The Grand Canyon is one of those things that you have to see in person to really get a feel for just how grand it really is. Pictures just don’t do it justice.

Even seeing it in person will only give you a glimpse into its size since you can’t see the whole thing from any one place (except maybe space).

The canyon itself took millions of years to develop. As the Colorado River ran through, it slowly eroded the rock away until it got as big as it is today. Technically speaking, the Grand Canyon is still growing thanks to this process.

There were times in history when the Colorado River rushed much heavier and faster, which would speed up the process a little, but today the river is relatively small and moves along the bottom of the canyon.

As a thought experiment, how much water would it take to fill the Grand Canyon up? Well, assuming you could plug up each end of the canyon and just add the water directly in (not accounting for evaporation or other factors), it would take a lot.

According to the National Park Service, the total volume of the Grand Canyon is approximately 4.17 trillion cubic meters (147 trillion cubic feet).

One cubic meter holds 1000 liters, which means that the Grand Canyon could hold 4.17 quadrillion liters (give or take) of water.

Well, there is a lot of water on Earth. The US Geological Survey says that there is around 1,386,000,000 cubic kilometers (332,519,000 cubic miles) of water on Earth. That is 1,386,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 liters of water (1.386 Septillion liters).

That means it would only take about three ten-millionths of all the Earth’s water to fill up the Grand Canyon. Still, that is a lot of water and would not be an easy task for anyone to complete.

So, while you should never intentionally add (or remove) anything from the Grand Canyon if you did happen to spill a bottle of water into it (or even a few thousand swimming pools filled with water for that matter), it wouldn’t have any noticeable effect on the total amount of water.

While fun to think about, this is not something that anyone should do. Let’s just stand back and enjoy the breathtaking views of the Grand Canyon and leave it to nature to fill or empty it naturally.

If you think that’s impressive, check out this story about a “goldmine” of lithium that was found in the U.S. that could completely change the EV battery game.