Summations Only

I have no such idea. I'm aware that the Grand Canyon is unique in that all the layers are in one place and so completely exposed.And I don't see how this explains how there can be a "missing" layer that leaves absolutely no evidence that it was ever there in the first place. I'm not getting your point. If there is actual evidence of this scraping off and relocation, fine, but in the general idea of this kind of unconformity there is no such evidence, there is a clean contact line between two layers where a missing layer is simply assumed to have been, without a shred of evidence for it.And I'm afraid your remarks about erosion are also beyond me to figure out. Sorry.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Isn't that what I've been saying? You seem to think you are contradicting me. As I understand it there are no other places in the world where the strata are exposed to such an extent as they are in the Grand Canyon. It would be nice if there were. I suppose the first answer is that it's amazing anything like the GC was preserved at all, let alone that we should expect such a situation anywhere else in the world. For some reason conditions weren't right anywhere else for the preservation of the strata as happened in the GC, and in fact all over the Southwest in different forms. But I'm sure the PROCESSES were the same everywhere. In some places the tectonic and volcanic forces obliterated the strata after they were laid down, in some places, like the UK for instance, it looks like they got scoured off leaving them as hills and valleys rather than sheared walls as in the GC. Some places you see massively buckled and twisted strata. The GC is simply very rare, for whatever reason. What is that explanation? Few here even agree with me about as much as you are agreeing about. A couple have suggested it's not that unlikely that there WERE hundreds of millions of years in which no tectonic or volcanic disturbances occurred. Is that the explanation you have in mind? If not, I have no idea what explanation OE has that I'm ignoring. I DO think the placid millions of years idea should be recognized as violating if not the laws of physics, any normal expectation of normal activity on this planet, certainly by Uniformitarians who should expect the same amount of tectonic and other disturbances we're familiar with in our own world today. There's no sign of them. So what's this explanation OE has that you're talking about? Well, THAT is an amazing admission, thank you. That's how OE rationalizes everything. Time alone does all these amazing impossible things. But of course the millions of years is all pasted on. We do NOT know that mountains get eroded down any more than we can actually see in mountains existing right now. The reality is we see the Appalachians, or any mountains, in a state of erosion consistent with their structure and with no more than say 4300 years of existence. NOTHING is actually KNOWN beyond that about the erosion of mountains, it IS all speculation. And I really do have a big problem with the idea that a tilted stack of layers COULD be eroded flat like a plain and I keep being amazed that Geology actually promotes such an idea. Speaking of violating the laws of physics. Or chemistry, or whatever laws are involved. That's just NOT how nature works.

But the schematic does show a lot of disturbance - it shows a large bending and uplifting and fissures plus some large anomalies at each end of the section. What more would you expect and why? It's also just a schematic, i suspect the reality is far more complicated than that. Is anyone saying otherwise? I have no reason to expect the entire planet to be broken into small pieces and jumbled up and that's obviously not what we see. I would expect very many large sections to remain undisturbed for millenia otherwise the sediments couldn't form they way they have could they?

I agree. As far as the structures go, I think it's just a matter of not having discussed this or looked for these data to date on this forum. However, doing a quick search on "synsedimentary faulting 'grand canyon,'" I found the following:Source (from the Abstract):J. Michael Timmons, Karl E. Karlstrom, Carol M. Dehler, John W. Geissman and Matthew T. Heizler Proterozoic multistage (ca. 1.1 and 0.8 Ga) extension recorded in the Grand Canyon Supergroup and establishment of northwest- and north-trending tectonic grains in the Southwestern United States
Geological Society of America Bulletin (February 2001), 13(2):163-180

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Sedimentary and tectonic studies show that Chuar deposition took place during east-west extension and resulting normal slip across the Butte fault. This event is interpreted to be an intracratonic response to the breakup of Rodinia and initiation of the Cordilleran rift margin. Laramide monoclines of the Grand Canyon region have north and northwest trends, reactivate faults that originated at the time of Unkar and Chuar deposition, and can be traced for great distances (hundreds of kilometers) from the Grand Canyon. We use the distribution of monoclines in the Southwest to infer the extent of Proterozoic extensional fault systems. The 1.1 Ga northwest-trending structures and ca. 800-700 Ma north-trending extensional structures created regional fault networks that were tectonically inverted during formation of the Ancestral Rocky Mountains and Laramide contraction and reactivated during Tertiary extension.

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Essentially, this is stating that deep-seated, billion+ year old structures, in particular the ones responsible for down-dropping and preserving the Grand Canyon Supergroup, continued to become re-activated (and are possibly still active), resulting in the formation of monoclines that are presently visible across the surface of the Grand Canyon area and further out.Below is a graphic representation of the East Kaibab Mononcline and a photo. Here is a map of the faults and monoclines from the above-referenced paper: Magmatic intrusions are the result of very specific geologic conditions, such as subduction, extension, hot spots, etc. Unless those conditions are present, and they aren't present everywhere as you can see today, magmatism will not occur. However, down in the Unkar Group, there is a lava flow and basaltic dikes and basalt, so at that time, extension may have been occurring. In addition, magmatic intrusions do not have to result in deformation of the surrounding or overlying sedimentary package. This only happens under certain conditions, mostly due to the type of magma invading the rock and the type of rocks surrounding the intrusion. The cross-section is a simplified graphical representation of a complex system. It does not incorporate all the details because that would be impossible. To get the details, you need to read the technical journals.Edited by roxrkool, : No reason given.

Another good reason to avoid creationist sites. I'll let the others deal with him. Let's look at this in a little more detail, not just the quote-mine provided:Meander - Wikipedia

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A meander, in general, is a bend in a sinuous watercourse or river. A meander is formed when the moving water in a stream erodes the outer banks and widens its valley and the inner part of the river has less energy and deposits what it is carrying. A stream of any volume may assume a meandering course, alternately eroding sediments from the outside of a bend and depositing them on the inside. The result is a snaking pattern as the stream meanders back and forth across its down-valley axis.

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The context tells us that they mean any volume that stays inside the banks of the river\stream, because only then do you get the erosion\deposition pattern they talk about.Further down:

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Meander geometry

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... It is characterized as an irregular waveform. Ideal waveforms, such as a sine wave, are one line thick, but in the case of a stream the width must be taken into consideration. The bankfull width is the distance across the bed at an average cross-section at the full-stream level, typically estimated by the line of lowest vegetation.

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As a waveform the meandering stream follows the down-valley axis, a straight line fitted to the curve such that the sum of all the amplitudes measured from it is zero. This axis represents the overall direction of the stream.

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At any cross-section the flow is following the sinuous axis, the centerline of the bed. Two consecutive crossing points of sinuous and down-valley axes define a meander loop. ...

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Again, obviously inside the banks of the river, so the volume can be any size as long as the flow stays within the banks. Flood flow over the banks will erode across the meanders and tend to fill them in.If you have a flood over the sides of the bank then the flow would follow the down valley curve as that is the steepest path and takes the least energy to follow.Post flood fantasy catastrophic cascading flow is by your definition over the banks of the river at the start ... and it would take the fastest (lowest energy) path to the sea. It would not follow the course of the Colorado River whether there before or after. It would not could not create meanders.Have you ever looked at how a flooded river flows?Floodplain - Wikipedia

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A floodplain or flood plain is an area of land adjacent to a stream or river that stretches from the banks of its channel to the base of the enclosing valley walls and experiences flooding during periods of high discharge ...

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Flood plains are made by a meander eroding sideways as they travel downstream. When a river breaks its banks and floods, it leaves behind layers of alluvium (silt). These gradually build up to create the floor of the flood plain. Floodplains generally contain unconsolidated sediments, often extending below the bed of the stream. These are accumulations of sand, gravel, loam, silt, and/or clay, ...

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Seeing as there are no such floodplain until the river exits the canyon, no such deposition north and south of the rims of the canyon, there was no flow over the tops of the banks.And that means no fantasy flood.Enjoy

Ah, excellent! Perhaps you would be willing to transcribe (or maybe even scan?) a somewhat fuller excerpt where Austin mentions some evidence for the assertion you quote. Ideally it would be nice to see figures 5.12 and 5.16 which the rebuttal I linked says are not at all alike and therefore cannot be used to support the conclusion that high-velocity flows produce meanders:

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The authors then mention the Palouse River in Washington. Look at Figure 5.12 of this riverwhat incised meanders are they talking about! It looks nothing like Figure 5.16. You don’t have the same degree of stream curvature that is shown in Figure 5.16, which proves that it formed quicker than the Goosenecks of the San Juan River. This proves that a cataclysmic flood model would tend to produce a straighter canyon, in contrast to the slow-forming Goosenecks.

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The link you provided to Austin's defense of his work includes a further rebuttal:

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Austin (1994) uses his discussion of Bretz's work to infer that, because flooding due to catastrophic draining of a large lake caused rapid scouring of the Channeled Scabland, similar catastrophic flooding formed the Grand Canyon during the waning stages of Noah's flood. However, as Heaton (1995) pointed out, Austin fails to take note of the radical differences between the geological formations in the Channeled Scablands and the Grand Canyon. Heaton (1995: 35) states, "The narrow inner gorge of the Grand Canyon and its equilibrium tributaries are the antithesis of the broad flood plain, multiple overflow channels, and gigantic 'ripple marks' of the Channeled Scabland. It would be hard to imagine two canyons more geomorphically dissimilar to one another."

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These two rebuttals both make the same point; the geologic features Austin is using to support the assertion you quote do not resemble each other and cannot therefore reasonably be used to draw the conclusion Austin draws.I hope you have not allowed this discussion of meanders (pleased though I am that you are addressing it) to distract you completely from our ongoing discussion about the brooding dinosaur. I await a clearer explanation of your objection to the law of superposition. If you cannot present evidence that the law superposition is in error, then I think you must logically concede that the Flood could not have deposited an in situ brooding dinosaur in terrestrial deposits near the top of the rock record. I'm finding the sudden shift away from this topic, just when a conclusion seemed to be within reach, to be rather jarring.

Austin committed fraud in both his "study" of Grand Canyon lava and in his "study" of lava from Mount Ngauruhoe. In real science that ruins your career, in creation "science" it gets you a lifetime sinecure. It's a bit late here, I'll pull the evidence together tomorrow morning.

Yes you did, exactly. You wrote about very deep and very fast. When challenged, you posted a quote that meanders can be cut by a river of, as you put it, ANY VOLUME.ANY VOLUME is not ANY VELOCITY. Fast is not about volume, it's about velocity. Slow flowing rivers that are very deep and wide have high volumetric flow rate and create meanders. Fast flowing rivers that are shallow and narrow have low volumetric flow rate and don't form meanders. Which isn't volume. Even though you can't keep the difference straight between velocity and volume.(I don't particularly trust that Wiki reference anyway, because "volume" is not the correct term. "Volumetric flow rate" or "volume flow rate" are correct. But I see RAZD has exposed your quote-mine.)And you are still avoiding the fact that fast-flowing streams do not create meanders, and fast and deep streams do not cut incised meanders with straight walls, they undercut the walls.Edited by JonF, : No reason given.

I gave the Austin quote for the fast part and the Wikipedia quote for the deep part. I did not confuse them.If fast is a problem make it deep alone, deep it certainly would have been.

I don't want to get into this, just forget I ever posted anything from Austin if it's going to be contested, I'll check up on it some other time.

I believe the Flood had to have done it but I'm not interested in arguing with you about the specifics, about the dinosaur or any other issue you've raised. You can consider yourself the winner of the argument.

Yes it shows a LOT of disturbance, Tangle, ALL AFTER ALL THE STRATA WERE ALREADY LAID DOWN. Sure the reality is going to be more complicated, but any complication on the scale you are noting here, that occurred DURING the laying down of the strata, would certainly have been indicated on the diagram.This leaves the hundreds of millions of years during which the strata were BEING laid down unaffected by any of these sorts of disturbances, which ought to be recognized as highly unlikely, calling into question the hundreds of millions of years. Dr. A is trying to with some of his pictures, which I think prove MY point and not his; but no, mostly it's not being challenged. The problem is that it implies hundreds of millions of years of NO disturbances, which makes little sense on a planet that supposedly would have undergone the sorts of disturbances we are aware of in our own time, those faults and tiltings of strata and volcanic deposits that should have occurred between layers over hundreds of millions of years -- I mean like those we see at the top of the formation, not the narrow sills, but magma that would interfere with the laying down of any subsequent strata. We're not talking millennia, Tangle, we're talking HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF YEARS. But even millennia on this active planet record lots of such disturbances, so just because you happen to like the idea of such long periods without any disturbances, you have to explain how that is possible on THIS planet.I could argue THAT way for the Flood, you know. Well, it just IS that way and I know the Flood occurred, therefore the Flood did it. And as a matter of fact I believe that, but I do try to argue from the evidence itself if I can.But really, such a long stretch of undisturbed strata is easy enough to explain over a few thousand years, it's those hundreds of millions that call it into question.

My my. Well, I did as much as Percy did in that post you recommended I take as my model. I guess it's enough for him but not enough for a creationist. Hm? You are missing the point. Of course. I'm talking about speculations BASED on evidence, on what's available for observation, such as the cross sections I like so much. Sanctimonious lectures seem to be very popular around here. There is no new evidence that contradicts what I've been saying about the cross sections. Please do try to follow the argument. I have no particular expectations, why should I? I was talking about what can be seen on the cross section and that's the lowest one represented there, as I said. You aren't even thinking about what I just said. When you start thinking about it, let me know. It ISN'T a whole intact terrestrial ecosystem, it's things that got picked up from some location or other and deposited as a layer here. And PLEASE consider the question of why one would ever expect an "ecosystem" or a time period of millions of years to be encased in a flat slab of rock. Nothing happening on this earth NOW supports such a notion. Henry Morris did hydraulic studies on these things, and so did somebody Berthault. Water DOES sort sediments, as can be seen deposited by rivers and even under the ocean. Ocean water IS ITSELF sorted into layers and currents. Waves deposit all of one kind of sediment at a time. Precipitation out of standing water also sorts out different kinds of sediments. There is NO problem with the idea that WATER sorts things even if we don't know exactly how in a particular case. So you can drop your "no such mechanism" claim because you are very wrong. I don't know how anybody can call the Bible the inspired Word of God and reject the first 11 or so chapters of Genesis. I'll give you my suspicion as to why: We are told to believe, to have faith. If any supposed knowledge contradicts God's word it is our obligation to contend against it rather than just give in and accept it just because it gets a grip on our fallible intellects. We are always required to CHOOSE between God and this world. We encounter such tests of faith all the time, what makes science any more convincing than anything else? "Let every man be a liar, but God be true" is in scripture. Also we are to use God's appointed spiritual weapons against "every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God" which the old earth sciences certainly do -- some like you manage to remain some kind of believer although I can't see how, but thousands of others have become atheists as a result of this stuff. If we reach the point where we can't summon any arguments against such God-denying claims, we should do what Kurt Wise did and just say OK they have the evidence but I'm sticking with the word of God anyway. "Though He slay me I will trust Him." Oh I believe it most certainly does and even my own limited argument USES the evidence to support the Flood. But if you can't see it, I recommend the position of Kurt Wise rather than deny God's word. Fine, but my own was not taken seriously and if both are to be considered so should mine. Face the fact that half this argument is nothing but entrenched bias against creationism and not a lot of actual science at all.

The earth's surface area is about 200m square miles and in that section we're looking at a tiny proportion of it. I don't find it at all surprising that there are sections of the earth that have remained relatively undisturbed for hundreds of millions of years.Not all the earth is geologically active - at least not in the sense you mean, volcanic and tectonic - the rocks in those formations are sedimentary, for them to form at all they need long periods of calm as they gradually build, compact and finally cement.I also suspect that if you actually looked at those rocks you'd find plenty of evidence of movement and faulting - just not on the catastrophic scale you are asserting is always necessary.You're also looking at a schematic showing - at a rough count - 10 layers that are relatively undisturbed but a further 15 on top of them that have been totally eroded. If you looked at the section to the right of the diagram alone, you wouldn't know that there had ever been a further fifteen layers above the 10 you're looking at and being amazed that they hadn't been interfered with by time. In other words, you are being surprised, only because you are seeing what HASN'T yet been disturbed but ignoring what has. You don't know what is missing from the picture, but are surprised by what is there.

I guess you prefer your notions about an inactive earth and even fault lines that wouldn't be visible on that cross section, and far be it from any Geologist here to straighten you out so I'll leave you to it. But this part I have to respond to: This is some weird thing I can't even follow, but the layers to the left are the Grand Staircase and I've included them in all my discussions, also my theory about how the whole area got eroded as it is by all those disturbances we're talking about, and your notion that I'm "surprised" by any of it is just off the wall. Probably because you haven't been following the argument until recently. Oh well, what do I expect?Edited by Faith, : No reason given.