Summations Only

My argument has been based all along on the fact of the huge disturbances that occurred in the canyon area after all the strata were in place. The supposed placidity lasted some 750 million years, only to be suddenly brought to an end by all that tectonic and volcanic activity seen in the uplift over the canyon area, the cutting of the canyon into it, the stairs and canyons of the Grand Staircase to the north as well as the uplift there, and the magma dike at the end of the staircase that penetrates through all the strata to the very top where it's created a lava field, and the Hurricane fault that created the angular unconformity to the north of it, and so on.Of course there is also the activity that can be seen beneath the canyon as well, the Great Unconformity, the magma intrusions and so on, which are usually understood to have occurred BEFORE all the strata were laid down, long long long before. I rather think they occurred at the same time as those that clearly occurred afterward but either way you've got a lot of tectonic and volcanic activity in the region that supposedly DIDN'T happen at ALL for at least 750 million years.Now I suppose you can just assume that's just the way it happened, but that of course strikes ME as a cop-out. The fact of so much disturbance to the entire area happening after all the strata were laid down kind of suggests that any former placidity of hundreds of millions of years is an illusion. But I guess that's just me.Oh but you need to recognize also that there are some here who are challenging the very idea of all that placidity, claiming there was such activity but it just didn't get recorded on the cross sections. Dr. A and Rox at least are trying to make that point. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

You'll have to forgive me but this round of debate is the first time anyone has ever suggested that lithified rock bends at ALL, no matter what the distances involved. Now it's become the Argument Du Jour. Obviously because it gives you a way to deny the implication that the strata were still damp. But really it doesn't matter because the more important point is that they were all already laid down when the tectonic and other disturbances occurred, such as the creation of the Kaibab monocline itself. Any sedimentary layer being laid down after those events would not have conformed to the new slopes no matter how many miles in length, they would have laid themselves out most nicely horizontally and butted up against any such obstacles, perhaps piling up there, who knows, but they wouldn't conform to the new shapes. This time around at least people are conceding that point though.

That's just your astounding ignorance speaking. All kinds of rock bend and fold under pressures and temperatures found when they are buried deep in the Earth. Well-known fact.{snip oft-refuted arguments from more ignorance}Edited by JonF, : No reason given.

Accuse accuse accuse. I don't CARE about the meanders, I got drawn into this discussion more or less just to appease Atheos who was carrying on about it. I haven't studied it enough to get into a debate about it. I don't trust what you say or anyone says, frankly, you can pick and choose the evidence you want to apply, and in this case I've got Steve Austin disagreeing with you, and he could be right despite the accusations you are all making against him too. Nobody is wrong about everything. And I distrust those accusations as well anyway. Sometime maybe I can look into it more and come to my own conclusions, but for now your arguments are suspect in my mind. In order to get out of them I'll just concede the point. You win this round.

You seem to have pointedly ignored the context as usual. I said first time in these debates this has come up, and that's the truth. As for bending under high temperatures and pressure when buried deep in the earth, how is that relevant to rock NOT buried deep in the earth conforming to an uplift or down slope? It gets tiresome talking to kneejerk debunkers.

They are not bald assertions, Faith. They are based on geologic evidence collected by geologists for decades, using knowledge gained over 200 years. Regardless if you accept the data / interpretations or not, the conclusions in the paper I provided will have evidence to support them; unlike your unfounded opinions based on nothing but your desire to have a 2000 year old book be true.Are the authors suggesting they are 100% accurate in their interpretations? No. They are saying, "Hey, we have these data and we think they point to this happening." Other workers will read those conclusions and think, "They are partly right, but I know that so-and-so collected this other set of data, so their conclusion regarding this is wrong." And so on. Little by little, the story of the Canyon is being told. I personally think there are more faults, but we haven't taken the time to really look into it. Plus they may not be visible on the surface as it appears the off-set on them has not been so great or so sudden that the overlying strata break in a brittle fashion. Presently, most of the strata are behaving ductilely and draping across the structural off-sets. This is why the authors of the paper are looking for monoclines on the surface. However, what I have found so far, is perfectly reasonable.What I would like to see is synsedimentary faulting in the GC, but have not been able to find anything so far in online searches. Synsedimentary faults, also known as growth faults (I believe), have lithologic relationships that indicate active sediment deposition adjacent to a fault undergoing contemporaneous (or synchronous) displacement.The GC exists today in its current spectacular form precisely due to its being located in an area of prolonged stability. The area is really not that large. Continental cratons present on most (all?) the continents have been stable far longer and are far larger in extent.And let's not forget that what we see in the subsurface of the GC is only a tiny sliver of what actually exists under the strata. We only see cross-sections of strata in the canyon walls. What is still left to be discovered? Perhaps a buried volcano, more lava flows, a small/localized igneous complex, synsedimentary faulting evidence . We don't know. We may never know. I did not see "Pleistocene" anywhere, but Proterozoic and Laramide are ages of the faults and monoclines, respectively. The Proterozoic (i.e., Precambrian) faults are the normal faults (horst and graben structures) that down-dropped and preserved the Grand Canyon Supergroup into the crystalline basement rocks before being planed off by erosion (the Great Unconformity). The Laramide monoclines suggest that during the Laramide Orogeny (~80 Ma), the Proterozoic basement faults were reactivated, gently deforming strata in the Grand Canyon area. The lines end for a variety of reasons, in this diagram I'd say it is to keep it simple and easy to read. To get an accurate representation of the structures, you need to look at a geologic map in the appropriate scale.And while the monoclines formed after all the strata were laid down and lithified, the fact that the Proterozoic faults were reactivated suggests this would have happened in the past as well IF tectonic conditions at the time demanded it. Meaning that if the continental margin where the GC sediments were being laid down was passive, nothing's going on and nothing will move. If, however, there is nearby mountain building, island arc collisions, then the faults will give.We simply need more of the strata to be exposed.Why do you keep going back to the cross-section views? They are only schematic representations of the major geologic features of the Canyon? They cannot possibly incorporate the complexity that exists in reality. Your lack of experience and knowledge is clear and it forces you to depend entirely on cartoons when you should be reading and using technical papers to reinforce your statements. The Cardenas formation in the Unkar group is such a unit that spills on top of layers and then is buried by more sediments. It is a volcanic lava flow of basaltic composition and is evidence for continental rifting. Since the lava had to come from a deeper magma chamber, somewhere there are the fissures or maybe even volcanoes or dikes that erupted the basalt. However, they are not exposed and we may never see them. Since that formation exists, it is logical to surmise that others also exist or existed, though they may be buried or eroded away.So the Cardenas lava is there because of continental rifting. Which once completed, would end the eruption of basaltic lavas. Unless something else happened, such as subduction, development of a new hot spot, etc., there is nothing to cause magmatic activity. So yes, I'm okay with little to no igneous rocks above the Great Unconformity. Well I appreciate you not insulting me.You are mystified only because you have used a vague image on the cover of a book to guess at its contents and determined it was not worth reading.

Kneejerk debunkery again. Its being deep doesn't mean it was a "gently slow-flowing stream."

Uh, no. But please go ahead and explain in better detail exactly how a package of rocks can be tilted while an overlying package remains horizontal.

Yes, Faith we all know that you aren't going to address the physical impossibilities that your fantasy entails. It's amusing to see you propose "solutions" that contradict your previous "solutions". It's SOP for YEC 's to make their fantasies self-contradictory.

Right, it doesn't, and I never said it did.But no gently flowing stream is carving a canyon a mile deep in anything, especially your "hardened rock" (your words), in the time frame you are proposing. Gently flowing with meanders and too slow to cut the canyon, or fast and violent beyond our imaginations and cuts a canyon with no meanders. Either way your fantasy fails again.IOW you are not even trying to make a coherent hypothesis.

I think you're confusing two things. What I have proved is that there were many episodes of erosion. RAZD is quite right to think that tectonic episodes were much rarer.

The GC strata WERE buried, Faith.Deformation of rocks requires neither high temperature nor high pressure. Just having been buried under a thick sedimentary package and subjected to tectonic activity is enough. And just because you see the rock on the surface of the earth today, does not mean it was not at one time buried.As sedimentary basins continue to fill, the crust underneath will begin to subside and thin (i.e., stretch) due to the added weight. Down warping of the crust allows an enormous amount of sediment to be deposited within the basin, tens of thousands of feet in fact. This will happen until something changes the tectonic environment, such as the crust thinning to the point that the underlying heat causes thermal expansion and eventual uplift, or uplift due to an orogenic event.You keep ignoring the fact that OE has an explanation and evidence for everything you can think up, while you are left making things up and ignoring 99% of the available data.Your lack of knowledge is palpable.

This is just you making things up again. There's no such thing as damp, flexible rocks drying out to become hard rock. It's pressure that turns sediment to rock, not evaporation.Rock is not some supernatural material that doesn't bend. No material has a flexural strength of infinity.And you've been misreading that diagram and wrongly thinking that the horizontal and vertical scales are the same. They're not. Around the Grand Canyon, the amount of bending over a couple hundred miles is probably only a mile or two. Were the diagram to scale the amount of bending would be barely discernible.Each individual layer is only a few hundred feet thick at most. If you had a hundred inch long slab of an incredibly strong rock like granite that was only a tenth of an inch thick, which is about the same proportions as a layer at the Grand Canyon, you would be able to see the bend, and sedimentary rock has much less flexural strength than granite and would bend much more.The only reason you made up a story about damp rocks is because you didn't know the diagram exaggerated the degree of bending and that the deformation is actually very slight, and because you didn't know rock can bend by small amounts, and because you didn't know the sedimentary layers are not continuous slabs of solid rock but have existing fractures and new ones can be easily created, and because you cannot seem to figure out that the deformation takes place very slowly over eons, not suddenly. You must be misunderstanding something. No sedimentary layers could have been created after the region around the Grand Canyon was uplifted. At that point it could only experience net erosion, not deposition. Again, you must be misunderstanding something. No one would concede the point as you've described it above, because it's dead wrong.But I don't understand why you keep insisting that the layers are all so flat. They're certainly roughly flat, but the thickness of each layer varies by as much as hundreds of feet, and this couldn't be true if the boundaries between layers were all flat.--Percy

No, you are right about that and I knew it as soon as I posted it but oh well. Of course they WERE buried deep. OK.Nothing you said in that post requires OE explanations, though.As for anything I can think up, I have had the strong impression that the lack of major disturbances during 750 million years of strata build up followed by lots of disturbances all at once hadn't been recognized at all. Getting anybody to even grasp what I was talking about I thought was going to be a losing battle, and for most of the discussion it was. Not that you can't "explain" it once it's been acknowledged of course.

The reason the meanders are important is that rapidly moving water cannot create meanders. Then it should be apparent to you, as it already is to everyone else, that you don't know enough about geology to be having this discussion. These concessions are dishonest and deceitful because you don't mean them. You've pulled these kinds of stunts far too many times to fool anyone.--Percy