Water is life. Nowhere is this truer than in arid landscapes like ours in the Southwest. Rivers carve the valleys and mountains we live among and sustain our life and culture with the land. As highly responsive and dynamic systems, rivers record stories of landscape evolution, land use, and climate change as sets of river terraces. Terraces are the stranded sediment left behind by ancestral rivers and chances are that you live on one! As the geologic foundation of the places we call home in the Middle Río Grande Valley, terraces bridge perspectives of geology, ecology, and culture as records of Earth and human systems.

In this piece, we demonstrate the connections between human timescales and geologic timescales—the inseparable nature of our place within landscapes. Scientists that study landscapes can use river deposits preserved as terraces to unravel the chapters of a landscape’s history. Rivers record the stories of the mountains, climate, and ecosystems we attach to our cultural identity. Studying landscape evolution at both geologic and human timescales repositions our communities as part of geologic processes, strengthening our sense of place and connection to the Earth processes that we respond to.

This art piece utilizes fluvial sediment—sand, gravel, and pebbles—from the Río Grande to construct a view of dynamic river systems. We tell a story of geologic time projected from the bottom-oldest sediments of New Mexico’s human history and colonization to the subsequent damming and diversion of streams. We speculate how river sediment will record the present and the near future based on decisions we make now.

With this layercake of fluvial strata and story, we invite you to imagine your place within our living landscapes. We hope to promote a landscape-perspective that recenters reciprocal relationships with arid landscapes and connects us to our place within geologic time.