Description
The Utah Navajo Sandstone is a geologic formation in the Glen Canyon Group, which is distributed across the U.S. states of southern Nevada, northern Arizona, northwestern Colorado, and Utah as part of the Colorado Plateau province of the United States. The wide range of colors exhibited by the Navajo Sandstone reflects a long history of alteration by groundwater and other subsurface fluids over the past 190 million years. The various colors, except white, are caused by the presence of varying mixtures and amounts of hematite, goethite, and limonite that fill the pore spaces in the quartz sand that encompasses the Navajo Sandstone. The iron in these layers originally came from the erosion of iron-bearing silicate minerals.
