We are still way down in the very bottom of the canyon, but one thing has become abundantly clear.
The lowest layers that can be seen right now in the GC (certainly not the oldest rocks on earth since there are others underneath them) are are the waste product of yet older rocks. The Vishnu schist is the product of several steps. First other activity built a mountain somewhere else. That was then eroded and the gradually worn down into smaller and smaller pieces until you has sand and small rocks. The sand and small rocks were then transported to it's present location where other processes turned it into sandstone, then turned the sandstone into schist.
Well it takes a while to build a mountain, then to wear it down, then to move the sand to a new location, then to change it to sandstone, then to change the sandstone to schist.
BUT ...
things can happen quickly as well. There has been some recent work on some of the rapid occurring events. One such event that folk have been studying for a long time is Heart Mountian. The evidence seems to show that it once moved about sixty miles eastward in perhaps as little as a half hour. Just imagine a mountain passing by at about 120 miles per hour.
But IMHO these are the important parts.
- we have been able to tell for a long long time that the rock at the summit was older than the rock at the bottom.
- that means the geologists are able to recognize unusual strata.
- they have been able to find several things that are unique to Heart Mountain that makes it different from the other peaks in the range it started out in.
- they have been able to model the event to show one method where such a thing would be possible.
The point of all this ramblin is that there is not just one set of evidence that points to an old universe, but rather every single dataset points to an old universe, and that there is remarkable correlations between every single method of dating. It is not that one method points to a universe that is young, another sorta young, another kind old and another very old, all seem to point to a very old universe.
Aslan is not a Tame Lion