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Author | Topic: Evolution. We Have The Fossils. We Win. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
edge Member (Idle past 1736 days) Posts: 4696 From: Colorado, USA Joined: |
A couple of points...
The Cocnino/Hermit boundary is a discontinuity representing millions of years of erosion of the Hermit Shale and whatever now-lost layers were above it.
I really don't think it was that long and probably very little was lost. Sometimes people get the wrong idea about ages. For example here is what Durango Bill says about the Coconino and Hermit formations:
Coconino Sandstone - This layer averages about 260 million years old and is composed of pure quartz sand, which are basically petrified sand dunes. Wedge-shaped cross bedding can be seen where traverse-type dunes have been petrified. The color of this layer ranges from white to cream colored. No skeletal fossils have yet to be found but numerous invertebrate tracks and fossilized burrows do exist.
Note that Bill says the formations average 260 and 265 million years old. Words mean something, and here the word 'average' is a very careful usage. No one should take these ages to mean that there is a 5 million year gap at this contact. Hermit Shale - This layer averages about 265 million years old and is composed of soft, easily eroded shales which have formed a slope. As the shales erode they undermine the layers sandstone and limestone layers above which causes huge blocks to fall off and into the lower reaches of the Canyon. Many of these blocks end up in the side drainages and down on the Tonto Platform. The color of this layer is a deep, rust-colored red. Fossils to be found in this layer consist of ferns, conifers and other plants, as well as some fossilized tracks of reptiles and amphibians. http://www.bobspixels.com/kaibab.org/geology/gc_layer.htm#hs Further, it is thought that the cracks in the Hermit are actually mud cracks that were open when the Coconino sand began blowing across the drying mudflats. In many cases the cracks can be seen zig-zagging downward into the Hermit suggesting that there is compaction of the muds as it was loaded by the overlying sand mass or even later as the sediments piled up. My interpretation is that the mudflat was uplfted ever so slightly as the sands slowly and gently loaded the mud. As to the Schnebly Formation. What Garner is actually saying (though he doesn't know it) is that the Schnebly is chronologically equivalent to the Hermit and probably part of the Coconino as well. This, again, is an outgrowth of Walther's Law. Finally, I have been trying to find out if anyone thinks that the Coconino/Hermit contact is an unconformity and I don't really see it discussed as such. If you have such information, I'd be interested in seeing it. I might call it a diastem, but I don't think it is a full-blown unconformity. Edited by edge, : No reason given.
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edge Member (Idle past 1736 days) Posts: 4696 From: Colorado, USA Joined: |
Does Berthault actually demonstrate anything more than deposition on a slope (which you vehemently denied), Walther’s law and hydrodynamic sorting ? All of which your opponents already accept ?
All Berthault has done is to demonstrate things that geologists have known about for a hundred years. The problem is that he has put it in the context of some refutation of mainstream science. And it isn't. That is why I call Berthault a charlatan.
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edge Member (Idle past 1736 days) Posts: 4696 From: Colorado, USA Joined: |
So you are saying that it's common knowledge among geologists that strata can form in running water simultaneously rather than one on top of another separated by time? Funny nothing you've ever said or anyone else either has ever implied such a thing.
Those are not strata. Also the experiments showed that older strata and therefore their fossil contents can deposit on top of younger strata and their fossils and I don't recall ever hearing that from you or any other geology source. Even by your definition.
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edge Member (Idle past 1736 days) Posts: 4696 From: Colorado, USA Joined: |
By now I'm so used to my own way of thinking about all this I can barely read your description at all because it strikes me as so meaningless. In my scenario NOTHING happened in or "sometime after" the "Cretaceous" because the Cretaceous is just a name for a sedimentary rock that got deposited at a certain level in the geological column. It isn't a time period.
But all you are saying is that because you can't believe it, it must not be true.
The idea that the "ancestral Colorado River" could have removed that enormous amount of rock in the Grand Staircase area hits me as just impossible, no matter how many millions of years you give it, unless you are saying the river was at Flood proportions then, which would work with my scenario since I believe all that erosion above the Permian was caused by the receding Flood water. I often find your information about physical geology to be very useful, just not Historical Geology, and I don't know what to make of your notions about the timing of things, except that of course if the Flood was the actual cause I don't see the two phases thing working. But it's interesting to see that you allow yourself to speculate about possibilities that aren't part of the standard thinking. Anyway I'm writing this because of what I just wrote in response to PaulK about the paradigm clash here. I'm beyond any point where I can even read about millions of years without rolling my eyes and regarding it as so fantastical I've been having trouble even trying to characterize that point of view for the sake of discussion. And on your side I see how hard it is for you all even to get what I'm trying to say.
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edge Member (Idle past 1736 days) Posts: 4696 From: Colorado, USA Joined: |
But obviously you think this is wrong, and I've read that the Hermit Formation is one of the least studied layers, so maybe you think this information shouldn't be trusted? Yes, thanks for mentioning this. I discovered I was wrong about this and was going to work it into an upcoming message, but this saves me the trouble. I thought I'd discovered evidence of tectonism, but no such luck. Yes, I do think that the statement is wrong. Let's put it this way. If there were much erosion of the last Hermit layer, why aren't the mud cracks filled with Hermit materials? Here's another thing. If the mud cracks were open to receiving sand from Coconino dunes, they had to be in existence at the same time. In other words, the youngest part of the Hermit is actually younger than the oldest part of the Coconino. Once again, this is a necessary outcome of Walther's Law and is well understood by stratigraphers though still hard to grasp by first-year students. Now, if someone could show me canyons in the Hermit with heaps of truncated bedding planes, I might see things differently. But I don't see that yet. Edited by edge, : No reason given.
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edge Member (Idle past 1736 days) Posts: 4696 From: Colorado, USA Joined: |
A flume is tightly confined by walls.
Well, I'm not sure what went on before my time, but AFAIK, there was never any confusion about cross-bedding versus strata.A global flood is not. No matter what Faith says, superposition is not violated because, at any given location, a grain of sediment is resting on grains that were deposited prior, even in cross-bedding (a term I don't remember them using in the video, by the way) this is the case. First of all if you look closely, each lamination is formed by a 'catastrophic' event where sediment is collapsing down a slope. This will cause sorting of the sedimentary grains. You can even see this in boulders at the base of a cliff sometimes. You will notice that the demonstrations (I don't call them experiments) show features at a scale of centimeters. The video cleverly compares those to beds that are meters to hundreds of meters thick reaching out into the ocean. This is a deceit. Finally, what we do see in the continental scale is practically dictated by Walther's Law. At any given time, the sandstone and the siltstone formations both exist and if the sea transgresses, one will be superposed over the other. Even though they exist at the same time! And no, the demonstration does not invalidate original horizontality. We do know that sediments can be deposited on a slope. That slope is often called the 'angle of repose'. Without it, a pile of sand would just flow away to a thin layer. This is all kind of humorous since Faith has at times rejected the idea of slopes on original bedding. Anyway, the principle of original horizontality is currently understood to be a first order approximation and is often perfectly accurate. So in conclusion, let's just say that streams (like flumes) are not the same as transgressing seas. As soon as a current is introduced the world becomes more interesting.
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edge Member (Idle past 1736 days) Posts: 4696 From: Colorado, USA Joined: |
Okay, let's call it the contact line. It's about one inch thick. How is that a "knife-edge tight" boundary? Here's the image for reference:
It is indeed called a 'contact'. And in geological circles this would be a 'sharp contact'. (Although in greater detail, it may not actually be so).
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edge Member (Idle past 1736 days) Posts: 4696 From: Colorado, USA Joined:
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Well, there is some apparent discoloration below the main sandstone bed. As to what it is we can only guess. There are several things that it could be. My guess is that it would be mapped in with the Hermit because it is slightly recessive, but the color looks sandy.
Perhaps someone has a drone to take some close-up pictures? But it's all really moot since, my understanding is that the the Coconino interfingers with the Hermit in some places.
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edge Member (Idle past 1736 days) Posts: 4696 From: Colorado, USA Joined:
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So, is there some principle of stratiography that says the contact cannot be an inch thick? What is it that convinces you that the light band belongs to the Hermit?
These is no fast rule. I would say that a contact between layers or beds is of no thickness. It would be like two sheets of paper, one on top of another. The contact between formations, however, can be from no thickness to tens of feet. In fact, some formational contacts have been disputed in geology. Sometimes it might be the bottom of the first sand or the top of the last mudstone. Or it might be the fist occurrence of a certain fossil. For instance the Kayenta Formation is in gradational contact with the overlying Navajo (meaning that the beds alternate back and forth between a wind-blown sand and mud until the sand completely replaces the mud. However, any given contact between beds can still be very sharp. From a photograph we can't really tell anything. I would probably put the band with the Hermit because it seems to be slightly recessive. However, from here I cannot tell what the composition is.
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edge Member (Idle past 1736 days) Posts: 4696 From: Colorado, USA Joined:
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Regardless... the bigger point is: How could the flood make such a clean transition? You are trying to make this claim of a "knife-edge contact" to say that traditional geology can't explain it, but in reality... your flood scenario is what can't explain it.
This is a fact. Any method of transport that could carry all of that sediment of all those sizes and composition would have to be so turbulent to mix all of the sediments and dump them at once in a chaos deposit. The closest thing we have to such a deposit are mudflows. They do not have formations or beds, and therefor, no contacts.
How could waves surging over the Hermit Shale lay down a huge layer of seemingly wind-blown grains of sand without disturbing the layer beneath.
Especially when those waves would consist of heavily sediment laden slurries. It staggers the imagination to think that sand could be so sorted from silt and clay to form formations, and that they all could be laid down evenly so as not to disturb the underlying sediments.
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edge Member (Idle past 1736 days) Posts: 4696 From: Colorado, USA Joined:
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It has been pointed out to you that erosion does not start with its formation because it is deeply buried when it becomes rock. The material that buried it must be eroded first. The burial and subsequent erosion of overlying material could take millions of years before the formation is completely disintegrated.
Remember the canard about the canyon sedimentary rocks being soft (or in Faith's scenario, 'kind'a, sort'a, maybe soft enough) so that the canyon could be eroded quickly? Don't you get it? The formation has to end up at the surface before erosion can start working on it. The Grand Canyon did not start eroding when the formations were deposited. The GC began eroding after the overlying material was eroded, and millions of years after the formations were deposited. There's a whole pile of rounded boulders, gravels and sand down here that say that's just silly. How did those boulders get to be so hard after they were washed away so easily?
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edge Member (Idle past 1736 days) Posts: 4696 From: Colorado, USA Joined: |
The idea about reducing a formation to dust is about how long it would take from its formation to be completely disintegrated.
But if the sedimentary deposits of the canyon were so soft, they would be easy to disintegrate to dust. And yet, why do I have all of these hard gravels down here in Arizona? Did they come from flushing soft sediments down the Colorado River?
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edge Member (Idle past 1736 days) Posts: 4696 From: Colorado, USA Joined: |
Reducing a FORMATION to dust means a ROCK.
So, the GC sediments were lithified?
And don't exaggerate the softness of the sediments at the end of the Flood. They were three miles deep so certainly highly compacted.
I knew you'd say that. Okay, so they were kinda-sorta-mildishly-weakly-yet-strongly-more-or-less tentatively lithified. The point is that is becomes very difficult to see how soft rocks could so easily be eroded to depths and yet still form boulders, cobbles and gravel beds hundreds of miles away.
And who knows what the gravel is you're sitting on anyway.
Yah, well, I've only talked to people who have been studying this stuff for decades; and really, where else did it come from? It's right there along the river in stranded gravel beds and it occurs from there for miles in some directions. If you have a better idea, I'd just love to hear about it.
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edge Member (Idle past 1736 days) Posts: 4696 From: Colorado, USA Joined: |
I meant by "formation" the hoodoos and the Monument Valley buttes and that sort of thing.
In geology, the word 'formation' has a very specific meaning, so I was reading something different, evidently.
But perhaps they too weren't rock at the time they were eroded if I'm right that it was the receding Flood that did the first carving of them. So I've taken the position that compaction under miles of other sediments was enough consolidation to leave the buttes and take away all the material around them, to leave the whole limestone rock pretty much intact after exposure while starting the process of carving the hoodoos and so on, and left much of the Grand Canyon walls intact while washing away the less consolidated strata above the Permian and carving out the basic shape of the canyon.
This is kind of garbled here. Not sure that it's important, but it doesn't exactly flow.
Compacted, not lithified yet, but compaction can produce a pretty hard formation anyway, in fact on a thread here quite a long time ago somebody found a site that said compaction does produce rock all by itself. Except for the very uppermost strata that got washed away I don't think it's right to describe any of the damp strata at the point the Flood receded as "soft" at all.
In that case how did the gravels from the canyon become so hard just laying around in stream deposits?
I'm not sure what you mean by "eroded to depths." You mean the cutting of the canyon?
I have always been discussing the canyon unless I specifically say otherwise. In this case, I mean erosion down to the metamorphic basement rocks including granite.
The amount of water involved that would have been rushing into the cracks in the strata would have sent chunks of material down the canyon to carve it out. But if the rocks weren't "soft" but highly consolidated or compacted they wouldn't just disintegrate, they'd break up into large pieces as well.
THen they would become harder after being broken up and transported?
Being washed down the canyon should do quite a bit of shaping wouldn't you think?
Over thousands of years and thousands of miles, yes.
But I'd also mention that you don't know WHEN any given boulders and gravel formed, do you?
Well, it's pretty clear that it would be during formation of the canyon. All I know is that people who study the Neogene deposits say that they are from the Colorado River and the greatest erosion along the Colorado is in the Grand Canyon. I also see the same beds above the current banks of the existing river. Besides, you don't have all that much time to deal with it this all happened 4ky ago. But I'm glad to see that you understand the post Permian rocks to be softer and less resistant and would be more readily worn away over the millions of years since their deposition; and that a peneplain might be developed on top of the Kaibab. This was the surface the allowed formation of the meanders that we see so prominent today.
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edge Member (Idle past 1736 days) Posts: 4696 From: Colorado, USA Joined: |
... So it's more about the Coconino than the contact between the Coconino and the Hermit.
Good digging. It's starting to look like there was some kind of seismic event or events, that liquified the base of the Coconino and caused injection into fractures forming in the Hermit near the Bright Angel Fault. The orientation of the cracks are compatible with the Bright Angel fault, with what appear to be more pronounced on the west side of the Bright Angel (I can't really tell this from the diagram, but the largest certainly is on the west). The crack formation and the presence of sandstone fragments (which I have not seen, but were mentioned) suggest that lithification was advanced in both units. It also seems to be telling us something about lithification of sandstones in that it can take quite a long time. For instance that might explain why a lot of the Mesozoic sandstones are not really all that hard. We seem to have come across some interesting stuff. Anyway, I am not very convinced of Whitmore's conclusions since he is working with a YEC agenda. I could tell by his language in the publications.
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