Crand Canyon Tracks Were Not Formed During a Worldwide Flood

TB posted this on the Non-Marine sediments thread but that one is getting a little crowded. Let’s examine his claim.

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If the flood plain is carrying a lot of silt then footprints can be recorde in water. Most of trackways in the grand Canyon best match amphibian/reptiles walking under water.

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The claim that these tracks were made during Noah's Flood is actually a great example of the absurd length that creation scientists will go to try to twist reality to fit their myth.The most famous tracks in the Grand Canyon are those found in the Coconino Sandstones.http://www.psiaz.com/Schur/azpaleo/cocotr.htmlIf you examine the page you will find that many of the tracks could NOT have been made underwater. Further, according to the flood scenario put forth by Steve Austin and creation "scientists" the Tapeats Sandstone, Bright Angel Shale, Muav Limestone, Grand Wash Dolomites, Temple Butte Limestone, Redwall Limestone, Surprise Canyon Formation, Supai Group of four formations (Esplanade, Wescogame, Manakacha, and Watahomigie), and the Hermit Shale Formation were all deposited by the flood in a shallow sea prior to the deposition of the Coconinos. How are there any animals still alive to make tracks?? Note also that most of the tracks are distributed through the lower 2/3 of the formation so saying the animals came in on top of the Coconinos during a recession of the magical surging flood won't help.The creationist interpretation the Coconino tracks is really quite amusing and can be found on a web page written by Andrew Snelling and Steve Austin on Answers in Genesis at. Startling Evidence for Noah’s Flood | Answers in Genesis Read the whole thing to see what the creationist "Flood Geologists" are actually saying here. These are direct quotes but in a different order than given by Snelling and Austin. I added some highlights"Cross beds within the Coconino dip consistently toward the south, indicating that the sand came from the north. However, along its northern occurrence, the Coconino rests directly on the Hermit Formation, which consists of siltstone and shale and so would not have been an ample source of sand of the type now found in the Coconino Sandstone. Consequently, this enormous volume of sand would have to have been transported a considerable distance, perhaps at least 200 or 300 miles (320 or 480 kilometres). At the current velocities envisaged sand could be transported that distance in a matter of a few days!Cross beds of that height imply sand waves at least 60 feet (18 metres) high and a water depth of around 300 feet (between 90 and 95 metres). For water that deep to make and move sand waves as high as 60 feet (18 metres) the minimum current velocity would need to be over 3 feet per second (95 centimetres per second) or 2 miles per hour. The maximum current velocity would have been almost 5.5 feet per second (165 cm or 1.65 metres per second) or 3.75 miles per hour."Now to have transported in such deep water the volume of sand that now makes up the Coconino Sandstone these current velocities would have to have been sustained in the one direction perhaps for days. Modern tides and normal ocean currents do not have these velocities in the open ocean, although deep-sea currents have been reported to attain velocities of between 50 cm and 250 cm (2.5 metres) per second through geographical restrictions. Thus catastrophic events provide the only mechanism, which can produce high velocity ocean currents over a wide area. ""Indeed, when the locomotion behaviour of the living amphibians is taken into account, the fossilized trackways can be interpreted as implying that the animals must have been entirely under water (not swimming at the surface) and moving upslope (against the current) in an attempt to get out of the water. This interpretation fits with the concept of a global Flood, which overwhelmed even four-footed reptiles and amphibians that normally spend most of their time in the water."So according to the authors the flood water took 10,000 cubic miles of sand that it had picked up from somewhere two or three hundred miles away (they never say how or why there was 10,000 cubic miles of sand laying around to be picked up), and after carrying it all this distance without dumping it, spread it out over 200,000 square miles in formations that look very much like wind formed sand dunes while moving at a speed of no less than 2 miles an hour and no more than 3.75 miles an hours (a brisk walk). To cover 200,000 square miles at 3.75 miles an hour a water wave 450 miles wide would require about 5 days at 3.75 mph or 9 days at 2 mph.Snelling and Austin claim that small animals were somehow making tracks that got preserved in these sand dunes as they were forming in moving water that was at least 300 feet deep and was dumping 10,000 cubic miles of sand on the animals at the time. Further they were running up the dunes as the dunes were being formed trying escape the flood. Does this make sense? Does it seem to be a valid scientific explanation for the tracks or for the formation of the sandstones? Of course not but when there is no logical interpretation that fits with their myth creation "scientists" don't hesitate to put forward a totally illogical explanation as long as it fits the myth.The rock strata of the Grand Canyon could not have been formed by Noah’s flood. The claim has been falsified by the trace fossils and the details of the geology. Here are some web pages that address the creationist problems with the sediments of the Colorado plateau in more detail.
http://www.geocities.com/earthhistory/grand.htmhttp://www.geocities.com/earthhistory/grandb.htmhttp://my.erinet.com/~jwoolf/gc_intro.htmlRandy

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The only models I would believe in detail would be ones that reproduce the known sea-level curves and hence the global innundation geo-col data. Any other model is extremely low resolution.

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Of course it doesn’t bother you at all that there is no evidence that there ever was a totally global flood.

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My personal theory, irrespective of E vs C incidentally, is that plate subduction events are 'delayed' relative to the build up of pressure at the trenches by subduction friction. The swelling of the newly created sea-floor causes sea-level rises. When a frictional threshold is overcome at the plate-plate boundary subduction occurs releaving presure at both the subduction zone and the mid-oceanic trench thus lowering sea-level again. In this way the sea-saw 'first order' sea-level curves are qualitatively reproduced.

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This may or may not be news to anyone involved in plate tectonics although I haven't found this simple explanation in the geo-literature yet. If it isn't there I plan to publish it and I will call it 'delayed subduction' . The first order sea-level curves call for such a systematic, cyclical process because the sea-levels repeatedly rise with an exponentially decreasing RATE and then suddenly drop (just like a capacitor charging/discharging). The drop is significantly quicker than the rise. This is exactly the dynamics one gets when fighting a frictional threshold with a fleixible medium.

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And this happens how many times during a flood year? This still sounds a lot like runaway subduction which cooks the earth to death thousands of time over as was explained to you on the Baumgardner thread. Good luck trying to publish it.

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Anyway, regaredless of this mechanism or not, the major sea-level innundaitons were global of course and that is not debatable - it can be correlated across the globe.

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It seems to me that Joe and Edge and others have not only debated this on other threads but totally falsified it but that is not the point of this thread.

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In terms of the flood I put down the '1st order' surges to this process and the lower order surges to tidal processes which have bee nshown by simulaitons to generate high amplitude tides on an earth 90% covered by water (as more or less agreed by the mainstream discoveries).

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I seem to have missed the mainstream discoveries that show that earth was 90% covered by water but it doesn’t solve your problem because these super high tides will kill all the animals and wash away their tracks. The Coconinos were supposedly deposited by sand brought from 200 miles away to the north. How do tides produce this effect?

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So I quite reasonably see the potential for major global cycles of marine/non-marine exposures due to tectonic events as well as hundreds of smaller tidal cycles during the flood year. There is plenty of opportunity for tracks, nests and evaporites.

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Read my first post above again then explain where the animals including insects who made the tracks in the Coconino sandstones were hiding out while a few thousand feet of sediments including the Tapeats Sandstone, Bright Angel Shale, Muav Limestone, Grand Wash Dolomites, Temple Butte Limestone, Redwall Limestone, Surprise Canyon Formation, Supai Group (Esplanade, Wescogame, Manakacha, and Watahomigie), and the Hermit Shale Formation were all deposited by the flood prior to the deposition of the Coconinos. Tell us how are there were any animals still alive to make tracks after all this happened. Did they come running down from somewhere to make the tracks between the surges of 300 foot deep water that deposited the sandstones? From where? Maybe the Navajo sandstones. There are dino tracks in them. But wait. The Navajo sandstones are above the Coconinos so they weren’t even deposited at the time. According to Austin the water that supposedly formed the Coconinos has to have been a least 300 feet deep and carried the sand at least 200 hundred miles before dumping it. The tracks are distributed throughout the lower 2/3 of the formation and many on them are completely inconsistent with formation in water. When taken it its entirety the Snelling-Austin AiG page is seen to be totally absurd even though written by two of the top flood geologists. This is because flood geology is nonsense and any attempt to explain the actual features of the world in terms of nonsense will necessarily produce more nonsense.As to evaporates you still need most this to happen in about a year. How do you get thick salt layers forming between flood surges? Do you do it by boiling the oceans? Remember that this cooks the earth to death. Meanwhile you need to have soil layers forming and trees growing to maturity in other places between these supposed surges. You just can’t seem to see how totally ridiculous this all is.Randy

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The super high tides wont kill the animals in the 50% of the land surface not yet innundated of course. With the first order and lower order sea-level curves there is plenty of opportunity for animlas to tread and settle on newly created strata during the flood year.

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The problem that you have is that the land where the animals supposedly made the tracks must have been underwater to deposit the Tapeats Sandstone, Bright Angel Shale, Muav Limestone, Grand Wash Dolomites, Temple Butte Limestone, Redwall Limestone, Surprise Canyon Formation, Supai Group (Esplanade, Wescogame, Manakacha, and Watahomigie), and the Hermit Shale before the Coconinos were deposited and in fact it must have been under a lot of water to deposit all those sediments.Now you say that animals were around to make tracks in the sandstones that were deposited on top of these sediments.Where did they come from? Could the animals make tracks in water deep enough (300 feet according to Austin) to make the sand waves? Obviously not and some of the tracks must have been made in dry sand.The tracks are distributed throughout the lower 2/3 of the formation. Where there successive waves from the North 300 feet deep that receded to allow the animals to come in from somewhere? From where? By what mechanism did the waves form?Why would the animals come down to the recently deposited sand from wherever they were that must have been at least 300 feet above the level of the Coconinos?How many times could this happen during whatever little portion of the flood year was available to deposit this part of the Grand Canyon sediments?The animls would have to have been some place that had NO flood deposits during the time that the Tapeats Sandstone, Bright Angel Shale, Muav Limestone, Grand Wash Dolomites, Temple Butte Limestone, Redwall Limestone, Surprise Canyon Formation, Supai Group and the Hermit Shale where deposited or they would have been wiped out and buried in the deposits. Where was this? Were they in hyperspace or something.The whole idea that all the sediments of the Colorado plateau were deposited by a global flood and that the animal tracks in the Coconino Sandstones were made during this flood is totally absurd.Randy

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Originally posted by Tranquility Base:
Randy

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You are simply painting the worst possible picture. We paint the best possible picture but empirically:

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* there are huge sand waves
* even mainstreamers have reinterpreted these as water laid
* there are footprints
* in other GC strata there are oriented fosils suggestive of catalcysmic processes

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The 300 ft deep environment of formation doesn't have to be at the same time as the footprints with surging.

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No I am painting the ONLY possible picture and you are painting a totally impossible picture. The footprints could not have been deposited before the sand was there. The sand could not have been there until all the other deposits were laid down. Even a creationist must admit to those obvious facts. The surging has to produce surges at least 300 feet high over the whole huge area to make anything like these sand waves so there is really no place for the animals to be safely hid out during these surges and in fact no place for them to have been while all those other strata were deposited.Many of the tracks had to have been made in dry sand so after all those other deposits are formed you need have long enough periods between each of the "surges" for1 The sand to dry out completely.2. Some animals to come into the area from somewhere high up and far away and make tracks3. The tracks to get preserved somehow before the next massive surge moves over the area with 300 foot deep moving water wiping everything out over the 200,000 square mile area.As far as I know the only person who has suggested that the tracks were all formed in water is Brand who is a creationist and not mainstream at all and he has even backed off from this somewhat(see below).Look at the tracks
http://www.psiaz.com/Schur/azpaleo/cocotr.html
Here is a quote or two
This is one of the most spectacular combinational fossil slabs we have found yet. Along the top and decreasing toward the bottom we find raindrop impressions seen as round bowl shaped pits. In the center, a surface impression of the bark from a tree is seen crossing the slab from left to right. And along the bottom a spider trackway proceeds across the slab. The story this slab tells is interesting, perhaps 280 million years ago, a large tarantula like spider (Octopodichnus) crossed a sand flat between the dunes near a fallen tree in a large desert perhaps running for cover from the large raindrops that began to fall. Found near Ashfork.(Octopodichnus) Spider Trackway - One of the better trackway slabs found by us up near Ashfork. Such small animals can ONLY leave their trackways on completely dry sand. This represents an inter-dunal sand flat that was wetted by a morning dew after the animal passed to solidify the surface of the sand and preserve the layer before the next sand storm buried it. Ashfork area.Another fine impression of a spider trackway (Octopodichnus) from Ashfork. This marks the passage of the animal across an interdunal flat, perhaps dry sand near the shoreline, but NOT in the wet tidal zone. From Ashfork.The Coconinos are not the result of huge water deposited sand waves but eolian sand dunes formed at a seashore similar to the Oregon dunes that exist today. It may make sense to a YEC that water could pick up thousand of cubic miles of sand from somewhere to the north, carry it 200-300 miles without dumping it and then spread it out over 200,000 square miles in formation that look just like sand dunes while preserving animal and insect tracks and raindrop impression but I don’t think it can make sense to anyone who thinks about it rationally. Do you really think that water moving slower than you can walk could carry sand 200 miles without dumping it and then spread it more or less evenly over 200,000 square miles? Even if you believe this absurd scenario you still have all the other problems with the tracks that I have discussed.Look at this site
http://www.geocities.com/earthhistory/grandb.htm"Interestingly enough, Brand (1996) himself wrote in the conclusion of a 1996 paper that: "The data do suggest that the Coconino Sandstone fossil trackways may have been produced in either subaqueous sand or subaerial damp sand" (Variations in salamander trackways resulting from substrate differences. Journal of Paleontology 70, 1004-1010). So, Brand's work, even taken at face value, does not necessarily indicate that the substrate was deposited subaqeously, as flood geologist frequently claim. "The subaqeous sand-wave theory promoted by Austin (1994) is rendered dubious on other sedimentologic grounds as well, which overwhelmingly support the eolian interpretation. For instance, whereas the angles of cross-beds in subarial dunes frequently exceed 25-30 degrees, sand waves possess very low angle cross-beds, deviating from the horizontal by about 1-10 degrees. One of Austin's own sources, Allen, writes:"We cannot emphasize too strongly that sand waves possess low to mild slopes ... it is clear that the sides of the waves rarely dip more steeply than 10 degress overall and can slope as little as 1 degree ..."The bedforms are also inconsistent with subaqeous deposition. Middleton et al. (p. 195) write:The low height-to-wavelength ratio of the wind ripples as measured in plan view exposures of many foresets is consistent with those recorded from modern coastal and inland dunes.There is simply no way that the tracks could have been formed according to the creationst scenario. As I said before it is totally absurd.Randy

TB on the other thread you wrote

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At the end of creation week we have the created bedrock and oceans with the left over evidence of the land having dynamically come up out of the waters - namely much of the pre-Cambrian continental stata. I don't believe God faked a single stratum.

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Earlier on this thread you said

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Your Mesa Verde sources? Regardless of potential source areas highlands get preferntially eroded for the simple reason that they are higher and will not collect protecting sediment as do basins! This is kindergarten level geology that is impossible to sensibly debate.

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Are you suggesting that the flood eroded the 10,000 cubic miles of sand in the Coconino sandstones off of some highlands? Do you know how much energy would be required to make 10,000 cubic miles of sand from Genesis rock? Or did God put 10,000 cubic miles of sand on some land that rose up magically between creation and the flood to be these highlands? Wouldn't that be faking in a sense?You still haven’t answered where the animals and insects that made the tracks in Coconino sandstones were hiding out while the Tapeats Sandstone, Bright Angel Shale, Muav Limestone, Grand Wash Dolomites, Temple Butte Limestone, Redwall Limestone, Surprise Canyon Formation, Supai Group and the Hermit Shale where deposited and while the 300 foot deep water brought in successive waves of sand to supposedly form the Coconinos. I hope they weren’t on those highlands that the 10,000 cubic miles of sand was washed from. You’d think that would have been a little tough on them.You do know that the deposition of those all those limestone and dolomite layers in the Grand Canyon sediments would have generated a LOT of heat don’t you? I suspect that heat might be more than enough to boil the flood waters at least locally without the added heat your rapid subduction would add. That might have been a little hard on animals that were hanging out nearby as well.Randy

I have been away and some other have answered JediKnight well but I thought I should answer since the post was addressed to me.

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JediKnight wrote
I know I'm a newcomer here, but there's one thing I've noticed. You, Randy, have a propensity to point out the flaws in other people's theories, while ignoring attacks on your own. For example: as you so deftly pointed out many times, sand is transported from one location to another quite readily, by either water or wind. How would sand become hardened if it was not above water, or another layer of sediments? Wouldn't it just blow away? No tracks would remain, if they were made above water! On the other hand, water pressure pressing directly down on sediments the size of sand could compress them in a very short amount of time, leaving tracks.

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So you are new. Did you read the original posts on this thread? The famous flood geologists Snelling and Austin are claiming that the sandstones were laid down by moving water 300 feet deep that was spreading the sand into waves and overwhelmed the animals. How does anything make tracks in that? I have pointed out that their theory is total nonsense because it is total nonsense.While sand can be transported by water I really don't think it makes sense that 300 foot deep water moving at a walking pace could carry 10,000 cubic miles of sand for 200-300 miles without dumping it and then spread it over 200,000 square miles in waves that just happen to look like wind formed dunes, let alone the impossiblity of animals making tracks that were preserved during this process.

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There is also something else I would like to point out. When you make a footprint in sand, it looks roughly like a footprint, right? Look at it again when it's exposed to a moderate wind for even a few minutes. It doesn't look anything like it did before, does it? Couldn't we be mistaking these footprints of spiders, etc. for tracks of other animals, or even plant fossils? I hate to say it (well, actually, I'm rather enjoying it), but those spider tracks could be nothing more than the tiny imprints left by the sori on the underside of a fern frond!

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Not likely. And if you did look at the web site then you should know that it does postulate mechanisms for preserving the tracks. Unlike, the YEC mechanisms they are not impossible.http://www.psiaz.com/Schur/azpaleo/cocotr.htmlNow TB and some other creationists are claiming that the Coconinos were deposited in surges and that the animal tracks which are distributed throughout the lower 2/3 of the formation were made by animals that came in from some high ground somewhere between surges. Maybe you can explain to us where the animals and insects that made the tracks in the Coconino sandstones were hiding out while the Tapeats Sandstone, Bright Angel Shale, Muav Limestone, Grand Wash Dolomites, Temple Butte Limestone, Redwall Limestone, Surprise Canyon Formation, Supai Group and the Hermit Shale were deposited and while the 300 foot deep water brought in successive waves of sand to supposedly form the Coconinos. TB has totally failed to do so. Perhaps the task is impossible because the scenario is absurd.It seems to me that Steve Austin(aka Stewart Nevins) who is one of the authors of the AiG web page wrote a book that claims that the area of the grand canyon was a shallow sea before the thousands of feet of sediment were deposited. So where was the high ground in a shallow sea?
Randy

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Now, the real "Admin" comments:
Are not these plate tectonic discussions rather far off the topic of this thread. Maybe there's a better place for it.
Adminnemooseus

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I agree. I am STILL waiting for TB to tell us the location of the "high ground" the animals and insects hung out on while all those layers of sediments below the Coconinos were deposited and the 300 foot deep water brought in "surges" of sand from 200-300 miles to the north to form the Coconinos.Of course I also wonder how 300 foot deep water moving 2 to 4 miles an hour carries 10,000 cubic miles of sand for 200-300 miles without dumping it anywhere and then spreads it neatly and uniformly in dune like formations over 200,000 thousand square miles. I also wonder why the animals and insects would keep coming down from their supposed high ground to get wiped out by successive surges. I am wondering how you get these massive surges from the north as well. Doesn't seem to me that tides would do that. But all those are just other impossiblities along with the impossibity of animals surving all that prior deposition and being around to make tracks.So where was the high ground??Randy

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Originally posted by Tranquility Base:
Randy

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How can we possibly have such a discussion without a geo-map sitting in front of us. Without that it is too easy for me to come up with hypotheses. Of course both of us need to answer where the sandstone came from.

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And where were the animals while the sand was laid down? At high ground of course.

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Except that all the ground around there is part of the Colorado Plateau and was supposedly being deposited by the flood at the time so there was no high ground. Remember that thousands of feet of sediment were supposedly deposited in this area by the flood prior to the deposition of the Coconinos. This is where the whole "high ground" scenario falls flat on it face. It seems to me that any gound near there higher than the Coconinos had to be deposited after the Coconinos since it is laying on top of them so it won't really help you at all.
Randy

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I already came up with the easy hypotheses (they were on high ground eg, at a distance if necessary) but it is absolutely ludicrous to try and have a more detailed discussion without the maps sitting in front of us! It's like a planning meeting without a calander so far. Becasue it is such a complex reconstrcution I beleive it would be difficult to prove your point conclusively so I personally feel it is a waste of time.

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It seems to me that the layers of the Colorado Plateau in the Canyon area are pretty well mapped out. It should be easy for you to find the pre-flood high ground if any existed. Of course it doesn’t.

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But if you guys want to try and prove that animals could not have migrated inbetween surges go for it but I wont spend time on it until you do since its your point.

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No you were the one who came up with the ridiculous idea and now you see that there is no way for you to support it with facts.The animals migrated from where? We are talking about the Colorado Plateau here remember? The Grand Canyon area is the highest part so there is no higher ground around.and how could there have been any higher ground around before all the layers of the Colorado plateau were deposited? You also don’t have much time in your scenario and the animals must come in repeatedly so they can’t come from to far away. I think the nearest significantly higher ground is probably in the Rockies which might be a bit of a trip and I thought there weren't supposed to be any really high mountains around before the flood anyway.Now you need high ground not just for the 300-foot surges depositing sand but for the animals to survive on while all those flood deposits below the Coconinos were deposited. This is the point creationists never seem to address. Austin at least starts with the Tapeats Sandstones as flood deposits so the animals have to survive somewhere while the
Tapeats Sandstone,
Bright Angel Shale,
Muav Limestone,
Grand Wash Dolomites,
Temple Butte Limestone,
Redwall Limestone,
Surprise Canyon Formation,
Supai Group
Hermit Shale
Are all deposited and then survive these surges. The only higher ground around than the Hermit Shale is made of materials deposited after the Hermit Shale including of course the Coconinos which lay on the Hermit Shale with no big spikes of "high" ground" of prexisting rock stuck up through them as far as I know. In fact I think the Coconinos are fairly flat over a pretty big area.Here are some nice pictures of the Canyonhttp://my.erinet.com/~jwoolf/grandcanyon.htmlThis page also gives quite a bit of detail on the sedimentary and underlying layers in the Plateau as well as demolishing the creationist position on the Plateau sediments as flood deposits in some detail.
http://www.geocities.com/earthhistory/grand.htmAll the relief you see came from erosion after the relatively flat layers totaling thousands of feet thick were deposited. Where are the mile high (above the base of the sediments) Genesis rock layers for animals to survive on while all those sediments were deposited? They are not there and they never were. You seem to want to put animals on ground that wasn’t even there at the time according to your own model.

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What I am saying is a priori reasonable. You want to rule it out in detail? Go for it.

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You see, I never claimed proof. I claimed feasability.

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What you are saying is totally absurd not feasible. If you think you can support it in detail go for it. So far you haven’t done any such thing.
Randy

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Originally posted by Tranquility Base:
Randy

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You've provided no data on the 3D topography of the entire region during the Paleozoic depositions.

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You are simply stating how you think it will turn out - just as I am. Our biases are obvious.

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Your bias has led you into absurdity. You see the strata that are there. They are pretty uniform over very large regions except where erosion has occured and they are very thick in total. They are decribed in some detail in the web site I pointed to before.http://www.geocities.com/earthhistory/grand.htmThe paleozoic formation are described on the second pagehttp://www.geocities.com/earthhistory/grandb.htmHow were any strata deposited to form "high ground" without killing any animals around during single great flood even if it did surge? If there was high solid rock it should still be there. Where is it?You are the one who made the claim of high ground. Why don't you show us some data showing where it may have been. I don't think you can do it because it only exists in the minds of YECs.Randy

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Why should it 'still be there'? The Mesozoic and possible Cenozoic stages of the flood were still to come. Lots of opporuntity for catastrophic erosion. I'm sure that even in a mainstream context no-one could credibly claim to know the precise 3D topgaphy of that region. And your two steps away. You don't even have the maps sitting in front of you.

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There is an expression, I think from Bob Dylan that goes You don’t need a weather man to tell which way the wind blows. One can look at the geology of the Colorado Plateau and tell that your high ground scenario is absurd without precise 3D topography if one is not desperate to cling to a myth that science abandoned 200 years ago.I suppose now you are going to tell us that therapods that left tracks in the Wingate, Kayenta and Navajo formations were hanging out on even higher ground. How far will you go with this nonsense?

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Your claiming stuff from bias just as I am. But you're claiming proof of my being wrong whereas I'm simply arguing feasibility.

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I am claiming stuff from a logical analysis of the situation and you are making up a wild fantasy with nothing to support it. As I said before, I hope you don’t think the animals were in the same highlands that had 10,000 cubic miles of sand washed from them to form the Coconinos.Another thing I find very amusing about all this is that creationists often claim there were no really high mountains before the flood but here you are putting animals at least several thousand feet up on high ground to survive flood surges and deposition of thousand of feet of sediment. Self-conflicting explanations seem to be the essence of YEC and this subject illustrates it well.Randy

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^ The animals only needed to be high enough to not get caught up in the current surge. This continued until the highest mountins were covered. As simple as that. Completely consistent and a priori plausible unless one doesn't want to consider the possibility.

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But you have to have a source for this high ground and in the creationist flood model the ground is what is being deposited by the surges so there is no "higher ground" before the next surge deposits it.The Vishnu formation underlies the Grand Canyon and it is flat with little or no local relief. The rocks above the Vishnu surface are all sedimentary. They were deposited in Layers even if they were deposited before or after the flood in your model. Each layer covered the other completely as it was deposited from there on up, over vast areas, though of course erosion has occurred and some layers are unconformable. The point is that in the area of the Colorado Plateau the high ground that you want to use to preserve the animals had not yet been deposited at the time it is needed to preserve the animals. There is no Genesis rock sticking up there for the animals to have been hiding on. This is only one reason your scenario is absurd but it is a clear one.I will out of town next Sunday and won’t be posting again until at least then.Randy

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Originally posted by Tranquility Base:
Randy

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You have made no attempt to demonstrate from Paleozoic 3D topographical maps that there was no high ground in the region. We all know that these formations are continuous and flat but that does not have to mean absolutely everywhere! You are simply assuming it.

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I don't need to demonstrate 3D paleozic topo maps. The Visnu formation has virtually no relief and overlaying flat layers are continous everywhere in the vicinity and you need these animals to be close to come in between the 300 foot high "surges" that supposedly deposited the "sand waves". You are invoking a prexisiting "high ground" for animals to survive on while previous "surges deposited thousands of feet of sediment and you need it to then disappear without a trace after all the sediments were deposited. There never was any such "high ground" in the neighborhood. You are obviously incapable of logical analysis of this subject.
Randy

I think the web page that Bill referenced in the new Grand Canyon thread speaks to the feasibility of the ad hoc assumption that there was "high ground" sufficient for the permian animals that made the tracks in the Coconino sandstones to escape the flood while thousands of feet of sediment were being deposited so that they could come in between the 300 foot deep sand carrying water that supposedly made the "sand waves" that comprise the Coconino Sandstones and leave tracks that got preserved.Revisiting the Grand Canyon

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With the new eyes provided by seismic-sequence stratigraphy, the accuracy of the sequence model, involving approximately 15,000 feet of sedimentary rocks exposed at seismic scale continuously for a distance of over 40 miles, is compelling.

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Any "high ground" in the area lies on top of thousands of feet of flood deposits. There is no outcrop of "Genesis Rock" that the animlas could have lived on. It certainly doesn't seem logical to me that animals could be living on sedimentary "high ground" as that ground was being deposited but then Snelling and Austin say the animals that left the tracks were running up the sand dunes to escape the water that was depositing the dunes they were running up so I suppose it is not too illogical for a YEC.Randy

I just dropped by. Since we have YECs still claiming that the Coconino Sandstones with their famous animal tracks are flood deposits I thought I would bump this old thread on the subject.The OP details the absurdity of Snelling and Austin's claims about the Coconinos. There web page does not give startling evidence for Noah's flood but startling evidence for the ridiculous lengths that YEC must go to try to interpret the Grand Canyon sediments as flood deposits.Below is another link to a page detailing the impossibility of a flood depositing the sandstones.http://www.answersincreation.org/coconino.htmRandy