Summations Only

So half a million years and what I figured was 20 thousand feet in a million years so now it's down to 10 thousand feet since they were formed and they should still have eroded away to dust by that calculation.
abe: Sorry the second figure makes it a tenth of that time so 2000 feet should be gone. What does that leave?

We're eroding the CLIFFS, Dr A., not the channel.

40 to 60 million years is the age given for the rock from which the hoodoos were carved, by the Old Earthers who wrote the article for the National Park Service, whom I suppose to be real people, but I suppose they could be robots programmed to spout OE stuff.

Do you have some reason to suppose that the hoodoos didn't start eroding at that point?

Sigh. OK. So it's 450 thousand down to 180 thousand years old, so that means that at the rate given by Percy if they are half a million years old they'd have added ten thousand feet to the English Channel, or at the lower age about 2000 feet since they were formed. Is that feasible?

But there is no reason whatever to suppose the erosion started recently enough for that to be the case.

The fact that they wouldn't be here if it started when of course it did start, right after the cliffs were formed ...

So you've explained away the hoodoos and Dover. How are you going to explain away the rate of erosion of the monuments in Monument Valley? I can hardly wait.

All the time periods in the Geo Time Table, the CLASSIC Geo Time Table, that follow the strata of the Geo Column up up up and up through time, DO follow the strata, DO follow th physical ascent of the strata. It's only now that we're in the Holocene that it's OK for some reason for it NOT to follow the physical ascent of the strata because the physical ascent of the strata has in fact stopped. I say that's as good as declaring an end to the Geo time Table.

Yeah, but it's stopped and whatever is continuing is continuing NOT on top, so say you all. End of Geo Column, end of Geo Time Scale.

The Geo Column is an identifiable stack of strata that can also be identified by the order of fossils contained in some of the layers. The sediments are different from place to place and there may or may not be fossils in any given portion of the stack, but it is nevertheless an identifiable geologic structure. There shouldn't be any way to confuse it with other depositions. It's a stack, the layers are usually pretty thick, they were clearly laid down originally horizontally, and the contacts between the layers are often knife-edge close. They may be folded or otherwise distorted, but always as a block (although the whole block may not be distorted, such as in the case of the angular unconformity where the upper layers remain horizontal).

That's very clever ...

The thing is if a deposition did occur over that formation it would fill in the valleys and I haven't ever seen an angular unconformity in which the upper layers were anything but straight and flat both top and bottom, have you?

Also the upper layers occur over tightly folded lower layers, I've never seen one form over the kind of base in that diagram, have you? In theory that could happen but in reality there's no evidence that it ever does that I know of. Perhaps you can find some but I doubt it.

I wanted to see more of the upper part of that picture, but that's OK. As usual it defies the way things are in reality that folded layers would be eroded flat on top like that unless there was more than just weather to work on them, such as a deep stack of sediments above that resisted the movement below.

What I've been calling the Geologic Column is called at Wikipedia the
Stratigraphic Column.