Summations Only

That would actually make a good epitaph for you. Or, on a more cheery note, it's how you should introduce yourself at parties. "Hi, I'm Faith, and I don't even know WHAT I'm wrong about!" It'll break the ice.

No they didn't. There's only about 750 million years between the Grand Canyon Orogeny and the Laramide Orogeny. Three-quarters is less than two, I counted.

And of which I have shown you ample photographic and documentary evidence. So will you please stop lying about this? At least lie about something else for a change.

Yes, could I possibly be talking about the erosion when I show you photographs of erosion and say "Look, here's the erosion, it's right there where the erosion is"? No you don't, as you can see from the photographs which show the unconformities but not this "disturbance to the whole stack" which you made up in your head. That's not so much an argument as an assertion. Nor is it a request. What a strange lie.

It's not long enough to be two billion years. AFAIK, the Claron (note spelling) was deposited after the beginning of the Laramide Orogeny. But yes, most of the Grand Staircase sediments above the Great Unconformity were deposited between the end of the Grand Canyon Orogeny and the start of the Laramide Orogeny.If you have even the flimsiest shred of evidence to suggest that there was or should have been another orogeny in the Grand Canyon region between those two, now would be a great time to produce it.

So you're like a man who wants to prove that all birds are flightless, and so only "deals with" ostriches, kiwis, emus, and penguins. And we could show your ornithological counterpart lots of birds capable of flight, but why should he focus on those?

That's not a fact, though. You're like a kid saying "I didn't hit him, and anyway he hit me first!"The strata are all undisturbed, you say, and anyway all the disturbances happened after they were all deposited. If you know nothing about the scientific method, this would be a great place to not discuss it.

Yes there are. We showed you photographs, remember?

That is in fact the Great Unconformity as seen from Lipan Point. Here it is again. Note that this page belongs to Dr. John Merck, professor of geology at the University of Maryland, who presumably knows an unconformity when he sees one.

Yes there are. This is why I was able to show you photographs of them.

Well the river doesn't flow in a straight line, so the Grand Canyon doesn't look the same all the way along. So you also get diagrams like this: ... which only show the Vishnu Schist exposed in the canyon, and diagrams like this: ... where you can see most of the Grand Canyon Supergroup. And they're all correct, it just depends on exactly where you take the cross-section.

No, some of the layers have undergone large-scale erosion, leaving them neither undisturbed nor flat. That's the time between the Grand Canyon Orogeny that uplifted the Grand Canyon Supergroup and the Laramide Orogeny that uplifted the Colorado Plateau. Almost all the deposition in the Grand Staircase region after the Grand Canyon Supergroup happened between the two orogenies. They're not both true, but it is true that there were about three-quarters of a billion years between orogenies. This is not at all unusual. Consider that right now there are only two orogenies going on anywhere in the world: the Andean and the Alpine. There are none happening in North America (or, come to that, Africa or Australia), and none have occurred in North America since the Laramide Orogeny, which ended about 40 million years ago. Given this data, it is not surprising that long periods should go by between two orogenies happening in exactly the same place. Most of them, but not all of them. The Coconino Sandstone, for example, has features which clearly identify it as terrestrial, such as footprints. That's right. In water too deep for the sediment to be touched by the "wave base", there's really nothing to disturb it, it just piles up in flat layers of enormous extent.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

Another nice picture. This shows the unconformity between the Coconino Sandstone and the Toroweap Formation and the unconformity between the Toroweap Formation and the Kaibab Limestone. Here's a close-up of the contact between the Coconino Sandstone and the Toroweap Formation. (Not from the same location, obviously.)

Kaibab Limestone on the top, then the Toroweap Formation, then the Coconino Sandstone. Note the highly visible irregularity of the erosional surface at the top of the Coconino Sandstone; in the close-up picture, note how the cross-beds of the Coconino Sandstone are sharply truncated by the unconformity rather than grading into the Toroweap Formation.

You what?Try this. ETA: Oh, you did.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.