unlikely topic

geology in the west

I found an article in which the “potholes” of the Grand Canyon area are explained by geologists. These are places in sedimentary rock where a long-ago eddy swirled, with heavily sedimented water, for long enough to cut a hole in the rock… complete with spiral cut marks and water marks all around it. The sediment-filled eddy current is like a flexible drill bit. The potholes which are sufficiently vertical to contain what goes in them, be it water or hikers, are called “keeper potholes”.

The geologists agree that water did it. Nobody offers to guess how LONG it takes for a pothole to form, but they agree water did it.

I was using google earth to survey Monument Valley, especially the flat tops on the “monuments” that stand in the great red lowlands just east of the Grand Canyon, and I found several of these potholes on TOP of the monuments. Exactly like the ones further down along Marble Canyon and moving toward the Grand Canyon itself.

Potholes. One of them I measured at 45 feet across, another at only 10 feet. How deep they are, I cannot determine with the publicly available software, but the shadows that are in the pictures I’m examining do show they are not just depressions. They’re holes. Some of them still have water from the most recent rains. The photograph shows the 45 footer, on top of a monument, with the ground level scrub brush in the top portion of the photo. This is a Google Earth capture.

And the thing that struck me, and would strike you too, is this; how does water flow, over time, carrying sediment, on TOP OF A MONUMENT? These are table tops, mostly, and hundreds of feet tall. They stand isolated, surrounded by dry red desert. There are no signs of water channels, no trace of water having ever flowed even nearby — but especially no way to understand how water could have flowed along the TOP of a structure whose top is four hundred feet above a flat, dry desert, and is only a few hundred yards long to begin with.

A mesa surface, topping a vertical red rock structure that is less than a half mile long or wide, and which sits in the middle of a flat, dry desert with no old water channels anywhere. On that mesa is a pothole, drilled by an eddy, water laden with sediments, circling in one spot because of flow patterns.

How? HOW? The pothole is exactly like any number of them in this area. But the way they say it formed COULD NOT HAVE HAPPENED.

I wish I could find a meeting of geologists committed to conventional theory and ask them. I have asked a few questions of geologists and they do not like it. They repeat how they spent years in school reading books and that they know how these things happened, but I do not.

I have some basic questions. This is one of them.

How do holes in rock, cut by eddies in currents of sediment-laden water over a long period of time, appear, when there is no water flow and no possibility it was ever there?

Also… if the conventional wisdom about deposited layers of sediment is true (about a foot every thousand years, your mileage may vary), why are there thousands of vertical feet of layers visible in the Grand Canyon without any signs of erosion? No gullies, no berms, no wind-scooped depressions. No sign that any of these layers were ever the surface of the earth for a thousand years. Each layer is dead flat, 90* from vertical, one on top of another, as if they were all laid down in a fast sequence with no time for erosional changes in the flat horizontal line of ANY age, a million years or a hundred million years ago… how? How are they all dead flat, one on top of another, no erosion or shaping of any kind? That kind of thing only happens when heavily sedimented water calms and drops out the sediment, heavy first, graduating to lightest last. Liquefaction, it’s called. Put water in a clear tank, add sand and dirt of different densities, shake well, and watch. Several distinct layers of sediment drop to the bottom.

There is more on my mind. But this pothole thing points to a vastly different story of the geology in the west. Potholes eroded by sedimented water making eddies as it flows by — ON THE VERY TOP of “monuments” with tall sides and small tops, in a big low flat valley — says to me that there was once an ENORMOUS amount of water in that valley. And once, it flowed out, in a single event. It was a moment of such rapid flow — thousands of cubic miles all at once — that it eroded and scarred parts of the landscape that are now utterly beyond reach of water… beyond imagination of such possibilities.

And yet, it was water that left huge marks that are still clearly visible, one of which IS the Grand Canyon.

And another is a pothole, visible here and there in unlikely places.

Geologists tell ME they’re formed by eddying, whirling, sediment-laden water. But they don’t like my conclusion about how water did that, in THOSE places. They won’t even touch the subject of how it happened high atop a mesa in the middle of the desert.

It’s called a world-wide flood. Perhaps there has been more than one. Perhaps the history of this earth is turbulent beyond belief. Or perhaps the Bible is right. One thing is for sure… the small increments of change over hundreds of millions of years thing does not, as they say, hold water.