Here's some facts about the Grand Canyon from the book "Grand Canyon- A Different View" by Tom Vail. A book evolutionists attempted to have censored.
The Grand Canyon is perplexing to geologists, and especially evolutionary geologists. Here are a few reasons why.
Gaps: The gaps are much larger than Schmidt admits; one gap is 10 million, another 60 million, and another 100 million. Above the Great Unconformity is a gap of over a billion years, with no soil between it and the overlying sedimentary layers. These gaps give no evidence of large passages of time between the one below and the one above, suggesting the gaps are fictional: no long ages did elapse. The ages claimed for the layers come not from the onsite observations, but from the a priori belief that they must be fitted into a pre-existing construct, a model constructed and later Darwinized in England: the Geologic Column.
Flat contacts: The contacts between many layers are knife-edge thin and straight for hundreds of square miles, with no evidence of erosion between.
Flat layers: The “generally accepted notions” expect us to believe that the Colorado Plateau rose and sank above and below sea level repeatedly, yet kept the layers flat and undisturbed, a preposterous notion.
Gravity: The Grand Canyon traverses the Kaibab Plateau, a mile higher in elevation than the river upstream. Clearly, rivers do not flow over mountains. Something caused the canyon to scour through this region after a catastrophic period of sheet erosion and rapid downcutting.
Source of material: secular geologists don’t know where all the sedimentary material came from. Some have speculated that it was transported somehow over long distances, from as far as Appalachia (09/15/2003). On the other hand, a flood could have scoured and pulverized great quantities of lime mud and sand, and deposited it rapidly underwater. The characteristic layers could represent material brought in from different directions as the currents changed. (This could also imply that the similarities to Appalachian sediments indicate that similar processes were occurring there also).
Fossils: One layer of the Redwall Limestone contains billions of fossil nautiloids, apparently buried in one day over a vast area covering 5,700 square miles (12/24/2002). Other fossils common in the canyon are broken and jumbled, indicating they were not buried in situ, but were transported for great distances by powerful currents and quickly buried in sediment.
No evolution: Squirrels on the north rim are subspecies of those on the south rim, with smooth gradations of varieties in between (CRS). They differ mainly in fur color. If these species were geographically isolated for at least five million years, why did they not evolve further apart? In that same length of time, evolutionists claim that humans evolved from ape-like ancestors.
No evolution II: Investigations of organisms inhabiting the forests of Shiva Temple, a forested butte isolated from the north rim, found no differences between species on the rim, even though they, too, should have been geographically isolated for millions of years. (CRS.)
Downstream: no large river-delta deposits can be found downstream that would be expected if the Colorado River carved the canyon over a long time.
Upstream: large basins that could have held enough water to carve the canyon by a dam breach can be discerned upstream. Also, portions of the canyon (Marble Canyon, inner gorge) are convincing secular geologists that it was carved quickly (see 07/22/2002) entry).
Tectonics: faults intersect the canyon all the way from top to bottom at multiple points, but not part way up. This indicates the layers were deposited rapidly, then faulted together as units.
Folding: The layers fold together as if they were still soft and unconsolidated at the time. Some folds, such as in Carbon Canyon, show more than 90° fold with no evidence of cracking or crumbling.
Volcanos: Volcanic dikes and cones poke up through all the layers from bottom to top, but not part way up, casting doubt that millions of years transpired during sedimentation.
Fluting: The inner gorge rocks are only fluted at river level, indicating the river has not been cutting downward through the igneous rocks for long.
Sheet erosion: Vast quantities of rock above the canyon were swept away by sheet erosion before the canyon itself was carved. Evidence for this can be seen at Cedar Mountain and other buttes which protrude above the canyon, displaying remnants of the thousands of vertical feet of sediments that had been swept away before the downcutting of the canyon began.
Sand Dunes, Not: The Coconino Sandstone, long claimed to be sand dunes turned to rock, are too fine-grained to be aeolian (wind-blown) sands, and cover too a vast an area (much of the Southwest: 100,000 square miles, with a volume 10,000 cubic miles) for this scenario to be plausible. The crossbedding could have been laid down as sand waves by deep ocean currents. The fossil trackways could have been made in shallow water and would have had to be buried suddenly to be preserved. All other layers in the canyon are indisputably water-deposited. To believe the Coconino was wind-deposited, the entire region would have had to be lifted above sea level without cracking or folding, yet the contact with the water-deposited Hermit Shale below it is flat and smooth. This indicates that deposition of the Coconino in the Grand Canyon began immediately after the Hermit formation, without 10 million years between them.
Monsoons: a type of 3-D crossbedding called hummocky cross-stratification, visible in numerous places in the canyon, gives evidence of gigantic cyclonic storms on scales larger than anything observed today.
Sapping: The Redwall shows evidence of sapping (rock fall occasioned by springs weakening the rock above). The large amphitheater-shaped alcoves characteristic of the Redwall suggest that the layers were still soft and unconsolidated and impregnated with water when they formed.
Dam Break Redux: Large lava dams that formed in the lower canyon are known to have backed up the Colorado River into a huge lake since the canyon formed, yet broke and catastrophically drained quickly, perhaps multiple times. Why not suggest the same mechanism for formation of the canyon itself? In recent years, this idea – first proposed by creationists – has become popular among secular geologists (05/31/2002). Why have they not given the creationists credit?
Lava Dates: Radioactive dates from the lowest lavas in the canyon (underneath all the sedimentary layers) show up “younger” than those on the top at Vulcan’s Throne, indicating that radioactive dating methods that yield millions of years cannot be trusted. Another falsification is that different radiometric methods applied within the same formation yield widely divergent dates. In addition, carbon-14 has been found in coal seams around the Grand Canyon. Since the half-life of carbon-14 is 5,700 years, none should remain if the coal were really millions of years old, as claimed.
(For more detail on these evidences, see Tom Vail’s book, ICR’s Grand Canyon: Monument to Catastrophe, and Walt Brown’s analysis.)
The Grand Canyon is perplexing to geologists, and especially evolutionary geologists. Here are a few reasons why.
Gaps: The gaps are much larger than Schmidt admits; one gap is 10 million, another 60 million, and another 100 million. Above the Great Unconformity is a gap of over a billion years, with no soil between it and the overlying sedimentary layers. These gaps give no evidence of large passages of time between the one below and the one above, suggesting the gaps are fictional: no long ages did elapse. The ages claimed for the layers come not from the onsite observations, but from the a priori belief that they must be fitted into a pre-existing construct, a model constructed and later Darwinized in England: the Geologic Column.
Flat contacts: The contacts between many layers are knife-edge thin and straight for hundreds of square miles, with no evidence of erosion between.
Flat layers: The “generally accepted notions” expect us to believe that the Colorado Plateau rose and sank above and below sea level repeatedly, yet kept the layers flat and undisturbed, a preposterous notion.
Gravity: The Grand Canyon traverses the Kaibab Plateau, a mile higher in elevation than the river upstream. Clearly, rivers do not flow over mountains. Something caused the canyon to scour through this region after a catastrophic period of sheet erosion and rapid downcutting.
Source of material: secular geologists don’t know where all the sedimentary material came from. Some have speculated that it was transported somehow over long distances, from as far as Appalachia (09/15/2003). On the other hand, a flood could have scoured and pulverized great quantities of lime mud and sand, and deposited it rapidly underwater. The characteristic layers could represent material brought in from different directions as the currents changed. (This could also imply that the similarities to Appalachian sediments indicate that similar processes were occurring there also).
Fossils: One layer of the Redwall Limestone contains billions of fossil nautiloids, apparently buried in one day over a vast area covering 5,700 square miles (12/24/2002). Other fossils common in the canyon are broken and jumbled, indicating they were not buried in situ, but were transported for great distances by powerful currents and quickly buried in sediment.
No evolution: Squirrels on the north rim are subspecies of those on the south rim, with smooth gradations of varieties in between (CRS). They differ mainly in fur color. If these species were geographically isolated for at least five million years, why did they not evolve further apart? In that same length of time, evolutionists claim that humans evolved from ape-like ancestors.
No evolution II: Investigations of organisms inhabiting the forests of Shiva Temple, a forested butte isolated from the north rim, found no differences between species on the rim, even though they, too, should have been geographically isolated for millions of years. (CRS.)
Downstream: no large river-delta deposits can be found downstream that would be expected if the Colorado River carved the canyon over a long time.
Upstream: large basins that could have held enough water to carve the canyon by a dam breach can be discerned upstream. Also, portions of the canyon (Marble Canyon, inner gorge) are convincing secular geologists that it was carved quickly (see 07/22/2002) entry).
Tectonics: faults intersect the canyon all the way from top to bottom at multiple points, but not part way up. This indicates the layers were deposited rapidly, then faulted together as units.
Folding: The layers fold together as if they were still soft and unconsolidated at the time. Some folds, such as in Carbon Canyon, show more than 90° fold with no evidence of cracking or crumbling.
Volcanos: Volcanic dikes and cones poke up through all the layers from bottom to top, but not part way up, casting doubt that millions of years transpired during sedimentation.
Fluting: The inner gorge rocks are only fluted at river level, indicating the river has not been cutting downward through the igneous rocks for long.
Sheet erosion: Vast quantities of rock above the canyon were swept away by sheet erosion before the canyon itself was carved. Evidence for this can be seen at Cedar Mountain and other buttes which protrude above the canyon, displaying remnants of the thousands of vertical feet of sediments that had been swept away before the downcutting of the canyon began.
Sand Dunes, Not: The Coconino Sandstone, long claimed to be sand dunes turned to rock, are too fine-grained to be aeolian (wind-blown) sands, and cover too a vast an area (much of the Southwest: 100,000 square miles, with a volume 10,000 cubic miles) for this scenario to be plausible. The crossbedding could have been laid down as sand waves by deep ocean currents. The fossil trackways could have been made in shallow water and would have had to be buried suddenly to be preserved. All other layers in the canyon are indisputably water-deposited. To believe the Coconino was wind-deposited, the entire region would have had to be lifted above sea level without cracking or folding, yet the contact with the water-deposited Hermit Shale below it is flat and smooth. This indicates that deposition of the Coconino in the Grand Canyon began immediately after the Hermit formation, without 10 million years between them.
Monsoons: a type of 3-D crossbedding called hummocky cross-stratification, visible in numerous places in the canyon, gives evidence of gigantic cyclonic storms on scales larger than anything observed today.
Sapping: The Redwall shows evidence of sapping (rock fall occasioned by springs weakening the rock above). The large amphitheater-shaped alcoves characteristic of the Redwall suggest that the layers were still soft and unconsolidated and impregnated with water when they formed.
Dam Break Redux: Large lava dams that formed in the lower canyon are known to have backed up the Colorado River into a huge lake since the canyon formed, yet broke and catastrophically drained quickly, perhaps multiple times. Why not suggest the same mechanism for formation of the canyon itself? In recent years, this idea – first proposed by creationists – has become popular among secular geologists (05/31/2002). Why have they not given the creationists credit?
Lava Dates: Radioactive dates from the lowest lavas in the canyon (underneath all the sedimentary layers) show up “younger” than those on the top at Vulcan’s Throne, indicating that radioactive dating methods that yield millions of years cannot be trusted. Another falsification is that different radiometric methods applied within the same formation yield widely divergent dates. In addition, carbon-14 has been found in coal seams around the Grand Canyon. Since the half-life of carbon-14 is 5,700 years, none should remain if the coal were really millions of years old, as claimed.
(For more detail on these evidences, see Tom Vail’s book, ICR’s Grand Canyon: Monument to Catastrophe, and Walt Brown’s analysis.)
