Del: How long've you been doing this, Steve?
Steve: I've been looking for a particular kind
of marine fossil called a nautiloid in Grand Canyon
for about 25 years.
It's taken me along about 100 miles of the Grand Canyon.
And I've been finding them all in one layer.
So what I do is I go find the layer
in the Redwall limestone where they occur,
and then I study the fossil content
and that's what we get.
Del: So what is nautiloid?
Steve: A nautiloid is a squid in a shell.
It has a cone-shaped shell
that has pressurized chambers in it,
and the body of the organism is at the wide end of the shell.
And the animal could swim really fast.
Del: Oh, it's very cool.
Steve: And they're the fastest- swimming predators
you can imagine.
Del: How big do they get?
Steve: Some of these squid- like organisms are up
to one foot in diameter and seven feet long.
Del: That's a pretty large creature.
Steve: About the average length of these things —
about the length of your arm.
Del: Hmm.
Steve: And there are small ones, medium ones,
and big ones.
Del: So you found them out here somewhere?
Steve: Yeah, right here in the limestone
below us we can see an excellent display,
a typical display of nautiloids.
Now, look… take a look over there you can see
the cone-shaped organism pointing this way.
Del: I see it.
Steve: And you can see the curved chambers internal
to the shell.
Del: Uh huh.
Steve: That might be originally four feet long or so.
And then I see over here —
right in this area — and that must be 1 or 2 feet long.
And then I see the tip end
of a nautiloid very beautifully preserved… Del:
oh, that one's cool.
Steve: …with the internal tube down the center.
And then I see it looks
like a middle segment of a broken nautiloid
with the chambers coming through here.
Del: Yeah.
Steve: So there's four nautiloids right there.
Del: And, now, what is that?
I mean it looks like somebody drew a circle in the rock.
Steve: Yeah it looks like a circle sitting
on the same plane as the other four nautiloids.
Could that be a nautiloid pointing down?
Del: So it's vertical!
It's fossilized in a vertical position.
Steve: It is.
Del: That seems strange to me.
Steve: Yeah, about one out of seven of the nautiloids
that we're finding in this layer are tip end pointing down.
Del: So that's not rare, you find that all over?
Steve: Yes, on every location
where I see many nautiloids displayed,
I'll always see the circle.
And they're pointing down.
Del: But the rest
of these all seem to be pointing in the same direction.
Steve: You noticed that?
Isn't that interesting?
See I pointed out four nautiloids,
and the one's pointing this way,
one's pointing that way, one's pointing that way,
and one's pointing this way.
They're all in that general trend running this way
across the layer.
So what does that argue?
It's an aligned condition of fossils.
Del: And what would cause that?
Steve: I think that a current swept
over this deposit and it aligned them.
If these organisms died a natural death
and fell to the bottom of a calm, placid sea….
Del: It would be random.
Steve: They would be randomly pointing and they're not.
And so something swept over them and buried them.
It froze very rapidly to trap a nautiloid
in vertical orientation.
Del: Right.
Yeah.
Well, Steve, the conventional story is
that creatures are fossilized;
when they die they sink to the bottom,
they slowly get covered up.
What is the evidence that you see here
that supports the Genesis story?
Steve: Well, there's a lot of sediment here,
you know, layers
— but the nautiloids are all
in this one plane of the Redwall limestone.
And I've seen it through 100 miles
of the canyon and it argues
that there must be a billion nautiloids around here.
And so there's some type
of mass kill or death associated with this.
And then the bedding surface we're looking
at is consistent with that:
we see the orientation
or the alignment of fossils which argues
that it wasn't a natural death that killed these organism.
They didn't fall randomly to the bottom;
something swept along and moved them.
Their bodies may be still in the shells
and they were buried by being smothered here.
So it's a mass kill on a colossal dimension
in an ocean current
which brings to mind immediately something like a global flood.
Del: And it seems to me also, just the detail
— I mean that one fossil over there,
there's just exquisite detail in that fossil,
and it would seem to me that if it was a long time…
I grew up on a ranch,
those things decay and they decay quickly.
So these must have been buried rapidly.
Steve: Those are really mind- challenging things.
So my original thought is they may have been poisoned,
but now I'm thinking
that they have been smothered alive by
this fast-moving current.
The fastest moving predator
in the ocean is probably a nautiloid
and it can't survive
whatever whumped on it here some kind of curve.
So the fossil deposit is
kind of a Sherlock Holmes detective story:
we're looking here,
trying to discern the events that led
to the killing and burial of these marvelous creatures.
Del: So all of that evidence seems to point back again
to the history we have recorded in Genesis.
Steve: Yeah, this is not a calm
and placid sea; this is not business as usual.
This is something really extraordinary.
Del: So is this a mud layer that's rolling in here?
Steve: It could be muddy, could be very much a slurry;
and that's another story that I'd like to tell you.
Del: All right.
You lead the way.
Boy, this is really interesting.
Steve: We're looking at the bottom part
of the Redwall limestone here in the middle
of the Grand Canyon.
In the top we see the thin-bedded,
rather brown limestone
and churt strata with an abrupt boundary,
with a thick-bedded limestone underneath it.
And that upper seven feet is the nautiloid bed
and then running right down the middle of it is
the coarse fossils zone,
and that coarse fossil zone
continues for 100 miles down the Grand Canyon.
It also goes to the west, out in the Lake Mead area.
I've even seen this bed
in Frenchman mountain next to Las Vegas,
Nevada, eye level with the Stratosphere Hotel.
There's this seven foot layer.
So it's extremely very persistent and extensive.
And we're just looking at the general characteristics
of it here.
So in the middle there
is the nautiloid layers with all our coarse fossil material.
Del: So that corresponds to what we just saw
when we saw the fossil,
so we were looking down on that surface.
Now we're looking at it in cross-section.
Del: Well, Steve,
I've heard that limestone just takes a long time to form.
How do we explain this?
Steve: On the Great Bahama Banks limestone accumulates
about a thousand years per inch — lime sediment and lime mud.
And maybe that is some people's thinking
about the conventional way,
but thinking about this limestone later here
in the Grand Canyon causes me to just jettison
that idea almost immediately.
Del: Is there a difference between this and that?
Steve: Very much a difference.
Remember the fossils are all along one horizon in the bed?
They're not distributed vertically throughout the bed.
And then you notice
that it's very extensive — extremely extensive —
down 100 miles of canyon.
And then remember the alignment
of the fossils provide evidence of a current?
Together, these three observations need
of an excellent and good interpretation,
and that led me to do some very serious reflection
and it challenged me to do my best work.
And the experiment that I had with my son February 3rd,
the year 2000,
in the giant sandbox is worth talking about.
With a dad and his kid with the sandbox,
it started with pouring sand.
And you know, pour sand — it's in friction.
When you pour sand fast, it forms mounds.
Okay.
But when you throw sand,
it can stream out over a surface like a blanket.
Del: Right.
Steve: And I was throwing
out sand with little leaf fragments in it,
thinking about nautiloids,
when the idea of a high velocity flow came to my mind.
Rather than thinking about granular friction — you know,
the grains as they bounce along and in a…
as you throw the grains out, the frictional flow.
I imagined little springs between the sand grains,
holding them apart.
And if that could happen,
the sand could flow almost endlessly.
And my brain entered a domain —
I call it “no friction land."
I started thinking about high speed,
no friction, flow of sediment slurries — concentrated,
sediment slurries over the surface of the earth —
on low low slopes and that kind of thing.
It led me into a four year thought experiment,
if you will,
about how sand grains, and sand-sized particles,
and large fossils might move.
How did the fossils —
the coarse fossils — get in the middle of the bed?
That is the mind- challenging thing.
I could imagine
how they could get at the bottom of the bed:
just fall out.
Or, I could imagine how they get to the top of the bed.
But how could they get in the middle?
That was really interesting.
Del: And how did you figure that out?
Steve: Well, I'm thinking about the sand flowing out,
I'm looking at those leaf fragments and I'm thinking,
in the wake of a high speed flow there could be a turbulent eddy,
and that's how the nautiloids
could fall out with the sediment.
Concentrated sediment would fall out first,
and then the fossils would be buoyed up,
and they would fall out and then finally the light stuff,
the finer texture would fall out.
And so it seemed to explain things.
In no friction land,
I can imagine how this occurred.
I worked out the equations in 2D of a dynamic pressure
and static pressure on a fast- moving flow.
You know when you have your hand out in the car
at 60 miles an hour,
you feel that really strong current that's flowing
past your hand.
That's called dynamic pressure,
and a fast moving slurry like a mud slurry
with lots of of organisms
in it would generate that kind of pressure.
The faster it goes, the more pressure it develops.
When that pressure developed in front is equal to the weight,
the submerged weight,
of the flow — the mud flow,
if you will — it causes a property called hydroplane.
And in hydroplane there's no friction
with the surface underneath.
Del: Just like what happens on the highway.
Steve: Just like right on the highway.
So this thing — by its speed it generates its own cushion,
if you will,
that makes it detach from the earth.
And it flows on a hydroplane.
Del: So all those particles are suspended
in their same position,
and then traveling at a very fast rate.
Steve: Yeah.
So the boundaries of this thing are high shear.
But internally, this thing is very laminar and it flows
along almost endlessly and with low friction.
And so I gave it to a modeler —
a computational fluid dynamicist — to model that condition.
I gave him a couple of months to do the 2D computer simulation,
and I remember getting a phone call one day and I said,
"How you doing
on that computational fluid dynamics problem of simulating
an underwater mudflow” — 50 percent sediment,
50 percent water,
moving at a speed of about seven meters per second,
twenty one feet per second — something like that.
And he said, “wow, they fly!
”.
Del: Huh.
Steve: And then he noticed they generated wing shape
as these flows moved under the water,
over the sediment surface.
They generate a wing shape and they, essentially, fly.
So now we have flying
sediment flows on a hydroplane moving over the ocean floor.
Del: And so we can get material, then,
transported very long distances.
Steve: Yeah, and very fast.
And then the breakup
of the wake of this flow creates the conditions
that allow the nautiloids
and the other coarse fossils to fall out
in the middle of the flow.
Del: Is that towards the tail of this, then?
Steve: The tail of the flow.
Del: Uh huh.
Steve: And so that theory has now been modeled in computer
and it seems to explain the… the essentials
of what this is like.
Del: Well then everything is happening very quickly.
Steve: The sediment sequence can be explained and modeled by
computational fluid dynamics very quickly — minutes,
not millions of years.
So it's a completely different explanation for the origin
of limestone layers.
Del: And it's not just the limestone layers.
I mean we've been here in the canyon
for a number of days and it seemed like everywhere
we look —
whether we're talking about the layers all
being laid down rapidly and all the evidence to show
that it was a rapid deposition,
and then the carving of the canyon — the evidence shows
that happened rapidly,
all the way down to the mud flows,
and how those form rapidly.
With all of that evidence before us,
why do people still hang on to the conventional model?
Steve: I think it's
not because of the sedimentary evidence, ultimately.
I think it's something else.
Most people have a high regard for radioisotope dating
and maybe that's the last part
of their thinking about millions of years.
And so we need to talk about that subject as well.
Del: Well that's always been a tough issue.
Do you want to talk about that?
Steve: Well, I have a friend: Andrew Snelling.
He's a geologist from Australia
who has done some dating on Grand Canyon rocks with me.
Del: I know Andrew —
I floated down the river with him.
So I look forward to seeing him again.
Well before we go,
though, we started out talking about the history in the rocks.
And these rocks have told us a story.
Steve: A powerful story, haven't they?
And, you know,
the children of Israel were crossing
into the Promised Land 1400 B.C.
And as they crossed the Jordan River,
it dried up.
And Joshua said,
hey pick up 12 stones, pile these up in Gilgal.
These stones will be a monument.
Steve: And then Joshua said
when your sons and daughters asked
what mean these stones,
you shall tell them they are a monument —
or memorial — to the great things
that God has done.
And, boy, right here
in the Grand Canyon we have a monument
or memorial to the great things
that God has done in creation and the flood.
Del: They're a memorial
to the judgment of God, are they not?
Steve: Ultimately.
And… and it's a… a beautiful world
that was judged — and then look at the product
for us to study today
and the testimony about the character
of God here in the rocks in… of all places, Del: Yeah.
Steve: the Grand Canyon.
Del: And just like God,
he will take the great destruction
that is evident here and turn it into something beautiful.
Steve: Yes.
Del: That's the grace of God.
Well, unfortunately, it's getting late.
I'd like to stay here a long time.
I guess we better go.
Steve: Well, Del,
I'd love to show you many more rock formations here
in Grand Canyon.
Del: I would love to see them.
Steve: And there are many places with nautiloids.
There is the Coconino Sandstone, there is the Kaibab…