Introduction:

In January 2007 I attended a course at the Canadian Mennonite University entitled Evolution, Creation and the Bible. To read my rebuttals to the utter blasphemy that was taught see my article "Nothing New at CMU". One of the students admitted to me that he used to be a young earth creationist, but was forced into the old earth position after he visited Grand Canyon. To him, the spectacular layers in the canyon, not to mention the almost 300 mile-long (10 mile-wide and 1 mile-deep) canyon itself, must be the product of enormous amounts of time.

Of course, I have read a lot about the canyon and heard many lectures from a creationist perspective. I shared some of this information with him, but having never actually gone to the canyon myself, I felt just a bit hypocritical. In May 2007 my family and a couple of friends drove down to the canyon for a first hand look. It was spectacular! What follows here is not a super-detailed dissertation on Grand Canyon. That has already been done wonderfully by Dr. Steven Austin, "Grand Canyon: Monument to Catastrophe", and Dr. Walt Brown's on-line book "In the Beginning", which may be viewed at www.creationscience.com.  This short article is more of an introduction to creationist interpretations of the canyon for those who may be unfamiliar with them.





In this photo, taken from the North Rim, you can see the canyon itself running horizontally. Running perpendicular to the canyon and towards the top of the page is the Bright Angel Fault. It cuts as deep as the canyon itself. How did this happen? Near the middle of the picture you can see a trail, which terminates at the cliff edge. This is called "Plateau Point". It lies well over 3000 feet below the rim. From Plateau Point one can look down to the Colorado River, which lay at the bottom of the Canyon some 900 feet below.




Chad Bamford (on the left) and I decided to take the 12-mile hike to Plateau Point. Here we are preparing for the descent. Chad is refuelling on his special "see-food" diet.




A simplified diagram of the canyon (from Steven Austin's "Grand Canyon: Monument to Catastrophe") Notice that the Colorado River flows down from Marble Canyon (near top right) southward where it joins the Little Colorado. Their junction marks the beginning of what is known as "Grand Canyon." Notice that the river runs through the Kaibab Plateau as it makes its way westward. One of the canyon's mysteries is why the river did not flow around this uplifted area. Instead, it looks as though the river flowed uphill, and over the Kaibab and then started cutting downward. There is no river in the world that behaves this way. What has happened here?




A cutaway view of the canyon (from John Morris' "The Young Earth", Master Books, 1997). There are two mysterious features about the canyon that become apparent. The first is the horizontal strata. Thousands of square miles of perfectly horizontal layers, with no sign of erosion in between makes it hard to believe they were laid down over millions of years (as the evolution story proposes). How were they laid down? The second feature that deserves attention is the assemblage of tipped layers beneath the Tapeats sandstone. Notice that within those layers we have the Shinumo quartz - real tough stuff, and Hakatai shale - extremely brittle stuff. How is it that both have been sheared off at the same level? Millions of years of erosion would have eaten away at the soft shale, leaving us with large outcrops of the hard quartz. Wouldn't it?


At right we see the evolutionists' explanation for how the Grand Canyon's strata were formed. How reasonable is it to suppose that thousands of square miles of sediment could be laid down perfectly horizontally, in remarkable purity, only to later be lifted up above sea level, and then back down below sea level repeatedly without warping or fracture? Surely this explanation seems lacking. What really happened?

The Bible makes sense of what we are seeing. The great flood of Noah's day would have sorted sediments based on bodyweight and density in a process known as liquefaction.

 This diagram of how liquefaction occurs comes from Dr. Brown's website. Here we see that as a wave passes overhead, the pressure forces water-saturated sediments into a tighter arrangement. As the peak passes and the trough moves in, water stored within the sediments is forced upward as the pressure drops and water is released. As the process repeats itself the sediments are sorted into distinct horizontal layers. A lens is created when the permeability of layers beneath is greater than the layers above. This sorting action would have caused dead fish to be pushed up into the liquefaction lenses where they were eventually crushed when the "roof" collapsed. This is where their flattened bodies became fossils. This scenario explains the very existence of fish fossils, and their peculiar flattened condition under thin sedimentary layers

In addition to the sorting action of liquefaction, a catastrophic flood event such described in Genesis 6-9, would certainly have produced far greater tides than we experience today. We can imagine vast amounts of water sweeping up onto the continents and then receding. As the floodwaters rose, they would sweep further and further inland until complete coverage was achieved. Each time the waters advanced huge amounts of sediment were undoubtedly carried inland and deposited. These 2 mechanisms could easily account for the great strata layers we see, not only in Grand Canyon, but elsewhere around the world.



The Geologic Column. The column is an interpretation of the fact that the earth's crust is composed of many fossil-bearing strata layers. The exact "evolutionary succession" upward through the layers is seen nowhere in the world. The whole column is, as the Encyclopaedia says, "a mental abstraction." Of interest is the fact that Grand Canyon is missing many hundreds of square miles of Mesozoic rock. One of the only remnants left is Temple Butte just south of Grand Canyon Village. Temple Butte is a 1,000 ft column of supposedly Mesozoic rock capped with hardened volcanic material. Apart from this, all of the Mesozoic rock appears to have been swept clean from the area. What happened?


As we made our descent into the canyon, one of the more intriguing features is the cocconino sandstone pictured below.

The Cocconino sandstone. For years the evolutionist community insisted that the 400 ft thick Coconino deposit was a fossil sand dune, indicating a dry, desert environment. Of course this would throw a huge wrench into the creationist interpretation of the Grand Canyon's strata. How can you have a sand dune in the middle of a flood? Notice the angled marks running throughout the sandstone. They are positively huge! Geologist Dr. Steven Austin has demonstrated that based on their angles, these could not possibly have been laid down in dry conditions. He suggests that they are the remains of vast amounts water-borne sand that was deposited by the wave action of massive amounts of water. Notice that the Coconino is hundreds of feet thick. The creationist understands that violent floodwaters may have carried this sand here. The evolutionist on the other hand is at a loss to explain from where this sand has come, or how it arrived.

As for the strange angled groves we see in the Cocconino, there are two popular competing creationist theories. According to Austin, wave action accounts for the deposition of the sand in these unique "dunes".  See picture below:

 Dr. Walt Brown has another explanation which will be discussed a little later in this article.

Amphibian Tracks. Try leaving your footprint in the dry sand on the beach. What kind of print is made? How many details can you make out? Chances are the depression is not much more than vaguely human. Now leave a print in wet sand. The depression is much sharper, more distinct with more details preserved. These amphibian tracks were made in the Coconino sandstone. Austin cites the research of others showing that such prints had to be made while the animal was struggling to run up hill, under water! Furthermore, others have pointed to at least one similar trackway where the animal appears to have faced one direction, while being carried in other. At least one such trackway continued this way for a few feet, and then suddenly vanishes, only to pick up again several feet way. It's pretty clear what happened. The little animal was struggling against the current, trying to climb up hill when the water swept him up, depositing him several feet away. The claim that the Coconino represents a desert environment seems more than a little contradicted by such prints.

 The break between the Coconino above and the Hermit Shale beneath. I snapped this picture along the trail. Notice the remarkable purity of these layers and their perfectly horizontal structure showing no signs of erosion. Can we really believe that it took millions of years to deposit these layers?

Overlooking the Granite Gorge. Here I am at the edge of Plateau Point, overlooking the Granite Gorge and the bottom of Grand Canyon. Near the centre of the picture you can see the Colorado River flowing away from the camera. Notice that the rock just above the river is not layered like the rest of the canyon. It looks as though this rock has been fractured and crushed. It also appears as though molten rock has "squirted up" into these fractures and hardened there.

A Plausible Explanation for Grand Canyon
Much of what is suggested here comes straight from Dr. Walt Brown's Hydoplate Theory - perhaps the very best model for the Genesis Flood.

Genesis 7:11 states that the flood began when the fountains of the deep broke open. Brown suggests that a vast amount of subterranean water was jettisoned from the earth through a huge gash marked today by the mid-Atlantic Ridge (which, as its name implies, runs under the ocean between the Americas and Africa, and, in fact, wraps around the globe). The earth became inundated with this subterranean water, and as it did, vast layers of sediments were laid down.

As the water continued to explode from the earth, the gash grew wider and longer, until the "floor" of the subterranean chamber buckled upward. This buckling caused the Americas to the west and Africa / Europe on the east to slide down and away from the rising ridge. This is not continental drift, but a sudden shift. This shift created enormous friction, effectively crushing and melting vast amounts of granite beneath.  

The shifting ended with a compression event, in which mountain ranges were suddenly thrust up. Think of a carpet being shoved along the floor until it hits the wall. On impact the carpet crumples up like an accordion. The Rockies rose in a similar fashion.

Remember that it was not granite "slabs" (Dr. Brown refers to them as "Hydroplates") alone that slid away from the rising mid-oceanic ridge, but slabs topped with layered sediments, freshly laid down by the floodwaters. As the plates themselves came to a stop some of the layers above no doubt continued to slide. It was during this compression event that the lowest layers of strata, unable to continue sliding due to the enormous frictional forces, suddenly buckled. This formed what we now know as the Great Unconformity. As the layers above continued their westward movement, the buckled layers beneath were effectively sheared off. This explains why the hard quartz and the soft shale within the Great Unconformity are so uniformly eroded.



The diagram above illustrates the fact that the layers of the great unconformity are angled as are the striations within the cocconino sandstone. According to Dr. Brown's theory, the compression event was responsible for both features. Remember that Dr. Austin's theory was that the cross-bedding of the cocconino was the result of wave action as the sediments were being laid down. Austin would also argue that the layers within the Great Unconformity were pre-flood strata, laid down and tilted by geological activity sometime within the 1656 years between the creation and the flood. Which view is correct? Though I'm not dogmatic about it, Brown's simple, coherent theory seems to have more explanatory power, at least for now.

As noted, this sliding and buckling of vast amounts of sediments and rock caused fracturing in the granite beneath. As this fracturing occurred, molten rock squirted up into the network of cracks, leaving the "marble cake" appearance we see in places like Grand Canyon's inner gorge:

Grand Canyon's inner gorge. Notice the "marble cake" look, achieved, we suggest, when molten rock flowed upward through granite crushed during the compression event.




(Diagram from Walt Brown, www.creationscience.com) The newly formed Rocky Mountains created the equivalent of a hydraulic pump. Their sinking pushed water, and molten and crushed rock long the path of least resistance. It was the sinking of the Rocky Mountains that caused the uplift of the Colorado Plateau (of interest is the fact that the origin of plateaus are still a geological mystery. It is also interesting that the largest mountain ranges in the world are adjacent to the largest plateaus).

The uplift of the Rockies (and other ranges) marked the later stages of the flood (Psalm 104). As the mountains went up, the waters drained off into valleys and oceans, and also creating many huge inland lakes.

The Grand and Hopi Lakes (also from Dr. Brown's site). These two huge lakes once existed east of Grand Canyon and it was their eventual emptying that scoured the land to the west clean of "Mesozoic" rock. With all of that weight removed, the plateau rose even more, creating a fracture in the earth that would become Grand Canyon. The escaping floodwaters headed straight for the east-west gash and effectively removed vast quantities of material. As this material was removed, the plateau continued to rise. This explains why the rim of the canyon to the west is so much higher than where the Colorado actually enters the canyon on the east.




The dotted line in the illustration above indicates how much "Mesozoic Rock" was scoured off the plateau. Notice how the north rim of the canyon bows upward. This shove upward we believe was caused by the hydraulic forces of the sinking Rocky Mountains.





Parallel faults. The diagram above (from Dr. Brown's site) shows that the main canyon is only one of several tension cracks that opened up as the region rose. This is in perfect harmony with Brown's theory.




In the satellite map above we see that Grand Canyon is more than a single east-west crack in the earth. It is, in fact, an enormous crack connected to a complex network of branching side canyons. These canyons reach the same depth as the main canyon, yet with no visible source of water today that could account for such deep erosion. What happened here? The creationist has an explanation.

Even after the majority of the floodwaters had rushed into the oceans, leaving most of the continent's surface dry, the water table under the surface would still have been quite high. Underground aquifers would have developed, as water would have flowed in the path of least resistance. This subterranean water-flow would have depended upon depth and the porosity of the surrounding sediment matrix. As the main tension crack developed, it would have sliced through many aquifers. These aquifers would have quickly emptied their waters into the main canyon, cutting downward in the process. Subterranean waters in the still unconsolidated sediments would have followed this path into the main canyon causing, eventually, the sediment immediately above to collapse into the newly formed side canyon.




Two views of a rapidly formed canyon (above). Mt. St Helens exploded in May 1980, creating geological changes that would otherwise take many thousands of years (such as layered strata). A second eruption in 1981 saw vast amounts of scalding mud and water to tear a canyon in minutes. Today there stands a hard rock canyon, in many ways a 1/40-scale model of Grand Canyon.




Grand Canyon on the left, the canyon formed at Mt St Helens on the right. Notice the similarities - and differences. Both are today deep, hard-rock canyons with a "trickle" of water running through them. If one took only days to form and less than a decade to lithify, then couldn't the other? One sceptic pointed out that the Grand Canyon is "V" shaped, while the canyon formed at Mt St Helen's is not. Of course that is true but that doesn't mean it took millions of years for Grand Canyon to form. The "V" shaped inner gorge, and the equally deep side canyons are explained by the sinking of the adjacent Rocky Mountains, as noted above.

Summary and Conclusions

The Grand Canyon contains many features that simply cannot be explained by appealing to physical processes in operation today. We noted the presence of:

1. Horizontal layers of sediment covering thousands of square miles. Their remarkable purity and lack of erosion between layers suggests deposition by water - lots of it. This is in perfect harmony with the biblical creation / flood account.

2. Missing Mesozoic Rock. The emptying of two gigantic inland lakes and the scouring effect of their waters upon the Colorado Plateau region explain the missing 1,000 feet of Mesozoic Rock. Current processes in operation today seem hopelessly inadequate to explain the removal of this much material.

3. No Delta. If the Colorado River slowly cut the canyon over the last 6 million years (as many Geologists claim), then it should have formed a substantial delta by now. After all, more than 800 cubic miles of dirt has effectively been removed in the cutting of the canyon. The creationist explanation accounts for this. The canyon formed first as a tension crack into which the waters from the Grand and Hopi Lakes ran violently westward. The 800 cubic miles of sediments were blasted out of the canyon with tremendous force in a relatively short time. The Colorado River therefore did not form the canyon, but is merely a residual "trickle." Incidentally, the "missing dirt" appears to have been found in the ocean around California, exactly as predicted by the catastrophist model.

4. Side Canyons. The branching side canyons are as deep as the main canyon with no visible source of water that could have cut them. The creationist explanation makes sense. On this view, the rising of the plateau caused a tension crack running east-west. This crack sliced through underground aquifers which emptied their waters into the crack. As the water followed the path of least resistance into the canyon, side canyons were cut in a relatively short period of time.

5. Energy, Forces, and Mechanisms. Standard explanations for the Grand Canyon often involve use of terms like "crustal upheaval", "a mountain building episode", "geological activity", etc. These terms are largely vacuous. Seldom are any real specifics given. The creationist explanation given here describes the energy, forces and mechanisms responsible for the Grand Canyon. The only assumptions required are:

a. There was once a subterranean water reservoir about ten miles beneath the earth's surface
b. This water came shooting to the surface, ripping a crack in the crust along what is known as the mid-oceanic ridge.
c. The force of gravity and other physical laws observed today were consistently operating in the past.

Given these assumptions, the Grand Canyon's formation becomes entirely explicable in an intellectually satisfying way.

The Last Word...

No doubt about it, the Grand Canyon is beautiful to behold. And yet if the biblical explanation is correct, it is nothing more than the shattered remains of a once-perfect world judged by God for sin (rebellion against Him and His wise laws). We pause to consider: If the ruined remains of that world are this beautiful, how beautiful that original perfect world must have been!

As we ponder the grandest of canyons, we ought to ponder an infinitely greater chasm. This is the chasm that was created between God and man when our first parents sinned. Let us be grateful for the fact that even after this chasm was created, God in His mercy did not abandon us, but worked to restore fellowship with His creatures. Jesus Christ, the sinless Son of God came and died for our sins, so that we might be credited with His righteousness. If we accept this gift that He offers to us, God promises that fellowship with Him will be restored.

May God alone be glorified as the bridge spanning the Ultimate Grand Canyon!