Summations Only

To be consistent I think you have to concede that any obstacle, no matter how small, would raise the level of the water behind it. It might be minuscule, immeasurable, swamped by other more significant factors and variables, but it would be present nonetheless.--Percy

If you would read that list of definitions, and learn something, you would do a lot better in scientific discussions.As it is, you are using a number of those terms incorrectly.

I see what you're saying, and yea I will concede that point since it is the increase of water level that provides the increased energy. But for all intents and purposes that increase in water level is theoretical since the energy will be transferred practically instantaneously and the level will not actually rise. Faith's idea seemed to be that any barrier would cause the water to rise and overflow the banks, and that's just not correct. There will be a point at which the energy cannot transfer fast enough to overcome the resistance of the barrier, and then the water level would rise in a noticeable way, but I just didn't want to explain the voodoo science of energy transfer etc.Plus flow dynamics of a stream are much more complicated than I made it out to be with drag from the banks and the bottom and the surface etc, etc ... I was just trying to keep it simple. I thought it was pretty straight forward, but I guess not.HBD

So let me see if I understand the sequence. At the time of the uplift the flood waters still covered all land everywhere. The uplift caused cracks to appear in the topmost layers of the uplifted region. The flood waters descended into the cracks. Do I have this right so far?If so, then there was no flow of water while the flood waters were just sitting there. The cracks opened beneath the flood waters, the flood waters descended into the cracks, and there was no sustained flow of water.Then the flood waters receded, but this, too, could not have caused the sustained flow of water necessary for so much erosion plus carrying all the eroded material away.So after the flood waters have receded we're left with an uplifted region with cracks across its surface into the topmost layers. How was the Grand Canyon formed? Here's the image we're talking about again: It does look like the river was wider at one time, but that's an illusion. I know the broad flat region of the peninsula in the center of the image looks like former river bottom, but it's actually just a cap of harder rock overlain by soil. You can see this cap at many other points in the image as you follow the river into the background. Once this layer of harder rock was broken through somewhere downstream then upcutting would have rapidly cut through the soft layers below and back upriver around through all the meanders.The material covering these broad flat areas is the eroded products of the nearby cliffs of lighter color, as is obvious since these broad flat plains are highest in elevation next to the cliffs. The cliffs were once adjacent to the river, but they have experinced slope retreat for a considerable period of time, to the point where they are now completely absent in places where they were once prominent. The would tend to be absent in these peninsulas formed by meanders because the slope retreat is experienced on both sides of the peninsula and eventually meet in the middle. If rock erodes at a rate of a few inches per century (let's say 5 inches/century), and if the total slope retreat is a mile, then that would take over a million years. For it to have only taken 4300 years would require that rock erode at the rate of 15 inches/year. If rock eroded that fast then it would definitely not go without notice. In particular it would mean that homes built of rock (very common construction in Quebec) would disappear at a rapid rate.To give you an idea of how fast rock actually does erode you need only consider Edinburgh, Scotland, which the lack of forests for wood means that many buildings are made out of various types of stone. When I visited I inquired about all the work I observed being performed on building facades and discovered that the limestone facades needed frequent work because of erosion. Many of the buildings being worked on were a couple hundred years old. It took that long for significant erosion to occur.Or go to any old graveyard. Limestone was a common material for headstones a couple hundred years ago. Examine the limestone headstones from the 1700's, roughly two to three hundred years ago. You will only be able to barely make out the inscriptions. That's because in two or three hundred years the limestone has eroded away maybe a half inch at most. Can you see now that I was being very generous when I used a figure of 5 inches of erosion per century? I know your math skills are a bit weak, so allow me to add that because the 5 inches was in the demoninator it makes the number of years to erode a mile much smaller than had I used a figure like a half inch per century, which seems a lot more likely. Again, rock doesn't form by drying.--Percy

Salt is not as hard so it can easily deform.

quote:

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Stage 3 (60—95% time elapsed) - Diapir sagging: When the diapirs nearly emerge, synkinematic sedimentary layers are progressively deposited (dark gray, red, and white sand in that order). Diapirs start to subside because regional extension continuously widens the diapirs. Salt could not be imported rapidly enough from the depleted source layer to supply salt to the widening diapirs. Thus, these diapirs began to sag.

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Again you are forgetting that the flood of water would have dissolved any salt into the water and it would still be dissolved in the water today. Your model has again been proven false. Here you go.
You failed to explain how it is that this salt exists at all with your model since a flood cannot deposit salt in the first place. The salt would have dissolved.
That you cannot comprehend this simple fact I attribute to your fallen nature.

Not quite correct. Oh good. Then you accept quantum mechanics and the standard model with the strong and weak nuclear forces and the behavior of radioactive elements? That is all "valid" science that has nothing to do with the past although it is useful for dating things.Matter is matter and doesn't change with time, right? The probability for an unstable isotope to decay is governed by the law of quantum mechanics which doesn't change with time. There is a threshold that has to be overcome for decay to occur. It would never happen except for the phenomenon of tunneling that happens at the quantum level. So the probability of decay of an isotope remains constant. No variation with time. Then decay rates do not vary with time. Then you must accept radioisotope dating. You must accept the missing isotopes with short half lives that should be around if the earth were young as evidence for an old earth.Unless of course your fallen mind isn't up to the task.Edited by shalamabobbi, : No reason given.

Here is her answer posted later that same day (Message 1509): No, she does not accept the processes of lithification, but rather insists on her "Mudpie Model". Yet again, she is ignoring the facts and working hard to avoid learning anything that's inconvenient.At least the rest of us and the lurkers for many years to come have and will have learned.

What happens when you add water back?Submerge dried clay into a bucket of water and it returns to being wet clay again. It returns to being what it was originally. Drying it did not change it.Submerge a dried mudpie into a bucket of water and it returns to being wet mud again. It returns to being what it was originally. Drying it did not change it.Submerge a sedimentary rock into a bucket of water and ... it becomes a wet rock. It does not revert to being the original sedimentary material. That original sedimentary material had lithified, had become rock! It was changed by the processes of lithification.We've described the processes of lithification, which you insist on ignoring. Even if you were to subject a mudpie to compaction -- presses are very common and can be constructed using a car jack --, it will still be dried mud, not sedimentary rock, and when placed in a bucket of water and allowed to soak it will revert to being wet mud.You ideas about lithification do not hold water. How stupid!

So I said... ...and you predictably answered with a whole page of quotes from who knows where that is just the usual pedantic recitation of the Science Creed I've been objecting to in various ways all along. You really don't get what I'm trying to say at all. So what else is new. Blah de blah blah blah. The point I keep trying to make here is that such definitions can be applied to REAL or HARD science but that ALL YOU CAN EVER HAVE with the sciences of the unwitnessed or prehistoric past IS "theory," that is, all you have is interpretation of what happened, an imagined idea of what happened. You CAN'T test it or prove or disprove it.You think the fossil order in the strata proves that one form evolved from another. This is theory. You cannot prove it and it could easily be that it proves no such thing but you believe it anyway and you construct models to illustrate your imagination about it, models of supposed "hominids" for instance that you've never seen, reconstructed from pieces of bone and fleshed out with nothing but mental conjurings. it could all be false as false but nobody can prove that either. Once you've got your mental castle built nobody can pull it down even if it's nothing but pure imaginative hooha. Others come along and build new wings on the castle, also made of imaginary stuff -- as long as it follows the shape of the original mental castle it's considered scientific work. It's amazing that such pure mental gymnastics ever acquired the status of science but it did and it's even asserted to be "fact." Biggest flimflam ever pulled on the human race.You also have established as "fact," meaning it's been decreed, that similar body structures, and the similar DNA for such similar body structures, are proof that one animal genetically descended from another. You can't actually prove that, it's nothing but theory or hypothesis or sheer imaginative cobweb-spinning but it has acquired the status of Fact although none of it has ever been observed, and none of it could ever be proved or disproved. Call it "theory" or "hypothesis" or mental cobweb-spinning or imaginative castle-building, it can NEVER BE VERIFIED, PROVED OR DISPROVED, it remains a mental construct, PERIOD, and yet you CALL it Fact.Things that CAN be observed, at least to some extent, such as genetic mutations in the DNA, are interpreted to fit the overarching theory that they are the source of viable genetic material, although in fact they provide overwhelming evidence of destructive rather than constructive effects on organisms, and the supposedly positive effects are NOTHING but "theory" or "hypothesis" or mental conjurings or whatever you want to call it, it doesn't matter what you call it because the point is there is nothing there BUT imaginative castle-building. In other words, SHEER FANTASY.That's the evolutionist side. On the geology side you've got all these fanciful ideas about what the world was supposedly like during some supposed time period for which the evidence is nothing more than a slab of sedimentary rock, a huge usually flat rock pancake as I've called it, dozens of them that were originally stacked miles deep in many areas of the planet, and the characteristics of your imaginary earlier world are defined completely by the dead things found in the rock and certain characteristics of the rock itself. If there are raindrops preserved in the rock surface that somehow proves that rock existed at the surface for millions of years. I guess it only rained once and very lightly during that period (shouldn't there be raindrop impressions every few inches within the rock?), and the footprints you find on the surface are maybe three, none before, none after, instead of millions of creatures that would have run across that surface in millions of years (and they too are always on the surface, not previous surfaces at different levels within the rock although shouldn't that be expected if sediment was available to fill in the impressions at any point in the formation of the rock?). And if there's a fossilized plant embedded in the rock that proves that it flourished whatever hundreds of millions of years ago you've assigned to that rock. And if a colony of identical creatures is found in the rock but a slightly different colony of the same creature is found in a different level of the rock that proves they lived in different time periods and one evolved from the other [Of course with organisms that similar one DID (micro)evolve from the other but it could be that the lower evolved from the upper, which would contradict your theory)]. You imagine that time periods succeeded each other in successive layers of different kinds of rock and the time period neatly fits into the rock without overlapping with other rocks. And so on. In all this all you have is theory, or hypothesis or mental conjuring or whatever you want to call it, you cannot prove or disprove it, it remains a mental construct and the more you build onto your mental construct the more it gets reified or takes on the status of Fact or Reality in your mind until you don't know the difference between Fact and Theory, Observation and Theory, Reality and Theory, Fact versus Interpretation.I was going to address the rest of your post and I may next but this is enough for now.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Please read -- and try to understand -- the definitions of "proof" and "theory" again.

Message 1493 Most of what you've said isn't possible and doesn't make sense. Floods don't transport entire layers of strata hundreds and thousands of miles, they don't sort material into neat strata, they don't sort by radiometric isotope, they don't sort by evolutionary and geologic era, they don't keep oil and gas deposits together, catastrophic flows don't create meanders, tectonic forces do not create meandering cracks, erosion doesn't make landscapes more uneven, erosion doesn't create sloped canyon walls from vertical ones, and rocks don't dry. The evidence in Monument Valley is of meandering rivers for millennia. There's no evidence of a flood. Again, rocks don't dry.Also, were the valley carved quickly by flowing water, the monuments would be alligned in the direction of flow, but there's no such alignment. Things that happen leave evidence behind, and for the things you're claiming there's no evidence. What's really bizarre is that you think the amount of water has anything to do with erosion. The oceans, which are a fairly large amount of water, aren't eroding the sea floor, why would you think the flood waters would erode the landscape below? The tsunami that flooded Japan didn't scour the landscape of mere soil, why would you think encroaching flood waters or deep flood waters or receding flood waters would scour away miles of layers of rock from the antediluvian era? Are you back to your old misleading terminology? Does "right after the flood" actually mean "at the height of the flood"? Not knowing what you mean, there's no point responding to the rest what you say in that paragraph. You would only say this if the bathtub example is yet another example of something you don't understand. Again, I ask you to fill your bathtub, but instead of dumping in a few shovel fulls of dirt this time drop some food dye in at regularly spaced intervals of around six inches and pull the drain. How fast do you see the dye flowing toward the drain. Barely at all, right? There's just a tiny amount of rapid flow just before the bathtub empties. So what makes you think that receding flood waters would create any significant flow on a submerged landscape?And where did all the material scoured off the landscape go? The only places in the ocean we find any significant sediment from land is river outlets, like where the Colorado empties into the Gulf of California. If your flood transported strata from one place to another to create the layers of the Grand Canyon, then we should find the strata it removed from the Grand Canyon region deposited neatly on the sea floor somewhere, right? Yet though we've taken sea cores from all over the world, we've never found sections of the Claron layer out in the ocean somewhere. In a region of net deposition, what could possibly prevent anything sticking above the rest of the landscape from eroding flat, no matter what the material or the organization into layers or the orientation? You think tilted strata would resist erosion by rushing water? How? Let's say you have a horizontal layer of limestone. You believe it could be eroded away. Now you take the same layer of limestone, but make it tilted, and now you believe it can't be eroded away? Why? Do you think tilted limestone harder than horizontal limestone? Do you somehow think that material is less vulnerable to erosion when it is tilted? I've got real mixed feelings about this comment. On the one hand I want to strongly encourage an experimental approach, but on the other I have to wonder that you can't simply think through something so simple and obvious. What is this supposed to mean? Are you really and truly skeptical that it's possible to sand the corner of a board? If so then, well, added to everything else about the real world that you don't seem to understand I guess maybe you've spent your life in a box.--PercyEdited by Percy, : Typo.

You should always keep examples from the real world in mind, because they tell us how the real world works. In many parts of the US rivers run much higher in the spring than they do during the rest of the year, yet they don't usually leave their banks. Most riverbanks are high enough to prevent this, even during spring floods. Those that do leave their banks almost never form new and permanent paths through the landscape.So given all this margin that rivers have, why is it that you think that a few inches a year uplift is going to divert a river?An aside about spring floods: Water seeks the lowest level, and it can't be very often that a river isn't already taking the best low level path through a landscape. This is an enormous advantage over alternative paths through the landscape that a river might temporarily avail itself of during spring floods. What are you imagining would destroy the meanders during uplift of a few inches per year?--Percy

You're the one who keeps running into evidence she can't explain and invoking unnatural processes that are in violation of physical laws and that of course have never been observed. You're the one having a great deal of difficulty understanding simple principles. You're the one whose side has a plentitude of contradictory theories that are not married in any particular way to evidence.If the Earth is young then the evidence will show that it is young. Interpreting evidence requires understanding how natural processes work and what kind of evidence they leave behind, for instance that enormous floods leave behind big jumbles of landscapes like this: They don't leave behind neatly sorted strata, and no natural force imaginable could sort by both radiometric isotope and evolutionary distance from modern forms.Also notice that as the water of the Japan tsunami flowed across the landscape that it didn't cause any significant erosion or scouring, and the surface was only soil, not rock.Why don't you switch to some much less implausible scenario. Why couldn't all the sedimentary layers we see today have been laid down before the flood when the world was much more fertile? This doesn't eliminate all your problems, but it does eliminate some of the most ridiculous ones.--Percy

Well, yes, Faith, as I said when I explained this to you in more detail back in Message 1211 (which you didn't reply to and apparently didn't even read), adobe brick dries. It dries into bricks, and unless you fire it then it dissolves when it rains. And yes, clay dries, too, and unless you fire it it turns back into clay when you add water. And sediments, like those in a dry river bed, dry too, but they dry into a pebbly soil.None of these things dry into rock. That's because rocks do not form by exposing them to the air and allowing them to dry. Rocks require compaction. That's why shale layers that form from clay are so different from pottery. That's why sand that dries on the beach remains sand instead of becoming sandstone.And that's also why when you remove the overlying weight of layers providing the pressure of compaction that rock formation ceases. If the Kaibab that is the top layer at the canyon was not hard rock when the overlying layers were removed then it would never have become hard rock.A few posts before this you protested against shabby treatment. If you'd like better treatment then could I suggest not calling an accurate statement stupid while simultaneously launching into a display of both breathtaking ignorance and stubborn determination to maintain that ignorance. The universe follows natural laws. Your decision to follow a completely natural approach that avoids miracles is fatally compromised by your frequent resort to decidedly unnatural processes. You're not God. Something you've concocted in your imagination is not natural just because you say it is.--Percy

As has been pointed out several times already, we observe gradual uplift today in several parts of the world. The Himalayas are still pushing up at the rate of a few inches per year. We've never observed any area of the world uplifted by several thousand feet in a short period of time (say, less than a year), and I'm not aware of any evidence that this has ever happened in the history of the Earth.In addition, the evidence at the Grand Canyon and of the entire region is of gradual uplift, and incision of a river into a landscape is what happens with gradual uplift.This means that your belief in rapid uplift is in the complete absence of supporting evidence. The "mathematical formula" was: Doesn't get more simple than this. The smaller the area through which a volume of water must be pushed, the greater the velocity required to push it in a fixed time. But you don't have to understand the equation. Even the simplest intuition should tell you that this is so. Take this image of a boulder blocking a portion of a river: Notice that the river is slightly higher behind the boulder and slightly lower in front it. Also notice that the water spills rapidly by the boulder on either side and over the top, exerting greater erosive force. Eventually the boulder will erode away and the river will flow freely at this particular spot.(An aside: The boulder wasn't plopped down at that spot by some giant. It was carried there by strong river currents, most likely during spring floods. So it is unlikely that the boulder will ever remain in that spot long enough to erode away. Some spring flood will likely come along that is strong enough to move it to another spot further downstream. As it tumbles along it will collide with other rocks and be scraped along the bottom, becoming smaller and smaller. Eventually it will become just a bunch of widely scattered pebbles.) Since we're describing things that can be seen happening in the here and now, your designation of "wacko" only invites ridicule. In effect you're denying reality, which is absurd. Why don't you at least adopt a defensible position. Concede that yes, we can see this happening and that you understand it is real, but then go on to argue how the evidence shows that something else happened. The "I know this" switch in your brain might be in the "on" position, but some people "know" they're Napoleon Bonaparte, and some people "know" they've been abducted by aliens. So what. What you think you know is in spite of all the evidence showing you're wrong. When you think you indisputably know something is when you should be most suspicious of your own judgement. As I said before, continuing to simply declare you're right in opposition to all evidence just invites ridicule.None of us, except you, is claiming we know we're right. What everyone except you is claiming is that we follow the evidence. Whatever the evidence says, that's what we'll believe.The simplest evidence concerning the flood tells us that in water the densest and heaviest material sinks first, the least dense and lightest last. Since the geologic layers are not stratified in that way, therefore they were not formed by a single flood event, nor, as further investigation reveals, by floods in general.--Percy