Geology Reference
In-Depth Information
2
A Grand Canyon
F
INALLY
I
TOOK
the last step and reached the top. It had taken all day, but I had fulfilled an
ambition to hike up through the world's best-exposed story written in stone. Standing on
the rim, I turned and looked down almost a mile to the bottom of the Grand Canyon, still
marveling over the extraordinary tale preserved in the rock walls along the trail. Elated and
exhausted, I left the rim and walked over to the National Park Service gift shop.
I picked up a small coffee-table topic intriguingly titled
Grand Canyon: A Different View
.
It told of how Noah's Flood ripped up the surface of the world like a geological blender,
laid down the great pile of rock exposed in the canyon walls, and then deftly excavated the
canyon as the waters receded.
1
Digging deeper into the topic, I read that the canyon itself was carved when the sediment
that formed the rocks now exposed in its walls was still soft. I was puzzled that the authors
did not try to explain how a mile-high stack of saturated sediment remained standing without
slumping into the growing chasm—or how all the loose sand and clay later turned into solid
rock. The topic simply stated that, according to the Bible, Noah's Flood formed the Grand
Canyon and all the rocks through which it's cut in under a year. There was no explanation
for the multiple alternating layers of different rock types, the erosional gaps in the rock se-
quence that spoke of ages of lost time, or the remarkable order to the various fossils in the
canyon walls. The story was nothing like the tale I read in the rocks I had spent the day hik-
ing past.
