Summations Only

No but you quote him saying this which means the same thing: The lack of erosional channeling is what characterizes a knife-edge tight contact. I don't know where I got the term but the presence of some erosion in a contact is the usual thing, which is what makes this one special."Approximately horizontal" is all I ever mean. I'm talking about the appearance of straightness, levelness, horizontality that can be seen in a block of undisturbed strata.The film I posted in Message 1140 calls all Steno's principles into question so I'm not going to spend much more time defending them.Your plains and deserts simply are NOT as straight and flat and level as any strata anywhere. It's a ludicrous claim.I'm not comparing knife-edge to straight and level. A lot of the strata in the Grand Canyon are straight and level but as far as I know it's only that one short section of the Coconino-Hermit contact that is knife-edge tight. There may be others but this is the one that gets pointed out so it seems to be unique. Most of the contacts have some small amount of erosion in them.Yes of course there are straight strata elsewhere in the world, duh. But there is nothing like the extent of them found exposed in the Grand Canyon that makes it such a treasure.You say something is confused about what I said about erosion at the contact, but you are the one confusing that with the erosion of the walls, not I.; I was talking about erorion WITHIN the contact line that makes it not "knife-edge" close. I haven't said anything about the erosion of the walls at all, but it's interesting that you know it occurs at a rate of 1.6 feet per thousand years.Paul Garner of the British Creationist Society made an issue of the tight contact between the Coconino and the Hermit as something special which I took to mean unique. This is in the video of his lecture on the Grand Canyon. It starts at 57:40 and goes to 59 something.;Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Yes, it was informational. Yes, I know. You're the only one in the thread who apparently didn't know that already. The ultimate destination of all products of erosion is the canyon bottom and the river, though some will be carried away by wind or animals. Some amount of the canyon ends up on tourists. Don't say "reduce it to dust" when you mean eroded away. Erosion creates particles across a range of sizes, and dust is only one of them. Again, the rate of slope retreat (that's the rate of erosion of the canyon sides) is 1.6 feet per thousand years. If the canyon is seventeen million years old (it's worth pointing out that they don't actually know how old the canyon is - massive empty cavities in the Earth aren't directly dateable, so all we have are educated estimates) then the amount of total slope retreat for both canyon walls is about 10 miles. So no, if the millions of years are real, the canyon would not have already been eroded away. And it certainly wouldn't be dust, which is not a synonym for erosion. Lake Mead has only existed since the construction of the Hoover Dam. The sediment accumulation rate at Lake Mead was originally great enough to give it a lifetime of about four centuries, but then the Glen Canyon Dam was completed upstream of the Hoover Dam, and now Lake Powell traps most of the sediments, so Lake Mead's lifetime has been greatly extended. See Sedimentation Lake Mead.Of course, this only pushes the sedimentation problem off onto Lake Powell. It is filling rapidly, which will eventually force the decommissioning of the dam, timetable unknown at this point. See Risks to the Glen Canyon Dam - Siltation.The above has nothing to do with the topic. It's informational. Hope that's okay.--Percy

That is correct. All those from the Kaibab up to the Claron are part of the Grand Staircase but my point is that the erosion of the entire area from the staircase to the canyon occurred as a result of the Kaibab Uplift, in conjunction with the Hurricane Fault and the uplift there, but all at the same time.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

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That is correct. All those from the Kaibab up to the Claron are part of the Grand Staircase but my point is that the erosion of the entire area from the staircase to the canyon occurred as a result of the Kaibab Uplift, in conjunction with the Hurricane Fault and the uplift there, but all at the same time.

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I know what your claim is. I was pointing out that the evidence suggested far less erosion at that end of the Grand Staircase, which calls your claim into question.If all you can do is to try to ignore most of the evidence and then restate your assertion you don’t have much of an answer to that.

"Far less erosion" ??? You're talking about the cliffs of the Grand Staircase:??:?

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"Far less erosion" ??? You're talking about the cliffs of the Grand Staircase:??:?

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And that is just ignoring the point. There are a dozen or more strata at that end of the Grand Staircase that are absent at the other end. This suggests that there was far less erosion at that end.

Oh, OK, and what is the point of that?

My responses are a function of the number of your errors. Perhaps you can tell us a little of the evidence and rationale that led you to this conclusion. Or by "hypothesis" do you mean "just an idea I had"? Can I guess that there's an equal amount of evidence for this tectonic event as there is for the flood? An earthquake isn't really a tectonic event. There's more than one cause of earthquakes, but a common one is slippage along a fault line that has developed strain due to tectonic plate motion. If you hadn't made the error of calling an earthquake a tectonic event I wouldn't have said anything. Why do you think so, and how do you envision this being possible? Finally, something true. Ah, I see, you find discussion from an evidence-based perspective tedious. This is confusing. Science views the deposition of the Paleozoic layers as having taken a few hundred million years, so it seems as if you're referring to the scientific view, but you also refer to "one gigantic tectonic event," which is your personal concoction, so I don't know how to interpret this.But certainly no one claimed the the canyon region to be immune to tectonic activity. I've repeatedly mentioned three tectonic events: a) The mountain building event shown by the Supergroup remains; b) The mountain building event at Cedar Break; c) The Kaibab Uplift. Maybe you have, but I don't think anyone else here has assumed any particular frequency rate of tectonic events. Whatever happened will be recorded in the strata in the form of uplift, subsidence, tilt, faults, dikes, etc. You mean you've been pointing out the absence of evidence for an idea no one is pushing? I think you often don't understand what people have been saying, which is a couple things. First, your favorite diagram is not a record of all tectonic events. Second, there is no requirement for how frequently tectonic events must occur. I don't think I've noticed where people have ever accepted your point about the canyon region being too tectonically quiet, and noting that it is far from plate boundaries where most tectonic activity occurs is simply a fact, not a rationalization. An expression of incredulity is neither evidence nor argument. This is just a bald restatement of your position. Yes, ignore most of the arguments, it's what you do.--Percy

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Oh, OK, and what is the point of that?

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That that end wasn’t exposed to as much erosion, and therefore likely for a shorter time.

I think it was just that the strata above the Grand Canyon were directly in line with the Kaibab Uplift while those to the north were only exposed to the tilting of the whole area.

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I think it was just that the strata above the Grand Canyon were directly in line with the Kaibab Uplift while those to the north were only exposed to the tilting of the whole area.

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That doesn’t seem to make any sense. Why would that mean those strata - at least those that were once present - would now be absent at the Grand Canyon end.

Yes I find the evidence-based picking of nits to be tedious.

It is far more tedious to deal with the details that are reality than to simply repeat some fantasy dogma from your cult. Yes, that is certainly true. Yet EVERY detail examined over the last 200 years or so has show that there was never a global flood during the time humans existed, that the continents did not separate during the time humans existed and that the Earth and Universe are old.We have the fossils, the geology, the paleontology, the anthropology, the models, the mechanism, the process and the procedures, the reefs and the sand dunes and the White Cliffs of Dover.All you have are fantasies and stories written by ignorant humans.We win!

Tried to research this on the web. Colorado River's connection with the ocean was a punctuated affair says there was a natural interruption of the Colorado's flow to the sea around 5.1 million years ago, then:

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At roughly 4.8 million years ago, the river resumed depositing massive amounts of sediment back into the Salton Trough and began rebuilding the delta. Today's view of the delta, however, reflects human-made modern disturbances to the river's sediment discharge and flow of water reaching the gulf.

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To meet agricultural demands for irrigation and drinking water for human consumption, Hoover Dam was constructed on the river to form Lake Mead during the 1930s. In 1956-1966, Glen Canyon Dam was built, forming Lake Powell.

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"If we could go back to 1900 before the dams that trap the sediment and water, we would see that the delta area was full of channels, islands, sand bars and moving sediment. It was a very diverse, dynamic and rich delta system. But manmade dams are trapping sediment today, eerily similar to what happened roughly 5 million years ago," Dorsey said.

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The article doesn't directly say, but does sort of imply, that the amount of sediments delivered to the Gulf of California pre-Hoover Dam wasn't all that different than the amount delivered 4.8 million years ago, which it describes as "massive."The Wikipedia article on the Colorado River doesn't provide much help, either, though it does say:

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Sediments carried from the plateau by the Colorado River created a vast delta made of more than 10,000 cubic miles (42,000 km3) of material that walled off the northernmost part of the gulf in approximately 1 million years.

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Is 10,000 cubic miles of sediment in a million years a lot or a little?The article Hoover Dam gets into a little more detail, but again, I have nothing to compare this with:

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Prior to the 1930s, it carried approximately 125 million tons of suspended sediment to its delta at the head of the Gulf of California.

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But this was kind of helpful: Glen Canyon Institute: All Dams are Temporary - Sedimentation:

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Built in 1963, Glen Canyon Dam is 563 feet high and has steadily been filling with the equivalent of 30,000 dump truck loads of sediment every single day100 million tons of sediment annually.

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Back before the dams I think the sediment load of the Colorado was pretty high where it flowed through Glen Canyon and the Grand Canyon, so the 100 million tons of sediment flowing into Lake Powell annually now must be a great deal. This would make the 125 million tons that used to flow into the Gulf of California before the dams also a great deal.I tried a comparison with the largest river in the world, the Amazon, and something said it discharges 1.2 billion tons of sediment into the ocean each year. Wow!--Percy

IIRC, the Mississippi actually discharges a larger sediment load than the Amazon. On reason is obvious: agriculture. The second not so: much sediment is trapped in the Amazon lowlands during flooding.The Amazon is definitely unique. It has the highest sustained stream velocities of any measured in the world and it is the only 13th order stream in the world - if you count all of the divergences from a single stream, you come up with 13. The next highest numbers are perhaps 10 or 11. Again, this is from memory.The point here? Well it is a transcontinental stream and that is likely what existed in the Mesozoic era, flowing from the eroding Appalachians to somewhere in the NW United States where it was then blown into the great Jurassic ergs of the Colorado Plateau area (just to get back to where we started...)