Thank you and it is my pleasure.
> When referring to localized high energy currents in the
> rapid formation of the Grand Canyon, you wrote:
>
> > Can you point to such confined and localized high energy
> > currents in today's oceans? In a water covered earth, the
> > the currents would spread out and cause eddies.
>
> I recall reading one scenario where after the flood water
> receded and the glaciers formed in the resulting cooling
> period, a very large lake formed upstream from the "Proposed
> Grand Canyon Site". The water had gathered behind a
> glacier. When the glacier dam failed, you have the confined
> and localized high energy currents. It was these high
> energy waters that channeled and blasted out the Grand
> Canyon.
Geology accepts catastrophic glacial dams failing, but they don't scoop out
canyons like the Grand Canyon. There is a widely accepted event, the
breaking of the Lake Missoula Dam 18,000 years ago. Dott and Batten write:
In western
Montana, a large basin filled and drained several times to form
Lake Missoula. About 18,000 years ago its moraine dam in
northern Idaho suddenly broke. A wall of water rushed across
eastern Washington with incredible velocity. This catastrophic
flood scoured channels and deposited immense gravel bars over a
large part of the Columbia Plateau (channeled scablands)."~Robert
H. Dott, Jr., and Roger L. Batten, Evolution of the Earth, (St.
Louis: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1971), p. 447
A 2,000 foot head of impounded water swept across the Columbia Plateau. The
erosion was only able to scoop out basins as deep as 135 feet and left river
bars 100 feet high and more. "Current ripples 10 feet and more in height"
were scattered over the region. A 200 square mile gravel delta was laid
done at the joining of the Willamette and Columbia valleys. But no Grand
Canyon was excavated. (See J. H. Bretz, "The Lake Missoula Floods and the
Channeled Scabland", Journal of Geolgoy 77:505-543, 1969) and Bretz Jour. of
Geol. 23, pp 139-149 and Vol 31, pp 617-649
The appeal that is made to such a catastrophic flood to excavate the Grand
Canyon didn't do it elsewhere. So the suggested mechanism of excavation
does not seem to accomplish what Austin and others believe it should.
>
> A current day example exists. When Mount St. Helens
> erupted, and Spirit Lake was forced down the mountain, a
> "mini grand canyon" was formed. Another situation developed
> in that a log mat was formed from the trees that were made
> homeless in the eruption. The log mat was an accumulation
> of these trees on lower bodies of water. When divers
> explored under this mass they discover, not only many layers
> of logs, but many logs that were floating in an upright
> position. Many were sticking up out of the layers of
> recently deposited sediment. Can one draw a conclusion that
> these upright logs would form fossils of trees that are
> upright through different layers of sediment rock? And that
> there are such fossils that have been discovered? Is this
> not a case for castastrophism? (I sure hope that's a word)
Remember that volcanic ash is very soft and of ONE lithology. The Grand
Canyon has many different lithologies. The situation at Spirit Lake is quite
different from the Grand Canyon.
glenn
Adam, Apes, and Anthropology: Finding the Soul of Fossil Man
and
Foundation, Fall and Flood
http://www.isource.net/~grmorton/dmd.htm