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Language: en

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Providence Canyon, a couple of hours' drive
from Atlanta,

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is known as Georgia's Little Grand Canyon.

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This network of gorges and gullies reaches
over 40 metres deep, and it's beautiful.

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Even without the artificial saturation boost
that a lot of photographers give it.

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This is known as one of the
Seven Natural Wonders of Georgia.

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There is just one problem with
that description, though:

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this is man-made,

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by accident.

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This is a scar in the Earth,

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and it's a scar that'll take a very long time
to heal.

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The ground here is made of
unconsolidated sediment.

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That means I'm standing on loose sand and clay
that was deposited

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tens of millions of years ago
on what was then the sea floor.

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It's stable, of course,

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but it's never been compacted into solid rock
or cemented together by geology and time.

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It's not going to collapse,

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but if you draw a line from, say, desert sand,
where nothing sticks together,

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to solid rock, the sort of thing that
miners have to blast with dynamite...

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the ground here is definitely on this end
of the scale, for a long way down.

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Tree root systems, grass, and
other plants all help to stabilise it.

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And that was fine for millions of years,
and through most of human history,

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until settlers manifested their destiny
all over this continent.

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At the start of the 19th century,
this whole area was flat forest,

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none of these canyons were here.

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Settlers cleared the area of all its trees
and ploughed the soil for agriculture.

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Either they didn't know about
crop rotation and soil management

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or perhaps they didn't care, seeing a
whole continent laid out before them.

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Soon, the little drainage paths that rainwater took
after storms started to erode

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and become bigger, and bigger,
and... bigger.

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With soil like this, it only took a few decades
before this landscape formed.

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A century and a half later, new trees
are starting to stabilise some of it,

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but it's still changing and eroding.

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The park management has to move these fences
occasionally;

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sometimes they'll find that one of the spires
out there has just fallen after heavy rain.

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There are strict no-climbing warnings here,
because, well,

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the rock you're holding onto could just
fall away and dissolve in your hand.

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So my question is: should this count as a
natural wonder?

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It is part of nature.

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People do come to wonder at it.

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All those colors are from the different minerals
that are in the soil:

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so this is a look back through those
millions of years of geological history,

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and those millions of years
are unquestionably natural.

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But exposing them: that was very much human.

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[rumbling noise]

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So I'm hoping the microphone
picked up that noise.

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Er, because as soon as I
turned my camera off,

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there was a massive noise,
and I'm fairly sure that was a rockfall.

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From this cliff.

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Which is worrying.

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It's probably fine.
It's probably fine.