The Geologic Column

1. The Geologic Column Sean D. Pitman, M.D. June 2006 www.DetectingDesign.com

2. Features of the Geologic Column • Made of layers of sedimentary rock • Layers generally very flat/even relative to each other (may be tilted/warped now) • Found generally all over the globe • Most areas have missing layers • Few 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

5. Leonard Brand and James Florence, Stratigraphic Distribution of Vertebrate Fossil Footprints Compared with Body Fossils - Origins 9(2):67-74, 1982

6. An Old Geologic Column? Ariel Roth

7. Foot of the Book Cliffs northwest of Grand Junction, CO

11. Narrow divide between buttes near Page, AZ

12. Goosenecks of San Juan River 9 miles northwest of Mexican Hat, UT

13. 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?

14. Weathering By Dissolution Mechanical Chemical Dissolved Salts Sand Clay Granites and other Igneous Rocks

18. The Speed of Erosion • 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

19. 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

20. Mt. Everest • Thought to be over 60 million years old • Just 20 cm/Kyr of erosion equals ~12,000 vertical meters of erosion in 60 My • Still covered by Mississippian crinoidal limestone - only about halfway down the column! • Perhaps the layers used to be much thicker? • Even those places were the geologic column is said to be complete are not much thicker than 4,500 meters or so and most areas average no more than 1,500 meters in thickness

21. 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 • Rate of about 14cm/Kyr • Tertiary sediments survived atop the Grand Staircase?

22. ~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?

23. Brian Head Oligocene 32 Ma Kaibab Limestone Paleozoic 250 Ma

24. 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

25. 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

26. 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. . . ”

27. “ . . . 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.”

28. 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."

29. 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."

30. The “Smooth” Grand Canyon Dome ~2000 m

32. How did Red Butte Survive?

33. Red Butte, Arizona

34. Beartooth Butte • Butte layers 300-400 million yeas old • Same layers Bighorn Basin’s Paleozoic layers • Basin formed during Laramide Orogeny, ~70 Mya

35. “The Bighorn Basin, like the other intermountain basins of Wyoming and Colorado, was filled with the debris eroded from the surrounding uplifts even as folding continued. During the later part of the Tertiary the rivers were able to remove much of the basin fill, exposing the older bedrock.” - Louis J. Maher, Jr. http://www.geology.wisc.edu/~maher/air/air07.htm

36. Beartooth Butte, Wyoming

37. http://www.geology.wisc.edu/~maher/air/air07.htm Sheep Mountain, Big Horn Basin, WY

38. Eroded by rivers over millions of years? Eroded Dome of Sheep Mountain

39. Eroded Dome of Sheep Mountain

40. Little Sheep Mountain area, Bighorn Basin, WY

41. Little Sheep Mountain area, Bighorn Basin, WY

42. Pryor Mountains north of Lovell, WY

43. The Cookie-Cutter Look 25 miles northwest of Twin Falls, ID

44. 10 miles east of Moab, UT

45. Sinkholes in Permian Kaibab Along right bank of Chevelon Fork (of the Little Colorado River) 18 miles southeast of Winslow, AZ

46. Dead Sea Sinkholes Diversion of the Jordan River causing shrinkage of Dead Sea by 3 feet per year

47. Canyon of Little Colorado River northwest of Cameron, AZ

48. Hanging valleys along Colorado River in Marble Canyon About 20 miles downstream from Page, AZ View to southeast. Echo Cliffs

49. Columbia River Basalt Stripped of Loess

50. Scabland Channel (Coulee)