They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Well, the Grand Canyon is one thing where 1000 words doesn’t cover the picture and the picture doesn’t cover seeing it live. I took this shot on Friday, June 11, and it’s much like the famous pictures of the Canyon you see (from the same location). When I took my tour, we stopped by three viewing points: Mather Point, Bright Angel Lodge, and Desert View. These three points give you the biggest views and the iconic views that just leave you in jaw-dropping awe and wonder. Take note: in this picture, there is a canyon heading towards you. This is the Bring Angel Canyon, a small side canyon. The main Grand Canyon is going from right to left.
The Grand Canyon of northern Arizona is considered one of the largest canyons in the world, but what makes it stand out is that due to the desert landscape, you can grasp the magnitude of it in a few views. It is about 277 miles long, with depths exceeding a mile deep and widths spanning 1-18 miles for most of the canyon. Mather Point and the Bright Angel lodges are very close to each other (but you still need to drive without some good hiking), and they allow you see the greatest percentage of the canyon. Then Desert View showcases some extensive views as well. Here is one of them:
The pictures off my phone are clearly nowhere high quality, but there are important features to observe here. Until you reach the bottom of the canyon, all the layers are sedimentary — laid down by water. Both the secular and Biblical models agree on this. Only the sedimentary layers have fossils in them. You will also notice that for the most part, the layers are pretty flat in relation to each other, though there are exceptions to this. FAR to the west of the Canyon is “Surprise Canyon” (well outside our viewing range), which is a 400-foot gorge cut into a side channel but then filled in with various debris all the while having flat layers on top. The secular models use this canyon to prove that layers had to represent long periods of time for a river to carve that canyon (all the while claiming the Colorado River carved the massive Grand Canyon).
So, what do we have in the canyon? At the very bottom, we have the “Vishnu Schist” and the Zoroaster Granite, volcanic granite that is often called “basement rock.” Flood geologists call this “Day 3: Creation Rock,” — this is the rock that was formed out of the waters on Day 3. Everything on top of this is sedimentary rocks laid down by water. In some visible places, there are up to 12,000 feet of rocks that were initially stacked on top of each other and then “faulted,” that is, tilted over (the Joggins area in Newfoundland has 20,000 feet of sediments in a similar status). On top of that is what is called the “Great Unconformity,” which is called that because it goes directly against the secular models of how geology is supposed to work. Nearly every layer from here on out is predominately flat. There are about ten distinct layers from this unconformity upward including the Tapeats Sandstone, Redwall Limestone, the Coconino Sandstone, and the Kaibab Formation at the rim. Within these layers are various lava flows, fossils, wood carvings, and numerous other finds. It’s these sedimentary layers that are of primary interest to all parties. Another important thing to note: these layers are continental in size. They are MASSIVE and cover many multiple states, not just local areas.
Now there are other areas called “unconformities” throughout the canyon, and flood geologists have often debated these points. But it is important to notice that the secular models point to such “unconformities” because they have entire layers MISSING from the Canyon. How do they know they are missing? Because they compare the actual layers to the Geologic Column. The secular models proudly proclaim that nearly 25% of the geologic history is not found in the Grand Canyon and say that these layers were removed. Well, what would cause such removal of entire layers with no evidence they were ever there? Where did these layers go? How do they know these layers actually existed there? The secularists and Old Earthers won’t tell you this outright, but while they accuse Flood geologists of starting with their answers (that is, starting with the fact of Noah’s Flood, a record that well predated their ideas), they are doing the exact same thing (that is, starting with the Geologic Column as stated in the textbooks is real, which doesn’t exist in the real world as presented).
The secular models for how the layers got here is through rising and falling seas. I found that very interesting because this looks a lot like the flood models as the waters rose from the fountains of the deep and the windows of heaven along with the tides that would be ever changing due to the changing water levels. This is supposed to be coupled every few million years with the continent collapsing due to the weight of the rock and waters, which enables the rising seas to deposit the next layer. While we have seen evidence of this collapsing called isostasy in different places around the world, do we see evidence of this here? And how would the collapsing produce the same drop for the entire span of the area, leaving essentially perfectly flat layers AND without any significant visible cracking that would be expected when rock moves on that kind of scale? These models must have this collapsing (yet the books I’ve read don’t actually mention this and one author admitted it was because he and his co-authors decided it was too complicated to explain), otherwise they actually promote a global flood for every layer. There are problems here that I am not convinced the secularists have thought through.
The Flood geology models for the laying down of the layers include the rising and falling of flood waters due to the daily tides and running off as the land was being churned up. Some models call for tsunami waves caused by the massive geologic upheavals to crash ashore and leave their deposits as the waters receded with each wave and tide. Other models call for the fact that as the waters rose, they churned up two miles of rock, and then as things started to settle down, the layers were deposited and cleanly sorted by size, weight, and density (which is very easily observed in a household experiment). Then came the runoff from the Flood which had effects that I will get into later. I’ll just say here that there are two miles of missing layers from ABOVE the canyon. There is no way I can get into the technical details here, but you can look into the two major models of the Hydroplate Theory and Catastrophic Plate Tectonics at the links provided.
So, what caused all the layers to form? I personally believe it is a combination of the tsunamis and sorting. I don’t think either model can cover it alone. But I found the secular models to be wishful thinking at best. The secular models’ proposed mechanisms are simply not capable of producing the size or scale of rocks we find WITHOUT being global in scale. But the secularists will not consider the Flood at all because it really wrecks up their models and their dating methods.
This post discussed the formation of the Canyon’s layers. Next week, I’ll look at the different models for how the canyon was carved.
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