The question facing Johnson, chair and associate professor of Environmental Studies, was simple: Why is the Gorge so deep? What makes it so different than other rivers in the area?

While he stared at the maps, Olivia Stanley, an environmental studies major and 2020 graduate, came to him with findings from a research project. Her work transformed how Johnson saw his research.

I had spent the better part of my last two years at Davidson researching the Gorge, Stanley said. In the summer of 2019, with a grant from the Davidson Research Initiative, I walked miles and miles of riverside trails, taking field notes and turning them into a digital mapping of the Linville River and Gorge.

That map showed that the Linville River starts much farther up in the Blue Ridge than other streams around it, Johnson said. It looked just like stream profiles in Virginia that we had looked at in class the day before.

That paper focused on stream capturethe geological phenomenon when water from one stream is diverted into another, steeper stream. The similarity between the captured streams in Virginia and the Linville River seemed to indicate that stream capture might help to explain the unique nature of Linville Gorge.

At its most simple, it is really a question of which way a river flows, Johnson said. Rivers on top of the Blue Ridge Escarpmentthe steep section of terrain that leads into the mountainstend to be slow, meandering rivers that eventually drain toward the Gulf of Mexico. Meanwhile, streams on the face of the Blue Ridge Escarpment are much steeper and drain toward the Atlantic. This creates a situation where the steeper streams that drain east can steal flow from the lazier streams on top.

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Research Reveals Origins of River, Evolution of Ancient Landscape - Davidson News