy reveals a geologic history between 30 million and 300 million years old. The extraordinary preservation of all these years in the monument’s rocks, landforms and fossils makes Grand Staircase-Escalante special. Now, however, it is threatened by the Trump administration’s land-management policies.
Geologists say that no other terrestrial record of this time period is as complete. Wind and water have whittled the cliffs and terraces that expose its various chapters, creating an open book for scientists to explore. President Bill Clinton invoked the Antiquities Act in 1996 to establish the nearly 1.9-million-acre monument in hopes of enabling researchers to piece together the Earth’s complex past using the landscape’s sweeping geologic record.
But according to scientists, the national monument, which is overseen by the Bureau of Land Management, has yet to fully deliver on its mission. Insufficient resources and the federal government’s shifting priorities — including the administration’s recurring threats to downsize the monument — have kept it from reaching its full scientific potential.
“It is the most famous storybook of the history of our planet,” said Colorado State University geoscientist Joel Pederson. But “the research that could be done in Grand Staircase has not yet come to fruition.”
GRAND STAIRCASE-ESCALANTE’S time as a national monument has led to many discoveries. The uncanny resemblance between the Moqui marbles — pea-to-grapefruit-sized ancient concretions of iron pulled from groundwater — and some Martian rocks observed in 2004 confirmed that our planetary neighbor also had a watery past. Scientists have also identified 30 new species of fauna from fossils here that include dinosaur skin, tracks and marble-sized bird eggs. Many of these fossils have not been found anywhere else in North America, a mystery that confounds scientists.
And Grand Staircase-Escalante may hold the key to other scientific questions. By understanding how life evolved under different climes, for example, scientists can gain insight into how life might fare in a warmer future. But increasingly, the paleontologists who dig here face heightened challenges to conducting their research.
The monument suffers from chronic underfunding, which threatens managers’ ability to protect fossils and other specimens from vandalism and theft. Since its inception, its budget and staffing levels have shrunk by at least three-quarters. The nonprofit Grand Staircase-Escalante Partners reported that, since January, the national monument has lost multiple backcountry rangers, rangeland technicians and its only in-house paleontologist. The BLM declined to respond to questions about Grand Staircase-Escalante’s management or budget.
“It is the most famous storybook of the history of our planet; the research that could be done in Grand Staircase has not yet come to fruition.”
Flip-flopping federal policies have added to the uncertainty. During his first term, President Donald Trump nearly halved the size of the monument and opened the rest to drilling and mining. President Joe Biden restored its original borders, but in July, the House of Representatives proposed funding only half of the monument’s acreage — in effect, restoring Trump’s original reduction.
The Trump administration justified this by declaring an “energy emergency,” though many doubt that Grand Staircase-Escalante’s natural resources are worth extracting. During Trump’s first term, no mining company leased lands within the national monument. The Interior Department is also considering shrinking or eliminating five more national monuments, including Chuckwalla and Bears Ears.
Surrendering any section of Grand Staircase-Escalante, whose rocks exquisitely document deep time, would be an immeasurable loss. Retired geologist Marjorie Chan likens the landscape to nature’s version of the Venus de Milo, the famous armless Greek sculpture
of Aphrodite that is now protected in the Louvre. “How much time did nature take to sculpt all this?” Chan asked. Grand Staircase is worth fighting for, she added, “because you’re never going to be able to get that reproduced again.”
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This article appeared in the January 2026 print edition of the magazine with the headline “Unmet scientific potential.”
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