The Geologic Column
Sean D. Pitman, M.D.
May 2006
www.DetectingDesign.com
Features of the Geologic Column
• Made of layers of sedimentary rock
• Layers generally very flat/even relative to
each other
• Found generally all over the globe
– Some areas have missing layers
– Some areas have most if not all the layers
• Found on mountains such as the Swiss Alps,
Mt. Everest, American Rockies, Himalayas,
Appalachians, etc . . .
• Popularly thought to record millions and even
billions of years of Earth’s history
An Old Geologic Column?
Foot of the Book Cliffs
northwest of Grand Junction, CO
• Layers are flat/even relative to each other
• Layers often extend over hundreds of
thousands of square miles
• Where is the expected unevenness usually
seen with weathering?
The Speed of Erosion
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Rockies currently uplifted at 100-1000 cm/Kyr
No change in elevation
Erosion rate is matching uplift rate
Current uplift thought to have started 70
million years ago (Laramide Orogeny)
• An erosion rate of 100 cm/Kyr equals 1,000
meters of erosion per million years or an
incredible 70,000 meters in 70 million years
• Total thickness of layers in this region is
~3,500 meters – including the Tertiary layers
• Ruxton and McDougall (1967) report erosion rates of 8
cm/Kyr near sea level and 52 cm/Kyr at an altitude of
975 m in the Hydrographers Range in Papua
• 92 cm/Kyr for Guatemala-Mexico Border Mountains
• Himalayas = 200 cm/Kyr
• 800 cm/Kyr for Mt. Rainier region
• 1900 cm/Kyr New Guinea volcano
• Chugach and St. Elias mountain ranges in southeast
Alaska, are currently eroding at "50 to 100 times" the
current Rocky Mountain rate - i.e., at about 5 to 10
cm/year or 50,000 to 100,000 meters or erosion per
million years
• Yet, many of these mountain ranges still have very "old"
sedimentary layers on their surfaces? Go figure . . .
Ariel Roth: http://www.grisda.org/origins/13064.htm
Mt. Everest
• Thought to be about 50 million years old
• Himalayan erosion rate ~200cm/kyr
• Just 100 cm/Kyr of erosion equals ~50,000
vertical meters of erosion in 50 My
• Still covered by Ordovician limestone - only about
halfway down the column!
• Perhaps the layers used to be much thicker?
– Only some 6000 m of sediment once covered Everest
– Harutaka Sakai suggest have of Everest slid off 20 Ma
– Ordovician exposed for 20 Ma and its still there?
Really?
The Colorado Plateau
• Colorado River sediment equals 500,000 tons per day
– before Glenn Canyon dam
• Sandstone = 140 pounds per cubic foot
• 7.1 million cubic feet of erosion per day from an area of
~200,000 square miles (~5.57 trillion sqft)
• 2.6 billion cubic feet of erosion per year
• Colorado Plateau uplifted ~15 million years ago?
• 38,000 trillion cubic feet of erosion in 15 million years
• 7,000 vertical feet (2,100 m) eroded in 15 million years
• Tertiary sediments survived atop the Grand Staircase?
~2000 m
Why did ~2000 vertical meters erode in one region,
but not in the other? Was there really an additional
2,100 meters of tertiary sediment above Brian Head?
Shouldn’t the higher reliefs erode more quickly?
Brian Head
Oligocene
32 Ma
Kaibab Limestone
Paleozoic
250 Ma
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•
•
Today’s continents average 0.875 km above sea level
Land surface area: 148,647,000 sq km
Cubic km above sea level: 130,066,125 km3
An average of several references suggest that about
13.6 km3 of solid material are carried by all the rivers
of the Earth into the oceans every year
– 31,000 million metric tons/year
• Time needed to erode away all land currently
above sea level: ~9.5 million years
http://worldatlas.com/geoquiz/thelist.htm
What About Human Impact?
“Humans have simultaneously increased
the sediment transport by global rivers
through soil erosion (by 0.6 - 2.3 billion
metric tons per year), yet reduced the flux
of sediment reaching the world’s coasts (by
0.3 - 1.4 billion metric tons per year)
because of retention within reservoirs.”
James P. M. Syvitski, Charles J. Vo¨ro¨smarty, Albert J. Kettner, Pamela Green Impact of Humans
on the Flux of Terrestrial Sediment to the Global Coastal Ocean, Science, VOL 308, 15 APRIL 2005
• C. R. Twidale recognized this problem as far
back as a 1976 in the American Journal of
Science:
“Even if it is accepted that estimates of the
contemporary rate of degradation of land surfaces
are several orders too high (Dole and Stabler,
1909; Judson and Ritter, 1964; see also Gilluly,
1955; Menard, 1961) to provide an accurate
yardstick of erosion in the geological past there has
surely been ample time for the very ancient
features preserved in the present landscape to
have been eradicated several times over. . . ”
“ . . . Yet the silcreted land surface of central Australia has
survived perhaps 20 m.y. of weathering and erosion
under varied climatic conditions, as has the laterite
surface of the northern areas of the continent. The
laterite surface of the Gulfs region of South Australia is
even more remarkable, for it has persisted through some
200 m.y. of epigene [surface] attack. The forms
preserved on the granite residuals of Eyre Peninsula
have likewise withstood long periods of exposure and yet
remain recognizably the landforms that developed under
weathering attack many millions of years ago. . . The
survival of these paleoforms [as Kangaroo Island] is in
some degree an embarrassment to all of the commonly
accepted models of landscape development.”
• Dott and Batten (1971) noted:
"North America is being denuded at a rate
that could level it in a mere 10 million
years, or, to put it another way, at the same
rate, ten North Americas could have been
eroded since middle Cretaceous time 100
m.y. ago."
• B.W. Sparks (1986) in Geomorphology:
"Some of these rates [of erosion] are obviously
staggering; the Yellow River could peneplain
[flatten out] an area with the average height that of
Everest in 10 million years. The student has two
courses open to him: to accept long extrapolations
of short-term denudation [erosion] figures and
doubt the reality of the erosion surfaces, or to
accept the erosion surfaces and be skeptical
about the validity of long extrapolations of present
erosion rates."
The “Smooth” Grand
Canyon Dome
~2000 m
How did Red Butte Survive 5.5 million years?
Red Butte, Arizona
Beartooth Butte
• 300-400 million yeas old
• Same layers: Paleozoic
Beartooth Butte, Wyoming
http://www.geology.wisc.edu/~maher/air/air07.htm
Sheep Mountain, WY
Eroded Dome of Sheep Mountain
Eroded Dome of Sheep Mountain
Little Sheep Mountain area, Bighorn Basin, WY
Little Sheep Mountain area, Bighorn Basin, WY
Pryor Mountains north of Lovell, WY
Bighorn River Canyon
Between Pryor and Bighorn Mountains, MT
10 miles east of Moab, UT
25 miles northwest of Twin Falls, ID
W
S
N
E
The Real Grand Canyon
Straight shot with few twists or U-shaped turns
Scablands of eastern Washington
Deccan Traps, India
• Thick pile of basalt lava flows (~2,000 m thick)
• Cover 500,000 km2 with a volume of >1,000,000 km3
• Thought to have formed about 65 mya over the course of
30,000 years and played a role in the extinction of the
dinosaurs
• Individual flows understood to form very quickly (a few
days) because they cover over 100 miles
• Time between lava flows: 2 to 3 hundred years
• Not enough time for significant erosion between flows
Deccan Traps, India
Granite Boulders, Deccan Plateau
• If Deccan Plateau and Deccan Traps formed
some 65 mya what would erosion do to them
over this time?
• Current rates of at least 4 cm/Kyr for granite
and16 cm/Kyr for basalt equals 2,600 meters
and 10,400 meters of erosion respectively
• How did the Deccan Plateau (granite), much
less the Traps (basalt) survive?
Columbia River Basalt Group
• Northeastern US
• 163,000 sq Km
• 300 individual flows
extending up to 750 Km
from their origin
• The CRBG is believed to
span the Miocene Epoch
over a period of 11 million
years (from 17 to 6 million
years ago via radiometric
dating)
CRBG
• Average time between flows = 36,000
years
– Enough time for 6 to 7 meters (19 to 23
feet) of vertical erosion – yet no evidence?
• Several examples where two or three
different flows within the CRBG mix with
each other
• Erosion rates too high?
• Some suggest rates <0.5 cm/Kyr for exposed basaltic
rocks
• Real time study by Riebe et al (2001) on erosion rates of
the granites in the Sierra Nevada region
– Average of 4-5 cm per 1,000 years (Kyr)
– Range of between 2.0 cm to 6.1 cm per Kyr
– Independent of very different climactic conditions
• Lasaga and Rye (Yale University)
– Basalts from the CRBG erode, long term, “about 4
times as fast as non-basaltic rocks” (Idaho Batholith)
• Basalt erosion would therefore average 16 to 20 cm/Kyr
(6-7 m per 36 Kyr)
• Several thousand years worth of erosion can occur in
one year (episodic erosion - Idaho Batholith, 1997)
– (http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2001HyPr...15.3025M)
• Lincoln Porphyry lava flows of Colorado
– Originally thought to be a single unit
because of the geographic proximity of the
outcrops and the mineralogical and
chemical similarities throughout the
formation
– Revised after radiometric dating placed
various layers almost 30 My apart in time
– No erosion despite hundreds of thousands
of years between layers
Tertiary lava flows in the Gunnedah Basin
sequence exist between Triassic and Jurassic
sediments which are thought to be over 100
million years older. Over a large horizontal
scale, these flows grade imperceptibly into lavas
which overlie Lower Tertiary sedimentary rock.
Consequently, the lava flows that are found
between the Triassic and Jurassic are
considered Tertiary! Otherwise, geologists
would have to acknowledge that everything
between Jurassic and Early Tertiary is
contemporaneous!
- Robert Kingham (1998) Australian Geologic Survey Organization
Younger With Time?
• What is one of the strongest
evidences that the Geologic Column
is much older than YEC notions of
“less than 10,000 years”?
• “The Grand Canyon lava dams
required hundreds of thousands of
years to erode – each!”
The Baby Grand?
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•
•
•
Ed Stiles, "Is the Grand Canyon a
Geologic Infant?" The University of
Arizona News, OPI, July 18, 2002
2000 foot GC lava dams collapsed
within 80 minutes!
Huge wall of water suddenly released
“37 times the flow of the largest
flooding of the Mississippi River”
• Huge amounts of rapidly moving water equal
huge amounts of rapid erosion
• Certain portions of the Grand Canyon, once
thought to be up to 5 million years old (Marble
Canyon and the Inner Gorge), “may be as
young as 600,000 years old”
• Initial dating of 5 My backed up by K/Ar dating,
now thought to be inaccurate in this region due
to the lack of complete removal of the argon
daughter product at the time of initial formation
of the lava dams
• Mather Gorge and Holtwood
Gorge in Pennsylvania
• Used to be 180 million years old
• July, 2004: Luke J. Reusser, a
geologist at the University of
Vermont in Burlington, used
measurements of beryllium-10
that builds up in quartz when
exposed to cosmic rays to redate these gorges to just 13,000
years
• Younger now by 4 orders of
magnitude!
Monument Valley
Over 50 million years of erosion?
Ripple Marks?
“Priest & Nuns” of Castle Rock
SW view of Castle Valley, 10 miles east of Moab, UT
Arches National Park
100 million years of erosion
in southeastern Utah?
• More than 2,000 arches within 73,000 acres
of southeastern Utah
• Once buried by almost 1 mile of sediment
• Local uplift caused cracks to form 100 million
years ago
• Subsequent erosion expanded the cracks to
form the fins and arches that we see today
Arches National Park, UT
Entrada sandstone (Jurassic)
Arches Nation Park, UT
Landscape Arch, 291 ft.
Landscape Arch
• Erosion rates too high for the
layers to still be there, much less
thin walled high-relief fins to
survive for tens of millions of years
• Note also that only the surface
layers of these fins show any
evidence of significant erosion
Paraconformities
Supai Group
30 million years
Redwall Limestone
150 million years
Muav Limestone
Paraconformity – sediments on sediments (same orientation)
no obvious erosion surface
(Boggs, p. 456)
Redwall
Paraconformities
• Millions of years, no sedimentary layer
• Where did it go? No evidence of erosion
• How does solid rock interdigitate over
and over again with sediments that
come along millions of years later?
• Top layers of GC region are Permian (250 to 290 my)
• Next should come the Pennsylvanian (290-320 my) –
Not there! 30 my Completely missing?
• Permian rests direction on the Redwall Limestone
(Mississippian; ~325 to 345 my)
• Red color of the Redwall Limestone result of iron
oxide derived from the overlying Supai Assemblage
• Interesting that many meters of solid rock could be
stained so completely and so evenly by iron oxide
from overlying sediments
• Below the Redwall Limestone should
come the Devonian, Silurian, and
Ordovician layers (totaling more than
150 million years of time), but they too
are completely missing except for a few
small "lenses" of Devonian
• Redwall is found resting directly on and
interdigitating with the Muav Limestone
- which contains many trilobites and
other Cambrian fossils
Dead Horse Point, Utah
Gaps cover 250,000 sq. km
• N.D. Newell, in the 1984 issue of the
Princeton University Press, made a very
interesting and revealing comment
concerning this paraconformity phenomenon:
"A puzzling characteristic of the erathem boundaries
and of many other major biostratigraphic boundaries
[boundaries between differing fossil assemblages] is
the general lack of physical evidence of subaerial
exposure. Traces of deep leaching, scour,
channeling, and residual gravels tend to be lacking,
even where the underlying rocks are cherty
limestones (Newell, 1967b). These boundaries are
paraconformities that are usually identifiable only by
paleontological [fossil] evidence."
• In an earlier paper Newell noted:
"A remarkable aspect of
paraconformities in limestone sequences is
general lack of evidence of leaching of the
undersurface. Residual sods and karst
surfaces that might be expected to result
from long subaerial exposure are lacking or
unrecognized. . . The origin of
paraconformities is uncertain, and I
certainly do not have a simple solution to
this problem."
• T. H. Van Andel in Nature, 1981:
"I was much influenced early in my
career by the recognition that two thin coal
seams in Venezuela, separated by a foot of
grey clay and deposited in a coastal
swamp, were respectively of Lower
Palaeocene and Upper Eocene age. The
outcrops were excellent but even the
closest inspection failed to turn up the
precise position of that 15 Myr gap."
Empire Mt., Southern Az
Older on top of Younger
• “Nonconformity”
• Cretaceous Rock
capped by “older”
Permian Limestone
– 150 my older
• Undulating contact zone
• No evidence of
overthrusting
– No scraping, gouging, or
linear striations
– Undulations not
smoothed off
Angular Unconformity
Happened slowly? – or catastrophically?
Clastic Dikes
Coconino Sand Dunes
• Coconino sand dunes have an average slope angle
of 25° while the average slope angle of modern
desert dunes is 30-34° (the “resting” angle of dry
sand)
• Sand dunes formed by underwater currents do not
have as high an average slope angle as desert dunes
and do not have “avalanche” faces as commonly as
deserts dunes do
• Some crisp avalanche faces are found in the
Coconino Sandstone dunes suggesting that at least
some exposure to open air occurred, but such
exposure may have been intermittent and relatively
brief
• Grain “frosting” occurs both in desert environments
as well as during underwater chemical “cementing”
during sandstone formation
Varves
• Lambert and Hsü (1979) measured "varves" in Lake
Walensee, Switzerland and found up to five laminae
deposited during one year
• From 1811, which was a clear marker point (because
a newly built canal discharged into the lake), until
1971, a period of 160 years, they found the number
of laminae ranged between 300 and 360 instead of
the expected one per year or 160
– Our investigations supported de Geer's first
contention that sediment-laden floodwaters could
generate turbidity underflows to deposit varves,
but threw doubt on his second interpretation that
varves or varve-like sediment are necessarily
annual. (Lambert and Hsü, p. 454)
• Julien, Lan and Berthault (1994)
experimentally produced laminations by
slowly pouring mixtures of sand,
limestone and coal into a cylinder of still
water
• Using a variety of materials, they found
that laminae formed if there were
differences in size and density of the
materials and that the thickness of the
laminae depended upon differences in
grain size and density
• In many cases where large ice lobes or glaciers sit or float
in lakes, there is year round delivery of sediments and
turbidite activity occurs almost continually resulting in
graded laminae that are not true varves. (Quigley, p. 152)
• How many varve-like layers form from year to year
becomes anyone's guess. Wood (1947) describes peak
river inflows after light rain that deposited three varve-like
couplets in two weeks. Just as we have seen in many
situations, e.g., stalagmite and canyon formation, strata
deposition, and fossilization, time is not the essential
factor for their development, although evolutionists insist
that such things took much time to form. While
evolutionary catastrophists admit rapid formation, they
almost invariably propose long periods of tedium between
catastrophic events. (Ager)
Shale Beds
Continental Drift
• 2000 years ago Emphesis was a seaport city, now it
is 5 miles inland
• Louisiana coastline is being lost a 25sq. miles per
year
• US spends $500,000,000 to prevent erosion of the
east and west coasts
• Florida spends $8,000,000 per year
• Past 50 years Washington state has lost over 300
meters of certain of its coastlines
• Northern and north center regions of California erode
at about 30 cm/yr with some areas (Capitola) eroding
at up to 1.5 m/yr (Plant and Griggs 1991).
http://bonita.mbnms.nos.noaa.gov/sitechar/main.html
• Texas is loosing between 0.3 and 15 meters
of coastline per year
• Landmark lighthouse of Cape Hatteras, built
1500 m inland in 1879 has to be moved to
avoid collapse into the ocean
• True all over the world
• Japan literally spends billions of dollars to
prevent erosion
• What would an average of just 1 cm of
coastal erosion/deposition do to the
shape of the continents in 200 million
years?
• The change would be two thousand
kilometers (1,200 miles) . . . Enough to
erode (or deposit) half way through or
onto the United States on all sides!
• Would the puzzle still fit?
Questions?
Seanpit@gmail.com
www.DetectingDesign.com