The Grand Canyon, a stunning natural feature in the landscape of Arizona, US, is featured in these two satellite views.

This river valley in the southwestern portion of the Colorado Plateau stretches for about 443 km and is up to 29 km wide. Canyon walls, rock structures, old lava flows, buttes, ravines, stair-step topography and brilliant colours mark its valuable geological heritage.

Although a number of processes combined to create the Grand Canyon, it was formed primarily by the eroding action of the Colorado River that began about six million years ago. Other contributing factors include vulcanism, continental drift and the semi-arid climate.

As water erosion sculpted this majestic geological landscape, it revealed layers and layers of exposed rocks that provide us with a profound record of geologic events. As some of Earth’s oldest rock lies at the bottom of the canyon, it is said to be a billion years deep.

In this comparison, the canyon is the rocky formation stretching across the centre of the images and visible in hues of orange in the left image and blue on the right.

Also visible in the top right corner of the left image is Lake Powell, an important reservoir on the Colorado River and the second-largest artificial lake in the United States. Straddling the border of Utah (to the north) and Arizona (to the south), Lake Powell provides water to approximately 40 million people, irrigates over 2.2 million hectares of land and has the capacity to generate more than 4200 megawatts of hydropower electricity.

The left image is an optical view captured in June 2026 by the Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission, while the image on the right is a Copernicus Digital Elevation Model (DEM) that represents the various altitudes in the area, with colours ranging from blue, for elevations close to sea level, up to dark green for altitudes above 2000 m.

A digital elevation model is a three-dimensional relief map generated from Earth observation satellite data to provide pixel-by-pixel elevation values of Earth’s topography. Combined with other satellite observations, it helps to improve the mapping, modelling and analysis of landscapes and the study of changes in the terrain on a global scale. This supports a wide range of applications, including geohazard assessment, urban planning, civil engineering, disaster management and hydrology.