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If so, what are the chances these creationists have actual evidence for the presence of these lakes?Lakes that large, that existed in the relatively recent past, will leave evidence, such as wave-cut terraces/benches, beach/shore deposits, etc. Those of us living in the Great Basin (Nevada and Utah) are quite familiar with paleo lacustrine geology in the form of the ancestral predecessor to the Great Salt Lake, Lake Bonneville.It's wave-cut terraces galore out here.Edited by roxrkool, : No reason given.Edited by roxrkool, : No reason given.

I'm old and so forgetful but it seems to me that there are a few pretty clear examples (maybe even mentioned in this here very thread) of floods caused by dam breaks emptying large lakes and what evidence such events do leave.

Yes, the only reference I could find to prehistoric water in that area was the inland sea in the Cretaceous. That would leave beaches, and salt water deposits ... Which brings up another issue -- whatever happened to the water that must have filled the "Great Basin" -- an area that includes almost all Nevada and half of Utah that has no river outlet. All you have left is Great Salt Lake ... which is not salty enough for the whole basin to have evaporated ...Curiously I was looking at this earlier:Access denied

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USA Watershed Wall Map click here for interactive map

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It's interactive so you can move around and zoom in for greater detail.Amusingly I notice that each of the rivers that drain these watershed drainage systems meander ... every one.Other questions involve what are the lowest passes between watersheds and are there any drainage channels across those passes? (ie between the Colorado river watershed and the Rio Grande watershed).Enjoy

I'm (more or less) guessing groundwater flow.Moose

But they all did not drain into Great Salt Lake. There are dry basins full of salts all over Nevada and NW Utah between every range. They extend up unto SE Oregon, where we have the Alvord Desert and other huge salt flats.Edited by Tanypteryx, : added a bit more.

Obviously the Missoula floods are the greatest example of this, but I believe you are correct, Jar, only I really have not spent that much time looking into it. We discussed this in school (I went to school in Reno) and spent several field trips looking at these terraces just outside Fallon and Wendover, NV, and I travel to Utah via I-80 quite a bit and you see the terraces all over the place, but I don't recall any flood deposits here.Let's take a Google look...Well lookee here from THE CATASTROPHIC LATE PLEISTOCENE BONNEVILLE FLOOD IN THE SNAKE RIVER PLAIN, IDAHO, HAROLD E. MALDE, 1968 (PDF file):

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A catastrophic flood caused by overflow and rapid lowering of Pleistocene Lake Bonneville at Red Rock Pass near Preston, Idaho, descended Marsh Creek Valley and reached the Snake River Plain at the site of Pocatello. Large tracts in the upper Snake River Plain were inundated, particularly an area near American Falls and a basin that surrounds Rupert. Farther downstream, the Snake River canyon that extends 200 miles West of Twin Falls was flooded to a depth of 300 feet. Spectacular erosion in the form of abandoned channels, spillways, cataracts, and scabland identifies the flood path between American Falls and Twin Falls, and the canyon farther west is strewn with huge boulders some of them more than 10 feet in diameter, which are heaped in enormous bars of boulders and sand that rise nearly 300 feet above the canyon floor.

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The USGS report has great pictures (physical EVIDENCE!) of what these deposits look like.

Much of the water simply evaporated over the last several thousand years as the climate dried out. But the Great Basin does have quite a bit of water in the subsurface as Percy suggested. There are other remnant lakes other than the GSL, such as Pyramid Lake outside of Reno, NV and the now dried up Lake Winnemucca, which had water up until the first half or so of the 20th century. Incidentally, Lake Winnemucca is also the location of the oldest pictographs / petroglyphs in North America. They are pretty spectacular.Driving around the less traveled roads of Nevada, you will see that many of the valleys are dried lake beds. The desert has encroached onto most of the lake deposits, particularly in the central to southern part of the state, but in northern Nevada they are still very visible. The Black Rock desert (Burning Man) is a great and popular example.Edited by roxrkool, : No reason given.Edited by roxrkool, : No reason given.

Did that fix it?

Wouldn't that leave caves and the like? And then there is Death Valley that is below sea level ... where does it drain to?Interesting site
http://store.usgs.gov/...OT&layout=6_1_61_48&uiarea=2%29/.doI captured this shot of where rte 89 crosses the ridge north of Grand Canyon: The contours are at 40ft intervals so we know the highest point is less than 5640 ft.The rims of the canyon are 7250 ft (south) and 7750 (north) ... and the high point of the Kaibab plateau is over 8400 ft ...So the water would need to cut through (7250-5640 =) 1,610 ft of Kaibab Plateau before it gets to the elevation of the Rte 89 pass ...A location that does not show any evidence of a water erosion channel.That's a lot of water to just disappear or magically NOT flow downhill.EnjoyEdited by RAZD, : piclink

The other information I read while poking around said that in the distance is the Marble Platform and further away the Kaibab Plateau, for reference here's your image: --Percy

Ok, but the point is that there is no outlet for water that would have to fill that basin to over 7000 ft and that means some 3000 ft of water. Sea water. Salty water.Enjoy

Really, the only time you get good cave development is where there is limestone or calcareous rocks. Slightly acidic waters will dissolve the limestone to form open-space caves and/or karsts, and this is usually caused by carbonic, sulfuric, or nitric acids.

Just to annoy you all further and especially poor Roxie who must not have many eyelashes left, I would like to reiterate my most simple observation of them all:The idea that a rock, in fact a gigantic rock pancake of sorts ... a gigantic rock pancake, I say, that may stretch for hundreds or even thousands of miles across a continent, somehow represents a particular time period in Earth's history, IS ABSURD. It assumes the idea that a specific kind of sediment, and ONLY that sediment, collected over such a huge distance by normal means we observe today, and that a peculiar assemblage of living creatures managed to die normal deaths over normal spans of time and get fossilized therein. And that this process repeated itself from time to time with a DIFFERENT sediment each time, for hundreds of millions of years, rock pancakes stacking up to miles in height /depth, so that we now have a record in these rock pancakes of former periods of time on the planet, with very specific flora and fauna etc etc etc. And all this is supposed to have occurred by normal means of sediment deposition, by streams for instance, and seas that in defiance of all known means keep rising and falling to accomplish this feat. I mean, REALLY, you poor dear human patsies, REALLY!I'm not allowed of course to call this an argument, I must have EVIDENCE. But there really isn't much more in the way of evidence except the fact of the rock pancakes, the rest is all interpretation. I would think the drear facts ought to be sufficient, really, but I was inspired to do this post by reading a little on the Claron Formation, which is the layer of the strata which exhibits those fascinating pink hoodoos. ...about which I've commented that they demonstrate the principle I keep harping on, that first you get the layers upon layers upon layers, with NO cutting or other disturbance, until "recent time" when finally, suddenly, the planet undergoes tectonic movement, earthquakes, volcanism, etc etc etc, and you get the canyons and the other interesting shapes carved out of and into the strata. The implications of this for Old Earth assumptions are HUGE but you all just keep rationalizing them away. Which is of course easy to do because as I keep saying there are no safeguards against rampant interpretive error when you are dealing with the UNWITNESSED / PREHISTORIC past.The complex fictions that have been put together supposedly to explain the formation of the various strata, such as in that Wikipedia article, in my opinion should make you all weep for the misuse of the human mind.The strata are not a record of evolving life, though they do tell us what once lived on the Earth before the Flood, but really, what the strata are is a record of a massive DEATH. There is DEATH and only DEATH in the walls of the Grand Canyon and the layers of the Grand Staircase and the hoodoos and everywhere else you find the strata and the fossils. Geology is all about a gigantic GRAVEYARD. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

No problem with this observation Faith, we observe this in many places, some disturbed and others not.We also observe the assortment of particles that make up the rocks, the materials they are made of, and any evidence of metamorphosis and bending and erosion. And yet you too think they represent a "particular time period" -- we just disagree about the time period. No, you can have mixed deposits, such as boulders in sandstone that come from older rock and pyroclastic rocks mixed in clay shale. and some that span several deposition layers, but yes this is observed. Or with the same sediments or with NO sediments (chalk cliffs for example), but yes we see continued sedimentation occurs and we observe that some times the process is terrestrial and sometimes it is marine -- from the type, shape and formation of the rocks.We see fine layers deposited over coarse layers in periodic deposits in many lakes due to seasonal variations in the inflow rate and volume.We observe similar alternating fine and coarse layers in rocks that have lithified over time, and we observe that all these layers contain some evidence of life going on while the layers are formed. We see the growth of marine deposits with brachiopods growing on old shells of dead brachiopods that are still attached to older dead brachiopods in deposits that are many feet in thickness, brachiopods with growth rings on their shells showing their relative ages and from this we can estimate the amount of time it took for those feet of thickness to be deposited.We observe slate layers below sandstone and conglomerate stone, where the slate is formed from clay which is very fine compared to either sandstone or conglomerate. Yep. Some are index fossils and can be used to track the dates of the rocks so that when we see sedimentary rock "A" with index fossil "X" and a different sedimentary rock "B" with the same index fossil "X" we have high confidence that they are the same age even though we can only date one type of rock by some method or other.Oh ... did I mention that several different sedimentary deposits can occur at the same time in different places? Just as we observe all over the world today. Actually it is in accordance with known, observed and measured tectonic activity. So pure fantasy is better? Curiously death is a part of evolution, without death evolution would not occur. Massive death accumulated over massive time. Indeed. Some 99.9% of all known past and present life-forms are extinct -- in several different and distinct mass extinction events as well as over time between extinction events since the beginning of life on earth some 3.5 billion years ago.Enjoy

Unless that time period is forty days and forty nights. Then, and only then, does it become sensible. Thanks for reminding us. Yes, there was only ever a forty-day span of time in which living creatures could die. The idea that plants and animals could also die over the course of millions of years --- pfui! Absurd!Actually, I don't know why I'm bothering to supply sarcasm. You yourself are writing what I'd write if I was satirizing creationism. There's nothing for me to do.