[MD Expat in PA]

Run the water on a fresh pad and watch a miniature grand canyon form before your eyes. It happens every time perfectly.

No. No it doesn’t. If you run water, even hot boiling water or even volcanic lava (the hottest materials found at the Earth’s surface), at very high speeds through a flat surface of mud or wet dirt, you don’t see features anything like a “miniature Grand Canyon”. No experiment running water on a “fresh pad” would result in anything like the Grand Canyon and it wouldn’t result in the sharp turns, u-shaped turns. If you can duplicate that result, I’d really like to see it.

Many variants of rock formations could occur during catastrophic events, so inclination can form (vertical or otherwise). The reformulation of material and other events can occur over time, several times (i.e. stages)

See Mount Saint Helens.

For one thing the erosion on Mt. St. Helen’s after the eruption looks nothing like the Grand Canyon and for another the Mt. St. Helen’s erosion field is only about 20m deep compared to the 1.5km of the Grand Canyon and the debris fields around Mt. St. Helens are made up of rocks & gravels, ash & mud, & the remains of pyroclastic flows, sitting loosely atop each other – they’re not compacted or consolidated. And all this is sitting on steep slopes, pretty much unprotected by any plant cover (particularly immediately after the eruption sequence), and in an area where the average annual rainfall is about 3m for year – a recipe for some pretty impressive erosion. The Grand Canyon is different.

This (Grand Canyon) significant geological feature cuts through layers of limestone, sandstone, shale and metamorphic granite, a mile down to the Colorado River. Those types of rocks are simply not formed overnight or in a few days or weeks even during catastrophic events.

A bit snarky but a good explanation is illustrated here:

Grand Canyon carved by floodwater -- debunked

And your question re: a trench is a nonsequitur WRT this discussion. Trench failures are always due to wedge pressures on the side of the trench; no such pressures exist in a sea of mud.

So would you be willing to dig a trench in a “sea of mud” to the scale of the Grand Canyon, say a 1/16th scale and would you be willing to stand in it for as long as it takes for that mud to turn to limestone, sandstone, shale and metamorphic granite?

See at about 2:19 (Water Accumulation) and get back to me.

Trenching & Excavation Safety

[DManA]

Why aren’t there hundreds of Grand Canyons on every continent?

[DManA]

The only reason to make this young Earth, WWFlood argument is you think your eternal soul is at stake.

It’s irrelevant to my faith. And beyond that the subject is a relatively irrelevant curiosity to me.

The “truth” of the matter isn’t going to change my destiny on Earth or Eternity.

[editor-surveyor]

You can repeat your lie as many times as you wish, but those of us that have witnessed the exact kind of errosion happen for the same reasons in the same conditions know better.

Run storm drainage, or a loose hose, it makes little difference; the result is a true microcosm of the grand canyon every time. The only prerequsite is that the soil has to be dampened by a prior storm. If you do it dry, all it does is dig a deep narrow gouge instead of a broad cut like the GC.

[kimtom]

Sorry, apologetics for uniformitarism or evolutionary LONG periods of time needed to create results similar to Grand Canyon will not stand up to a real debate.
nearly all geologist agree that Mt St. Helens is a undeniable example.
(of course it was only ONE volcanic eruption, but imagine what a world wide catatrophe would do???)
Yes it is also possible that the G Canyon formed by more than one event.

“...The effects of Mount St. Helens, however, have cast some serious doubt on the long-held uniformitarian theory that the Grand Canyon must have been slowly carved over millions of years. Before the eruption, Spirit Lake (the lake close to Mount St. Helens) drained into the Toutle River. The upper river, however, was buried by up to 600 feet of debris from the eruption, which blocked the lake’s usual drainage site. For two full years, Spirit Lake was unable to drain into the Toutle River. Then, on March 19, 1982, a small eruption around the summit of Mount St. Helens caused a mudflow that was 20 miles long. The mudflow pooled behind the debris dam, and sent mud flowing furiously over the west end of the big steam pit. The flow quickly cut a canyon that was 140 feet deep. “The canyon produced by the mud has been called ‘The Little Grand Canyon’ because it appears to be a one-fortieth scale model of the Grand Canyon” (Morris and Austin, 2003, pp. 74-75).

If the eruption of Mount St. Helens could initiate a situation in which a canyon one-fortieth the size of the Grand Canyon was formed in one day, and the eruption of Mount St. Helens was by no means the largest ever (dwarfed by the last eruption measured at Yellowstone, which produced 2,000 times the explosive power), then what would a person expect to happen when the “fountains of the deep” were broken up and the entire world was covered by water as in Noah’s Flood? Surely, the evidence from Mount St. Helens shows that catastrophic origins of geological features like the Grand Canyon are a possibility. The ideology of those who refuse to acknowledge the Flood’s geological force is discussed in 2 Peter 3:5-6: “For this they willfully forget: that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of water and in the water, by which the world that then existed perished, being flooded with water” (emp. added)....”

REFERENCES

Morris, John and Steven A. Austin (2003), Footprints in the Ash: The Explosive Story of Mount St. Helens (Green Forest, AR: Master Books).

“The Geological Story of the Grand Canyon,” [On-line], URL: http://www.grand.canyon.national-park.com/info.htm.

[kimtom]

In June 2010, John Matson wrote an article for the Scientific American Web site in which he reported about a huge catastrophic flood in Texas that occurred in 2002. Matson noted: “At Canyon Lake, a reservoir north of San Antonio, water rushed over the dam’s spillway, pouring into the valley below. Within days a 50-meter-wide channel now known as Canyon Lake Gorge had been carved into the soil and bedrock, drastically transforming the landscape on a short timescale” (Matson, 2010). Michael Lamb, a geologist from the California Institute of Technology who studied the effects of the flood, “found that the landscape below Canyon Lake had been remodeled in just three days or so, during which hundreds of thousands of cubic meters of rock and sediment were flushed downstream” (2010). Matson also stated: “The 2002 Texas flood was powerful, plucking meter-sized limestone boulders out of the bedrock and carrying them away to leave a channel that in places exceeds 12 meters in depth.”

The implications of such a flood are clear. If huge channels over three stories deep can be carved in bedrock in a matter of days, then catastrophic flooding on a larger scale could easily be responsible for carving much larger canyons in brief periods of time (cf. Butt, 2002; Butt, 2003; Butt, 2004). The false assumption of uniformitarianism, by which so many people have been taught to believe in billions of years of Earth history, cannot be logically sustained in the face of such clear evidence for the catastrophic origins of geological features like canyons.

REFERENCES

Butt, Kyle (2003), “Changing Their Tune About the Grand Canyon,” http://www.apologeticspress.org/articles/1811.

Matson, John (2010), “Data Deluge: Texas Flood Canyon Offers Test of Hydrology Theories for Earth and Mars,” http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=canyon-lake-flood.