Long build up of Sediments

Yes, and it is edge he is answering, not me. But rereading edge's post now, I don't think he was saying that. He's just saying that erosion happened at many points in the process of deposition, even before a whole layer was laid down.But I believe roxrkool has suggested, at least in the past, that there has been some erosion between layers, after the upper layer was laid down, even a whole stack of upper layers. This is what prompted my thought about seepage between layers from still damp sediments. Yes, that figures. Yes. But could explain some observed mingling of layers.

This is possible, though it is not usually uniform across a whole strata and I am not sure if there is any evidence for this kind of action within the grand canyon.There was a description of this possibility in my very first post to you, noted by steno and discovered by later geologists. Subsidence of a region can occur when layers of underlying rock is eroded, usually by water activity. Here is a link to information on a type of terrain resulting from such activity.Like I said though, it is not so uniform over such large terrain. I'd think the only erosion within the grand canyon, would be surficial, rather than between layers.The map has evidence of relative age dating which suggests an older earth. Take a look at the right lower corner of the map. You see an igneous structure of some kind. You will note that it has a cropped top, followed by sedimentary layering above. How do you account for the age of that deposit within a Flood scenario?Based on ordering, it had to have moved up and solidified before the flood, as it sits at the bottom of the sed layers and clearly exhibits erosion (what size the original surface was is not known). That would have taken a lot of time to form (for cooling to solid stone) and had to be completed before erosion. That makes it different (older) than the volcanic activity which your were discussing as having altered the landscape (toward the left side). Is there an explanation for this?And I might add this is not the entire geo column. It may be the known portions of the geo column, but not the entire thing.{AbE:
You had questions about how such straight flat layers could have been laid down. From the Wiki article on the grand canyon one can read a very basic description, mirroring what others have previously suggested... Seashore advance and retreat is usually slow and at low angles, which cause relatively flat, straight layers. And here is an even better description of the geology of the GC at Wiki. It contains a breakdown of the layers and discusses geologic theory regarding how most were laid down (as far as specific depositional environment).NOTE: With the above link and the map provided by Percy (which you say you have for personal ref) you should be able to create a very clear question for which structures you are having a problem with.I would caution you not to believe the layers are as homogenous as you seem to think. PaulK's citation and description were accurate. }This message has been edited by holmes, 03-14-2006 10:55 AM

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holmes
"What you need is sustained outrage...there's far too much unthinking respect given to authority." (M.Ivins)

No. Magma, if you are referring to the Zoroaster Granite, did not intrude the Vishnu Schist after the entire package of rocks at the Grand Canyon was deposited and in place.The evidence is very clear that the granite does not ever intrude any sediments overlying the Vishnu. The granite intruded after the Vishnu protosediments were metamorphosed, but before the Grand Canyon Supergroup was deposited atop it. After the Supergroup was depostited, faulting occurred which preserved portions of the Supergroup prior to Cambrian deposition. Incision by the Colorado River was one of the last processes in the Grand Canyon. I'd say this is a seriously premature conclusion seeing as the last time we discussed the nature of the pre-flood world, you claimed there were only rolling hills. You conceded this was problematic for sourcing the massive amounts of sediment required to populate the entire geologic column- several thousand feet thick.

Let me see if I understand your proposed scenario:

1. A mighty and violent flood overtakes the land and kicks up huge amounts of sediments by scouring the continents.
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2. The flood waters become calm and the sediment falls out of suspension in randomly alternating layers of shale, sandstone and limestone, but ordered by radiometric age and by fossil type. The layers quickly become stone.
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3. The flood retreats with great energy and violence and erodes away large portions of the sedimentary layers it just deposited. Some portions of the landscape may have become more vulnerable to erosion due to uplift.

If I have this right, the primary objection would be that floods don't recede with great violence. For the most part, they don't encroach with great violence, either, since except for areas near the source of water, such as a dam break or perhaps overflowing the edge of a basin, flood waters rise placidly.Another significant objection is the rapidity with which you propose eroding about 1.5 miles of rock. If you took a fire hose and blasted water directly across the surface of a huge block of limestone (which is a soft rock) for a year, how much do you think would be eroded away? When water is fast and focused and heavy with sediment it can cut deep channels in just days like a saw cuts a narrow channel through a board, but when flowing water is spread out across a landscape it is more like sandpaper. It would take a very long time to sandpaper through a board, and it would take much longer for even rapidly flowing water to erode through 1.5 miles of rock. That isn't what is being said. Some layers blend gradually into adjacent layers, such as might happen as an area that was shallow sea is gradually uplifted to become coastline. But some layers do not blend gradually into the next layer. Rather, the change is very sudden. These sudden layer transitions are called unconformities, and they're often caused by this sequence of events:

• A layer is deposited by sedimentation.
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• The area is uplifted above sea level and the layer is partly eroded away.
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• The area subsides (opposite of uplift), and sedimentation begins depositing a new layer atop the eroded layer, and the stark boundary between the two layers is an unconformity.

The reason this point is being raised is that there is no way to erode layers that are still buried deep underground, and so people are asking you to explain how the flood could have produced unconformities. Another related question people are asking you is how non-marine layers were deposited between marine layers in the middle of a flood.--Percy

Right. Which is simply yet more evidence for Old Earth, that the flood never happened and yet another nail in the coffin of YEC.First the lower layer had to be laid down. That took time.Next the cheese layer had to be laid down. Yet more time.Then the cheese layer had to be eroded away. YMT.Finally the yop layer had to be added. SYMT.Lot's and lots of time. Paticularly since we don't see just one such sammich, but often two or three stacked on top of each other.And it get's neater. The order and actual makeup vary from place to place. Not only are the sammaches complete in one area and the cheese missing in others, but in some of the stacks it is a slice of bread that's missing instead of cheese.So far NO ONE has ever been able to explain how one event, let's call it The Flood, could produce what is seen.

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

Great violence isn't needed in my scenario, just that so much water would dissolve just about everything. And I do imagine quite a bit of turbulence at the bottom of the oceans what with volcanic activity and the releasing of the "fountains of the deep." Filling the waters with sediments for sure. Otherwise waves and currents carrying stuff don't need to be violent.The flood waters that appear to have sculpted the canyons and the steppes of the Grand Staircase would most likely have been from the massive inland seas and lakes left behind by the flood, finding outlets here and there after most of the flood had receded. It LOOKS that way, I believe, to the inquiring eye.I would suppose that some of the draining water COULD have been as fast and focused as you suggest, coming from a large body of water at such a height, but also I'd figure the strata weren't totally dried and hardened yet too, making it easier to cut through it.I don't have a problem with the possibility of tectonic uplift of that area. That would make the draining water flow faster through the layers too.NONE of the layers look like they "blend gradually" and certainly not gradually enough to justify the millions of years allotted to the process.In any case, there is nothing I said that that diagram could be arguing with. I love that diagram. I consider it my own find too, even if you also found it independently. I'd like to have a big poster of it to hang on my wall.

What is SEEN is mostly interpretation of minuscule clues, missing the forest for the trees, not actually what is seen. What is actually seen is in fact very consistent with a huge water event.The idea that enormous portions of the layers were eroded away is pure speculation based on some disturbances seen between layers, very small scale disturbances by comparison with the scale of the whole stack. The layers remain remarkably uniform and parallel for all those disturbances. A missing layer or section of layers based on the geo column idea is not a problem for the flood. It's the OE people who have to explain it. From a flood one would expect such a lack of consistency in the stacks. In the case of the Grand Canyon it's interesting that the supposedly missing layers exist farther north in Utah, layers carrying dinosaur remains. So those bloated bodies traveled farther on the currents or waves for some reason perhaps?

Nice post, one nitpick... There is a way to erode layers underground, which I pointed out a few posts back. Subsurface water action can remove great areas of rock and create subsidences (where an upper layer collapses). Granted it usually does not take a whole layer at once and neatly from the top or anything like that.

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holmes
"What you need is sustained outrage...there's far too much unthinking respect given to authority." (M.Ivins)

You keep making those claims, but never provide an explanation of how it happens.So here is YAO (Yet Another Opprotunity) for you to explain things. Uing the metaphor of sandwich stacks, would you like to participate in a thread where you can explain how the flood done it? If so we can propose a PNT or even a GD if you prefer.

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

If I don't believe the layers WERE eroded what is there for me to explain?

What is needed is the explanation of where they went, and what mechanism was involved.

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

Volume of water would not make rock dissolve faster. The time frame of the flood is pretty specific. No matter how much water you had it would take a very long time for water to "dissolve" all that material.As an experiment take a small quartz crystal and put it in a swimming pool or some other large body of water such that it is comparable of a large rock body to the amount of water in the flood. It is unlikely to dissolve within 40 weeks, much less 40 days.I think that's why Percy mentioned great violence. There would have to be some mechanical force added to the water to create that much sediment. Please explain this statement. In an earlier post I described problems between what you have said and what that diagram shows. If all one looks at is the mainly horizontal portions then there is less problems to be sure, but there are clear sections where previous beds (of solid stone) were turned then eroded and then more material deposited on top. This is seen to the left of the map as well as on the right bottom section. And as I suggested earlier, there is a large igneous structure at the bottom right of the map which has been eroded before deposition on top of it. That is not consistent with your Flood theory (or YEC).At the very least it needs an explanation.

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holmes
"What you need is sustained outrage...there's far too much unthinking respect given to authority." (M.Ivins)

The kind of dissolving I had in mind was the kind one sees in any flood, the kind that saturates hills and causes mud slides, and it only takes a few days of heavy rain to cause this. So of course in a flood of global proportions this process would be multiplied astronomically.I wonder why you always impute such impossible straw man thoughts to me? It's almost unheard of for anyone to impute a reasonable idea to me, it's got to be something ridiculous. Of course everybody here does that, but you do seem to come up with more absurd ideas about what I meant than others do. It's one of the reasons I don't spend a lot of time on your posts.

I have no idea why you consider such things to be a problem for the flood scenario. But also that is not what this thread is about though everybody insists on making it into that. But the main appearance of the parallel strata IS a problem for the OE theories, which is what I started out focusing on. The neatness and parallelness is a problem for slow deposition and it is NOT a problem for rapid deposition. neither are the unconformities and other irregularities a problem for rapid deposition.This message has been edited by Faith, 03-14-2006 10:32 AM

The kind of 'dissolving', in fact, which is called erosion.TTFN,WKThis message has been edited by Wounded King, 14-Mar-2006 04:04 PM