So we're at about mile five and a half on the Colorado River,
and we're looking at the Coconino Sandstone,
which is the lighter colored rock up above and the Hermit Formation,
which is this brownish rock down here below.
And we want to look at a couple of things here
at this contact between the two formations.
And we can see this contact all the way down the river,
and it's a fairly flat contact.
The Coconino sits immediately on top of the Hermit Formation.
There's very little evidence for erosion or weathering in between the two layers.
And the second thing we want to look at are what I think are sand injectites
at the bottom of the Coconino,
if we look up here at the base of the Coconino, we see these bits of sand
that come down from the Coconino Sandstone into the Hermit Formation.
They're lighter colored.
They kind of look almost like icicles penetrating down this formation.
Conventional geology believes that the Hermit Formation
is a floodplain environment.
So a river floodplain where this was made by rivers and stuff like that.
And then the argument goes that the climate dried up
and since this was a wet mud, that the wet mud cracked
and then made mud cracks, and then the Coconino Sandstone
blew in and filled up these mud cracks.
Well, about 20 years ago, I started to look into this to find out
if that was a good explanation for these cracks or not.
And these are relatively small ones.
We find some really big ones downstream along Bright Angel Trail.
And those are about 50 feet in length,
at least 50 feet in length and maybe about that wide.
And as you get away from the Bright Angel Fault, as you go upstream
and downstream, these cracks become shorter and shorter.
And so I've been down many trails in the Grand Canyon,
measured these things, measured the angle of these things and so on,
and have noticed a couple of very interesting things.
Number one,
the deepest cracks and the longest cracks are right next to the Bright Angel Fault,
which moved about 200 feet when it faulted.
The other thing that I've noticed is the cracks decrease in length
as you go away from the fault up the river, down the river
and even across the river to the north, these cracks become shorter.
And as I studied the cracks, I did not notice any horizontal layering in them.
If these cracks had been filled up by sand
falling down into them, if they were open mud cracks
and filled up the layers inside the crack would be horizontal.
But even in some of these cracks here, I see some vertical
layering in them, and that's very typical of these cracks.
And so
I found some other things as well that indicated
these are probably not mud cracks.
So I began to develop a new hypothesis that would explain the data
that I found.
The key piece of data is that the longest cracks are right next
to the Bright Angel Fault, and then they they get shorter as you move away.
The other
key piece of data is that
these cracks have a preferred orientation.
In other words, they're all oriented in about the same direction.
And I was able to show that statistically.
And one of the things that happens during earthquakes, if an earthquake
shakes sand that is filled up with water, the sand grains will actually come apart.
So if my fists represent sand grains
and then imagine my blue shirt being water around all these sand grains.
As the earthquake happens, the sand grains temporarily will come apart.
And if the sand grains temporarily come apart
because of the earthquake energy, that sand will flow just like water.
And I think that's what's happened here.
And also, when the earthquake happened, it caused the grains in the Hermit Formation
down below here to get packed together and actually open up some space.
And so what I think happened is the sand in the Coconino became liquid
and then was forced downward into the Hermit Formation.
And therefore, we think these are sand injectites.
Right at the bottom of the Coconino, we see this this band, it's maybe a little less
than a foot thick, sits right on top of the brownish Hermit Formation.
And it looks to me from this perspective that there's very little bedding in here.
And that's something that I found at several other sites as well.
And what we think this is, it's a layer that's been fluid as it's actually moved
along the base of the Coconino. And then in some places, it's
been injected downward into the hermit formation.
So the reason that these are important
is because it eliminates a lot of time from Grand Canyon history.
The Coconino was supposedly
laid down in a conventional view about 275 million years ago.
And then
the Bright Angel Fault, which
I think made these injectites, happened about 50 million years ago, more or less.
And so that's 225 million years of time difference.
And what's the problem here
is that the Coconino had to remain fairly unlithified
or it wasn't turned into a solid rock for 225 million years.
And then when the earthquake happened, there's still water in the Coconino and
a process called liquefaction happens, which pulls those sand grains apart
and the sand was able to flow down into the cracks.
And so this interpretation, I think, is the best interpretation.
And the problem with that conventional geologist might have with it
is it eliminates 225 million years from Grand Canyon history
because we still have to have the Coconino soft and not turned into rock
when it gets pushed down into these cracks making the injectites.
The other significant thing that we want to look here
at this boundary is how flat the boundary is.
In the conventional way of thinking, there's supposed to be 10
to 12 million years between these two formations.
And yet we see very little evidence of weathering
or erosion at this contact.
But the reason the conventional geologist wants to put a lot of time in between
here is we go 100 miles south towards Sedona.
There's a whole nother formation in between
these two formations called the Schnebly Hill Formation,
and it's about a thousand feet thick and sits right on top of the Hermit.
And then you have the thousand feet of Schnebly Hill
and then you have the Coconino.
So there has to be some time, in the conventional view to deposit that.
We don't have those kind of time problems
within flood geology.
And so what we think happened is the Hermit was laid down
and after the Hermit was laid down, Schnebly Hill was laid down
further to the south at the same time that Coconino began to be laid down
over this whole area, and eventually on top of Schnebly Hill.
So we don't see any evidence of the time here.
We don't see any evidence of the erosion.
And so we think there's there's little evidence of those long
periods of time that are supposed to be between these two layers.