Deposition and Erosion of Sediments

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Happy Easter!

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And I hope you had a Happy Easter / Resurrection Day yourself.I wanted to answer this post first briefly but although I did skip some points it still ends up being an awfully long post. It will probably take me a while to get back to the others now.Yes, I keep forgetting that the assumption of great lengths of time for the creation of the Geo Column means that actual evidence of any ongoing layering that occurs in the same way isn't going to be found.

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Since we don't see rivers drying up or changing course over night or even over 1000s of years; ...

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Actually there is at least one rather striking example of a major river's changing course in just a hundred years. This change in the course of the Missouri River was the reason it was hard to locate the remains of a steamboat that had traveled the river in the 19th Century and sank there, which was the subject of a PBS program some years ago. It was finally located a mile or more from the current riverbed by tracking the changes in the river's course over the years. http://glswrk-auction.com/102.htm
{Edit to add some more refs: http://yankton.net/...ies/012605/community_20050126030.shtml
Book on the Missouri
Rivers of Change - a reviewI have to ask, how would anyone KNOW whether or not these things have happened in thousands of years: "we don't see beaches become ocean bottom ... even over 1000s of years; ... we don't see big lakes drying up or being created ... even over 1000s of years; ... we don't see oceans lifting up ... even over 1000s of years; [and that] ... these things take longer than even that ?Actually if the Flood occurred there would probably have been many huge lakes left behind that hadn't been there before, that either dried up or drained away in the last few thousand years and maybe within the first few hundred after the Flood.This in a nutshell is the problem I keep running into in evolutionist reasoning. For anything we see or "don't see" that goes back before we have actual verifiable evidence, all you have is inferences from the present state of things and no other independent evidence and yet it is described as if it were observed fact. In the case of the changing course of the Missouri River there are historical documents and drawings to show at least that it had changed over time and even many times, and with some heavy thinking applied to these documents it was eventually figured out roughly where the steamboat actually sank. Just looking at the current situation of the Missouri an evo might postulate that it may have changed course at some time or other in the past but the time frame would probably have been a million or at least thousands of years, not many times in a hundred years.Back a thousand or two thousand years we MAY still have some written documents on SOME geological formations in the world, I don't know, but without such documents any generalizations you make will have no independent evidence to confirm or disconfirm them. All anyone can ever actually see experimentally is what is going on NOW. The best evidence available about the past is what somebody has written about it who witnessed it at the time. That's not perfect either, but it's better evidence than guesses based on current events. Even the MOST intelligent extrapolations to the past from the present have no way of being tested or proved, and without independent evidence in the form of testimony from the time of the event being described all you have is an unfalsifiable more or less intelligent guess. And of course the farther back you generalize the less reliable your guesses are.You have a principle called Uniformitarianism which ASSUMES that things always happened pretty much as they are happening now, but there is no proof of the validity of this principle. You have radiometric dating which is claimed to tell the age of something calculated by the rate of decay of radioactive content, but while it’s a reasonable theory there’s no way to prove that it actually works as it is unknown whether the rate of decay may vary under certain circumstances, and again there is no independent testimony from the time being measured to confirm or disconfirm a date. If science must be testable, replicable and falsifiable, this is not science. And you have the fossil record which APPEARS to be sorted according to age of the fossils, but again there is no way to confirm or disconfirm this. It’s plausible on the face of it but that’s all it is or ever can be.Over and over the reasoning that is required in these fields is not scientific reasoning according to the official definitions. Science certainly produces working plausibilities, but science can also ultimately confirm or disconfirm them with well constructed experiments. When dealing with what happened in the past there is no experiment that can be done. History does not lend itself to scientific method. The most reliable history has written documents to support it, but geological and biological history must do without that kind of evidence for all periods when there is no written report to be had.You want to show me that an understanding of what ACTUALLY happened in the formation of the strata would change my mind about the reality of a worldwide Flood. But what you are forced to rely on in your presentation of evidence of What Actually Happened is the assumptions of the very theories I am questioning. This is in fact Begging the Question, or what creationists are always being accused of, Circular Reasoning. But creationists in the case of the Flood at least do have the independent witness of the Bible, a witness from the time in question, while evolutionists have nothing but their current speculations to go on.This is why ALL the evidence that is offered from your side is just plausibilities, and why when a creationist offers counterplausibilities they are always rejected. There is no way of proving either, but the evos have the politically correct views and simply declare the creos wrong. My birds perching on dinosaurs was a pretty silly guess in the wrongheaded attempt to place birds with dinosaurs, but no sillier than the idea of dinosaurs dying once in a great while and being carried downriver to join a whole pileup of dinosaurs that somehow all bunched up together even though each corpse arrived after long passages of time and was buried individually. No sillier than the idea that the Carboniferous is not just a layer of coal but an actual period that was a landscape covered in coal. There is no way to PROVE OR DISPROVE any of these suppositions. The method is ONLY imagination, plausibility, and ridicule for the opposition’s thinking done by the same methods.My entire method here has been questioning evo plausibilities and offering creo plausibilities. This is all anyone can do with questions about what happened in the past. I’m always answered that I need to know more. Of course I do. My plausibilities are necessarily pretty limited for lack of knowledge. But knowing more will accomplish nothing either as Creationist scientists know more than most of the evo posters here but nothing they have to say is considered worthy of attention here. It is all ridiculed.

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We also wouldn't see the big changes that had to occur during at least the first few hundred years after a worldwide Flood.

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And here is one of these statements made as if it were absolute fact which is based on the suppositions I mention above and is untestable and unfalsifiable.If I ask you for proof of this statement what would you tell me? Nothing from the time of the Flood for sure, but only inferences backwards from currently observed processes, assuming that things were happening at the same rate then and so on. It sure seems odd to me that this kind of fact wouldn’t be considered to support rather than challenge the Flood idea. The time frame evos would postulate for the delta’s accumulation would of course be astronomically greater than what creos would postulate but as usual neither could be confirmed or disconfirmed scientifically, merely extrapolated from assumptions (including assumptions about the validity of radiometric dating under all conditions). But the fact that it is only in very specific local environments that you see evidence of layering similar to that in the Geo Column should in itself suggest that the Geo Column which is considered to be a worldwide phenomenon by all geologists, not just by creationists, can only be explained by something on a tremendously greater scale than a few deltas around the world. I guess you assume that even the ongoing deposits have taken millions of years then. No way to prove any of it though. Well, there are many reasons according to creationist thinking. And there is no objective basis for assuming they formed the same way. Limestone isn’t only organic but can also be inorganically formed under certain conditions. Some Creationists say this is how it is formed in limestone caves. They also say that most of the limestone in the strata is inorganic. Evo best guess is that great quantities produced all at once would eradicate the atmosphere, but you don’t know for sure and there’s no way to test it. May depend on other factors that are also unknown. Also maybe it was already produced before the Flood rather than during. Nobody knows for sure and there is no way to test it for sure.Creationist sites on limestone formation:Acts and Facts Magazine | The Institute for Creation Research
In the Beginning: Compelling Evidence for Creation and the Flood - Eight Observations That Are Now ExplainedAgain I’d just point out that the theory is only as good as its best guess, and there is no way to test that best guess. It can’t be replicated, it can’t be falsified, because it’s in the past. The best you can do is compare processes going on now with the contents you see in particular strata and guess that the same processes produced it. Certainly some guesses make more sense than others, but you can’t KNOW your best guess is right, and again there is no way to test it, replicate it or falsify it. All either side of the dispute can do is offer possibilities, plausibilities, possible scenarios to explain a given formation. The science involved is the same on both sides. The same scientific principles are used, the same chemical and biological processes are used to make the case. And here, Jazz, is another excellent example of what I’m talking about. The flat unequivocal statement that it was once an ocean. Of course that idea comes from considering contents and qualities of the strata and extrapolating from ongoing processes and chemical processes to the period of its formation, as usual. This is sensible of course. It’s the only thing that CAN be done in the attempt to reconstruct the past, but again, it can’t be tested, replicated or falsified. The best that can happen is that a more plausible explanation can come along. This isn’t a scientific fault, it’s just that anything that occurred in the past is not subject to proof by scientific method. The geologic timetable is not and the theory of evolution is not subject to that kind of proof. Neither is the Flood. Only processes that can be replicated -- intentionally repeated -- in the present are subject to proof or disproof by scientific method. History can’t be.A creationist COULD say, Of COURSE the GC was an ocean, the whole world was once an ocean for about a year, good of you to see the evidence at least in one place but you’d ridicule that answer on the basis of all the other suppositions about the formation of all the other strata as if all that were established fact too, when it’s all only unprovable, untestable, unreplicable, unfalsifiable educated guesses like all the rest. Yes, again, evos may correct a particular guess by a more plausible guess. I’m sure that happens all the time. But that’s not testability, replicability, falsifiability. And it’s exactly the same kind of thinking creationists do too, both sides competing with plausible scenarios, yet evos ridicule creationists for using the same methods they use. That’s the only REAL edge evos have -- they are the Establishment so they get to call the shots. They get to make the Judgment Call, which is what ALL the conclusions are based on.Overall the BIG plausibility problem with evo theory is the assumption that all things occurred in the past as they are occurring now. As usual with evo theory, what we get above is the theory itself given as if it were fact. What led geologists to the idea that the GC was once an ocean is not given, I'm just expected to accept the evo scenario as fact. It is assumed and presented as fact that tectonic destruction of sediments today is fairly extrapolated to the formation of the strata, but that assumption can be questioned as tectonic activity is figured by creationists to have STARTED with the Flood and what we are seeing now is a later development. Again your next statement is also presented as simple fact as if anybody had seen it with his own eyes that the ocean where the GC was laid down was actually just part of a large continental depression and a very high sea level feeling no need to give the actual observations that led to this educated guess about what happened. It may be a very plausible educated guess, but again there is no way to test it, prove it, replicate it or falsify it. It’s even hard to find out the reasoning process, but even if one has it, it’s still not testable. It remains the most plausible educated guess until a better educated guess comes along. Again, this is the only kind of reasoning that can be used with events in the past, but since it is in the nature of the situation that none of it is subject to the usual scientific methods of proof it SHOULD be treated as far more tentative than conclusions that CAN be tested, replicated, falsified etc. Actually to look at the diagram of that whole region, the altitudes involved, the maintenance of the parallel layering, it does seem it was all uplifted at one point. That’s no doubt a plausible scenario that Creationists can agree with easily enough although the time frame wouldn’t be accepted. Yes of course. They explain that unconformity as having occurred before the layers above it were laid down, but actually the diagram of the whole area would suggest that it probably occurred after — not the layers of that lower section of course, just the tilting of the whole block of layers -- although in that case how it managed not to disturb the layers above is a puzzle. The diagram I posted shows a great swelling that uplifted and distorted the layers north of the canyon just a bit without breaking them, which is explained as magma pushing upward that didn’t erupt through, that had to have occurred after the layers were formed (and were no doubt still damp in order to bend and not break), and that great unconformity at the bottom of the canyon appears to have been pushed by that magma into its current condition. Not being a geologist how would I know of course, but I’d guess the layers were still a bit damp when these tectonic forces occurred so that the upper layers exerted enough counterforce to keep from being disrupted, and enough to redirect the underlying strata diagonally along with the force of the magma. Jazz, I have not misrepresented the horizontality at any point. My visualization and spatial relationship faculties are excellent and I haven’t said anything that requires such a basic correction. I can SEE that the canyon was laid down in horizontal layers all with respect to each other as well as with respect to the horizon of the earth in the case of the canyon, and I’m also aware of Steno’s Law which SAYS that all such layers were ORIGINALLY horizontal. Even after being distorted by tectonic movements they remain PARALLEL in the greater canyon area and their original horizontality is easily inferred from this. Your diagram may certainly be the case in local areas, though as presented it is merely an abstract hypothetical, but for the canyon itself and the greater canyon area, if YOU will look at the diagrams given of the entire extended area to the north of the canyon you will see that the PARALLEL configuration of the strata is maintained over a magma swelling and on up into Utah beneath higher layers WITHOUT BREAK. Jar posted a diagram of the area on the original sediment thread and I posted one above, which I’ll link here again as well: Scrollable diagram down pageIs the sand at the bottom of existing sand dunes hardened to stone? Or are you talking about burial by other layers accumulating above? Because if so remember that the layers are supposed to have taken millions of years to form. So IF the Coconino remained dunes all that time and IF dunes don’t become sandstone in their lower regions under their own weight, then that process would only have begun when the next sediment started depositing on top and compression couldn’t have been early in that process as there wouldn’t be enough weight. But wouldn’t the new sediments from above conform to the dune shape beneath and preserve it? Wouldn’t they settle in the depressions of the dunes? Wouldn’t they in fact have been blown as the dune sand was? Or were they washed in by water, flattening the dunes and soaking them through? Jazz, LOOK at the Coconino: It is a thick hard layer of sandstone FLAT on top, FLAT on the bottom, not PERFECTLY for pete’s sake but VISIBLY FLAT. It does NOT have the SHAPE of DUNES at any point. It retains its basic flatness THROUGHOUT the entire region on up into Utah as illustrated on the diagrams. I have NEVER been talking about PERFECTION, ONLY observable visible parallel strata that in the canyon are also horizontal, and STENO AGREES WITH ME!I can accept that because of the configuration of the sand grains in the layer, the crossbedding as it is called, that they were once shaped by the same forces that shape dunes. That is a reasonable supposition. But you still have to explain how that whole thick layer became a flat horizontal layer on the notion that it took millions of years to build it up and then more millions to build up the layers above it, without preserving its dune wave shape in the process of filling in its depressions etc., if it started out as dunes and stayed dunes for millions of years. Again I would just repeat that this burying process supposedly took millions of years, so the lithification would have been correspondingly slow as the weight would not have been sufficient in the early stages. Also was the layer above formed in water or not? If formed in water then don’t we have to imagine the entire column being submerged at once and the dunes being soaked as well as the new-forming sediment layer? How does a new landscape form slowly on top of an old one without disturbing it? But the Coconino is clearly undisturbed sandstone neatly compressed into flatness above and below.This message has been edited by Faith, 03-28-2005 08:29 PM

Didn't I cover this pretty thoroughly? Most of my points hinged on it. You can't just repeat it as if I'd never said it myself. The point is you NEED WITNESSES in order to truly prove ANYTHING in the past. If you HAVE them, fine, then you have proof, and you may indeed have them for some geological events back a few thousand years, but the farther back you go the scantier they are going to get.But before there is any human witness to these things you have ZIP evidence, ALL you have is inference backwards, inference based on the mere ASSUMPTION that nothing was different before that, NOT PROOF, and PROOF is impossible to get. You do not SEE "ancient things." They CANNOT be seen by definition. They are PAST. They are GONE.What you see in the strata you ASSUME are ancient, you are not SEEING anything ancient. I am questioning the very grounds for your belief that the strata show ancient landscapes so it is begging the question / arguing in a circle to prove anything by reference to those assumptions. You cannot refer to the supposed great age of a rock to prove something else because that great age is in question. YOu cannot insist that radiometric dating has been shown to be trustworthy because there's no way to test whether this is true back before human history. THESE WERE THE POINTS I WAS MAKING. YOu cannot prove me wrong by appealing to your own theory which is what I believe to be wrong.I don't have time to answer further, and I still have two long posts before this last one to answer.

Hello Jazz. I will try to get back to this thread, starting with your message #29 as you requested. You are absolutely not getting it. You need to predict the accumulated effects of our normal weathering patterns over such an enormous period of time. Such events are not subtle at all if the principle of uniformitarianism is correct and they happen at the rate experienced in human history.Figure up the normal pattern of such events, of hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, mudslides, rock slides, volcanoes, forest fires, tidal waves, rainstorms, snowstorms, windstorms, floods, then add in the hundred-year record-breaking versions that are also part of the pattern, then multiply by whatever millions of years it is postulated that a particular stratum took to form. (Assuming that anybody agrees that any of them were ever above water for so long, which in fact may not be the case anyway -- but this is a digression).Most of these normal events have been known to alter the topography of the land. It is within historical time that such events may appear insignificant, not over millions of years, and insignificant to us because they don't happen everywhere at once, we are used to them and have learned to deal with them more or less, at least in some parts of the world. But they would not be dwarfed at all by millions of years, as you claim, but on the contrary, multiplied to enormous effects. Every year the world experiences a round of them and we manage to recover one way or another, even with great loss of life in some cases, but recover nevertheless, and sometimes we note that the terrain has changed, but we pick up and go on. Just multiply these yearly effects by millions.

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Over the span of your life have any of the hurricanes removed the Florida everglades or the beaches in the southeast coast?

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No, of course not, and your focusing on this shows you are missing the point. Each storm moves things around to some extent. Give it millions of years and see what moving things a little every year adds up to.

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Did El Nino destroy the Mojave Desert? Sure it might mix stuff up but it is still there.

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Uh huh, but as usual you are not getting the point, that small changes multiply greatly over millions of years.

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These "events" do not stop deposition and over the course of time the average will be positive deposition.

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But not your nice regular even flat deposition which is what we see in the strata.

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No one is claiming that everything must sit still for 50 million years. All it has to do is sit sill long enough for more stuff to pile on top of it on average. Once it is buried then either it gets further buried or it gets eroded. The stuff that gets eroded is carted off to some other location where it may or may not get buried there. It has to go somewhere and it WILL and up someplace where it is less and less likely to be eroded even if it has to travel all the way to the bottom of the ocean.

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Yes, but again these processes cannot be expected to build up regular horizontal layers of the sort we see in the strata. They shift things around, they do not allow neat layers to form. I'm not getting this picture. You aren't describing these layers, their contents, their thicknesses, comparing them to the Geo Column. You have to show that the rate of deposition and the distinctions between layers could explain the buildup of the Geo Column over millions of years. And who said anything about these layers being "from a different source other than the delta" anyway?

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When we practice geology on these layers we are looking at something that is "current" with respect to geologic time. The Mississippi delta system is "live" so we know a lot about the characteristics of the sediment in the delta. Then when we find layers buried somewhere else where there is not a river but has the same characteristics as the layers of the Mississippi delta we can hypothesize that there was once a delta there. Then we search the area to try to find evidence of an ancient river and when we do it confirms our ability to take our current knowledge that we gathered from the current "live" formation and apply it to something different.

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Sure, but many layers building up in a delta in historical time doesn't exactly commute to layers built up over millions of years as seen in the Geo Column. The best you can extrapolate is that water deposition is likely the cause.And since you are clear that the deposition is of sediments brought down from eroded upstream rocks and terrain, how does the idea of "landscapes" ever come up with regard to any of the strata as explained by water deposition anyway?

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This applies to many other aspects of geology. We can watch deserts today and how they work. We can watch sand dunes and cut into them to see what they look like on the inside. We can see that they are one big heap of sand with internal cross-bedding. A desert is a "live" geologic system even if we never saw the sand that is at the bottom of dune be deposited. Then when we find the Coconino sandstone that just looks like a lithified version of a sand dune we have strong evidence that the Coconino sandstone came from a desert.

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You can say pretty justifiably that the Coconino sandstone was formed from sand that was tumbled as dune sand is tumbled, but going on to say that that layer represents a millions-of-years-in-the-making "landscape" of dunes built on top of a millions-of-years-in-the-making "landscape" of clay deposition that became shale, on down through the strata... You know, I know I keep repeating myself, and I know it irritates people here to no end, but every now and then I just have to stop and think about what these layers actually LOOK like in the Grand Canyon and elsewhere, and the Geo timeframe explanation of millions of years again hits me as a gigantic hoax. "Landscapes?" Under water, above water, whatever, it does not compute. OK, I'm doing my best to put into words why. Excuse the digression please. The point was that when I'd point out how the strata in the canyon couldn't have built up over millions of years somebody would point to a river as an example of how it could, NOT to say that's the cause of the Grand Canyon itself -- neither I nor they made that mistake as far as I know -- but to say that this is a PROCESS OF LAYER-MAKING THAT CAN BE EXTRAPOLATED to the formation of the strata in the Geo Column in general. My answer is that the process may help explain it but not the time factor. In any case, as I recall, it look quite a while before anyone even said that the Grand Canyon was formed in the ocean, and some appeared to be unsure about how much of it was formed that way. If any strata lower in the column appear to be eroded, that also remains to be explained in terms of ocean deposition.It appears to me that ALL the horizontal -- or previously horizontal and still parallel -- strata wherever they are found MUST have been formed in water, but so far nobody has confirmed that. All I'm going to say to the entire quotation exchange above is that you are not addressing the effect I'm saying all these processes would have on the strata DURING THEIR MILLIONS OF YEARS OF FORMATION, when the sediments were still presumably quite moveable. You keep imagining things happening AFTERWARD, piling on top of the formation and so on, but remember, the formation itself was presumably, based on the timetable idea, in the process of forming for millions of years and presumably, therefore, subject to all these normal processes over those millions of years. You say there are records of mudslides. Fine. But surely a mudslide would have destroyed any layer in the process of forming before it slid -- not something piling on TOP of it, but the layer itself sliding. And if a mudslide occurred on top of a layer not yet formed then it would have interrupted it anyway. And how many of these do you suppose would have happened in millions of years here and there? Combined with all the other kinds of disturbances I can't see any strata forming at all.Except underwater of course.Yes, as you say, "SEDIMENT ON THE SURFACE IS SUBJECT TO WEATHERING." Thank you. Now extrapolate that TO MILLIONS OF YEARS OF extremely slow buildup on that surface which weathering would affect to a depth greater than the deposition depth implied by those millions of years and try to figure out how a layer stayed a layer for even a tenth of that time.UNLESS IT WAS UNDER WATER. AND IF IT WAS UNDER WATER, and you all agree it was under water, then other considerations apply, not erosion. These other considerations have to do with how on earth one kind of sediment accumulated so slowly for so long under water, just that one kind of sediment just as presented in the walls of the Grand Canyon, and then after MILLIONS UPON MILLIONS OF YEARS, a different sediment started accumulating. Why not in hundreds of years? Decades? Why should there be any thick layers of identifiable sediments at all? Why not a conglomeration? Why not an inch of one followed by an inch of another for the whole column? Why ten feet of one and then fifteen feet of another? Each accumulated over millions of years -- if underwater, without erosion too, so that what you see is what you get. You really are NOT thinking about the actual situation I'm trying to get hold of here. Just about nothing but sandstone for millions of years? Just about nothing but limestone for millions of years? Come ON!I'm going to have to break off at this point and resume answering this post later.

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Here's a creationist website saying what I've been trying to say so repetitively here (and to some so irritatingly) all along about why you can't extrapolate from present processes to the geo column, but they say it better: * * * * *

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Limestone is a neat geologic feature. YECs usually dodge my questions about limestone because it is very hard to fit limestone formation in a young earth and espeically a flood. Limestone is created from the fossils of dead sea creatures. A little sea creature will die and its body will fall to the bottom of the ocean just like a particle of silicate does for "regular" sedimentation. In order for limestone to accumulate in any thickness it requires a relativly calm warm environment like the bottom of the ocean or a lake. Near the shore where the tides are always mixing things up, limestone does not form so it it hard to imagine how a trillion trillion of dead sea creatures decided to settle out together during a worldwide flood.

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The flood covered the land to some depth. Why wouldn't it have carried trillions of trillions of sea creatures over the land areas? They would all have died in the thick sediments stirred up by the rains and the flooding. How many, who knows, but very possibly many more than live in the sea at one time now. But also limestone isn't always organically formed. Some creationists claim the majority observed isn't organic.However hard it is to make everything fit a worldwide Flood, it seems to me a lot harder to make it fit the Geo timescale, much harder to explain how you get 10 or 20 feet of limestone deposited extremely slowly over millions of years, followed by 10 or 20 feet of sandstone deposited extremely slowly over millions of years, followed by a few feet of clay/shale deposited at the same rate and so on for dozens of layers at least, and hundreds according to some reckonings.What happened to the sea creatures while the sandstone and shale were depositing? What explains only sand for millions of years? Only clay? Only sea creatures?

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Since the environment that allows limestone to form must be calm it is easy to see why we would expect limestone formations in particular to be pretty neat and flat. The bottom of the ocean and the bottom of lakes are pretty flat so there is no mystery there. Limestone does not form on land at all so if you were thinking that then I hope this clears that up.

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No, it needs moisture of some kind, but inorganic limestone forms in damp caves in the form of stalagmites and stalactites, and it forms pretty fast too: Pictures showing recent formation of limestone

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Some limestone is also due to reef systems, (also a problem for how a 1000ft reef of delicate sea creatures could form during a flood).

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These like reefs today are large habitats for little sea cretures and like most all limestone are packed full of marine fossils.

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Presumably the corals would have been moved from one place to another in a flood. Here's what is said about corals on the same page on sedimentation from ICR that I quoted above: Yes, but you have to postulate a VERY rapid change, rise in sea level or whatever, as the strata clearly show sharp demarcations and not long periods of confusion of sediments. The abrupt breaks are what make the whole geo timescale questionable. They retain their flatness so where's the erosion you say the abruptness suggests? Quite the opposite is suggested -- NO erosion because that would destroy the flatness. I know there are pockets of different kinds of sediments in some layers but this is not what would be expected as the result of erosion of the layer over huge spans of years, but obliteration of the horizontal flatness/shape of the layer.Not sure the tilting would have to have occurred before the sedimentation resumed. It could have happened in one tectonic catastrophe. For instance, looking at the bottom of the Grand Canyon it seems to me that the idea that the tilted strata would have been so neatly and horizontally sheared off over a few million years of erosion and then covered with neat horizontal layers over more millions of years doesn't fit any universe I've ever heard of. Seems more likely to me that something disturbed the lower part of the whole stack, that that part was tilted while still somewhat damp though highly compressed, and either the upper stack slid over it a ways or the lower stack was pushed under (big magma bubble suggested in the Grand Canyon area cross section would certainly have displaced and moved around the strata above it, and seems to have pushed the lower strata off to the side), and the weight of the upper sheared off the tilted stack, which was still damp and shearable. I don't know what happened either and my scenario may be silly as usual, but no sillier than the timetable idea of slow erosion to neat sheer horizontality of rock-hard layers diagonally thrust upward.

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How we know something "WAs on top of it" is by diagnostic means. It requires a very detailed look at the rocks that you just won't get from looking at a big picture of the GC.

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The idea that you have to look at the rocks microscopically to ascertain events that took millions of years makes no sense. Whatever took millions of years is GOING TO BE OBVIOUS on the face of it. If it's erosion, it's not going to leave a neat horizontal configuration of one kind of sediment. Sea level didn't change in a flood that covered the entire earth? What can you be thinking? It rose over a period of forty days, it stayed over the land for some period, during which the stirred-up sediments and dead sea life would have precipitated out over the land, and then it receded, during which it would have affected the land being exposed by waves and tides which might have further deposited sediments and sea life on land.Yes of course you have to postulate many risings and fallings of the sea to account for what appears in the strata on the timeframe idea. But the idea that erosion during the exposed periods accounts for the sharp demarcations simply makes no sense. Erosion would have messed up the horizontality. I know I keep saying this but it's true, it's obvious, it would have. Where you find this erosion is in the abrupt change from one stratum to another, but that's no evidence of erosion at all. If it was out of water for part of those millions of years, how long -- half a million? 10 million out of the 20 a given layer is supposed to have taken to form? -- it would simply not exist as a layer at all. I know I keep saying this but it's OBVIOUS. Erosion would NOT leave a neat horizontal surface upon which a new sediment would gradually start depositing horizontally after the sea level rose again. And how long did it take while the sea level was rising anyway? If it crept up by the slow increments everything has to happen by in this jerryrigged timeframe scenario of millions of years, then why wouldn't the sea itself obliterate the layer with its waves and tides washing over it during the creeping up period?

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So to make up our mind the answer is yes. Sometimes the deposition of the layers of the GC happened on land and sometimes it happend on water. Sometimes the layers were eroded and we see an erosional disconformity. Either way we know that sometimes the area was under water and sometimes it was not.

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Let me be sure I'm understanding although I answered this above: You are saying that the evidence of erosion is the sharp demarcations between the strata? Which is why you need all these postulated risings and fallings. Actually I have heard this scenario before. It boggled me then, it boggles me now. I see how it was arrived at but it doesn't make sense. And if the idea really is that the sharp demarcations are to be explained by erosion during periods above water that makes even less sense. The point is that the overall content is an enormously thick layer of at least 99% redwall limestone throughout the Grand Canyon area, as shown by both diagrams of the cross section that I've seen, into Utah to the north and no doubt east for some distance too, and what "dynamics" are going to change that fact?

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I am not sure what this question is asking. I assume you are asking how long was it unlithified sediment? Well lithification does not happen all at once. As something gets buried it is subject to pressure and heat. The more it gets buried the more it gets compacted until it finally becomes stone.

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Here's the picture. Let's assume sedimentation OUT of water. We are postulating back in time from what we actually see in the strata. We have a finished layer of stone, say sandstone, that is assumed to have taken, oh, what, 50 million years to form. It's forming on top of say a layer of, oh, shale, that has supposedly already formed and hardened (by my reasoning it couldn't have but let's pretend). It's got fifty million years to lay down 50 feet of sandstone and it is doing this by depositing grains of sand bit by bit, following the timeframe idea of slow deposition, centimeter by centimeter. How many years would it take for it to accumulate to a sufficient depth for the lower layers to begin to lithify?Or were our dunes blown in all at once somehow?

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There are even varying degress of this when talking about sedimentary rocks. You can find sandstone that is very loose and where you can still see the individual grains of sand very well. Then you can find different sandstone that is extremely hard and still harder to see the individual featuers of the sediment. For limestone, you can range from these very messy chunks of shells and material to very fine compressed rocks that do not even look like limestone until you pour some acid on it and watch it fizz. Basically, sediment stays sediment until it gets buried enough to compress it into rock. So a few layers down from the surface something might still be just loose sediment.

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Yes, these are all processes that do not take great periods of time to occur. The question about the time a given layer remains unlithified sediment during the millions of years posited for its formation has to do with how much time it had to be disturbed by external processes such as weathering.

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The bottom part of the layer probably started to lithify as soon as it was buried enough.

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What's enough? This is SLOW formation remember. It's going to take MILLIONS of years to become 50 feet of rock.

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The other important thing to think about is that the layers is MUCH thinner than it was when it was loose sediment. As things get buried they get compacted sometimes very drastically. A layer that is dozens of feet now may have been many hundreds of feet when it was still being deposited.

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Good point. Thanks for reminding me of that. So our sand has to pile up to many hundreds of feet over the millions of years before it settles down into 50 feet of rock. All sand, nothing but sand, millions of years.

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The Mississippian was a time and no limestone was not being deposited everywhere during the Mississippian. There is Mississippian sandstone, igneous rocks, etc depending on what was being deposited where. There are also places where the geologic history is missing any Mississippian rocks at all. These either represent areas where the erosion was geater than sedimentation during the Mississippian or where the Mississippian rocks have been eroded since that time.

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...A single layer of global limestone would mean that the whole world was under water. This would be great evidence for some kind of global flooding if anyone could find such a layers that was global. No one has so far.

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That's all clarifying, thanks. As I understood it, the way the time periods are established is by the fossil contents of the layers. So the same fossils are found in different sediments in different parts of the world?

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Nowhere has anyone found a global layer of anything except maybe the K-T Boundary which is a very thin layer of iridium probably from a stellar impact.

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I didn't say "global," Jazz, I said "great swaths." But perhaps it's only in isolated areas such as the greater Grand Canyon area? Certainly a huge swath of limestone was laid down there.Sorry if this is all rather disjointed. I'll try to boil it all down at some point, but right now I just want to get through your posts.

A partial answer to your #80. In preparation I did a couple of sketches of my own of what it seems to me the Grand Canyon walls should *really* look like given the assumption of millions of years of formation of each layer. Basically it's the same diagram but I elaborated the second a little more in the direction I have in mind, showing what I think actual erosion would do to the individual layers as they were forming -- no more nice neat horizontality. I used the MS Paint program and I made them into JPG files, but it turns out Image Shack won't accept them, says the files are corrupted -- I forget the exact message but something along those lines. I'm afraid they're also too large and I haven't learned the HTML way to post here. Well, maybe I'll try pictures again eventually.Meanwhile about the dis/non/unconformity information, I've understood the basic concept all along but the terms are a bit hard to keep in mind. Nonconformity = contact between sedimentary rock and other kinds of rocks, check; Angular unconformity = contact of layers at an angle to layers at another angle, say horizontal, check. But it is mainly the DISconformity that is of relevance to this discussion, as that is the term for the supposed erosion between layers.

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Knowing this much tells us that whatever it is that created the GC was more complicated than just dumping a lot of dirt.

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Um,not sure how you might have gotten the impression I thought such a thing, but onward...

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In fact, if the creation of the GC was due to a single depositional event we should not expect to see any unconformities at all.

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But I don't have any problem at all expecting to see them! Tectonic activity caused by the Flood would explain the angular unconformities for instance as it displaced layers laid down in the Flood. Irregularities in the deposition of a particular layer wouldn't be at all unexpected with sediments that were laid down by water, including drainage between layers moving some sediments and causing some apparent erosion on a small scale.

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The fact that these unconformities exist attests directly to multiple depositional events. Faith, if you are going to contest the mainstream interpretation of the formation of the GC, this is a good place to start laying some common ground from which to diverge. Do you agree that the fact of the existence of unconformities, without necessarily any admission of time, shows that with very little uncertainty that multiple depositional events are responsible for the formation of the GC?

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Not sure why you emphasize the unconformities, as the layers themselves are clearly separate depositional events from each other.

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And they were eroded away PERFECTLY...'

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Eroded away "perfectly" is not a very accurate statement. The diagnosis of a disconformity comes from that fact that the contact between the two layers is explicitly not uniform over an area. There very existence of an "imperfect" contact is what tells us that erosion has happened. The fact that it is still parallel just means that the area was not tectonicly active over the period between the erosional event and the subsequent depositional event that caused the disconformity...

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Everything you say suggests minuscule imperfections, but given the millions of years no way would the imperfections be minuscule if we're talking about erosion over at least much of that time, even to the removal of entire layers you expect should be present. Here's where I wish I could show you my sketches. Even they show far more regularity than I think would actually exist given the millions of years.

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In other words, flat places are still flat.

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No way, not after a million years of erosion.

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Given that, if there was an interruption in deposition for some reason such as sea level falling, then when deposition resumed there is no reason to expect that it would not continue to lay new "horizontal" layers over slightly eroded "horizontal" layers.

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Except that the eroded layer would not be merely "slightly" eroded after a long long long period exposed to erosion.

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This is in stark contrast to the west coast of the North America which is extremely active where layers are being bent, tilted, folded, etc due to tectonics. In this case we would expect there to form many angular unconformities.

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But angular unconformities aren't really relevant here. Obviously tectonic activity has acted as you say on already formed layers, but I'm talking about the formation period of each layer and how erosion and other weather effects would have obliterated its horizontality over even as "little" as a million years.

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Then when we find angular unconformities we know to look for other examples of tectonic activity in the geologic history of the area. In the case of the angular disconformity of the GC, this is exactly what we find. After the angular (originally horizontal) layers of the GC were laid down there was tectonic mountain building activity that caused those layers to be tilted. This evidence correlates the reason and timing for what we see with regards to angular layers in the GC.

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With regards to this. Do you agree that the way we know an unconformity exists is due to the "imperfect" nature of the contact between the layers?

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1) The definition at Wikipedia didn't mention any visible clues in the layers, just said "An unconformity is a gap in time in rock layers, where erosion occurs while deposition slows or stops. ...In an unconformity, data is lost, and geologist must use other clues...2) This "imperfect" nature of the contact is still in question. I see the illustration on the model of the Grand Canyon you linked, of disconformities at the surface of two layers, obviously something that occurred BETWEEN the layers, implying it happened AFTER the layer was formed, only on the SURFACE of it. But according to the Geologic Timescale it took millions of years to form those layers, so why is the erosion only on the surface, AFTER they were formed, but there is no erosion shown DURING that long period? I'd guess that these disconformities occurred between the layers after they were formed -- maybe after the one layer was laid down but the upper layer was not yet in place, or after the upper layer was in place, and in fact many layers above, as water would have continued to be pressed out between the newly formed layers for some time afterward and displaced some sediments in the process.See, the more you tell me, the more I know, the more convinced I am that my original impression is correct.

No experience with it. Pretty good at drawing, and sometimes doodle on Paint. Just out of curiosity, however, I'd be interested in hearing what you have in mind for the new logo. I do know a couple of people who do graphic design, though I'm not really familiar with their work.

Basically your rebuttal to my statement that normal weather/erosion would disrupt the formation of any of the layers in formation is that it wouldn't, or at least it didn't. Not much of a rebuttal. Obviously it didn’t. That proves the whole thing was formed under water and the layers were NOT subjected to normal erosive processes for any great length of time.A slope of thinness to thickness even to a great depth is not what I believe would be the result of normal weather processes. Remember I keep pointing out the VISIBLE STRAIGHTNESS or FLATNESS of the strata. A gradual slope is still straight and flat, certainly compared to what erosion over millions of years would do to it. I expect that it would have been disrupted in many many ways by normal erosion and weather effects OVER MILLIONS OF YEARS. More thickness in one place than another simply fits a Flood scenario in which more was deposited in one place than another and then smoothed down to relative flatness by the water action and the sediments that were laid down on top of it. Erosion over the millions of years assumed by the Geo timetable, on the other hand, would cut into it, not make a smooth gradual slope.I’m going to send Percy another drawing to illustrate what I mean, a few layers laid down in water and not eroded, and then one exposed to weather after starting to be laid down in water. And in my opinion the actuality would be more drastic than the drawing. I try to show a couple of canyons being cut by water forming streams or rivers. The Grand Canyon itself was water cutting through over a mile of layered sediments, so why wouldn’t water runoff have cut through multiple layers at any point of exposure to surface weather over the postulated millions of years for each layer?

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The whole point about original horizontality is that in a given spot a deposit will be horizontal with respect to the layers above and below it. If it is not horizontal with respect to itself 200 miles away then that is okay.

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It’s OK with me too. I don’t get your point. What’s with all this quibbling about the OBVIOUS horizontality of the Grand Canyon strata? Honestly, of all things to dispute, to pick that is just incomprehensible. What ARE you trying to prove anyway? So there are minor deviations from perfect horizontal, and so there is erosion to a degree between the layers that doesn’t affect the overall horizontality, and so there are areas where parts of the whole stack have been tilted so that it’s not horizontal, but the layers are still parallel. What is it you are trying to prove? I really don’t get it. If you want to rebut my position you have to show that a million years of erosion of the surface of a single layer when exposed above water WOULD NOT disturb the horizontality or parallel configuration of the strata as I’m claiming it would.How do you explain that canyons were NOT cut by running water through multiple layers of the canyon at any point in their formation — after three or four layers, after seven or eight, or each one at a time as it was exposed to weather? -- just as the Grand Canyon itself was later cut by water? ALL the canyons that were cut through those layers, not just the Grand Canyon but canyons to the north that are seen on the cross section diagrams, were cut AFTER ALL THE LAYERS WERE LAID DOWN, AFTER THE ENTIRE STACK WAS BUILT. Why? Why not IN BETWEEN???? My first drawing illustrates the effect I would expect in the finished column. I expect that such canyons WOULD have been cut, and then filled in by later sedimentation according to the long ages theory and that’s what I tried to illustrate (Edit: That's really not too likely to happen in reality, that it would be filled in by the next sediment, but for the sake of the discussion and a simple illustration I'm proposing it. It would have disrupted the horizontal appearance of the canyon walls either way). The drawing I’m going to send now is my idea of how a single layer would have been eroded during its millions of years of formation.AGAIN, remember that we’re talking about MILLIONS OF YEARS for the formation of EACH LAYER, plenty of time for MANY canyons to form.

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When we look at the GC, which is a cross section of the formation in one spot compared to the breadth of it across the area, it looks very nice in between the layers near it.

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???In between the layers near it???

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In a different location it might not even be between the same layers, at the same depth, of the same thickness, etc.

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I would expect a variety of layers, that is, obvious discomformities, unconformities etc; it would fit a Flood scenario. It's the Geo timetable that has a problem with it, not I, but that's another subject. The subject of the moment is whether there is evidence of erosion within the individual layers, which I believe would have been so drastically disrupted by normal weather over millions of years the parallel layering would simply have been obliterated altogether. AGAIN, look at the cross section submitted by jar and the one I found. Here it is again. Scroll down the page: N-S Cross section of Grand Canyon area up through Grand StaircaseThe layers are depicted as remarkably parallel over a HUGE breadth of land to the north and east, and the formations of the Grand Staircase and canyons of Utah continue the extremely neat and consistent layers of the Grand Canyon to an enormous distance. I really don't know what you are trying to prove. The parallel formations are clearly the sort of thing that would have had to be laid down in water and NOT affected by erosion at ANY point in their formation if they were to retain that basic formation as they do.

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Now let’s try to figure out what would happen to a desert full of sand dunes as it experiences the occasional El Nino. Sand at the very top will get wet and be blown around. Some new sand will be deposited by the extra weathering going on. Some sand that is already there will get blown away. When normal deposition resumes, the normal rates of deposition will determine if the sand that is now at the surface will continue to be buried or continue to be eroded depending on what is happening as a net average to that environment.

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Part of the problem is that I think you are forgetting that, most of the time, land based deposits are continually eroded.

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That's very funny since that's what I've been emphasizing. You’ve done this before, claimed I’ve overlooked the very thing I’ve in fact been emphasizing and basing my argument on. I don’t know how to account for this. Do you?

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So yes, we do expect things like a hurricane or something to destroy something faster than it was already being destroyed if that was its erosional fate anyway. Most stuff on land gets eroded and ends up in the ocean or a lake. We do expect though that the minority of places like river valleys, basins, etc to be able to accumulate sediment and things like a hurricane are going to be more likely to help put stuff there rather than take stuff away.

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I was simply listing many NORMAL weather patterns that normally occur over a year’s time in various parts of the world. Focusing on hurricanes or any particular pattern misses the point that overall they all make a mess of the topography even in a relatively short period, and then if you multiply that by millions of years you just don't have a flat layer any more, you have a very lumpy dippy surface with streams making channels in it and so on. I don't think you are addressing the point I'm trying to make at all.

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So some places on land will be able to accumulate and preserve their deposits, especially if they then become inundated with water which is REALLY good at preserving deposits.

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You betcha. Water is the ONLY thing that will give us the horizontal layers.I'm only going to answer this much for now and ask Percy if he'll put up my second drawing.This message has been edited by Faith, 04-07-2005 03:14 AM

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Basically your rebuttal to my statement that normal weather/erosion would disrupt the formation of any of the layers in formation is that it wouldn't, or at least it didn't. Not much of a rebuttal. Obviously it didn’t. That proves the whole thing was formed under water and the layers were NOT subjected to normal erosive processes for any great length of time.

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In particular the GC this is mostly true. The only layer that is totally sub-aerial is the Coconino sandstone. The rest were oceanic marine deposits.

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Look, I have been talking about this for some time and you have been mostly addressing topics peripheral to it. Leave the Coconino for now and please address the formation of the other layers, as you and others have said that while they were formed as oceanic sea deposits there were also MANY risings and fallings of sea level and SOME of the layers had SOME length of time above water in which they were exposed to weather in an aerial environment, AND, if I got this right, that these periods out of water explain the erosion that IS seen between certain layers.Please let's stick to this topic. This has to be established first. I've been guessing that those that were exposed to air after having been laid down as marine deposits would have been so exposed for AT LEAST a very conservative million years out of the 20 or 50 million given for the total formation of a given layer, and unless I missed it you haven't said one word about this guess. Was it a million or ten million and which layers were so exposed to the air? What about the disconformities where it is believed that entire layers were eroded away? I've been mostly focused on this and have been claiming that during whatever time period it was, these layers would have been subjected to greater erosion than is present in any of them. This is what both my illustrations were designed to show. (As a matter of fact MANY things would have been different with such a scenario than what is actually observed but that's another subject).Please address just this one point for now. I still have to get back to posts of yours prior to the one I just answered as well as the rest of this one.

Hey you win. I'm sick of this. Goodbye.

Let me just ask you this before you quit.
Was this type of debate less stressful for you?
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Probably but it's hard to tell. Our posts got ridiculously long and I got very far behind. I actually went to other threads to take a break. Then the other threads got maddening and I got fed up with the whole thing here. Temper got the best of me I guess, but I'm still ticked off.
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Did the effect of not being "piled on" help?
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I don't know.
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What is your reason for wanting to quit now? Not interested anymore? Lack of specific knowledge? Is it something I said?
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Ticked off at the place in general and half a dozen posters and a couple of Admins in particular. Then you referred me back to your post which was already too long to read with two others yet to read, and I decided to throw in the towel.But maybe I just need to calm down and come back later. I did have a direction I was trying to go in, but I don't know if I can get back to it.

Yes, I expect to continue eventually, but I need more inspiration than I have at the moment as my mind is elsewhere, so it will take time to get back to it. Thanks if the time really doesn't matter.Also I wasn't aware of the peanut gallery thread. Where is it?

Well, now I can get onto the thread.Not angry at all. You catastrophize ordinary words, such as "threaten" which in context of closing a thread has no dire overtones or implications. However, I've agreed to debate, and doubting my good faith is a bad start. I'm not going to post here until I get caught up on my work and pull away from some of the other threads and review this one and the peanut gallery first. OK? Let's start between us and if you want to hand off the baton at some point we agree on that's OK too, but we have to agree on it at that point.This message has been edited by Faith, 08-03-2005 12:49 PM

Just want you to know I am reading through the thread, taking some time with the information at the various links, still have work to do outside EvC, am trying to avoid the seduction of other threads, and will get to this soon I hope.I don't know yet to what extent I want to do it quite as you outline. My original and continuing perspective is that the long ages explanation for the building of each layer and certainly the whole stack is untenable, and mustering reasons for that view is what I want to try to stay focused on. The erosion factor is one of those reasons. While I hope to be able to follow geologists' arguments for the most part, I still think it's more a matter of logic and visualization than sophisticated science. We'll see.This message has been edited by Faith, 08-05-2005 06:43 AM

Just for the record, I continue to come back to this thread and read through various posts and links, which often take me off on long chains of related investigations, not always relevant to this topic. I appreciate that the thread remains open.Just one comment. I much prefer my first topic to the ones later added by the admins:As Moose put it in Message 1: The general focus substituted here brings in too many purely geological factors that are beyond my focus or knowledge. My focus is on the TIME factor, and that does require me to get into some of the geological issues opponents bring up, but I don't think they should be the centerpiece of this thread.Percy in Message 79 defined the topic as: Again, the topic that concerns me is my original, Objections to Evo Time Frame Deposition of Strata. The young-earth viewpoint enters in from time to time, and the flood explanation too, but my thinking is all about what's wrong with the geo time scale, and alternative models are side issues.

This is a great debate thread deerbreh, not open to you.