Posted on 11/10/2009 8:45:14 AM PST by GodGunsGuts
Probably you have heard the expression, ‘Seeing is believing’, but is that always true? In fact, quite often it’s the other way around: ‘Believing is seeing’. This is true of geology, for example. Geological evidence does not speak for itself, and so it must always be interpreted. And how we interpret that evidence is always influenced by our beliefs.
A good example of this is found on a roadside interpretive sign near the Sheep Rock Unit of the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument in central Oregon. This is where the John Day River flows through a water gap[1] called Picture Gorge. It’s about 300 m (1,000 ft) deep, with nearly vertical walls of basalt.
According to the standard uniformitarian interpretation, the basaltic lava flowed over this area about 16 million years ago. After that, the river slowly cut down through these lava flows over millions of years to form the gorge. But how could a river flow through a long range of hills? You would expect water to flow around.
The creationist interpretation, however, does not have these sorts of problems...
(click excerpt link for remainder plus pictures)
(Excerpt) Read more at creation.com ...
The biggest uplift rate I know about is the intermittent uplift of the Yellowstone Caldera, at 7 cm/year, but that's being caused by volcanic forces rather than plate tectonics.
Sure you are...afterall, 100+species of large meat eating dinosaurs walked the Earth with Man.
Quite a fantasy...
...and, since you’re in “the know” and all, what exactly are the rates of uplifts of basalt flows at this spot?
Water is a powerful erosion agent....more powerful than a slowly rising basalt ridge....but you need that to be untrue against all evidence so you can have Man walking in the land of meat eating dinosaurs.
Making it up as you go ...again...
Don’t forget to add on an earth that the sun circles.
E-S claims he is a surveyor, but thinks the earth is the center of the universe, is only ~6000 yeras old, has no idea of geology or geologic processes and believes prayer and diet can cure acute appendicitis.
I think he is the new kid that holds the stick for the real surveyors.
Yeah, all those fossils and formations meant to try and fool the true believers.
A cataclysmic earth wide flood could certainly produce profound changes in the surface of the earth but is the valley near my house one of those?
Would lakes be formed and then drain as the depressed area spring back? What would the draining off of the waters look like? and would it look different from an unusually large period of rain?
The Mississippi changes course and we find paddle boats under cornfields, volcanoes remove entire islands in a day and rebuild them in a life time or two.
To say something like a gorge took millions of years to form is a guess unless we can form one by the same methods.
Make it up as you go.
Water is an “eroding agent” against basalt only when it is moving hard rock, and even then a significant slope is necessary to generate the velocity. In an area of uplift, slopes are going to be negligible.
You have a wild imagination.
That's a very effective method to make sure modern geological science never has to challenge your beliefs.
“Geology is hard!”
I think it’s built on rocky science
Congratulations. I think that is quite possibly the greatest contradiction in the shortest sentence I've ever seen.
You've never seen a fast-running stream on level ground? What matters is the height of the source versus the ultimate destination. The middle can be fairly level, and the stream will still run fairly quickly. And will carry pebbles and sand to help with erosion. Basalt WILL erode over time, if "over time" is on the order of millimeters per year.
It's time for you to either study up on fluid mechanics, or bail out of this conversation. The velocity of water in an open channel is proportional to the slope, and inversely proportional to the friction of the channel.
You can start by looking up Manning's Equation, then you can write your paper on fast moving water in flat channels.
See ya next year, ok?
You know not what my beliefs are so there’s little justification for any comment on them.
And the fact remains, you don’t know how it formed.
Nice try Obama!
When the creek encounters an uplifted area, the slope flattens, then reverses. (how are you fixed for uphill water? I know a few architects that can manufacture it with an arrow on a sheet of plans!)
You are assuming that the rate of uplift is greater than the rate that water erodes the channel. If the water is eroding the channel faster than the uplift, then the banks might grow higher, but the channel won't.
You have utterly no sense of elapsed time or how uplift drives erosion, do you?
Uplift is largely what creates the gradients for slopes to form in the first place. Erosion is what in turn creates the slopes. The morphology of streams in turn is a function of gradient and the underlying rocks and rainfall and climate.
The Rockies formed about 70 to 45 million years ago and then eroded to where there were a few isolated peaks poking up above an erosional plain where clastic sediments filled the areas between the peaks. Then, starting 10 million years ago, the region started a process of gradual uplift that raised the region about a mile in elevation, resulting in the exhumation of the Rockies. Streams started cutting down through the deep deposits of clastic debris, and in some cases as lower, buried mountain ranges that they flowed across became exhumed, cut right across the mountain ranges - that is how the early pioneers didn't realize the Wind River and the Big Horn were the same river - because it flowed directly through the Owl Creek mountains. And all that happened because of the uplift - and the streams in place across the peneplain started downcutting in place as the uplift provided the gradient for them to move sediments.
In some places, the original erosional surface still exists at high elevation. If you climb up a steep-sided formerly glaciated valley in the northern Wind Rivers, you will get to the top of the valley and encounter open, windswept plains of small boulders and tundra at about 11,000 to 12,000 feet. This peneplain used to be about 6,000 feet in elevation. The regional uplift created the gradients for erosion to work backwards into the uplifted areas - but it still hasn't removed all of the old traces of the ancient peneplain. Give it another 2-5 million years, and it will.
The point is, you haven't seen this stuff. I have, in person - I've been to Wind River canyon and the northern Winds, up to 13,000 feet. You have absolutely no awareness of how erosion works, from what you have posted here. You need to theorize less and get out more.
Thanks for the ping!
[[Carbon-14 dating is not used to classify the Earth as billions of years old.]]
No kidding- reread what I wrote- I didn’t say it did- you misread what I said
[[Sorry, but there is no point having much of a conversation with those who engage in bad science,]]
Didbn’t liek thel ist of links that pointed out the problems with al the different dating methods eh?
[[Try again (this time with, say, potassium/argon dating.]]
That method is covered i nthe links I presented showing the problems with it- again EVERYTHING beyond Carbon-14 is nothign but assumptions and riddled with problems
[[It does. That’s the point.]]
It does? you haven’t hsown me anything but unsupported assumptions/claims, and lots of insults towards Creationism and ID
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