This is a longer post than you usually write. 5 of your last 15 posts were one line, another was 2 lines, and except for this long post the rest seemed to range from 5 to 10 lines. Even before reading them I'm not going out on any limb if I predict that at best you just repeat your basic positions that have already been shown wrong, and at worst you just ignore what people say to repeat your old talking points. But since Edge and PaulK replied so briefly I'll attempt a longer response that touches on each of your points.
We all know there is copious evidence of unconformities, and it is plainly described in many places on the Internet.
Probably the best summaries are at the USGS site, a good starting point is
Stratigraphy of Grand Canyon National Park, and from there you can find descriptions of all the strata, including of the unconformities. Just click on any of the layers in the diagram to get to the corresponding page for that layer. The unconformities are described well enough to provide a good idea of what kind of erosive features are present.
The African Rift is a result of a continent splitting event that is taking place now - it is not something that "occurred" - it is still happening now. You can't make up your own reality. Claims that are made up and completely unsupported by evidence need no more rebuttal than to note that they are made up.
A couple of your paragraphs are so wrong they have to be addressed almost sentence by sentence. Your mistake density can become impressive, and such is the case here. The real world is conveniently available 24/7 for fact checking, you should make use of it more often. Making up stories is fun and easy, but it's no substitute for fact-based reconstruction of past events. Suffice to say that the current understandings of things like the formation of the Appalachians and the breakup of Pangaea are based upon evidence. You do mention evidence, like faults and angular unconformities and volcanic basalts, but they are mere decoration for your story telling that you never connect to your claims.
Because I plan to address angular unconformities in a future post, I won't respond to your comments on them in this post.
Faith writes:
And also, PLEASE explain the unconformities to us.
Certainly. They are contacts between layers that according to standard Old Earth Geology were originally occupied by a layer/time period, which can often be found in other stratigraphic columns in the vicinity. There isn't one iota of physical evidence of any former presence of such a layer where the "unconformity" supposedly exists, it is entirely an assumption based on the Geological Time Scale. In physical reality they never existed, no layer was ever deposited there.
This makes no sense. If the strata is rock (and if we're talking about the strata in the walls of the Grand Canyon then almost all the strata are sedimentary rock) then there must have been overlying layers providing sufficient pressure to turn the loose sediments to rock. And if the top contact of that strata has evidence of erosion then it must have been exposed at the surface, which could only be possible if the overlying strata were first eroded away.
The splitting of the continents was a worldwide event, that's what I'm talking about.
Please document this. Is the East African Rift part of that break-up?
No idea, but if it's a similar event and it occurred at the same time as part of the same tectonic movement I suppose it was.
You should have looked up "East African Rift" before replying. The East African Rift is not something that "occurred," as you described it, but something that
is occurring as we speak, and has been occurring for quite some time. The rifting began some 20 Ma, and eventually it will become a mid-oceanic ridge from which new sea floor will spread to create a new ocean basin. The African plate will split into two new plates that have already been named, the Somali and Nubian plates.
A lot of tectonic bashing and crashing going on.
There's no such thing as "tectonic bashing and crashing". Tectonic movements occur very slowly at the rate of inches/year at most. These slow motions can become apparent when tectonic forces build up stress along existing fault lines or create new fault lines, causing sudden slips that result in earthquakes, such as along the San Andreas fault in California or the North Anatolian Fault in Turkey. Volcanos can be another manifestation, though produced in a less direct way.
The breaking up must have been fairly jolting,...
The earthquakes and volcanos - sure.
...but then there was the subduction on the west side of the Americas that pushed up mountains etc. I happen to think it occurred in conjunction with the beginning of the receding of the Flood, because of the effects like the cutting of the Grand Canyon and Grand Staircase and the other massive erosion events in that area; and the dramatically deformed rocks in other places would be a natural result of such a tectonic bashing.
Edge replied to this this way:
edge writes:
So, the deformation occurred before the Tertiary rocks were deposited.
That's an important issue, and I'll address your response in a minute, but there are other important issues. What makes you think Pacific Plate subduction beneath the North American Continent, a process ongoing for millions of years, could be linked to erosion caused by receding flood waters.
It is true that deformation can result from plate collisions, what you're calling "tectonic bashing," but that is not the only result of tectonic forces. For example, the East African Rift is undoubtedly the result of tectonic forces, but plates are being pushed apart rather than colliding. This pushing apart is also deforming strata.
No, the conventional timing of the breakup of Pangaea is incorrect, as evidenced by the continuous laying down of the strata up to Recent time,...
This is an interesting statement for you to make, although "Recent time" is ambiguous. Assuming you mean roughly the present or at least sometime within the last couple hundred years, you seem to be saying that sedimentation and strata formation continued after the Flood but recently ceased. That of course is not true. We observe sedimentation occurring today, and there is no doubt it will continue on into the future. The products of erosion have to go somewhere, and the mechanisms of transport pretty much guarantee that the vast majority of sediments eventually end up on pond, swamp, lake, lagoon and sea bottoms.
But how does continuous sedimentation up to "Recent time" provide evidence for when Pangaea broke up? The dating of sea sediments from ocean cores tells us that the bottom layers from the oldest parts of the Atlantic, such as off the Maine coast, are around 175 million years old. The dating is mostly done through magnetic striping.
...as shown on the Smith cross section of England. Had the strata since the Jurassic not been deposited at the time of the breakup of Pangaea,...
Pangaea's breakup occurred over a long stretch of time from around 175 Ma to around 60 Ma. The end of the Jurassic does roughly correspond to the beginning of the breakup of Pangaea, so as long as one isn't too picky about when your "strata since the Jurassic" began being deposited, it is simply a truism that after the Jurassic strata were deposited during the period of Pangaea's breakup. But since the conclusion of Pangaea's breakup 60 Ma strata have continued to be deposited.
...it would not be deformed in the same pattern as all the rest were,...
What is this "same pattern" that you're referring to, what strata does the phrase "all the rest" refer to, and why do you think they're similar to the strata in the Smith diagram?
...because that deformation is best explained as the result of the tectonic event we are discussing which came after all the strata were in place.
This is incorrect. Angular unconformities around the world are the result of tectonic forces tilting strata, and strata have been tilted by tectonic forces during all different time periods.
In fact the recent strata in the UK would probably have been laid horizontally on top of all the other strata if the conventional timing was true because that's the way those strata were probably originally deposited.
It's impossible to know what recent means to you since to you everything is geologically recent, but in general sediments are deposited roughly horizontally and always on top of whatever is there. It has nothing to do with whether "the conventional timing" is true - it's just something that's been understood since Steno.
Instead the pattern of deformation across all the time periods shows that the continents did not split until after all the strata were laid down.
The mere existence of angular unconformities is proof that deformation occurred before all strata were deposited.
The strata in the Grand Staircase area demonstrate the same thing: all in place up to Claron before tectonic disturbance formed the GS cliffs and the GC.
As has been stated before, the Colorado Plateau has been relatively quiet tectonically for hundreds of millions of years, but not the rest of the world, including the regions immediately adjacent to the Colorado Plateau.
In the same way that the moon's lack of rotation held back astronomy by centuries, that the Colorado Plateau is the region where erosion has exposed so much earth history is holding back your own views by centuries. You're focusing all your attention on the Grand Staircase region not because it's typical of world geology but because that's where the strata are visible. You're like the drunk looking for his keys under the lamplight because that's where the light is, not where he dropped them.
Oh it does conform to the facts.
It's been explained many times how your views not only don't conform to the facts, but are often contradicted by them. Your reaction is to ignore or to simply repeat unsupported assertions as if they hadn't already been multiply rebutted.
So you had the mountains forming in western North America and the continents breaking up in eastern North America.
When did the Appalachians form?
The continents split between the east coast of America and Europe/Africa of course. I think the Rockies were pushed up as a result of the subduction beneath the west coast of America, but the whole continent was affected, I don't think you can split it between east and west, it all happened at the same time due to the same tectonic event.
The evidence we have says that the breakup of Pangaea occurred over a period of about a hundred million years.
The Appalachians of course formed at the same time but the pressure wasn't as forceful on that side of the continent as it was in the west so they are more of a buckling or crumpling of the land than a thrusting up of whole blocks of strata as in the Rockies.
The Appalachians can be found in Ireland, so since North America split with Europe very early in the Pangaea breakup the Appalachians already existed when the breakup began. The Rockies came much later with the Laramide Orogeny.
And there was volcanism released as a result of this event too of course, which accounts for the Sierras among other things.
If by Sierras you mean the Sierra Nevada range then yes, volcanism played a role in it's formation, but that fact by itself says nothing about when it happened.
The dike at Siccar Point one remnant of it in that area. The magma that reaches all the way to the Claron in the GS is another. Magma doesn't reach as far in the GC because the strata had been washed away above the point where the magma did spill over. The Hurricane Fault and the angular unconformity to the north of it were also the result of this tectonic event, the result of the raising of the land to the south, and apparently a LOT of sedimentary material just sort of fell off the cliff on the north, a lot of it getting washed away by the Flood water as so much of the Grand Staircase was also. Oh there's more...
It doesn't matter that there's more, you have no evidence for what you've already said. You've mentioned a bunch of things that exist but provided no evidence for when they happened.
The plain fact of the matter is that you're still just making up stories. Usually you just tell your stories and don't mention evidence, and when you do mention evidence it's unconnected to your claims.
--Percy
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