The Geologic Column

Sean D. Pitman, M.D.June 2006

www.DetectingDesign.com

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

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

An Old Geologic Column?

Ariel Roth

Foot of the Book Cliffs northwest of Grand Junction, CO

Narrow divide between buttes near Page, AZ

Goosenecks of San Juan River9 miles northwest of Mexican Hat, UT

• 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?

Weathering By

Mechanical

Chemical

Dissolution

Sand

Clay

Dissolved Salts

Granites and other Igneous Rocks

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

• 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 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

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?

~2000 m

Why did ~2000 vertical meters erode in one region,but not in the other? Was there really an additional2,100 meters of tertiary sediment above Brian Head?Shouldn’t the higher reliefs erode more quickly?

Brian HeadOligocene32 Ma

Kaibab LimestonePaleozoic250 Ma

• 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?

Red Butte, Arizona

Beartooth Butte

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

“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

Beartooth Butte, Wyoming

Sheep Mountain, Big Horn Basin, WY

http://www.geology.wisc.edu/~maher/air/air07.htm

Eroded Dome of Sheep Mountain

Eroded by rivers over millions of years?

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

25 miles northwest of Twin Falls, ID

The Cookie-Cutter Look

10 miles east of Moab, UT

Sinkholes in Permian Kaibab Along right bank of Chevelon Fork (of the Little Colorado River)

18 miles southeast of Winslow, AZ

Dead Sea Sinkholes

Diversion of the Jordan River causing shrinkage of Dead Seaby 3 feet per year

Canyon of Little Colorado Rivernorthwest of Cameron, AZ

Hanging valleys along Colorado River in Marble CanyonAbout 20 miles downstream from Page, AZ

View to southeast. Echo Cliffs

Columbia River BasaltStripped of Loess

Scabland Channel(Coulee)

Channeled Scabland, Coulee

Coulee

Bighorn River Canyon Between Pryor and Bighorn Mountains, MT

Grand Coulee – Before DamE. Washington St.

Grand CouleeE. Washington St.

View From Dry Falls

Palouse Falls

Bigger Coulee (Frenchmen)

Streamlined Scabland Hills

Satellite Viewof the Scabland Region

The Missoula Flood

Hanging valleys along Colorado River in Marble CanyonAbout 20 miles downstream from Page, AZ

Table Mesa, along Hwy 666, 13 miles south of Shiprock, NM

Outlying mesas south of Mesa Verde, CO

Just east of Mexican Hat, UT

Just east of Mexican Hat, UT

W

E

N

S

Straight shot with few twists or U-shaped turns

The Real Grand Canyon?

Dry Falls and Scablands

Dry Falls

Dry Falls

Scablands of eastern Washington

Grander Canyon Cataract?

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

• If the Deccan Traps formed some 65 million years ago what would erosion do to them over this time?

• Current rates of at least 16 cm/Kyr for basalt equals 10,400 meters of erosion

• How did the Deccan 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?

• 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 re-date these gorges to just 13,000 years

• Younger now by 4 orders of magnitude!

Monument Valley

Over 50 million years of Utah and Arizona erosion?

Ripple Marks?

“Priest & Nuns” of Castle Rock SW view of Castle Valley, 10 miles east of Moab, UT

Scablands, View From Dry Falls

Frenchman Coulee

Arches National Park

100 million years of erosionin 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

Notice how layers of Redwall limestone clearly interbed with the CambrianMuav, several times, despite a 150 million year age gap? . . .

Redwall

• 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

Redwall Limestone

Supai Group

150 million years

30 million years

Amazingly flat erosion over such a huge area

• 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 AzOlder 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

Kodachrome BasinUtah

Coconino Sand Dunes

Fossilized trackways only go uphill

Great Sand Dunes National MonumentLas Animas and Huerfano Counties, CO

Great Sand Dunes National MonumentLas Animas and Huerfano Counties, CO

• 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

Shale Beds

Bioturbation?

http://www.creationresearch.org/crsq/articles/32/32_4a1.html

Continental Drift

• 2000 years ago Emphesis was a seaport city, now it is 5 miles inland

• Colorado and Mississippi River deltas each grow by ~500,000 tons of sediment per day

• 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

• Major Gulf-coast storms can cause 30-40 meters of erosion in 1 day

• Landmark lighthouse of Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, built 1500 m inland in 1869 had to be moved another ~1000 m to avoid collapse into the ocean– About 10 meters of erosion/year

• True all over the world• Japan literally spends billions of

dollars to prevent erosion

“Significant Losses From Coastal Erosion Anticipated Along U.S. Coastlines,” Federal Emergency Management Agency - June, 2000 http://www.fema.gov/nwz00/erosion.shtm

• What would an average of just 1 cm of coastal erosion/deposition do to the shape of the continents in 200 million years?

• No big deal – right?• 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?• Why are all deltas young?• Gulf of Mexico filled in 10 Ma

What Does It Matter?

Does any of this affect the viewsof the Seventh-day Adventist Church in particular?

Biblical “Errors”

• Do any of these differences really affect the story or what the story means?– Cock crows different numbers of times

before Peter denies Christ the last time– Different numbers of people went with

Jacob into Egypt– Different wives and ancestry for Esau

• What about the days of creation representing vast periods of time or Noah’s flood representing a local flood?– Is the meaning of the story significantly

affected if interpreted one way vs. the other?– Are there extra details included in the telling

of such stories to indicate that the author(s) took special care to highlight the importance of this or that feature (like 7-literal days of creation or the world-wide nature of Noah’s Flood) to the coherence of the story itself?

The Nature of Inspiration?

• E.G. White claims that the Bible and her own writings were not directly dictated by God– Prophets are the penmen, not the pen, of God

• Prophets are shown historical and future events in vision

• Prophets hear the very words of God or angels in many cases, and write them down

• If E.G. White was a prophet, she made some very interesting claims– Vision confirming the literal 7-day creation week (The Spirit

of Prophecy, vol. 1, p. 85)

I was then carried back to the creation and was shown that the first week, in which God performed the work of creation in six days and rested on the seventh day, was just like every other week. . .

But the infidel supposition, that the events of the first week required seven vast, indefinite periods for their accomplishment, strikes directly at the foundation of the Sabbath of the fourth commandment. It makes indefinite and obscure that which God has made very plain. It is the worst kind of infidelity; for with many who profess to believe the record of creation, it is infidelity in disguise. It charges God with commanding men to observe the week of seven literal days in commemoration of seven indefinite periods, which is unlike his dealings with mortals, and is an impeachment of his wisdom.

EGW, Disguised Infidelity, The Spirit of Prophecy, vol. 1, p. 85

• God designed that the discovery of these things should establish faith in inspired history; but men, with their vain reasoning, fall into the same error as did the people before the Flood--the things which God gave them as a benefit, they turn into a curse by making a wrong use of them.

• It is one of Satan's devices to lead the people to accept the fables of infidelity; for he can thus obscure the law of God, in itself very plain, and embolden men to rebel against the divine government. His efforts are especially directed against the fourth commandment, because it so clearly points to the living God, the Maker of the heavens and the earth.

• There is a constant effort made to explain the work of creation as the result of natural causes; and human reasoning is accepted even by professed Christians, in opposition to plain Scripture facts.

EGW, The Literal Creation Week, PP 111-116

Esau’s Wives

• Critics frequently point to what they believe is a contradiction in the Book of Genesis. According to Gen. 26:34 and 28:9, Esau’s wives were as follows:– Judith, daughter of Beeri the Hittite (Gen. 26:34) – Bashemath, daughter of Elon the Hittite (Gen. 26:34) – Mahalath, daughter of Ishmael, sister of Nebajoth (Gen. 28:9)

• However, according to Gen. 36:2-3, his wives were:– Aholibamah, daughter of Anah, granddaughter of Zibeon the Hivite– Adah, daughter of Elon the Hittite – Bashemath, daughter of Ishmael, sister of Nebajoth

So there are three main possibilities:

1. Contradictory accounts, or2. A larger collection of wives with only

some mentioned in each list, or 3. Different names or nicknames for the

same women

• The name Bashemath (or Basemath) probably comes from the Semitic word-stem meaning “fragrant” or “perfumed” (for example, besem means “balsam” in Hebrew). When you add the Hebrew feminine ending –ath, you get Basemath, “fragrant woman.” The possibility exists that Mahalath (daughter of Ishmael and sister of Nebajoth) and Adah (daughter of Elon the Hittite) were both given the nickname “fragrant woman” (Douglas 1982: 124). In other words, the Bashemath, daughter of Elon, in Gen. 26:34 is the same as the Adah, daughter of Elon, in Gen. 36:2, while the Bashemath, daughter of Ishmael, in Gen. 36:3 is the same as Mahalath, daughter of Ishmael, in Gen. 28:9.

Stephen Caesar holds his master’s degree in anthropology/archaeology from Harvard.

http://www.rae.org/esauswives.html

http://nabataea.net/edomch2.html