Other layers are made of debris or sharply eroded, softer rock and are caned at about 45 degrees. The Tonto Platform, about a thousand feet above the river, is the closest one comes to the horizontal, but it undulates constantly and is never truly level...At an elevation of about 3,000 feet, the scrub-covered Tonto Platform – which is nowhere really level – allows one to traverse the Grand Canyon more or less horizontally. The Tonto Trail...runs for about 92 miles.
For the record, evolutionists believe that the Tonto edifice of the Grand Canyon occurred during the 70-million year Cambrian period, since it contains many fossils associated with the “Cambrian explosion.” But again, this is all based on the unproven and anomalous theory of uniformitarianism, besides the fact that evolutionists have found no fossils before or after the Cambrian period, in addition to the fact that the fossils in the Cambrian period reveal no transitional forms.

The Work of Johannes Walther:

Other secular scientists have proposed a different scenario. A few years after the work of Hutton and Lyell came the geological studies performed by Johannes Walther in the latter nineteenth century. Walther began his studies by examining sedimentary deposits that stretched from land to ocean. To test a hypothesis of his, Walther drilled out a vertical cylinder of sediment midway in the advancement. He found that the various layers in the cylinder were in the same order as the leading edge of the advancement into the ocean. From this evidence he reasoned that the layers were being laid horizontally (not vertically, as Hutton and Lyell had proposed).

Walther performed the same testing in the bay of Naples. He found that after drilling out a vertical column of sediment, it revealed the same sequence of layers as the sediments laying horizontally. He concluded that Hutton and Lyell’s theory (i.e., that layers on the top were forming later than the layers on the bottom) was wrong. After Walther, however, not much experimentation was put into his discovery.

But in 1965, the American geologist Edwin McKee found evidence of Walther’s horizontal sedimentation in one of the branches of the Colorado river after it overflowed its banks from a torrential rain. The stratified layers reached a thickness of twelve feet in only forty-eight hours, and showed the same particle sorting and bedding planes as in all other sites previously investigated by Hutton and Lyell. Hutton and Lyell would have had to interpret McKee’s evidence as interruptions in sedimentation wherein one strata would have hardened before the next layer was placed on top, but, of course, this type of hardening would be impossible within the space of forty-eight hours.

Horizontal sedimentation was also confirmed by experimental evidence from coastal marine floods. In the 1970's and 1980's several teams of scientists bored vertical columns in the bottom of the Pacific ocean. To their amazement, they found that their samples confirmed Walther’s theory. Thus, not only were layers of sediment being laid horizontally in bays and beaches, but also in the deep sea. Germane to our topic is the fact that the same tests were performed on the Grand Canyon, and with the same results – the deposits showed evidence of being laid horizontally, not vertically.

With this evidence in hand, various other scientists set out to confirm or deny this intriguing phenomenon. In the 1994 publication, Grand Canyon: A Monument to Catastrophe, geologist Stephen Austin offers an explanation by citing the work of sedimentologist D. M. Rubin on the relation between hydraulic conditions and stratified structures in San Francisco Bay, which Rubin had originally published in Sedimentary Geology. Rubin found that with a certain speed of current, depth of water, and size of sedimentary particles, a specific sequence of layers were formed. Austin also refers to Jay Sufford’s work in Sedimentary Patrology, which summarized a series of thirty-nine flume experiments on the relations between hydraulics and stratification, and which found the same results as Rubin.(8)

To his amazement, Austin discovered the same sequential depositing of layers in the sedimentary rocks of the Grand Canyon as those in Rubin’s experiments. One of these was the 800 kilometer sample of the Grand Canyon, which Keating recognized as the Tonto Platform. It comprises three layers which extend east to west. The upper layer is made of limestone; the middle layer of clay; and the lower layer of sandstone. As predicted by Walther, the same sequence of layers are found side-by-side as those found from top to bottom.

From this evidence, Austin determined the hydraulic conditions which would have been necessary to form the horizontal layers observed in the Tonto Group. Austin found that a velocity of water moving at two meters per second, and causing the water to rise nearly 2,000 meters above the ocean level, would have been sufficient. He further found that all this could happen within a matter of two days (not millions of years). Not surprisingly, the velocity of the water needed to build the Tonto Group corresponded precisely with the velocities discovered in the thirty-nine flume experiments performed by Jay Sufford.

How Was the Grand Canyon Formed?

Thus, sedimentation occurs as follows. The advancing water travels at differing velocities. Heavier or coarser particles deposit before lighter particles in a fast-moving current. As the water level increases, the speed of the current decreases, and at that point the sediments deposited would be proportionately finer, yet all of the particles would be deposited at or near the same time, resulting in the sandstone-clay-limestone sequence as we see in the Grand Canyon. During the point at which the river or ocean arrived at its maximum level there would be little or no current. The finest particles would deposit at a rate of about 2 centimeters per day. (This, of course, shows that superposition does, indeed, occur, but not over millions of years). This process would be interrupted when, as the waters began to subside, the current reappeared.

The curious feature about the layers in the Grand Canyon, and all other sedimetary depositions, is that the layers are almost perfectly bordered against one another. That is, you see a few vertical feet of limestone layer with hardly any variation in the width of the layer extending for hundreds of feet. The next layer of clay, or sandstone, is just as perfect. That doesn’t happen very easily with vertical sedimentation dependent on the bottom layer hardening before the top layer is added. Conversely, it occurs quite easily in horizontal sedimentation.

Moreover, it is quite unlikely that erosion over millions of years could have produced what we see in the Grand Canyon, for erosion is not locale specific. It erodes all that it touches uniformly without distinction. Cataclysms, on the other hand, are locale specific, as well as possessing the tremendous forces necessary to make dramatic changes in the landscape (as we see in the Grand Canyon), and they do their damage in a matter of days or weeks, not millions of years.

As for the huge gorges in the Grand Canyon, they would have been formed as the water from the cataclysm began to recede. As it recedes, it creates velocities of current that are sufficient enough to cut deep gorges into the lightly-packed sediments deposited during initial stratification. This does not happen today on a similar scale because the sediments, over thousands of years, have become hardened, and thus relatively resistant to effacing.

I say “relatively resistant” to effacing, because not too long ago we had even more proof that gorges the size of those in the Grand Canyon can be formed in a very short time. In 1980, Mt. St. Helens erupted. The most remarkable things have happened in the years following the eruption. In the May 2000 issue of National Geographic, geological scientist Peter Frenzen writes concerning a canyon cut by the water flow created by the eruption: “You’d expect a hardrock canyon to be thousands, even hundreds of thousands of years old, but this was cut in less than a decade.” Not only were the geologists shocked, but ecologists were just as surprised. Ecologist David Wood writes: “All of us were surprised at the rate at which this landscape was colonized again. We were thinking, Gosh, how long is it going to be before anything come back here?” The rest of the article answers the question: “Within just a few years scientists found flora and fauna pioneering in the niches created by the eruption’s various geological disturbances.”(9)

In conclusion, apparently unknown to Keating, there is abundant experimental evidence for the Grand Canyon being made in a matter of days or weeks, not over millions of years. Conversely, since the stratification theory used by evolutionists has never been proven experimentally, only assumed, then there remains little objection they can raise to these findings. As a result, their whole theory of the geologic column, including the multi-millions of years separating the Cambrian from such periods as the Jurassic or Pleistocene, will have to be discarded until they can provide experimental results to the contrary.(10) In the meantime, I thank Mr. Keating for allowing me to make this evidence available to the public.

Robert Sungenis
Catholic Apologetics Intl.
8-25-03

Footnotes:

1) This Rock, “The Testimony of Rocky Halls: A Grand Canyon Trek Gives Lie to the Young Earth Hypothesis,” July/August 2003, pp. 20-24.

2) Washington Times, August 17, 2003, in article titled, “Did he know the age of the Earth?,” p. B7.

3) In his Hexameron, Basil gives a long list of Greek writers advocating the evolutionary hypothesis (Homily 1, NPNF II, vol. 8, p. 53). Likewise, Basil dismissed the allegorical interpretation of Origen as “old wive’s tales” (The Hexameron, Homily 3, 2). Hippolytus also tells of his struggles against the Greek ideas of evolution in The Refutation of All Heresies, “Ch. X: Leucippus and His Atomic Theory.” Hippolytus also critiques “Thales, Founder of Greek Astronomy;” “Pythagoras on his Cosmogony and the Transmigration of Souls”; Empedocles on “Causality”; Heraclitus on his “Theory of Flux”; Anaximenes on the idea of “Infinite Air”; Anaxagoras on his “Theory of Mind and Efficient Cause”; Parmenides on his “Theory of Unity,” and many other Greek philosophic and scientific ideas.

4) The Hexameron, Homily 1, NPNF II, vol. 8, p. 53.

5) The Refutation of All Heresies, Ch. X: Leucippus and His Atomic Theory. Hippolytus also critiques Thales, Founder of Greek Astronomy; Pythagoras on his Cosmogony and the Transmigration of Souls; Empedocles on Causality; Heraclitus on his Theory of Flux; Anaximenes on the idea of “Infinite Air”; Anaxagoras on his Theory of Mind and Efficient Cause; Parmenides on his Theory of Unity, and other Greek philosophic and scientific ideas.

6) Ibid. St. Basil was, without doubt, the greatest patristic authority espousing the six-day special creation model. At one point he calls Origen’s attempt to allegorize Genesis as “dreams and old wive’s tales” (The Hexameron, Homily 3, 2).

7) Dr. Kevin Henke has developed the theory of “Actualism,” which states that “the geologic record is the product of both NATURAL catastrophes (like local floods, landslides, earthquakes, meteorite impacts, and hurricanes) and slow and gradual processes (such as lakes drying up over long periods of time and precipitating salt deposits).” But those who advocate Actualism invariably deny that one of those catastrophes was the Noahic flood recorded in Genesis (e.g., Dalrymple, Hubbert, et al).

8) Geologist G. R. Morton offers a critique of Austin’s book on the web home.entouch.net/dmd/grandcanyon.htm, but it is all based on uniformitarian geology, with gives no room to catastrophe to explain unusual formation in the earth rock structures. As a result, secular geologists can never prove their arguments. Since they refuse to accept Scripture’s information that, whatever uniform processes existed, they were interrupted by the Great Flood, they can never come to the truth. The bottom line is that Scripture gives information about the earth’s past that men, of themselves, simply do not know.

9) National Geographic, May 2000, pp. 117, 121.

10) The information for this analysis was taken from the material published by the Geological Society of France, 1993, and Julien Lan and Guy Berthault, “Experiments on stratification of heterogeneous sand mixtures,” CEN Technical Journal 8 (1):3750, 1994; Guy Berthault, “Experiments on lamination of sediments,” CEN Technical Journal 3:2529, 1988.

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