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The canyon that humans made by accident

Tom Scott | February 3, 2026



The tourist guides promote it as Georgia’s Little Grand Canyon: but this is a scar on the Earth, caused by humans either not understanding or not caring about geology. Is it natural? Or man-made? Or both?

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Written by Tom Scott

Comments

This post currently has 32 comments.

  1. @TomScottGo

    February 3, 2026 at 6:20 pm

    This is the last one from the Georgia roadtrip! I did want to descend into the canyon, but a massive storm had been through an hour earlier and turned most of the paths to mud…

  2. @l.clevelandmajor9931

    February 3, 2026 at 6:20 pm

    I live just a couple of hours drive from where this canyon is located. It stands as a lesson concerning bad farming practices. It is currently around 150 to 160 years old. Shows that canyons can form a lot faster that geologists say they can! I suspect that the Grand Canyon out west is no more that 3 or 4 thousand years old itself.

  3. @samuelspace101

    February 3, 2026 at 6:20 pm

    Honestly should we really say this isnt natural, under the implication that human deeds can't produce natural events, its a good philosophical question and from my point of view, this hasnt cuased any bad, as far as im aware its even created new habitat and shade for many animals, and its not dangerous, except for the occasional rockfall, its well maintained and preserved and healthy.

  4. @rbaxter286

    February 3, 2026 at 6:20 pm

    Yep, that's why I see the American Southwest as just a case of extremely poor land management, at the bottom of it all, when I see things like this in GA, where I live, and in SC, across the border.
    Nothing scenic is mass wastage when you can see green life elsewhere.

  5. @user-tb2jy9lu3d

    February 3, 2026 at 6:20 pm

    2:20 Anyone know where the carvings on there came from? I see "ABC" "5G" "Th FC" and such that is a bit hard to make out. Was that carved out by someone before it eroded down to that point?

  6. @stevecastle1730

    February 3, 2026 at 6:20 pm

    Natural wonder in the west: We subducted an entire oceanic plate under our crust, lifting a plateau of solid rock made of ancient sand dunes 6000 feet in the air and cut a 300 mile 6000 foot deep canyon in it.

    Natural wonder in Georgia: we accidently cut down all the trees and made a 150 foot deep ditch in a pile of loose dirt.

  7. @bobbarclay316

    February 3, 2026 at 6:20 pm

    Human activity? So what?
    Just yesterday the press was celebrating the fact that a sunken ship will become a brand new coral reef where there was none before.
    Which is it? Keep human hands from changing the planet, or let humans add coral reefs because we like them?

  8. @ryanmaxwelll2730

    February 3, 2026 at 6:20 pm

    Aren't humans part of nature? Why do we always presume ourselves to be outside nature? If gophers or moles are worms digging holes in this area were to cause the same type of erosion, would that be natural?

  9. @nickc6332

    February 3, 2026 at 6:20 pm

    Tens of millions of years ago??? The Earth is NOT that old!!! Claiming that geological formations take millions of years is the most passed around LIE I've ever seen. This is the definition of Mansplaining. These people have ZERO ideas of what they're talking about. Passing this garbage off as factual should be a crime. This is ridiculous.

  10. @Lenzcam

    February 3, 2026 at 6:20 pm

    The weather is overcast, the colors in Providence Canyon can look muted. On my last trip to the canyon, though, the weather was perfect, and the colors of the canyon walls just popped without adjusting the color saturation.

  11. @LA2047

    February 3, 2026 at 6:20 pm

    When I see things like this "wonder of nature" that was caused by man's inability to consider consequences, I'm reminded of places like Glass Beach near Fort Bragg in California. The only reason Glass Beach exists is because for decades humans used the area offshore as their landfill, dumping absolutely everything they threw in the trash into the ocean. Tides and waves relocated much of it back to the nearby shore, where waves did what waves do and turned the broken glass into smooth multi-colored "gems" aaaaall over the beach. The government forced them to clean up the site eventually but in a case of humans never passing up a chance at making money, they decided to leave all the glass beads because they kinda looked cool and hey, we can charge people to come see the beach covered in smooth glass beads. In the irony of ironies, however, NOW the beach has signs lamenting the destruction of the beach because in the intervening decades humans have done what humans do and have systematically stripped the beach of the gems through souvenir collecting, returning the beach almost entirely back into its original state. I find that rather comically ironic.

  12. @StevenDCook-rl5dg

    February 3, 2026 at 6:20 pm

    Even if it isn’t, natural in a classic sense, there’s probably not an intervention that wouldn’t do more harm than good. Nature appears to be trying to achieve a new equilibrium and it may take millennia.

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