Four million people per year visit the Grand Canyon and ponder at the incredible forces which cut this chasm out of the earth. Did the small river at the bottom carve through the many layers of sediment over eons of time or did a catastrophic event carve the canyon more rapidly? These are the competing explanations for the origin of the Grand Canyon. But how could a flood have accomplished so much? As the following examples show, moving water has enormous erosion capabilities.

In the spring of 1983 the spillway tunnel of the Glen Canyon Dam had to be operated to allow drainage of water from Lake Powell. When one of the spillways was fully opened the flow pattern changed and blocks of rock were seen hurtling out of the spillway exit. The water became red with dissolved sandstone and there were noticeable earth tremors. The spillway was immediately closed for inspection. The survey team discovered incredible erosion damage to the spillway tunnel cause by cavitation of the flowing water. In a matter of minutes, flowing water had penetrated the three foot thick, steel reinforced, walls and ripped holes into the surrounding bedrock. A 150 foot diameter hole had been cut into the rock requiring 63,000 cubic feet of concrete to repair the damage.

In the scab lands of eastern Washington is an even more dramatic example of the incredible erosion force of rapidly flowing water. An ancient lake was blocked at the end of the ice age by an ice dam in northern Idaho. When the water breached the dam it ripped through Montana, Idaho, and Washington leaving 16,000 square miles of scarred terrain and deeply cut valleys. At one location the flood cut a 50 mile long trench 6 miles wide and 900 feet deep through solid rock! An estimated 10 cubic miles of Columbia Plateau basalt was eroded in a matter of hours by this single event. The process by which moving water can cause such extensive damage is illustrated above.

Could the Grand Canyon have been carved out by a similar catastrophic events and processes? Many qualified geologist are coming to believe this is exactly what has happened. These geologists have proposed that a large area of the Southwestern United States was covered by water which apparently broke through a natural dam and very rapidly eroded much of the Grand Canyon to its current depth. The water for this massive erosion came from gigantic lakes left on the plateau when the worldwide flood receded.

There are many other examples of moving water accomplishing massive geological changes. Yet all of these local examples pale in comparison with the effect a worldwide flood would have in regional geological features. If there were a worldwide flood, the illustrated destructive forces would have been in operation during and subsequent to this event. The result would be the rapid accumulation of very thick sedimentary deposits over massive regions. During such an event, valleys would be filled with sediment thousands of feet thick.

Neither the inability of moving water to produce the massive geological features nor the lack of evidence for a worldwide flood prevents geologists from accepting the Biblical flood account as reality. Could it be a philosophical version to accepting that which is supernatural in its origin? Would a geologist who accepted a worldwide flood for the formation of our planet’s geologist features be welcomed into the present science community? Or would this “politically incorrect” interpretation cause him to be ostracized? To accept a worldwide flood as a factual event would profoundly affect other areas of science, including biology, paleontology, and anthropology. Would such an interpretation be allowed by the scientific community?

Source: http://www.drdino.com/articles.php?spec=36

Wolfwalker, of course Bush isn’t directly responsible, your attempt to distract from the main point was childishly transparent. And yes, this is an undisguised Bush-bashing post, yours was a thinly veiled Bush apologist post.

Apologies, I know this is a political rather than a scientific rant, however, this is the real issue, it is nothing to do with science

Seriously, though! People need to be kicked in a very uncomfortable place, and I don’t mean the back of a station wagon. The only thing keeping me from calling Bush the Antichrist is the fact that he could never, in a million years, bring about world peace.

That doesn’t keep me from calling him Satan, though….

Couple that with other policy decisions out of NPS headquarters affecting First Amendment issues – like the upholding of religious plaques with bible verses at several locations, the removal of “objectionable” material from the Lincoln Memorial video, etc – and there is a pattern of top-down decisions catering to religious interests at the expense of rationality, scientific integrity, and historical accuracy (see Lincoln video issue).

The NPS is a subsidiary of the Department of the Interior, which is an Executive Branch government agency, so it is under the authority of the President of the United States. If he is not directly making the individual decisions (and nobody is saying that he is), he has appointed the people running the show who are making the decisions, and he has enacted Executive Orders to circumvent Congress and enact the “faith-based” policies. This book is not an isolated incident, but one instance out of a pattern of behavior.

Thanks, Jeff, for digging in to that. I was going to say something about having trouble confirming the details of that claim.

What I did see was a request to the GCNP Superindent for an official answer to the question of the Creationist claims and a deferral to headquarters.

http://nerdcountry.blogspot.com/2007/01/grand-canyon-ungagged.html

The summary version is, I emailed PEER directly and asked if our interpretation of their press release was accurate and that, in fact, a “gag order” had been issued to Park Service employees, to the effect that they were to answer “no comment” when asked about the age of the Grand Canyon. Jeff Ruch replied that this is a misinterpretation of the press release, and that no such gag order was ever issued.

As I pointed out in my post, this doesn’t obviate the need to have that book removed from the shelves, but it’s important to be accurate and properly informed when dealing with issues like this. The sound and fury over something that’s not really happening dilutes the attention the very real underlying issue deserves.

Anyway, there you have it. It looks like this myth (in the words of one of my favorite shows) has been “Busted”.

You miss the point. This is not about any one book decision, or any one independent decision made at any one agency. The issue is a pattern of behavior across multiple federal agencies with the one consistency being the direction of the current Presidential Administration. There is a consistent and widespread pattern of agency officials impeding the performance and dissimination of scientific data and conclusions to cater to special interests for religious and economic agendas. Most of these functionaries are Presidential appointees, or following Presidential Executive Orders and policies.

For starters, I looked up the National Park Service’s Grand Canyon web site. There are two interesting facts there, both pretty much highlighting the hysteria in this post.

http://www.nps.gov/grca/supportyourpark/bookstore.htm

The bookstores throughout Grand Canyon National Park, are operated by the Grand Canyon Association. GCA is a private, non-profit organization founded in 1932 to support the educational goals of the National Park Service at Grand Canyon.
The association provides financial support to Grand Canyon National Park, publishes canyon related books and free park publications, funds research and naturalist programs, and helps support the park’s research library and exhibits.

So I doubt the President has much sway over what’s sold in the bookstore.

As for guides not being allowed to say how old the canyon is–does that sound remotely possible to you? It would only under certain conditions that don’t reflect favorably on you. How about this little tidbid from the Frequently Asked Questions at the Grand Canyon web site?

http://www.nps.gov/grca/faqs.htm#rock
Are the oldest rocks in the world exposed at Grand Canyon?
No. Although the oldest rocks at Grand Canyon (2000 million years old) are fairly old by any standard, the oldest rocks in the world are closer to 4000 million years old. The oldest exposed rocks in North America, which are among the oldest rocks in the world, are in northern Canada.

I’m sorry, I don’t believe a word that you’ve posted here. It seems you have a political axe to grind, and you’ll even lie–or at the very least, not check your facts–to promote your political goals.

For a landscape formed by a single massive flood, see the Grand Coulee region of Washington state. It is *very* different from the Grand Canyon.

link

Bill Clinton has a consenusal sexual affair and is impeached for lying about it. The only people really hurt – emotionally not physically – are Bill’swife and family plus perhaps a couple of friends. Really itnodbodyelses business. But hegets impeached and Republicans’and Bible-Belters (geographic & personality~wise) are fuming at the ears and truy to remove him from power over it.

Janet Jackson’s top is ripped by Justin Timberlake at a sports event and the same bunch of hypocrites (in many fnot all cases) are just about frothing at the mouth with outrage even though again no real harm was done. (And don’t tell me kids learning that women really do have mammary glands somehow constitutes harm, I’ll die laughing.) Instead of laughing it off, or treating it as the trivial strunt it was, they go ballistic using it as an exuse for censorship, ersatz “moral” outrage and again, create an national scandal and ugly debate over nothing.

But then when another President lies his way into a needless war that physically kills tens or even hundreds of thousands of innocent people, mostly civilians ,creates untold suffering and political damage for the ciountryand the West – in fact harms the globe generally … Or insists that children are fed religious lies rather than science at a world geological wonder ..

Then its seems there’s just a shrug of the shoulders … At least from most of the people, certainly nothing like the majorly over-the-top response to the earlier examples.

You’re a weird mob, you USA-ites, you really are ..

The harm his anti-science, anti-rationalism, pro-religious nonsense “education” policies have caused – among well, pretty much all his other policies* – is staggering, long-lasting and will take years to undo.
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* With the possible exception of the space exploration latest initiative which has, alas, yet to move from rhetoric into reality – or garner the massive funding it needs. (Has the $ been spent already in the futile waste of Iraq? I fear so.) … Sigh.
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That creationist baloney is being served up at the the Grand Canyon National Park – a world heritage natural wonder is a scandal as theBA rightly observes.

But compared with some of the other blunders its only a minor one. No-one has yet been directly killed or forced to suffer physically. Just children’s (& adults) brains potentially scarred, and thinking people insulted and offended.

America, you really, really must get rid of this wretched, neo-fascist administration sooner rather than later.

Democrats – show some spine and start impeachment proceedings over Bush’es conspiracy to committ mass murder by invading Iraq based on lies. Show the world that you are different, that you are angry, that you really do care and, for pity’s sake, START ACTING! Much as the rest of the world hates to admit it, the US is the global leader, the global superpower and trend setter – and the direction being set now is walking off a cliff without a parachute!

Republicans – Please for heavens sake wake up! Stop backing George the Second (also known as George the Lesser and George the Mad) just because of his father, his rhetoric and your blinkered partisanship. The man is a dangerously deluded, numbingly ignorant, and appallingly arrogant fool. That like science,like basic geology and the age of the planet is fact beyond any serious dispute.

As too is is the fact that those pulling Bush II’s strings are the bunch that George the First (George the Elder, George the pretty much sane) excluded from his inner circles because of those neo-cons ideological extremism and lack of understanding. It is now historical fact that the Neo-cons have got all the foreign policy and most other decisions disasterously wrong and their critics were right.

The time to debate the accuracy of that reality is long over, the time to remedy the situation is this very second -earlier if possible. Please just pull your heads out of the sand and stop digging the hole you”ve been burying yourselves deeper and deeper into. Recognising you’ve sunk too deep, stopping the digging by apologising to the rest of the planet and climbing out by reversing your current policies as fast as possible is what’s needed.

Americans, there is just too little time left, too much at stake and too much damage being done to delay the removal of this warped administration any longer. It needs to happen now.

Then you need to learn from its blunderings and see that they are NEVER repeated. Your nation and the rest of the planet just cannot afford such stupidity, waste and needless destruction again. For that matter, you can’t really afford it now ..

In fact, the Bible does not state the age of the Earth. There is an unspecified gap between the old and new testaments. Bishop Ussher, who calculated the famous date of 4004 BC, used a set of Babylonian records to bridge the gap between old and new testaments. He also had to choose between three different versions of the old testament, all of which gave different lifespans for the patriarchs (and hence different spans of time for the events in the OT), but he was helped by the discovery of a text that correlated with one of these three.

However, his date is not consistent with Chinese Imperial records, that form a consistent record that gives a minimum age of the Earth that is over 6000 years. So, even shortly after the young age of the Earth was first “determined”, it was called into question.

Ha ha! Get it? Rocks!

Never mind. Late night…

Simply? No.

For the long answer, read the links several people have posted above.