The Grand Canyon as evidence for the Flood? Yep!

I hope you got to watch and listen to the great Ian Juby's Part One of Persuaded by the Evidence?
It is somewhat jarring as it ends in the middle of a conversation but it is quite fascinating to listen to former Darwinist scientists and academics explaining why evidence caused them to abandon Darwinism.  


Jonathan photo credit

My favorite Creationist is Dr. Jonathan Sarfati.  He is a very smart guy, a very good guy, a funny guy and he is very informed on a wide range of issues.   My wife and I were overjoyed to spend a good part of two days with him, discussing politics and science and Biblical apologetics as well as sharing stories.   We hope we can bring him back in a year or two for another weekend conference situation.  We have met his wife, who is a wonderful person and I gotta admit I like a Kiwi accent.   Now he and his wife live in Georgia.  I wonder if Kiwi (New Zealand) and a southern drawl, well, how will those mix over time?   Particularly since the drawl itself is actually passed down from the English accents of settlers who came to America in the 17th and 18th Centuries.   They say you can still find places out in the boondocks of the Appalachians where plainsong and hymns and ballads reminiscent of centuries passed is sung and old tunes directly from Old England are played even to this day.    

I also have met many other wonderful people in the Creationist and ID world.   I don't want to try to list them all for fear of forgetting one and it is irrelevant to what I wanted to say, which is this:   The Creationist I most want to meet in person next is Ian Juby.  He obviously has a great sense of humor, is a terrific scientist, a very smart guy and seems like a guy you would be very comfortable sitting around with discussing all sorts of subjects...much like Jonathan.   I suppose my wife and I will have to keep an eye on his schedule and try to plan catching up to him once my knee is ready to travel.   We have connected on Facebook and I get his newsletters and have purchased some of his materials.   But I am anxious to shake his hand and talk with him face-to-face.   He has got to be a fun guy to hang around...

Ian photo credit

Below I have copied just one page from his blog, listed in my links and here is the newsletter site.  He has a very interesting YouTube account with all sorts of stuff.   If you are wise you will subscribe to his newsletters because he keeps the good stuff coming!



Geologic Column Segment

Resources page for the Internet Radio Debate on Sagadii radio.

Back to the main resources page.


Click here to jump to the rebuttal references.

John Woodmorrape's "non-existence of the geologic column" article:
http://www.trueorigin.org/geocolumn.asp

Geologic column doesn't exist:
"Nowhere in the world is the record, or even part of it, anywhere near complete. Even in the Grand Canyon of the Colorado River and the adjacent sections along the Little Colorado River, surely the finest record of geological history anywhere on Earth, there are huge breaks. Notable is the complete absence of the Upper Carboniferous (Pennsylvanian) and of the Ordovician and Silurian Systems. Devonian strata are only present in local lenses...." ("The New Catastrophism", by Derek Ager, 1993, p. 14). 

Missing Geologic Time in the Grand Canyon:
The best compilation of this supposed missing geologic time is laid out in a plaque from the Big Valley Creation Science Museum in Big Valley, Alberta, Canada.  The Grand Canyon model (pictured below) shows the relevent points from the plaque.

Figure 1:



Figure 2:


Figure 3:  Layout of the Grand Canyon layers (with a courtesy nod to Dr. Walt Brown for the original drawing)


Figure 4: Ripped up, transported block suspended in Bright Angel Shale (courtesy of CreationScience.com)


Figure 5:  Map of the Tapeats sandstone layers (Drawn after John Morris, "The Geology Book" by Master books):
This same layer is called the Flathead sandstone in Montana and the Northwest, central Utah it's known as the Tintic Quartzite; in northeastern Utah it is the Lodore Quartzite; also called the Sawatch Sandstone in Colorado and Deadwood Quartzite in South Dakota; in the Midwest it's called St. Simon Sandstone; and over in the Ozarks it's called the Lamotte Sandstone.


Figure 6: Same rock sequence as seen in the Grand Canyon, only this is in Wyoming.  (Near Cody, Wyoming)


Dr. Derek Ager, writing on the global layer of Austin Chalk:
"I was taken by a Turkish friend to visit a cliff section in Upper Cretaceous sediments near Sile on the Black Sea coast. ...what I in fact saw was the familiar white chalk of north-west Europe with black flints and old fossil friends such as Micraster and Echinocorys. What I was looking at was identical with the ‘White Cliffs of Dover’ in England and the rolling plateau of Picardy in France, the quarries of southern Sweden and the cliffs of eastern Denmark. …We have long known, of course, that the White Chalk facies of late Cretaceous times extended all the way from Antrim in Northern Ireland, via England and northern France, through the Low Countries, northern Germany and southern Scandinavia to Poland, Bulgaria and eventually to Georgia in the south of the Soviet Union. We also knew of the same facies in Egypt and Israel. My record was merely an extension of that vast range to the south side of the Black Sea. …Nevertheless, there is even worse to come, for on the other side of the Atlantic in Texas, we find the Augstin Chalk of the same age and character, and...found in Arkansas, Mississippi and Alabama. And most surprising of all, much farther away still in Western Australia, we have the Gingin Chalk of late Cretaceous age, with the same black flints and the same familiar fossils, resting – as in north-west Europe – on glauconitic sands."
-The Nature of the Stratigraphical Record, pp.6-7.


Figure 8: Crossbedding (this photo is from the Navajo sandstone, the Coconino is identical except in colour)

With the layered rocks are peculiar, tilted layers called crossbeds.  These crossbedded planes are made up of three parts: The topset (curving down from level), the foreset (the slope of the crossbed) and the bottomset (where the crossbed levels out again).

Textbook is wrong:
"The steepest angle of repose for cross laminated sand is about 33 degrees."
-Robert R. Shrock (Professor of Geology, MIT), Sequence in layered rocks, New York, McGraw-Hill, 1948, p. 244

Figure 9: Crossbeds made by water during experiments carried out at Creation Evidence Museum.


Figure 10: Modern, wind-blown sand dune in New Mexico desert:


Figure 11: Crossbedding in dunes at White Sands, New Mexico


Figure 12: Fossil amphibian tracks in Coconino sandstone


Figure 13: Depiction of "Crab-tracking" as seen in coconino ichnofossil trails


Figure 14: "Octopoda" fossil footprints in coconino sandstone.  Claimed to be spider tracks.


Compare figure 14 with figures 15 & 16: 
Figure 15:
 Experiments with a tarantula making footprints in sand


Figure 16: Footprints made in sand by a large, unknown spider in South Carolina (Photo courtesy of Heather Detwiler,Akron Fossils & Science Center)


Figure 17: Cracks in Hermit Shale filled with Coconino sandstone:


Figure 18:  No slickensides (scratch marks in the rock from sliding) visible in most of the contacts in the "Keystone overthrust", Red Rock Canyon, Nevada. At this specific location, it's a knife-edge contact, no slickensides visible.


Figure 19: "Gear mesh fit" of contact; this is at Valley of Fire state park, Nevada.  Any sliding of the upper limestone rocks across the lower red sandstone would have sheared off the bumps in the sandstone, such as is visible here.  Just like gear teeth cannot slide across each other, neither can this "gear mesh fit" between the layers.  There was no overthrusting here.


Wrong order of layers:
Eight Part Special Feature in CRSQ: 
 "Recorded Instances of Wrong-Order Formations or Presumed Overthrusts in the United States: A Bibliography - Parts I thru VIII, Walter E. Lammerts, Creation Research Society Quarterly, September 1984 (Vol 21(2)) thru June 1987 (Vol 24(1)).


REBUTTAL REFERENCES:

"A large number of welltrained scientists outside of evolutionary biology and paleontology have unfortunately gotten the idea that the fossil record is far more Darwinian than it is. This probably comes from the oversimplification inevitable in secondary sources: lowlevel textbooks, semipopular articles, and so on. Also, there is probably some wishful thinking involved. In the years after Darwin, his advocates hoped to find predictable progressions. In general, these have not been foundyet the optimism has died hard, and some pure fantasy has crept into textbooks...One of the ironies of the creationevolution debate is that the creationists have accepted the mistaken notion that the fossil record shows a detailed and orderly progression and they have gone to great lengths to accommodate this 'fact' in their Flood Geology." David Raup, New Scientist, Vol. 90, p.832, 1981 

Boil the oceans?First, what is the volume of the earth?
Using the World Geodetic System's reference ellipsoid, where a = 6,378.137 km and b = 6,356.7523 km, Earth's volume is calculated as 1,083,207,317,374 km3
(Wikipedia)

Okay, so the total, estimated volume of sedimentary rock on earth is: (0.029% of 1.08321X1012km3) 314,130,900 km3
(From :http://www.emporia.edu/earthsci/amber/go324/sediment.htm
"While sedimentary rocks and sediments may make up only 0.029% of the total volume of rocks on Earth, they account for two-thirds of the exposed rocks on the Earth's surface"
-Raymond, L. A. 1995. Petrology the study of igneous sedimentary metamorphic rocks. Dubuque, IA: Wm. C. Brown Publishers. )

Limestone is 10-15% of that volume, we'll go with 15% to be fair to the evolutionists: that = 47,119,635 km3 
(limestone is 10-15% of sedimentary rocks:  Harvey Blatt, Sedimentary petrology, New York: W.H. Freeman and Co., 1982, pg 241)

This equates to 47,119,635,000,000,000 m3, let's round up to 50,000,000,000,000,000 m3
Limestone has a average density of around 2,500 kg/m3

So for every cubic meter of rock, there is 2,500,000g of limestone, and for every g of limestone precipitated, there is (4,340 calories per mole, 1 mole ~ 100g, wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calcium_carbonate) 43.4 cal/g
(Reference: Walt Brown, "In the Beginning", page 226, 8th edition, personal communication with C. Stuart Patterson)

So, 50,000,000,000,000,000 m3 X 2,500,000 g X 43.4 cal/g =  5,425,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 calories of heat produced.

Let's estimate the volume of the ocean:

1,300,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 cc's
(According to wikipedia, the oceans are 1.3 billion cubic kilometers, 1 cubic kilometer = 1 cubic kilometer = 1.0 × 1015 cubic centimeters)

It takes 1 cal/1cc=degC change.  We only have 5,425,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 calories produced worldwide from the limestone beds.

So, 5,425,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 calories produced by the limestone, assuming ALL of it got dumped directly into the ocean waters, would raise the ocean temperatures 5,425,000,000,000,000,000,000,000cal/1,300,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 cc's = 4.1730769230769230769230769230769 degrees C
~~~~~~~

Greetings, Earthlings!  That is how I used to open the conversation on an old HTML chat site many years ago when the internet was young.  I knew the codes to make posts in various colors and to flash on and off and other tricks, so I would have a flashing "up antenna" and then arrive and say Greetings, Earthlings!  When it was time to leave I would do a flashing "down antenna" and depart.   The early internet phone?  I got to beta that...used to talk to people in Siberia and New Zealand and Hong Kong and France and so on.  I got to know a lot about the life of a Siberian University professor back in the 90's (had to live in an apartment with parents, husband and children, could not afford a car but got a computer for home use to use for school projects) and learned lots of local slang from various parts of the world.   "And Bob's your uncle!" = Kiwi.

Anyway, Ian Juby has a cool online museum to check out, too!


Look, it took me a few years to figure out Darwinism is a bunch of hooey.  I don't expect you to absorb this all at once.  But I have to ask...Have you figured out that Darwinism is big bunch of mythology and just-so stories unsupported by science?   Belief in the Creator God makes so many things fall into place.   Occam's Razor can be straight.  Common sense is welcome.  Scientific laws can be called laws again.   Eventually some of this terribly wasted money and time will be focused on worthwhile endeavors instead of trying to find ET or working in vain to make life come from non-life or explain a Big Bang that is far more miraculous and way more illogical than "In the beginning God..."