Growing the Geologic Column

In my own diagram of it I ignored the angular unconformity but I didn't ignore it in my description to HBD right above it. There's a difference between ignoring it and thinking it's best understood as I showed it in the diagram.ABE: Here's what I said to HBD in [Msg=181]: What I was trying to say is that since it would have had to deposit horizontally on the angular section, it would have to have been deposited before the tectonic pressure that uplifted that whole central area, which is probably the cause of the angular section anyway, meaning it probably didn't exist when the Stockton formation was deposited. So there was no angular unconformity until the tectonic upheaval that shifted that part of it to the left and eroded away the rest of it.Also, as I've been looking at cross sections by the hundreds lately I've seen the amazing variety of ways faults shift the layers relative to each other, so that the angular unconformity doesn't look like anything special, just another way the strata got moved around.So that's why I ended up drawing it as I did. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

I've read this through a number of times, and I know you've posted on it many times before, but right now I can't figure out why it can't be a sill. Would you please explain that again. Thanks.abe: the "erosional surface?"Or, since volcanic ash has been coming up, could it be that?Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Are you saying that all these layers are volcanic ash or welded tuff?And, what that would mean is that it was airborne rather than a flow, right?Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

I was going to ask JonF another queston but I guess I'll ask you. What you described is what the article he linked described, that the "whole outcrop" is volcanic but what is the "whole outcrop?" I suppose you mean not just the black layer but the whole hill in which it occurs? Meaning the light rock is not sedimentary but also volcanic?

But basalt IS usually intrusive into sedimentary rock, occurring as dikes and sills.

The thing is, that Cardenas lava between the layers looks SO layer-like in the diagram, so evenly thick, not lumpy enough to be a lava that would have flowed over a surface and later been covered by another sediment. I mean, lava usually IS pretty lumpy as it hardens on the ground, isn't it? (I keep meaning to get back to Percy's post about that.)

I didn't mean it ALWAYS has to be dikes and sills, of course it CAN just flow and deposit wherever. I was answering HBD's apparent idea that it isn't an intrusive when you find it as a layer between sedimentary layers.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Let's be fair now. I said I'd never seen it, and I hadn't. To me this is unique.

YES! Thanks for that much. It looks really strangely weirdly dramatically different. There is NO way there's ever going to be another Redwall limestone or Coconino sandstone. That's the way it just plain LOOKS when you compare those formations with the paltry depositions that are offered up as the equivalent today. Yeah, Time, the Magic Ingredient that turns a delta or continental shelf into the Grand Canyon.

I'm sorry, I don't see how that has anything to do with the question about the Cardenas basalt.

According to Old Earth assumptions, but they are just assumptions, something you take for granted, but if a worldwide Flood DID occur that would provide the very situation of changing sea levels where Walther's Law operates, but much faster. In the case of the Flood it took about five months for the level to rise to its fullest height and after it had stayed at its height for a month or two it took another five months to regress. Plenty of time to deposit all those sediments the forty days and nights of heavy rain had dumped into the rising water. Yes, that's the idea. And so much the more if the Pacific wandered up to meet the Atlantic in the Midwest.

But what it shows is a dike up through the limestone, an intrusive event in other words, but you are saying the Cardenas is not an intrusive. In the example the lava spreads out on an exposed surface, which is similar, but it doesn't originate as an "extrusive."And "extrusive" is a term that makes no sense to me in this connection. A lava can spread on the surface if it originates from an above-ground volcano, which is apparently what is being called extrusive, but if it originates deep underground, as it does beneath the Grand Canyon, then it is an intrusive as it pushes up through all the rock strata already present. Seems to me that basalt can be either depending on where it originates.But back to the Cardenas. My expecting volcanism to have occurred after the strata was all laid down isn't some presupposition of mine, as you seem to be saying back upthread a ways, it is something I concluded, or let's say hypothesized, from looking at cross sections, especially of course the Grand Canyon cross section, where a magma dike is shown rising from basement rock through the Claron/Tertiary. The fault lines, the rising of the land, and the massive erosion all seem to have occurred in the same time frame.Some of the magma beneath the canyon itself did not rise up through the strata but remained confined there -- diagrams show truncated intrusions. I connect it with the granite and the schist though you have some other explanation for that I haven't quite digested, and naturally also with that layer of Cardenas basalt -- but that basalt is also exposed to quite a depth on the surface of the canyon so it wasn't just confined though it seems to have originated beneath the canyon --yes, no?. Maybe I'm not picturing this quite right but if that magma/basalt formed both the layer in the Unkar group AND the basalt that's spilled over in the canyon itself, how do you picture it as surface in the Unkar group which then got layered over? Maybe I'm not asking this right. Since it's all over the place there, beneath the canyon and on the surface of the canyon, to me it makes sense that it would be a sill among those layers of the Unkar group. And I know you think I shouldn't be arguing with a geologist about such things. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Well, all those things are natural to the Earth so they aren't going to stop, but the strata of what I've been calling the Geo Column just do look strangely different to me, as HBD put it, from what is going on today. And one thing that's different is the scale, those thick thick rocks that span whole continents, and originally piled three miles deep as well. That's why I said there will never be another Redwall Limestone or Coconino Sandstone, could add never another Dover Cliffs or that gigantic wall of rock somebody posted from South America a while back, sorry don't remember the name of it. Well, there's no point in arguing this out for the zillionth time but in a sense BOTH sides are making things up because that's pretty much all you can do with the prehistoric past. And when you are dealing with made-up stuff, just hypotheticals, it's really quite possible to construct a whole web of evidence for them that looks pretty convincing but is still only a web of interconnected ideas, assumptions, plausibilities and so on. It's easy to confirm something you can't really test. abe: the explanation for how the angular unconformity of Siccar Point formed is a case in point: it's all an argument from Reason, or plausibilities, abe: yes, of course based on observations of the rock itself, but still all you can do is INTERPRET what you're seeing, for the most part these things aren't testable. /abe There's no way to PROVE it formed the way Hutton said it did, you either find the arguments persuasive or you don't, and for all you know there are all sorts of facts that are no longer in evidence that would change your view of it, or just facts you overlook.ABE: Looking for that picture of the South American formation, found "tepui" and Mt. Roraima which may be what I'm remembering but the picture that was posted here didn't show up. This one is maybe the closest: Such enormous slabs of rock that originally had to have been strata suggest the Flood to my mind, and certainly not slow deposition over millions of years. But there's a case in point where it's a matter of finding an argument plausible or not. And besides such gigantic flat slabs of rock there are all kinds of strange/ weird/ bizarre geological formations all over the world that I can't see ever getting reproduced on the Old Earth model, that all suggest the Flood to me. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

All that evidence for the Old Earth in all the sciences is mostly just plausibilities, interpretations of observations, suppositions, assumptions, hypotheses and so on. There's a lot of it so it looks like a lot of *evidence* -- which it is of course if you count plausibilities, interpretations of observations, assumptions, hypotheses and so on as evidence. Which again, is all anyone's got for the prehistoric past.Walther's Law is about rising sea level, not waves, tsunami-sized or not. The Flood would certainly have been a case of rising sea level -- over a five month period or so, and then there was the regressive phase as well, another five month period or so. So your remark about time in relation to a tsunami is totally irrelevant. Not that huge waves couldn't have contributed to the Flood scenario, as I'm sure they must have occurred especially as most of the water had receded away. Tides would have been operating still after all.YOu think it would have taken "geologic time" in the millions of years to lay down the sediments we see in the strata, I don't. Matter of plausibilities. You can't prove how long it would have taken and neither can I, but five months up and five months back seems like plenty of time to carry and dump sediments.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Yeah, but I've never misused the terms dike or sill.HBD put up that test that shows a dike which is NOT what edge was saying the Cardenas is.This is all just a bunch of definitional hairsplitting about "basalt." Why waste time over such stuff? We're talking about lava from volcanoes, that has a variety of forms and contents and does different things. "Dike" and "sill" ought to be sufficient to describe it where it intrudes into rock. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.