Shiva Temple is a summit located in the

Grand Canyon The Grand Canyon is a steep-sided canyon carved by the Colorado River in Arizona, United States. The Grand Canyon is long, up to wide and attains a depth of over a mile (). The canyon and adjacent rim are contained within Grand Canyon Nati ...

, in

Coconino County Coconino County is a County (United States), county in the North Central Arizona, North-Central part of the U.S. state of Arizona. Its population was 145,101 at the 2020 United States census, 2020 census. The county seat is Flagstaff, Arizon ...

Arizona Arizona is a U.S. state, state in the Southwestern United States, Southwestern region of the United States, sharing the Four Corners region of the western United States with Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah. It also borders Nevada to the nort ...

, US. It is situated six miles north of Hopi Point overlook of the canyon's South Rim, about 2.5 miles southwest of North Rim's Tiyo Point, and two miles northwest of

Isis Temple Isis Temple is a prominence in the Grand Canyon, Arizona, Southwestern United States. It is located below the North Rim and adjacent to the Granite Gorge along the Colorado River. The Trinity Creek and canyon flow due south at its west border ...

, where it towers above the

Colorado River The Colorado River () is one of the principal rivers (along with the Rio Grande) in the Southwestern United States and in northern Mexico. The river, the List of longest rivers of the United States (by main stem), 5th longest in the United St ...

. Shiva Temple is named for

Shiva Shiva (; , ), also known as Mahadeva (; , , Help:IPA/Sanskrit, ɐɦaːd̪eːʋɐh and Hara, is one of the Hindu deities, principal deities of Hinduism. He is the God in Hinduism, Supreme Being in Shaivism, one of the major traditions w ...

, the Hindu deity, destroyer of the universe. This name was applied by

Clarence Dutton Clarence Edward Dutton (May 15, 1841 – January 4, 1912) was an American geologist and US Army officer. Dutton was born in Wallingford, Connecticut on May 15, 1841. He graduated from Yale College in 1860 and took postgraduate courses there until ...

who began the tradition of naming geographical features in the Grand Canyon after mythological deities.Randy Moore and Kara Felicia Witt, ''The Grand Canyon: An Encyclopedia of Geography, History, and Culture'', 2018, ABC-CLIO Publisher, page 150. Dutton believed Shiva Temple was the largest, grandest, and most majestic of the Grand Canyon buttes, with a broad, level, forested top. This mountain's name was officially adopted in 1906 by the U.S. Board on Geographic Names. In 1937, the

American Museum of Natural History The American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) is a natural history museum on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in New York City. Located in Theodore Roosevelt Park, across the street from Central Park, the museum complex comprises 21 interconn ...

led explorations to Shiva Temple and

Wotans Throne Wotans Throne is a summit located in the Grand Canyon, in Coconino County, Arizona, US. It is situated one mile immediately southwest of the Cape Royal overlook on the canyon's North Rim, 1.7 miles west-southwest of Freya Castle, two mil ...

in the belief that these buttes, isolated for 100,000 years from the plateau, may have evolved new species. The scientists discovered

Ancestral Puebloan dwellings Hundreds of Ancestral Puebloan dwellings are found across the American Southwest. With almost all constructed well before , these Puebloan towns and villages are located throughout the geography of the Southwest. Many of these dwellings inclu ...

, deer antlers, and an empty Kodak film box that had been left behind a month earlier by pioneer Emery Kolb, his daughter Edith, Ruth Stephens Baker, Gordon Berger, and Ralph White, but no new species. According to the

Köppen climate classification The Köppen climate classification divides Earth climates into five main climate groups, with each group being divided based on patterns of seasonal precipitation and temperature. The five main groups are ''A'' (tropical), ''B'' (arid), ''C'' (te ...

system, Shiva Temple has a

Cold semi-arid climate Cold is the presence of low temperature, especially in the atmosphere. In common usage, cold is often a subjective perception. A lower bound to temperature is absolute zero, defined as 0.00K on the Kelvin scale, an absolute thermodynamic ...

Geology

The top of Shiva Temple is composed of

Permian The Permian ( ) is a geologic period and System (stratigraphy), stratigraphic system which spans 47 million years, from the end of the Carboniferous Period million years ago (Mya), to the beginning of the Triassic Period 251.902 Mya. It is the s ...

Kaibab Limestone The Kaibab Limestone is a resistant cliff-forming, Permian geologic formation that crops out across the U.S. states of northern Arizona, southern Utah, east central Nevada and southeast California. It is also known as the Kaibab Formation in Ar ...

overlaying cream-colored, cliff-forming, Permian

Coconino Sandstone The Coconino Sandstone is a geologic formation (geology), formation composed of light-colored quartz arenite of Aeolian processes, eolian origin. It erodes to form conspicuous, sheer cliffs in the upper walls of Grand Canyon, as part of the Mog ...

. The conspicuous band of sandstone, which is the third-youngest strata in the Grand Canyon, was deposited 265 million years ago as sand dunes. Below the Coconino Sandstone is slope-forming, reddish terraces of the

Pennsylvanian Pennsylvanian may refer to: * A person or thing from Pennsylvania * Pennsylvanian (geology) The Pennsylvanian ( , also known as Upper Carboniferous or Late Carboniferous) is, on the International Commission on Stratigraphy, ICS geologic timesc ...

-Permian

Supai Group The Supai Group is a slope-forming sequence of mixed red beds and limestones that outcrop in the Colorado Plateau. The group was laid down during the Pennsylvanian to Lower Permian. Cliff-forming interbeds of sandstone are noticeable througho ...

. Further down are strata of

Mississippian Mississippian may refer to: * Mississippian (geology), a subperiod of the Carboniferous period in the geologic timescale, roughly 360 to 325 million years ago * Mississippian cultures, a network of precontact cultures across the midwest and Easte ...

Redwall Limestone The Redwall Limestone is an erosion-resistant, Mississippian age, cliff-former, cliff-forming geological formation that forms prominent, red-stained cliffs in the Grand Canyon. these cliffs range in height from to . It is one of the most fossili ...

, and finally the

Cambrian The Cambrian ( ) is the first geological period of the Paleozoic Era, and the Phanerozoic Eon. The Cambrian lasted 51.95 million years from the end of the preceding Ediacaran period 538.8 Ma (million years ago) to the beginning of the Ordov ...

Tonto Group The Tonto Group is a name for an assemblage of related sedimentary strata, collectively known by geologists as a '' Group'', that comprises the basal sequence Paleozoic strata exposed in the sides of the Grand Canyon. As currently defined, the T ...

. Precipitation runoff from Shiva Temple drains south to the

via Trinity and Crystal Creeks.

Prominence – A plateau/tableland

The tableland plateau of Shiva Temple's prominence is made up of a forest of

Ponderosa Pine ''Pinus ponderosa'', commonly known as the ponderosa pine, bull pine, blackjack pine, western yellow-pine, or filipinus pine, is a very large pine tree species of variable habitat native to mountainous regions of western North America. It is t ...

; also pines, junipers, shrubs, and cacti.”Shiva’s Temple”, Arizona, Nature 140 (613)1937 (1937 nature survey expedition

/ref> The animals found in the survey expedition of 1937 were chipmunks, cottontail rabbits, pack rats, mice species, and

rock squirrel The rock squirrel (''Otospermophilus variegatus'') is a species of rodent in the family Sciuridae. It is native to Mexico and the Southwestern United States, including southern Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, West Texas, and the panha ...

Gallery

File:Shiva Temple aerial.jpg, Aerial view from the west File:Le Grand Canyon (5).jpg, Shiva Temple (left), Osiris Temple (right) File:Grand Canyon National Park, Powell Point Sunset.jpg, Shiva Temple centered in the distance, from Powell Point at sunset File:Shiva Temple and Isis Temple.jpg, Geologic layers of Shiva Temple File:Shiva Temple from southeast.jpg, Shiva Temple from southeast at Grandview Point File:Grand Canyon Hopi Point Evening Light 2013.jpg, Shiva Temple to the right, from Hopi Point File:Osiris, Shiva, Isis Temples. Grand Canyon.jpg, Shiva Temple centered File:Shiva Temple Grand Canyon Thomas Moran.jpg, Shiva Temple, 1872 pencil on paper drawing by

Thomas Moran Thomas Moran (February 12, 1837 – August 25, 1926) was an American painter and printmaker of the Hudson River School in New York whose work often featured the Rocky Mountains. Moran and his family, wife Mary Nimmo Moran and daughter Ruth, took ...

File:Le Grand Canyon (6).jpg, Claude Birdseye Point (west spur of Shiva Temple), named for Claude Hale Birdseye (1878–1941), Chief Topographic Engineer with the U.S. Geological Survey, whose expedition in 1923 down a portion of the Colorado River did much to advance knowledge about the Grand Canyon area.

References

External links

* Weather forecast
National Weather Service
* American Museum of Natural History Grand Canyon Expedition account
American Alpine Journal

Shiva Temple aerial photo
{{Geology of the Grand Canyon area, , state=collapsed Grand Canyon Landforms of Coconino County, Arizona Mountains of Arizona Mountains of Coconino County, Arizona Two-thousanders of the United States Colorado Plateau Grand Canyon National Park Sandstone formations of the United States

Geology

Prominence – A plateau/tableland

Gallery

See also

References

External links