Best Answer
Congratulations on your entry into grad school. Because of its astounding geography, the Grand Canyon would make a fascinating topic for your master’s thesis. Hopefully, you will have plenty of opportunities to visit it while you are in Arizona, though it looks like access is currently limited because of a combination of COVID-19 restrictions and normal winter access restrictions.
Geography is a fairly broad area of study and focusing on the Grand Canyon as an example of arid-land erosion is probably not the kind of through-provoking material that you want for a master’s thesis. Fortunately, its immense size means that there are plenty of smaller things you can choose to focus on when picking your thesis topic. The canyon is 277 feet long, 6,000 feet deep at its deepest point, and 18 miles wide at its widest point, which means you may find different geographical features at different points.
One of the things that has always fascinated us about the Grand Canyon is the restrictions on white water rafting through the Colorado at the point of the Grand Canyon. There is a lottery held each year and a limited number of rafters, who must prove their skill level beforehand, are selected to be able to raft the river. We love discussing how geography impacts humans, and think that a thesis that included first-hand accounts of those rafters who had been able to make that trip and juxtaposed those modern-day accounts with the idea of how the geography would have impacted Native Americans traveling in the area would make for a starting point for a thesis.
