Science
“Beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror,” the poet Rainer Marie Rilke writes, “which we are still just able to endure, and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us.” It's a definition that could have been inspired by the beauty of the American West – Trans-Pecos Texas included. Encountering a landscape of soaring mountains and vertiginous vistas, we sense powerful forces beyond our ken or control. One of those forces is known as the Rio Grande Rift. From Colorado to the Big Bend, the continent is being torn apart. Though it provides the route for its namesake river, the Rift itself is far more ancient. Geologists are still laboring to understand t... Hosted by for KRTS