Exploring the Grand Canyon, from the bottom up.

You may be interested in a new thread from Dr A and Pressie that will present a general overview of geology. It's still in the thread proposal stage (Introduction To Geology), but should get promoted soon.

Another one that might help is How to make Sand that starts at Message 1.

Hi Chuck77,

Can you and RAZD maybe find a few good posts that sum up the thread so far that would bring me up to speed?

I'm not a geologist, and I am learning from this thread, so we are in the same boat there.

Enjoy.

Message 1: I'd like for us to discuss the Grand Canyon, beginning with the lowest, oldest layers and then working up to the top, layer by layer. I'd like to see explanations for each layer, it's composition, the environment when it was created, and get questions about that layer answered before we move up to the next layer. If possible, can we begin with the Vishnu Schist?

This is a great thread that I would like to see continued.

Thought this was the best place for this:

From National Geographic

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Oldest known footprints in the Grand Canyon found

Exposed by a rockfall, the oddly angled tracks offer a rare glimpse into early animal behavior.

Rowland learned of the tracks by chance back in 2016, when a paleontologist friend of his was hiking the Grand Canyon with students. As they hiked Bright Angel Trail, the group saw a rock that had fallen out of the cliffside and cracked open.

The busted boulder had split along an inner seam, revealing a natural mold and cast of 28 footprints stretched out in a line more than a yard long. The friend let Rowland and park officials know, and a field crew pulled the rock off to the side. In May 2017, Rowland visited the prints, and in March 2018, he returned with San Diego State University geologist Mario Caputo to study them.

Exposed by a rockfall, the footprints are now the oldest ever discovered in the Grand Canyon, scientists reported this month at the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology's annual meeting in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The prints are also noteworthy for their strangeness: Each one is angled 40 degrees from the direction of walking, as if the animal had a diagonal gait.

Tantalizingly, these prints were made right around the time that reptiles' oldest ancestors started to diversify, and they resemble 299-million-year-old footprints found in Scotland made by early reptiles or amphibians with reptile-like proportions. If similar animals made both trackways, the Grand Canyon tracks could be the oldest footprints of their kind by more than 10 million years.

The team is also debating why the footprints are angled so weirdly. Was the animal struggling to walk into a strong wind? Or did it angle its gait as it walked down a sand dune, so it didn't slip? Caputo's study of the sandstone will help tease out these scenarios.

“If the exposure allows it, it will enable me to say, okay, this organism was walking near the crest or the summit of this dune ... or perhaps in an area in between dunes,” he says. Such specifics will let researchers reconstruct a single moment in the life of an animal that died more than 300 million years ago—an impressively intimate scientific feat.

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Dry sand dunes ... footprints ... too bad it doesn't say which sandstone layer the boulder came from.

Enjoy

By the given age (310 million years ago) I’d guess the very start of the Wescogame Formation. Footprints were discovered in that formation more than 100 years ago, but later in date.

More here Trackway

Of course it's just an animal running from the Flood waters about 4500 years ago and eventually overtaken and buried in that particular layer which of course isn't a time period hundreds of millions of years old.
sn't.

Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

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Of course it's just an animal running from the Flood waters about 4500 years ago and eventually overtaken and buried in that particular layer...

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Good luck coming up with a Flood geology scenario that explains how footprints can be found at many levels of the geological column.

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...which of course isn't a time period hundreds of millions of years old.

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Nobody thinks that a rock layer is a time period, Faith. That’s just something you made up. You would think that somebody who boasts of being honest and rational would avoid repeating crazy falsehoods. But here we are.

Funny, it's rock layers that are labeled as time periods in scads of illustrations of the geo column.

As for footprints on layers, some animals obviously escaped wave after wave of the Flood's incursion before finally getting caught. Big deal.

Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

typical

Enjoy

Upon googling that image that you presented, I found this.

Both sides have valid arguments in this one.

One of the most common (and one of the worst) arguments made by creationists -when it comes to Geology- is: The geologic column doesn’t exist anywhere in the world!! I run into this statement ad nauseam in their “educational” videos and literature. They state that the text books are lying to us and that it is a another fabrication made up by scientists to mislead and indoctrinate or children to convince us of the lie of evolution. But what argument are they actually making when they say this? Are they implying that the earth doesn’t not contain multiple stratigraphical layers? Of course not. This awful argument is formed on the foundation that most creationist arguments are: confusion and a straw man understanding of geology. The first problem they run into is confusing the geologic time scale with a geologic column,and in some cases doing so on purpose to confuse the issue.

Comments?

Edited by Phat, : No reason given.

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Funny, it's rock layers that are labeled as time periods in scads of illustrations of the geo column

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That is the time period when the material was deposited. It isn’t saying that the rock IS the time period. You would have to be insane to think that.

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As for footprints on layers, some animals obviously escaped wave after wave of the Flood's incursion before finally getting caught. Big deal.

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The idea of multiple “waves” leaving areas of dry land all through the Flood seems a pretty big deal to me. How do you fit that with the supposedly accurate story in the Bible ?

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Comments?

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What creationist - or to be accurate - YEC - arguments do you consider to be valid ?

The idea of multiple “waves” leaving areas of dry land all through the Flood seems a pretty big deal to me. ...

Waves that miraculously do not erase the tracks as they rush across the land.

Enjoy

Honestly? None of them. I don't believe that God would be so obtuse in His interaction with humanity. I believe that we will be judged by our response to what we have to work with. Stubborn beliefs without evidence are a dangerous form of thinking.