The Grand Canyon's Horseshoe Bend, where creationisst believe a raging torrent of flood water did a 180 degree turn and headed back the way it came.
The Grand Canyon often features in creationist disinformation websites because it needs to be explained away in terms of a history of Earth lasting only some 6-10,000 years and because it is easy to fool people who want to be fooled that it is somehow evidence if a global flood, and in particular how the water in the alleged flood ran away. Cult frauds also pretend the different rock layers in the canyon wall can all be explained in terms of sediment deposited during their god's supposed genocidal flood.
The truth, as usual with creationist claims, is nothing like the childish myth they like to pretend is real history. In fact, the walls of the Grand Canyon are a record of plate tectonics and climate change over hundreds of millions of years and mesh completely with what is known of Earth's history from other sources.
An indication of how creationists cult leaders are terrified of the information in the walls of the Grand Canyon, can be gauged from the notorious creationist purveyor of disinformation, Andrew Snelling's article on the creationists disinformation site, Answers in Genesis and the lengths he went to to obtain sample without disclosing exactly where he got them from, as related in this article in science. Snelling argued that it discriminated against his religion to require him to provide GPS coordinates of his samples! Clearly, Snelling believes his religion requires his 'science' to lack precision and reproducibility in case someone else tried to replicate his measurements and finds his to be bogus.
Snelling was subsequently given permission to collect samples under supervision and then wrote up his findings to try to explain away the fact that his findings didn't conform to his YEC preconceptions. His excuses include the creationists go-to excuse - the unsubstantiated claim that the uniformly old age of the rock he obtained must be because radioactive decay rates used to be different by several orders of magnitude!
One of Snellings stated objectives was to prove that the deformed Tapeats sandstone deposits, which he assures his readers are not fractured, despite the fact that photographs show fractures, were soft when deformed. He mentions this early in his article but then quietly drops the subject, presumably because his findings contradict his claim.
His findings are soundly refuted here.
Clearly, it is important to creationist cult leaders that their dupes are badly misinformed about the date of the rocks in the walls of the Grand Canyon, and it is obvious why, as this paper by geologists from Utah State University, together with colleagues from the University of New Mexico, Boise State University, Idaho, the University of Las Vegas, Nevada and the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, Denver, Colorado, shows. The rocks at the bottom of the canyon are from the Cambrian, 540 million years before creationists dogma says Earth was made from nothing by magic.
Other rocks map exactly onto what is known of changes in sea level and climate due to plate tectonics and how the canyon itself was carved into those strata is fully explainable in terms of erosion by a river flowing over a river bed that was rising slowly due to forces beneath Earth's crust over a period of millions of years.
Perhaps the most embarrassing thing for creationists is the thing they normally avoid like the plague - the famous Horseshoe bend, which requires their credulous dupes to believe a raging torrent of water, for no apparent reason, changed direction by over 180 degrees and headed back the way it came, when raging torrents of water are notoriously uni-directional.
And why on Earth anyone would imagine the water from a global flood would flow through a canyon in the middle of North America into the Pacific Ocean is anyone's guess and not something Andrew Snelling or any other creationist apologist has ever attempted to explain, simply leaving it to their parochial and culturally chauvinistic dupes to assume that anything important that happened in world history must have happened in the USA.
Tell me all about the Grand Canyon, how and when it was formed and the geological forces that caused it, please. The Grand Canyon is one of the most iconic natural landmarks in the world, known for its immense scale, layered bands of colorful rock, and breathtaking landscapes. It spans approximately 277 miles (446 kilometers) through northern Arizona, averaging 10 miles wide and plunging over a mile deep at its deepest point. The canyon's formation is a result of complex geological processes, with its origins stretching back around 70 million years, though the main forces that carved it into its present form were active primarily within the last 6 million years.And now, as though to knock another nail in the coffin of creation 'geology' the geologists have published their findings open access in the journal of The Geological Society of America, GSA Today and explained it in an article in Utah University's magazine, Utah State Today.
Formation TimelineGeological Forces at Play
- Ancient Beginnings (~1.8 billion years ago)
The oldest rocks in the Grand Canyon, found at the bottom, are metamorphic rocks like schist and igneous granite. These formed from volcanic and sedimentary material that was buried deep in the Earth's crust, heated, and compressed under intense pressure. The presence of these ancient rocks is a reminder that the Earth's crust in this region has undergone multiple cycles of mountain building, erosion, and sedimentation.- Layered Rock Deposition (~525 million to ~270 million years ago)
The flat, sedimentary rock layers that are visible throughout the canyon walls were deposited during different geologic periods. These layers tell a story of changing environments, from ancient oceans to vast sand dunes and floodplains. Each layer reflects different conditions in the past:
- Tapeats Sandstone was laid down in shallow seas during the Cambrian period.
- Bright Angel Shale and Muav Limestone formed in deeper water as the seas advanced.
- Redwall Limestone developed in warm, shallow marine environments, now stained red by iron from other layers.
- Supai Group rocks reveal coastal plains and river systems.
- Coconino Sandstone records ancient desert dunes.
- Kaibab Limestone forms the uppermost layer and indicates a return to shallow seas.
- Uplift of the Colorado Plateau (~70 million to ~6 million years ago)
The Colorado Plateau, where the Grand Canyon is situated, rose slowly over tens of millions of years due to tectonic forces. This uplift accelerated the Colorado River's erosion. Scientists believe that around 6 million years ago, the river began cutting into the plateau in earnest, rapidly deepening the canyon over time. This uplift increased the river's gradient, boosting its erosive power.- Erosion and River Action (~5 to 6 million years ago to present)
The Colorado River, aided by tributaries, rain, snowmelt, and flash floods, carved into the raised plateau. The river's powerful flow cut through rock layers and widened the canyon. As it flowed, the river picked up rock and sediment, which acted like sandpaper against the rock layers, deepening the canyon over millennia. Weathering processes, including freeze-thaw cycles, helped widen and sculpt the canyon by breaking down rock walls over time.The Grand Canyon’s formation is not solely attributed to a single event or cause but rather to a prolonged interplay of tectonic activity, river erosion, and climatic factors over millions of years. Today, the canyon continues to evolve due to ongoing erosion and weathering, albeit much more slowly.
- Tectonic Uplift
The Grand Canyon is largely a product of tectonic uplift, which raised the Colorado Plateau and gave the river the gradient it needed to erode deeply into the rock layers.- Water Erosion
The Colorado River played the most direct role in carving the Grand Canyon. With the energy provided by the gradient, the river could erode deeply and carry sediment away, gradually sculpting the canyon.- Weathering and Erosion
Various weathering processes, like wind, rain, and freeze-thaw cycles, contributed to shaping the canyon. Frost-wedging, in particular, occurs when water enters cracks in the rock, freezes, and expands, causing the rock to break apart over time.
It turns out the fossils in the lowest strata are those of Cambrian organisms from 540 million years ago. There is, of course, no hint of the global layer of sediment with a jumble of fossils from disconnected land massed that a global genocidal flood would inevitably have left, the absence of which falsifies the childish tale:
USU Geologist, Colleagues Rewrite Textbooks With New Insights From Bottom of the Grand Canyon
Geological Society of America Fellow Carol Dehler is part of an NSF-funded, multi-institution team using advanced technology and time-tested knowledge to offer innovative, updated perspectives of an iconic sedimentary record.
Any boomer, gen xer, millennial, gen zer or alpha who’s studied geology has likely gained foundational knowledge from Edwin Dinwiddie McKee’s landmark studies of the Grand Canyon’s sedimentary record — even if they don’t readily recognize McKee’s name.
The legendary scientist, who lived from 1906-1984, studied and documented the stratigraphy and sedimentation of Colorado Plateau geology, especially the Grand Canyon’s Cambrian Tonto Group, for more than 50 years. His time-tested tenets have influenced generations of geoscientists.
The Tonto Group holds a treasure trove of sedimentary layers and fossils chronicling the Cambrian Explosion some 540 million years ago, when the first vertebrates and animals with hard shells rapidly proliferated and sea levels rose to envelope continents with emerging marine life. McKee marveled at this pivotal geologic period, yet had no knowledge of plate tectonics or global sea level change, and his ideas were often shunned by the scientific community of the time.
Professor Carol Dehler, c-first author
Department of Geosciences,
Utah State University, Logan, Utah, USA.
Yet, what if McKee could have fast-forwarded through time and availed himself of current-day stratigraphic, depositional and paleontological models, data and technological muscle?
Dehler, with colleagues James Hagadorn of the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, Frederick Sundberg, Karl Karlstrom and Laura Crossey of the University of New Mexico, Mark Schmitz of Boise State University and Stephen Rowland of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, along with their students and interns, have employed these tools to construct an updated and insightful framework of McKee’s foundational ideas. They report their efforts in “The Cambrian of the Grand Canyon: Refinement of a Classic Stratigraphic Model,” the cover story of the November 2024 print issue of the Geological Society of America’s GSA Today journal, published online Oct. 23, 2024.
The team’s research was supported by a National Science Foundation Division of Earth Sciences grant.
The Grand Canyon is an epic Rosetta Stone for geology, and we’re helping to further decode it. Because Grand Canyon rocks record global changes in climate and tectonics, our work help us understand strata that were deposited worldwide during the Cambrian period.
You can see clues and discern at least part of what happened, but determining how it happened and the sequence of events takes time and effort. Just like the scene of a crime, the rock record of the Grand Canyon is much more complicated than what we currently know and its story is still being written.
James Hagadorn, co-author
Denver Museum of Nature & Science
Denver, Colorado, USA.
Studying the Tonto Group, [James Hagadorn] says, is like being a detective at a crime scene.
Dehler, a GSA Fellow, says the team’s new model offers three key pathways for deeper understanding.
From the Tonto Group’s 500-meter-thick strata, we’re learning about sea-level rise and the effects of catastrophic tropical storms – probably more powerful than today’s devastating hurricanes – during a period of very hot temperatures when the Earth was ice-free.
Professor Carol Dehler.
Sea levels were so high during this time period, Dehler says, that rocks like the Tonto Group were deposited atop every continent on Earth, as seas bathed the continents in a complex mosaic of shallow marine, coastal and terrestrial environments.
Further, she says, advanced chronological tools are revealing new information about the tempo of sedimentation, as well as how rapidly trilobites and other “disgusting, cockroach-looking creatures” diversified.
Publication:Our findings are a reminder science is a process. Our work in the Grand Canyon, one of the world’s most well-known and beloved landscapes, connects people to this science in a very personal way.
James Hagadorn
AbstractSo, despite the desperate attempts by creationist cult disinformation peddlers like Dr Andrew Snelling, to fool creationist dupes into thinking the Grand Canyon is evidence that Earth is only 6-10,000 years old, real scientists consistently show that it is evidence of a very old Earth, with the lower strata deposited around a shallow warm sea about 540 million years ago, and that the erosion process itself began about 6 million years ago as the Colorado Plateau began to rise under the Colorado River, increasing its gradient and so its erosive power.
The Cambrian Tonto Group of the Grand Canyon was used by Edwin McKee in 1945 to make an insightful visual representation of how sedimentary facies record transgression across a craton — a common conceptual framework still used in geologic education. Although the tenets of McKee’s facies diagram persist, the integration of new stratigraphy, depositional models, paleontology, biostratigraphy, and other data is refining the underlying dynamics of this cratonic transgression. Instead of McKee’s interpretation of one major transgression with only minor regressions, there are at least five stratigraphic sequences, of which the lower three are separated by disconformities. These hiatal surfaces likely represent erosion of previously deposited Cambrian sediments that were laid down on the tropical, pre-vegetated landscape. Rather than being fully marine in origin, these sequences were formed by a mosaic of depositional environments including braided coastal plain, eolian, marginal marine, and various shallow marine environments. McKee, not having the insights of sequence stratigraphy and plate tectonics, concluded that the preservation of these sediments were due to predepositional topography and subsidence of the “geosyncline.” Our modern interpretation is that accommodation space was a result of eustasy and differential subsidence on the continental margin. Our modified depositional model provides a more effective teaching tool for fundamentals and nuances of modern stratigraphic thinking, using the Tonto Group as a still-influential type location for understanding transgressive successions.
Refuting Creationism: Why Creationism Fails In Both Its Science And Its Theology
A systematic refutation of creationism, exposing the childish parodies, fallacies and pseudo-science that underpins it. This book takes the reader through the major themes of creationism from the Big Bang, through abiogenesis and the origin of the genetic code, the evidence for evolution, falsifying the claims of creationism with scientific evidence. Also exposed is the deliberate disinformation to be found on creationist websites and publications and the absurdity of the belief that the Bible, particularly the origin myths in Genesis, is real science and genuine history, written or inspired by an omniscient, inerrant creator god
Available in Hardcover, Paperback or ebook for Kindle
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