《The New Answers Book 2》(Ken Ham etc.) Table of contents

Rapid Erosion

Erosion can happen catastrophically, at scales that are difficult for us to imagine. When standing along the edge of a canyon and seeing a river in the bottom, one is inclined to imagine that the very river in the bottom of the gorge has cut the canyon over long periods of time. However, geologists are realizing that many canyons have been cut by processes other than rivers that currently occupy canyons.

Massive erosion during catastrophic flooding occurs by several processes. This includes abrasion,14 hydraulic action,15 and cavitation.16 The “Little Grand Canyon” of the Toutle River was cut by a mudflow on March 19, 1982, that originated from the crater of Mount St. Helens. The abrasive mudflow cut through rockslide and pumice deposits from the 1980 eruptions. Parts of the new canyon system are up to 140 feet deep.

Engineer’s Canyon was also cut by the mudflow and is 100 feet deep. There is a small stream in the bottom of Engineer’s Canyon (figure 7). One would be inclined to think that this stream was responsible for cutting the canyon over long periods of time if one did not know the canyon was cut catastrophically by a mudflow. In this case, the canyon is responsible for the stream; the stream is not responsible for the canyon.



Figure 7. Engineer’s Canyon, Mount St. Helens, Washington. The canyon was cut by a mudflow originating from the crater of the volcano on March 19, 1982. The cliff on the left is about 100 feet high. Note the small stream in the bottom of the canyon. In this case, the stream did not form the canyon, the canyon came first and is responsible for the stream being there! Photo by Steve Austin, copyright 1989, Institute for Creation Research; used by permission.

Other large canyons and valleys are known to have been cut catastrophically as well. One of the most famous examples is the formation of the Channeled Scabland17 of eastern Washington state. The catastrophic explanation of the enigmatic topography is now well accepted, but when it was first proposed in the 1920s by J Harland Bretz,18 it was radical. The idea was not well accepted until nearly 50 years later, in 1969.

Bretz was trying to explain a whole series of deep, abandoned canyons (cut in hard, basaltic bedrock), dry waterfalls, deep plunge pools, hanging valleys, large stream ripples, gravel bars, and large exotic boulders. The Scabland formed as a glacier blocked the Clark Fork River in Idaho during the Ice Age. The glacially dammed river caused water to back up and form a huge lake (Lake Missoula) in western Montana, in places 2,000 feet deep!



Figure 8. Dry Falls, near Coulee City, Washington. This is part of Grand Coulee, a canyon that is 50 miles long and as much as 900 feet deep, cut during the catastrophic Missoula Flood. The flood water poured over the lip of this 350-foot escarpment in the center of the photo, at five times the width of Niagara Falls. The lakes are filled plunge pools (300 feet deep) cut by water cascading over the cliff. Photo by John Whitmore.

Eventually, the ice dam burst, releasing water equivalent in volume to Lakes Erie and Ontario combined. The water rushed through Idaho and into eastern Washington, carving the Scabland topography. Hard basaltic bedrock was rapidly cut by abrasion, hydraulic action, and cavitation (figure 8). As the water drained into the Pacific Ocean, it created a delta more than 200 mi² in size. It took Lake Missoula about two weeks to drain. It has been estimated that at peak volume, the flood represented about 15 times the combined flow of all the rivers in the world!19 Catastrophic floods of this magnitude were unthinkable at the height of uniformitarian geology in the early 1900s. Today, they are becoming more widely accepted as explanations of large parts of the earth’s topography.20

The origin of the Grand Canyon has been a topic of much speculation. Conventional geologists have not reached any consensus on its origin. Dr. Steve Austin, of the Institute for Creation Research, published in 1994 that the Grand Canyon was cut by a catastrophic flood that originated from post-Flood lakes ponded behind the Kaibab Upwarp.21 In 2000, a symposium was convened in Grand Canyon National Park to discuss the canyon’s origin. One paper22 was published that was similar to Austin’s idea, although the authors gave him no credit. Evidence in favor of the lake failure hypothesis for the catastrophic carving of the Grand Canyon is growing.

Recent work from the Anza Borrego Desert of California also supports this theory.23 Austin believes that several lakes ponded behind the Kaibab Upwarp, containing a volume of about 3,000 mi³ of water, about three times the volume of Lake Michigan,24 or about six times the volume of Lake Missoula. Austin proposed that the lakes drained because the limestones of the Kaibab Upwarp, which held back the ponded water and developed caves (through solution by carbonic acid), catastrophically piping the water out of the lakes, cutting the canyon.

Rapid Fossil Formation25

When an organism is turned into stone (i.e., fossilized), the process usually must happen rapidly, or the organism will be lost to decay. Taphonomy is a relatively new branch of geology that studies everything that happens from the death of an organism to its inclusion in the fossil record. Many experiments have been performed to see what happens to all types of animal carcasses in all types of settings including marine, freshwater, and terrestrial settings.

The goal of many of these experiments is to make actualistic taphonomic observations so the fossil record can be better understood. One common theme throughout many of these experiments is rapid disintegration of soft animal tissue. In the absence of scavengers, bacteria and other microbes can rapidly digest animal carcasses in nearly all types of environments. For example, I have documented that fish can completely disintegrate in time frames from days to weeks in both natural and laboratory settings under all types of variable conditions (temperature, depth, oxygen levels, salinity, and species).11 The taphonomic literature has shown this is generally true for many other types of organisms as well.26

Simply put, in order for an animal carcass to be turned into a fossil, it must be sequestered from decay very soon after death. The most common way for this to happen is via deep rapid burial so the organism can be protected from scavengers that may churn through the sediment in search of nutrients. Many fossil deposits around the world are considered to be Lagerstätten deposits (like the Green River Formation), or deposits that contain abundant fossils with exceptional preservation. It is widely recognized that most of these deposits were formed by catastrophic, rapid burial of animal carcasses.27

Common experience tells us that soft tissues disappear quickly if something doesn’t happen to prevent their decay. However, what about the hard parts of organisms, like clam or snail shells? Shouldn’t they be able to last almost indefinitely without being buried? Numerous experiments have been completed, watching what happens to shells on the ocean floor over time.26 Not surprisingly, these experiments have shown that thick, durable shells last longer than thin, fragile shells.

If the fossil record has accumulated by slow gradual processes, like those that are occurring in today’s oceans, then the fossil record should be biased toward thick, durable shells and against thin, fragile shells. This was exactly the hypothesis that a recent paper tested.28 The authors used the online Paleobiology Data Base, consisting of extensive fossil data from all over the world and throughout geologic time. Contrary to their expectations, they found thin, fragile material is just as likely to be found in the fossil record as thick, durable material. A reasonable interpretation of this finding (which the authors did not consider) is that much of the fossil record was produced catastrophically! This finding supports the hypothesis that much of the record was produced rapidly, during the Flood.