Summations Only

So far I don't even know if geologists have done any calculations about the rates of erosion of the Monument Valley buttes or the walls of the Grand Canyon. I googled it and for the GC one site said a half million tons of sediment are removed from the GC daily, but that doesn't deal with the amount of erosion that collects at the base of the walls throughout the canyon. An entry on Monument Valley merely declares that the buttes have been shaped by erosion over millions of years with no hint that anybody's actually tried to measure it. Somebody at least estimated the rate for the hoodoos because it was given in a paper about the area, but how the rate was established wasn't discussed.. Well, if a given formation is said to be such and such millions of years old in its present form but the rate of erosion would have reduced it to unrecognizable rubble in a few thousand years, or even hundreds of thousands, something's wrong with the way the time factor is calculated for the units that add up to the billions of years given for the age of the earth. That is, these formations represent particular time periods in the history of the earth so if they are still standing after the particular millions of years assigned to them, but their rate of erosion would have disintegrated them in far less time, a tenth of the time, a hundredth of the time, then they simply are not as old as Geology says they are.So if one formation dates to, say, the Cretaceous period which dates from 145 mya to 65 mya but its rate of erosion would have disintegrated it within thousands of years, or even give it ten million if you want, it simply is not as old as they say it is, and if it isn't that old neither is the Cretaceous period. If the formation has been clearly dated by its sediment or its fossils or its placement in the geological column, the whole time scale system falls apart. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

What's wrong is your calculation. You can't use one back-of-the-envelope calculation to falsify millions of person-hours of work by thousands of geologists over two centuries.

And since the hoodoos started out at surface level and they did not grow instead the stuff that was around them eroded away it is all the shit that is not around them now that is what is important and would determine time spans.

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So if one formation dates to, say, the Cretaceous period which dates from 145 mya to 65 mya but its rate of erosion would have disintegrated it within thousands of years, or even give it ten million if you want, it simply is not as old as they say it is, and if it isn't that old neither is the Cretaceous period

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Do you think you could stop repeating the same silly mistakes ?Erosion isn’t magic. It won’t happen unless the rock is exposed. If a formation dates to the Cretaceous period then it must have been buried deeply to be lithified and it won’t start eroding until it is exposed again. The date that the sediment was deposited is no real help to you at all.

That's not an objection to my calculation, it's an objection to my chutzpah.There's nothing wrong with my if-then logic, if the rate I found for the hoodoos is correct (2 to 4 feet of erosion per hundred years) it should have been eroded away completely well before the 30 to 40 million years of its official age. There shouldn't be one hoodoo left standing now.And there are so many lines of evidence against the Old Earth this isn't just one casual calculation, it merely confirms all the others. That film about sedimentation I posted back in Message 1140 gives dramatic evidence against the Old Earth by showing that the strata that are the basis of the time scale form rapidly in running water and in such a way that younger material may deposit beneath older material, challenging the whole Geological edifice and doing it with scientific experiments you can see for yourself in the film.

And as I've pointed out, that has nothing to do with the age of the earth. We know the earth is older than the hoodoos. Your calculation tells us nothing about how much older. It doesn't, though, does it? Every "alternate" method that creationists have for finding the age of the earth gives a different result. The reason for that is that you're dating things in the earth, not the earth itself. It doesn't matter if the hoodoos are five minutes old or five thousand years old. The fact is that there are older things in the earth.

OK you're right, we need the age since exposure.The most recent estimate for the age of the cutting of the Grand Canyon is five million years. Since on that cross section it appears to have been cut at the same time the Grand Staircase was formed, which includes Bryce Canyon with its hoodoos, then the hoodoos should also have five million years of exposure. Would the rate of erosion come anywhere near that? I can't find any information about Monument Valley's date of exposure but that whole area of the Southwest was exposed after all the strata were laid down so I'd give it the same five million years.In reality of course I know it was exposed at the end of rhe Flood like everything else in that area.. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

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The most recent estimate for the age of the cutting of the Grand Canyon is five million years. Since on that cross section it appears to have been cut at the same time the Grand Staircase was formed, which includes Bryce Canyon with its hoodoos, then the hoodoos should also have five million years of exposure.

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Please explain your reasoning.

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Would the rate of erosion come anywhere near that?

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I really don’t know. The rate of erosion is obviously dependent on climatic variations - so I rather doubt it would be constant over millions of years. We have a lot of erosion needed to explain the existence of the hoodoos, too.Again, if you want to make an argument you need to do the work.

The Kaibab Uplift appears on the cross section to have been the main cause of the massive erosion over that entire area. It is all uplifted from north to south toward the Grand Canyon.

Oh good grief, when the age of a formation is given, they are not talking about the present form. They are talking about when those sediments were deposited, not when they started eroding. In many cases erosion does not occur until millions of years after deposition.The sediments are deposited. More sediments are deposited covering the first sediments deeply. The first sediments are slowly turned to rock by the heat and pressure of being buried deeply.Eventually, the overlying sediments are eroded away exposing the first sediments, now turned to rock. The hardness of the rock is determined by the type of material, the depth it was buried and the length of time it was buried.If we take the case of Monument Valley, we know there were sedimentary layers not only filling all the space between the buttes, but deeply above the level of all the buttes. We know this because that is the only way the buttes could be turned to stone.Erosion has removed all the sediments that deeply buried the layers in and between the buttes. Then, erosion removed the material that was between the buttes. Now we have a large area with a few tall remnants of those layers in the form of buttes and spires that are continuing to slowly erode and that are surrounded by talus slopes of material that has fractured from the cliffs.The present form of Monument Valley is not the form that was deposited. It is the result of millions of years of erosion that removed all that other material.In the case of the hoodoos at Bryce, the hoodoos were not deposited in their present form. They were deposited as a layer which was not buried as deeply, or for as long and made of softer material so it erodes more rapidly than what we see in areas like Monument Valley or the GC. The material is eroding unevenly, leaving the hoodoos. There is no river eroding this material, rather it is chemical and mechanical weathering, mainly from snow and rainfall runoff. Rather than a real canyon it is more the side of a soft plateau being carried away. To clarify once again, the dates assigned to formations are the dates the sediments were deposited, not the date they begin eroding. Then they had to be buried deeply by more sediments for millions of years and turned to stone, Then the sediments burying them have to be eroded away, Then, millions of years after those particular sediments were deposited erosion begins removing material from the formation.

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The Kaibab Uplift appears on the cross section to have been the main cause of the massive erosion over that entire area. It is all uplifted from north to south toward the Grand Canyon

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Yet the Claron formation sits well above strata exposed at the Grand Canyon. It seems rather likely that that area has seen much less erosion.

Yes I know all that and took it into account in the last post. It's still supposedly five million years since the Grand Canyon was cut (although in reality it was cut after all the strata were laid down which would make it more recent than that since we have Holocene deposits). But on those five million years which would have to be the same timing for the hoodoos as I just explained, the erosion rates would still demolish the formation before now.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

But Baumgardner did not describe the contact as "knife-edge tight" in Noah’s Flood: The Key to Correct Interpretation of Earth History. He just said:

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View of the contact between the Coconino Sandstone (above) and the Hermit Shale (below) in the Grand Canyon along the Bright Angel Trail. Note the lack of erosional channeling along this contact. This is not uncommon for contacts between successive formations across the geological record. (From Austin 1994, 49)

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Here's his version of the image: There are no gaps in the boundaries between buried layers. The great pressure of the overlying layers renders that impossible. I don't know where you got the term "knife-edge tight" from, but I think you're misinterpreting it. It doesn't mean the lack of a gap between strata. It refers to how narrow and sudden the transition is. This is expected at a disconformity. I was pointing out that your actual words seemed to imply something that isn't true. If by "knife-edge tight" you meant that there are no gaps between layers, implying that there are cases where there are gaps between layers, then that is not true. There are never any gaps between buried layers. There can of course be underground gaps and spaces in near-surface layers subjected to groundwater flow, but that's about it. If a layer isn't the same thickness throughout its extent, meaning that the top and bottom of the layer are not parallel with one another, then by what measure is it horizontal? If the top is horizontal? The bottom? A centerline drawn from one end of the layer to the other? What if none of these are horizontal? What if the top and bottom of the layer are not straight and flat?The layers at the Grand Canyon are only approximately horizontal. You still don't understand Walther's Law. A sea transgression is absolutely climbing an incline (in general, the elevation of the land increases with distance from the coast), just as a sea regression is descending an incline. A sea transgression cannot move further inland, and deposits cannot become higher, without an increase in water level relative to the land. An increase in the level of the water relative to the land can be achieved in two ways, either by increase in sea levels or subsidence of the land or both. "Building up of deposits" by itself achieves nothing. The evidence says you're wrong. These landscapes were produced by a combination of erosion and sedimentation: How these layers not just as flat and straight as the strata boundary in this following image, which is only about a twenty foot stretch at most: You appear to be changing the definition of "knife-edge" again. Do you mean no gaps, as you were saying earlier, or do you mean flat and straight, as you seem to be saying here. There's nothing rare or unique about that contact between the Coconino and the Hermit, except for the fact that it's at the end of an easily accessible trail and so gets photographed a lot. Erosion tends to flatten a landscape, and sedimentation upon a landscape that's been eroded flat will produce a straight and flat disconformity just like you see in the image. I was trying to make something important clear. "Straight and flat" does tend to be a characteristic of unconformities, but "straight and flat" is by no means the rule. I used the example of the episodic nature of transgressions and regressions because they can result in strata boundaries that are very much not straight or flat or anywhere close to horizontal, as shown in this diagram provided by HereBeDragons: How is it remarkable that a short stretch of disconformity survived all these things, which happen in some places and not most others? Layers like those at the Grand Canyon are not unique. They're found all over the Southwest and in many parts of the world. These straight and flat strata are found in Salta, Argentina: These straight and flat strata are found in Tennessee: These straight and flat strata are found in a cut-though in Pikeville, Kentucky: These straight and flat strata are from the French Alps: So very obviously you are wrong to say that it is rare for straight and flat strata to be preserved. The Grand Canyon is remarkable, and it makes the study of the geology of the region much easier than in most other places around the world, but there is nothing remarkable about the preservation of straight and flat strata. The same features are just as clearly apparent at many other places around the globe. There is nothing remarkable about the straight and flat strata at the Grand Canyon, besides the fact that that so much of them have been exposed. Exposure to erosion and weathering is not preservative. Burial is what preserves rock. The Grand Canyon provides remarkable access, not preservation. Strata at the Grand Canyon are not much distorted, and as I showed above, lack of distortion is true of strata at many places around the world. The Grand Canyon is not in any way made unique or uncommon by the presence of straight and flat strata. If by "simple observation of fact" you mean where you said that the Grand Canyon was an uncommon example of straight and flat strata, then no, you are wrong, as I illustrated above. What you said was, "That's the beauty of the Grand Canyon, huge areas of strata are preserved as close to their original flat and straight horizontality as possible after thousands of years (after millions we'd be lucky to have a pile of dust left),..." "Preserved" can only refer to buried strata. Strata on the canyon walls are *exposed* to erosion, not preserved. And even after the passage of some millions of years the strata visible in the canyon walls will be still be pretty much just like they are today, only a few feet further away. You are terrible at math. The rate of slope retreat (which is the rate at which the canyon walls are being eroded) is approximately 1.6 feet per thousand years. That amounts to about 10 miles (5 miles for each canyon wall) in seventeen million years, which happens to be the average width of the canyon. The width of the Colorado River was never 10 miles. When the region began uplifting the Colorado began cutting into the landscape creating slopes on the side, which began the slope retreat process that is driven by erosion. This is somewhat confused. About erosion, that can only occur on the canyon walls and has nothing to do with the formation of the strata hundreds of millions of years ago. Even for you who believe the strata formed 4500 years ago, erosion on newly exposed surfaces has nothing to do with the formation of the strata. Whatever the nature of the boundary between two adjacent strata was when originally buried and lithified, later erosion cannot change that. It might make it more difficult to understand the original nature of that boundary, but it cannot change the nature of that original boundary.I think you have misunderstood what others were saying if you think they were arguing that the Coconino/Hermit boundary is unique. It is a typical disconformity. There is nothing particularly unusual about it. You say that "other contacts are visibly not that tight," but you say it's because they "have small amounts of erosion and so on." But as just explained, erosion is recent and has nothing to do with the nature of the original boundary, the way it appeared when still locked behind canyon walls. If you're including the erosion of the canyon walls as part of the boundary between strata then you are making a significant mistake.--Percy

The Claron is just a tiny remnant of its former self, having been eroded down to one of the cliffs of the Grand Staircase, which were all formed at the same time as the Grand Canyon in the same upheaval that caused the Kaibab Uplift.

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The Claron is just a tiny remnant of its former self, having been eroded down to one of the cliffs of the Grand Staircase, which were all formed at the same time as the Grand Canyon in the same upheaval that caused the Kaibab Uplift

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Perhaps it is a tiny remnant. Yet the fact it is present at all supports my point. There are about a dozen more formations, by my count, below it which are not present at the Grand Canyon. That’s far more than a tiny remnant