Steve I got to admit I've been here several times —
I've floated the Grand Canyon —
but every time I come here it is breathtaking.
It's huge isn't it?
Give me the big picture: how big is it?
Four to eighteen miles wide,
a mile deep, 275 miles long — something like that.
It's visible from outer space.
Five million people come and see this thing.
It's one of the premier wonders of the world;
and geology keeps bringing me back to the canyon.
So, Steve, tell me: what do you see here?
What are we looking at?
When we look at Grand Canyon we see — or come to grips
with — the inside story to the ground beneath our feet.
There's something here just beyond the different colors
and the bigness of the canyon
that commands our attention, isn't it?
And we see sedimentation:
the process of the formation of the rock layers
of the earth here.
And we see erosion,
and we see the power of water in erosion.
We see the evidence of volcanoes, and uplift,
and upwarp — all kinds of geologic process.
It's pretty much like the rest of the world,
but it's so well displayed here that it confronts us, directly.
So it's kind of like the picture is
that we have these layers all over the world,
but we've got this blessing
that it's been cut out for us and now we're looking
at all of those layers,
right?
Yes.
So kind of walk us through the history
that you see here — of all that we see in front of us.
We see this layer cake of strata
and we go down to the bottom
of the cake to see the earliest events associated
with the formation of the strata and,
eventually, the whole Grand Canyon.
Down by the river —
around the corner here — we have granite
and we have a rock called a schist and gneiss.
These rocks form the core of the continent down deep —
somehow related to creation week, I believe.
Above those non- stratified rocks we have a diagonally-
tilted package of sandstone
and shale and limestone here — visible from the rim —
that are likely creation week rock — or even pre-flood —
but post- creation week rock.
In other words,
ocean floor at some time in the history of the earth.
Then on top of that we have flat- lying strata
on a beveled surface.
And this beveled surface is rather obvious in back of us.
But the flat-lying 4,000 feet
of strata sits on this erosion surface
and that's called the Great Unconformity.
And then on top of the Great Unconformity is
that 4,000 feet of flat- lying strata up to the rim.
That brings us up to here?
That brings us right here to the Kaibab limestone on the rim.
That 4,000 feet of strata is sandstone,
shale, and limestone,
and it forms this broad,
blanket sequence that we see across North America
and even to the world.
I think that 4,000-foot interval
and that scour surface underneath it —
the Great Unconformity — represents the onset
of the flood and the flood deposition.
We have other strata in the Grand Canyon region:
that's called the Grand Staircase.
We have about 10,000 feet — two miles thickness
of strata — on top of the Grand Canyon….
Higher than where we are.
Higher than where we are,
and that represents the later stages of the flood
and the retreat of the flood water.
This surface was beveled by retreat of flood waters and,
of course, later acquired lake basins
and then the Colorado River was established
after the breaching of these big dams
and failure of these lakes.
You're talking about three miles of sediment here, then.
Three miles of sediment.
So the flat-lying strata show the history from the beginning
of the flood through into the post-flood period that
we live in right now.
Well, the layers themselves —
as we can see — have that straight line with them.
And I can understand
that if they were exposed to the elements for millions of years
that we may not even see the layer, right?
Or at least we would see erosion evidence to it.
We'd have canyons within canyons
and buried canyons in the strata,
and that's foreign to what we see in the big picture
of strata across the North American continent.
So we'd see something much more complex,
is what you're saying here,
rather than these very nice, neat layers.
Yeah, and we have a layer cake here
and it needs a very simple explanation,
not a complicated,
millions of years explanation, you know.
Time is not the magic wand to Grand Canyon;
it doesn't solve all the problems —
it actually creates problems and
so we need to think in this new domain outside the box,
if you will,
in the creation flood, post-flood model.
That explains — or helps direct —
our thinking pattern to,
and challenge us to do, our best work.
Steve, take us back
to those people who began that story,
that paradigm.
There's a famous medical doctor named James Hutton
who introduced concepts
that later became part of this big paradigm.
But he influenced another geologist,
named Charles Lyell.
And Charles Lyell, about 1830,
wrote a book called Principles of Geology
where he illustrated the views of Hutton in a very direct way.
And it was Lyell
who was the teacher of Charles Darwin.
And Adam Sedgwick, a catastrophist geologist,
and Charles Lyell, a uniformitarian geologist,
those were the two primary teachers of Charles Darwin.
And Charles Darwin received his education,
believe it or not, in geology.
He was trained by geologists,
and then he went on to write some papers for about ten years
till he got sick with some type of general illness.
He participated in field trips and did a lot of geology.
He wrote geologic papers.
And so Charles Darwin was trained by geologists.
He performed as a geologist, he thought like a geologist,
and for his early career he was a geologist, obviously.
He had a rock hammer,
he did geologic maps, he drew stratigraphic cross-sections.
Darwin is a geologist just like me,
so I can challenge that paradigm system of Darwin.
But Darwin went on to influence the worldview
in a very different way.
He went into biology
and started applying and thinking about natural selection
and evolution of species.
And when that happened that whole paradigm shifted.
And, of course,
today we're going back and we're remembering
— I'm remembering —
that Charles Darwin was a geologist
and he needs… we need to go back
and challenge the foundation of his way of thinking.
Was it data and evidence, then,
that drove them deeper and deeper into millions
and billions of years?
Not really.
It was their paradigm, or their belief system,
that allowed them to process
data in a certain way to support the paradigm —
or to illustrate
what they believed about their paradigm.
So when someone begins to hold that paradigm,
what kind of influence does that have, then,
when they come to the Grand Canyon and see the evidence.
Does it play in what they see?
Well, most people come to the Grand Canyon and, what?
They know the story they're told and they say, wow,
what a marvelous canyon
the Colorado River eroded over tens of millions of years.
Okay.
And it's hard not to have
a paradigm dependent understanding of Grand Canyon.
But we need to go back to data and, ultimately,
we need to consider what it is
that is illustrating our understanding of history here.
I'll tell you what,
I've been rafting on that river and there is something in me
that wants to get back down there.
Is there a way we can go back down and see some things closer?
Oh, I'd love to take you down in the Hualapai Reservation
where some of my friends,
the Indians,
like to take me, show me rock layers
and so can I take you down there?
Absolutely.
I'm on your tail.
Okay.
Steve, thanks for letting me stop at the river in the way
to the nautiloids.
It's a beautiful place.
This is where the conventional story tells us it's this river
that carved all of this out.
It is.
And as we look at rivers, there's a power in thinking
about a modern river and what it might do,
such as erode a big canyon.
Let me show you two things right away.
And let's delve
into some thinking about the canyon.
We have a 10,000 cubic feet per second flow
down the Colorado River here… presently… Presently,
and we have this granite gorge sitting here.
Do you think
that granite gorge was cut by the action
of a flow like this, today?
That's what the story says.
There are historic photographs about 150 years
old showing rapids here in the Colorado River.
And we can come back and look at the rapids now.
The boulders in the rapids haven't changed position.
It's interesting that the rapids haven't changed over 150 years.
And there have been
some pretty big floods between then and now, haven't there?
Yes there have been floods
over 25 times the present flow of the river.
A quarter million cubic feet per second going down the channel
of the Colorado River.
That's a really big flood.
It is.
Okay, but it still didn't move the boulders!
Ok, and the channel is lined —
the side of the channel of the river is lined —
by slope boulders
that have fallen into the bank of the river,
and the bank of the river is stable,
not just the rapids.
And the bottom of the river is stable;
it's full of gravel and sand.
So the Colorado River isn't deepening
or widening the canyon.
So the ultimate question is
what cut the granite gorge here… right,
if it wasn't the river,
then how in the world did we get all this material out of here?
We need a huge amount of water.
We need super big flood flows, hundreds of times,
thousand times the present flow.
We got to have a big lake or some type of container
that fails to give… deliver that kind
of water to this gorge.
I think there is a lake over there in the Painted Desert —
about 500 cubic miles of water at about 6,000 feet elevation —
that the fall of that water down
through a spillway could easily erode a canyon like this.
So that much water can really
take all this material out in a short period of time?
It can, and let me tell you
about the four different processes of erosion —
slow and catastrophic erosion.
We have solution:
the river is actually dissolving away… in a very
weak way the rock.
Abrasion: that's where particle impacts particle
going down the river.
The third agent of erosion is a catastrophic agent.
It's called plucking:
when fluid flow in the river bed gets so big it's able to flush
all the rocks in the channel,
that energy can be expended on prying the cracks of the rock
in the channel apart.
It's called hydraulic plucking.
And the ultimate example is an underwater tornado, essentially.
A catastrophic flow can generate that.
So just like a regular tornado
that can pull things up off the ground….
Yes.
It does it here underwater.
It can do it underwater.
And then the fourth agent of erosion is very catastrophic.
When water flows very rapidly —
like about 20 feet per second down a channel —
that velocity allows vacuum bubbles to form,
especially in the downstream of an obstacle.
The water flow going
over that obstacle creates low pressure.
When that pressure gets low enough,
it gets to what's called the vapor pressure of water,
then water is torn open
and a cavity is formed in that water.
That's a vacuum bubble.
That vacuum bubble can collapse or implode;
and it's next to a rock,
and when it implodes it's like dynamite.
A catastrophic erosion by cavitation —
this process of collapse
of bubbles — is well understood by engineers,
especially in spillways and tunnels.
Do we have evidence of that recently,
that we've seen, that cavitation at work?
One possibility is Mount St. Helens.
We have a 600- foot- deep canyon eroded
in solid rock since 1980.
Is a lot of that through cavitation?
And maybe cavitation
and plucking by mud flows and the high velocity flows there.
Rapid erosion can create deep bedrock canyons.
That's what we see at Mount St. Helens.
We have some modern examples, like at Glen Canyon Dam….
Which is just upstream.
…just upstream here,
of catastrophic erosion by cavitation.
In 1983, flood flows in the upper part
of the Colorado River drainage basin filled
Lake Powell completely
and they needed to open the spillway tunnels
to allow rapid drainage of water over the top of the lake….
To save the dam.
…to save the dam.
And the 40- foot- diameter right spillway tunnel was opened
and water went down this incline 40- foot- diameter tunnel
and it burrowed out through the concrete
and the steel.
62,500 cubic feet
of concrete was needed to fill this cavity that formed.
How long did it take for that to….
They think it took minutes
for cavitation to erode that bedrock.
So it just like butter.
Knife through hot butter.
Explosion- induced catastrophic erosion.
We even felt earthquakes during the time
and they… the water spilling
out of the tunnel was seen to be red.
So it was obvious
that something catastrophic had happened there
at Glen Canyon Dam.
Water has incredible power;
it can not only rapidly cut the inner gorge here
and the granite along the Colorado River,
but it could also bevel the surface
like we see in the lower part of the Grand Canyon.
The granite in the granite basement rock
during the initial stage
of the flood could be beveled, rapidly.
So we need to think about incredible power of water.
And right here, thinking about the Colorado River,
thinking about the inner gorge, commands our attention to, what?
Think about that beveled surface
with the sandstone sitting on top of it.
And there is also catastrophic erosion —
not on a… not in a channel,
but on a continent, or even the intercontinental scale.
Well, Steve, when we think about the evidence
that we've seen in terms of the power of water —
Mount St. Helens,
Glen Canyon Dam,
the other places we've seen
that have shown us that water is extremely powerful —
geologists are now beginning to recognize
that it's the conventional story
about the river carving this out is not right.
Is that true?
That's right.
And there's kind of a consensus among geologists today
that the Colorado River did not evolve slowly
over tens of millions of years.
Most geologists suggest
that the canyon appears abruptly in some way,
and that's why I,
as a catastrophist, think I have a contribution to make.
Because I can understand
how a canyon can form catastrophically.
Well, why do people still teach that?
Why is it still on the signs?
It's a myth, isn't it?
It's a nature myth about what we think about origins,
and it's just easy to think about,
and it's customary, and it's in our experience.
But we need to think outside
of our experience and we need to think creatively —
sometimes outside the box —
really to solve the problems like what cut the granite here
in the inner gorge.
Thinking outside the box,
though… what you're saying is, to actually look
at the evidence — look at the truth of what we see.
Yeah, and not be persuaded by the conventional,
or the way things appear,
or just looking at the present.
We need to think creatively about the number
of different ways that things can form.