Now 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.
The very fact that there's vegetation there means that there's stability.
There was lots of erosion in the path 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, 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
Schneebly Hill Formation.
And above that, you can see the first white unit is the Coconino Sandstone.
And above that, you've got the Turoweep, and at the horizon, you've got the Kaibab
limestone, which is the rim rock of the Grand Canyon.
And here we are, 70 more miles from the Grand Canyon, and these layers are still here.
And the scale is what's important that 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 flat lying 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
a stack of pancake layers across northern Africa all the way to southern Israel.
So that's across 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 the 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 out here at a landscape where, over time, we've had erosion.
It's still going on down in the creeks when there's the 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 of 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 valleys?
Correct.
And we've got an excellent illustration of the point here.
We've already highlighted that red sandstone — the Sneebly Hill Formation.
Yes.
But that doesn't sound familiar to me.
No, that's the Sneebly 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 Sneebly
Hill Formation between the Coconino and the Hermit.
And this Sneebly Hill Formation — 800 to 1,000 feet thick over an area of 1,000 square
miles — had to have been formed very rapidly.
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 the Sneebly Hill Formation in 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
5 to 10 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 Sneebly 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 Sneebly Hill
Formation here had to form very exceedingly rapidly.
So in essence, we have millions and millions of years missing, according to the conventional
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 Mu'av limestone.
Again, you can see in many places a knife-edge boundary with no evidence of any erosion.
They claim there are 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 questions, doesn't it?
Absolutely.
Because the time scale 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 and 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'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 different slightly-leaked particle sizes over an enormous area 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 1980, 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 that there's bands within it that are sloping.
We call those crossbeds.
And what they indicate is that you had underwater sand waves 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, underwater, 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 a 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 — of these sloping beds.
Whereas underwater, 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 formed 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 a underwater sand deposition.
Added to that, 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.
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 walked —
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 up 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,
and 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've 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 up enough water.
But that dries out very quickly,
and then you get more sand, dry sand,
and it tends to distort.
These are sharp outlines,
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 have 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, 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 got 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 Mu'ave Limestone.
So the grain sizes get finer as you go up,
and that's a recurring feature of these megasequences.
The best way to explain it is with the 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 at the 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
you find 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 a quaternary for subdivisions.
Now, some of those names have been changed,
but they were originally established by geologists
who believed in the flood.
That was kind of the original geological column.
Correct.
So there's no… there's no contriving about this.
It was originally established on the flood paradigm.
But then there were geologists like Murchison and Sedgwick
and Lyle 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 been 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…
within 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.
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