Andrew, every time I come to places like this
I'm overwhelmed again by just the sheer beauty of all of this.
It is.
I mean, look at the colors.
But the important thing to note is
that this landscape is actually very stable.
I mean the very fact
that there's vegetation there means that there's stability.
There was lots of erosion in the past… oh yeah.
…to carve out this whole terrain.
But those cliffs
and the valley floor are very stable,
which is why you've got the vegetation.
So that means that we had a catastrophic period of erosion
and then it stopped.
That's right.
Today, everything's much, much quieter.
Today's processes are extremely slow,
but they can't explain how we got this erosion,
and how we got these layers,
how we got these cliffs.
This is, as it were,
a fossil landscape that is a remnant
of catastrophism in the past.
All right, so you were saying that you wanted to come here
because you see evidence
of a young earth because of what's here.
What do you see?
Yes.
Well, the first thing we notice is the extent of these layers.
It's like a stack of pancakes.
For example, the red unit
that goes all the way across our field of view:
that's the Schnebly Hill formation.
And above that you can see the first white unit is
the Coconino Sandstone.
And above that you've got the Toroweap and,
at the horizon,
you've got the Kaibab limestone which is the rim rock
of the Grand Canyon.
And you know,
here we are, 70 more miles from the Grand Canyon,
and these layers are still here.
And the scale is what's important.
We're talking about the scale of the sedimentation.
If we have a flash flood it's only in a very localized area,
and we're not going to get these nice,
flat, continuous layers that we see here.
These layers go for mile after mile after mile.
Take the Coconino Sandstone :
we can trace it from here right across New Mexico,
Colorado, right over towards Kansas and Oklahoma,
or even in Texas.
We're talking at least 200,000 square miles
for this one rock unit
that's consistent for mile after mile after mile.
That's not the scale
that we see today with localized sedimentation.
And to get it flatline like this over such a large area,
it's like you have to make your pancake all at once,
very rapidly.
And so these layers show
evidence of rapid sedimentation — the extent of these layers.
If we dig deeper into the Grand Canyon —
we get at the bottom
— we've got the Tapeats Sandstone.
That sandstone can be traced right across North America,
up into Canada,
across to Greenland — we see the same sandstone
with the same features
and the same relative position in the stack of pancake layers —
across northern Africa,
all the way to southern Israel.
So that's crossed one continent and found on another continent
at the same level with the same features.
So these layers are very extensive
and that requires catastrophic sedimentation on a grand scale.
Nothing like we see today.
It's almost hard to imagine the volume of material
that that represents.
Yes.
In this case of the Coconino Sandstone — for the area
that we've been able to delineate —
we're talking at least 20,000 cubic miles of sand.
The scale of that — from what we can understand,
from the composition of some of those grains
and trying to chemically match them with other areas
where they might have eroded from — we're talking
about a transport distance of well over a thousand miles,
probably as far away as from the Appalachians all
the way out here to this area in the southwestern U.S..
So we have these extensive layers,
not just across North America,
but they extend into other continents as well.
What other evidence do you see?
Well, the next thing we notice is the boundaries
between these layers.
They're flat, featureless, knife-edge.
Generally you can see the continuity all the way
across the vista that we're looking at behind us.
And we see the same in the Grand Canyon for mile
after mile after mile.
There's no evidence of erosion.
You think about it.
We're looking at here in a landscape where,
over time, we've had erosion
that's still going on down in the creeks
when there's a rainstorm.
So if you imagine
that there was a long time period
between these layers,
you would expect to find topographic erosion features….
Very ragged looking.
We don't.
We see knife-edge, flat, featureless boundaries.
That tells us that the layers
were deposited like a stack of pancakes rapidly,
one after the other.
The extent of the layers — rapid sedimentation,
the lack of erosion between the layers — means
that you have to have them sequentially laid on top
of one another very rapidly.
We saw that a lot.
I remember when we were in the Grand Canyon it was
just these layers, knife-edge.
That's right.
And so what you're saying is
that if there is a long period of time between them,
then there should be jagged edges in there and….
Correct.
And we've got an excellent illustration of the point here.
We've already highlighted that red sandstone,
the Schnebly Hill formation.
Yes.
But that doesn't sound familiar to me.
That's the Schnebly Hill formation.
It's not in the Grand Canyon.
In the Grand Canyon we go from the Coconino
into the Hermit formation.
There's that knife-edge boundary between the Coconino
and the Hermit formation and there's no evidence
of erosion there,
which means that the Hermit formation
was rapidly deposited and then,
immediately, the Coconino was deposited on top of it.
But here, we've come 70 miles from the Grand Canyon
and we've got this Schnebly Hill formation between the Coconino
and the hermit
and the Schnebly Hill formation — 800 to 1,000 feet thick,
over an area of a thousand square miles —
had to have been formed very rapidly.
If it… if that took millions of years,
we ought to see millions of years… evidence of millions
of years' erosion back in the Grand Canyon
at that same boundary.
We don't.
So that means
that Schnebly Hill formation and this area had to form
in a matter of hours.
So it tells you
that not only is there a lack of erosion,
but there's no time between those boundaries.
So the whole sequence of layers was very rapidly deposited.
And that's relevant to the time question
we were talking about.
If we take modern sedimentation rates
and extrapolate them.
And if we use
that in five to ten million years we'd have much,
much more than 800 to 1,000 feet here.
So something doesn't fit:
either the sedimentation had to be far more rapid
than modern sedimentation rates,
or you had to have erosion off of hundreds
and hundreds of feet to trim the Schnebly Hill formation down
to what we see here.
And the clue,
of course, to resolve this is going back
to the Grand Canyon and seeing
that there's no evidence of erosion between the Coconino
and the Hermit.
So that means there's no evidence of millions
of years there.
Therefore the Schnebly Hill formation here had to form
very exceedingly rapidly.
So, in essence,
we have millions and millions of years missing
according to the commercial paradigm in the Grand Canyon.
But there is no evidence of erosion.
That's right.
And it's not just this example:
if we go deeper into the Grand Canyon,
we find the Temple Butte limestone lies directly
on the Muav limestone.
Again you can see in many places a knife-edge boundary
with no evidence of any erosion.
They claim there are a 140 million years missing there
because in other parts
of the world you've got other layers between them.
But there's no evidence of millions of years there either.
So this really calls into question the time scales
for the deposition of this sequence of pancakes
that we can see
here — in this area in the Grand Canyon — and,
indeed, all around the world.
But the Genesis paradigm answers those question, does it not?
Absolutely.
Absolutely because the timescale for the Flood is only a year.
And so these layers are accumulating in hours, weeks,
and within months.
You've got this whole stack of pancake layers
over such wide areas.
We talked about right across continents
or between continents you've got this consistency.
Well, Andrew, even
though we have those very thick layers,
within them we have these smaller layers.
It's kind of like what I saw at Mount St. Helens.
What are… what's going on with those?
Well, that's a good case in point.
At Mount St. Helens we had over
a 20 foot layer deposited in just a couple of hours,
but the sediment flow —
within it the grains sorted out into these laminated layers
that were different grain sizes.
We see it here
on a much larger scale in the Schnebly Hill formation.
You can see these bands and you can think of… that
in terms of water currents bringing in the sand grains
and settling with [slightly]
different particles sizes over an enormous area very,
very rapidly.
There wouldn't have been a lot of time passed
between the next surge to bring in the next lot of material.
Back in [1990]
there was a hurricane called Hurricane Andrew
on the East Coast of the United States.
And it deposited a sand layer six inches thick.
Now within a few years
when the geologists went back to examine this layer,
the layer had been obliterated.
Why?
Because within weeks
and months, critters start burrowing into it.
We call it bioturbation: they start turning it over.
So that means
if there was long time periods for these laminations to form
within the large layers,
you'd have the critters getting in there and burrowing
and turning it all over.
It'll be all messed up — it wouldn't be nice and neat.
What you saw at Mount St. Helens was nice and neat
because it was rapid.
In one afternoon, in three hours, whoosh!
All this material,
this one layer, 20 foot thick,
was deposited and within it were all these bands.
And that's exactly what you're seeing here.
So we have this large extent of layers.
We have the lack of erosion between the layers.
We have the lack of critters turning this thing over.
What other evidence do you see?
Well if we look closely, for example,
at the Coconino Sandstone we see within the horizontal layer
we see the bedding the bands within it
that are sloping.
We call those crossbeds.
And what they indicate is
that you had underwater sand waves [that]
were moving along.
The comparison is in a desert.
Most people understand a desert with a sand dune
and the wind blowing the sand forward.
Well, under water we see the same thing: sand waves.
And so the water current is rapidly moving it along.
And what we get left behind are these front-facing slopes.
And we can estimate the depth of water,
the speed of the water current,
and we can do this with the Coconino Sandstone.
In actual fact,
it's important to recognize that there's a difference
in the angle in a desert dune —
it's usually 30 to 34 degrees at these sloping beds,
whereas under water it's usually 25 degrees or less —
and in the Coconino
sandstone these crossbeds are always 15 to 25 degrees.
So it was underwater deposition.
Well, Andrew, the Coconino Sandstone is a big issue because
the conventional paradigm has,
for years, said
that this was formed in dry conditions.
Yes.
It's given as the textbook example,
and it's held to tenaciously
that the Coconino Sandstone form in a dry desert sand situation.
You know, those crossbeds:
everyone agrees that they formed as a result of dunes,
but whether it was in air or water is the question.
Now we've examined this issue extensively.
Steve Austin's student, Dr. John Whitmore,
has combed the hills around here with his students —
hundreds and hundreds
of measurements of these crossbeds —
and they all come in the range of 15 to 25 degrees,
which is right
where it should be with underwater sand deposition.
Added to that, in this… in the Sedona area,
we find these strange folded units called
parabolic recumbent folds.
This is where the water current was so swift
that it turned over the edge of the top of the dune.
Kind of like you see a wave, when a wave curls?
Yes, when a wave curls and crashes.
And we don't see that in a desert sand dune situation.
We've examined… John Whitmore
and his students have examined hundreds of thin sections,
looking at the grains, looking at the minerals,
and all of those features indicate underwater deposition.
You'll be familiar, too,
in the Grand Canyon there's evidence of little critters
that walk… yes!
I've seen them.
…on some of those crossbeds and they're always going uphill
— up the front face.
It's as if the critter is getting buried by
the water it's trying to go up.
You can see the sky out there above the water
and it's trying to get up there.
Interestingly many of these the claws are
at a slight angle to the direction
that they're trying to go.
It means they're bracing
themselves in the water current — in some places
they've been knocked off their feet — and left,
right, left, right and then stops.
And then you see it again some distance away.
They're been moved across.
The other thing — you think about these nice,
neat footprints.
How would you form them in a dry desert sand?
There's no cohesion behind the sand grains.
The conventional paradigm says,
oh, well, maybe there was the dew in the morning
that held a… held enough water.
But that dries out very quickly.
And then you get more sand, dry sand,
and it tends to distort.
These are sharp outline and it's exactly
what you find in wet sand.
And, so, all of these details
together cry out wet sand deposition,
underwater deposition for the Coconino Sandstone.
And the speed — as I said before,
if you look at these crossbeds
you can figure out the depth of the water current,
the speed of the water current,
the direction of the water current…
and we're looking at the Coconino Sandstone
average thickness of about 300 feet over an area
of up to 200,000 square miles.
That's 20,000 cubic miles of sand.
The rate… the water was flowing you would've deposited all
that in a matter of days.
Not millions of years, just a matter of days.
Well, Andrew, talking about all of these layers
takes me back, of course,
to the textbooks I learned —
and all of us did — referencing the geological column.
Can you talk about that a little?
Yes, Del, the geological column is a real entity in the sense
that we do have physical rock layers
that are stacked up on top of one another.
You've already seen it, for example,
in the Grand Staircase.
Yes.
An actual sequence of rock layers —
and we can go down into the Grand Canyon,
right to the bottom of the Grand Canyon —
so there is a physical sequence of rock layers,
just like we see here.
Now sometimes there's layers missing in one area
that are found in another area.
But we can build up this concept of all this sequence of layers
into the geologic column by piecing together the details
from around the world.
Here in the United States,
we've actually found
if we go to all the local geologic columns
from drill holes and from observation — so that's real,
physical layers
— and then match them from area to area
around the United States,
we actually can break down the geologic column —
that section that contains all the fossils —
into six major sequences of rock layers called megasequences.
This has been known for over five decades.
We can trace them right across the continent
as if there was a sediment rush, surge,
that laid down these layers.
And, it's interesting,
within each megasequence you actually go from a coarse layer
at the bottom — in the Grand Canyon,
you saw the Tapeats Sandstone — sitting on top of that is
the Bright Angel Shale,
sitting on top of that is the Muav Limestone.
So the grain sizes get finer as you go up,
and that's a recurring feature of these megasequences.
And the best way to explain is with a Flood paradigm,
not millions of years.
And so we see
that there's a real sequence of rock layers
that we find around the world.
So it's not a figment of the imagination.
In fact, if we go back in history —
if we go back over 200 years ago — it was actually geologists
who believe in the Flood paradigm
that established some of the terminology found
in the geologic column.
They used to call the lower layers primitive
that went back to the original primordial creation.
Then they had the secondary,
which marked the beginning of the Flood,
which is these layers that we see here.
And then they had the tertiary,
which were the layers
that were formed at the end of the Flood
and into the post- Flood period
and finished with the quaternary — four subdivisions.
Now some of those names have been changed,
but they are originally established by geologists
who believed in the Flood.
That was kind of the original geological column?
Correct.
So there's no contriving about this.
It was originally established on the Flood paradigm.
But then there were geologists like Murchison
and Sedgwick and Lyell
who started to subdivide some of these layers,
and add in millions of years and give them names
like the Cambrian from Wales,
and Ordovician from a Welsh tribe.
And so they started to give these names to the layers.
Those labels do mean a particular package
or group of layers,
but they don't necessarily mean millions of years.
The issue of establishing millions of years is
a separate question that we've been dealing with.
We've talked about the radioisotopes,
we've talked about the extent of these layers
and all those other evidences in the geologic record indicate
that they weren't the millions of years.
But this is
because there's a clash of views of earth history:
those who want to have the conventional view
of millions of years,
versus those of us who say no,
most of these layers form rapidly within the…
the year of the Flood.
So it isn't a difference
in believing in those layers that exist.
Not at all.
It's the difference of time, isn't it?
Correct.
And so it's not a question of science versus the Bible.
It's a question
of different views of earth history.