I recently received Dr. Walt Brown's Christmas letter, and as always it is filled with remarkable insights, as well as some updates and new photographs and diagrams that are going into his newest edition of his comprehensive book on his hydroplate theory, In the Beginning: Compelling Evidence for Creation and the Flood.
One of the updated photos is a very recent picture of the strata of the Grand Canyon, taken just after Thanksgiving of this year, and showing his two grandsons standing next to a quartzite block embedded in the layers of the Grand Canyon -- a quartzite block that acts as a very important clue about the strata that geologists use to try to understand the ancient history of our globe and its geological features.
That updated photo of the quartzite block can be seen on this page of Dr. Brown's hydroplate theory book, which he graciously makes available for free to everyone online in its entirety. The photo is labeled "Figure 1" and it shows the location of the quartzite block in the wall of the Grand Canyon (the image to the left) as well as a close-up of the block and the strata around it.
The reason this block, which Dr. Brown estimates to weigh between five and ten tons, is so significant is the fact that it is made of quartzite from the strata of the Grand Canyon below the "Great Unconformity" which are usually designated as the "Pre-Cambrian" strata, but this huge block is embedded in the layers above the unconformity, which geologists say formed about a billion years later! Further, as the interested reader can easily see by looking at the close-up of the block in the "later" strata, the layers around the block are clearly deformed in smooth-flowing lines around the mighty block, almost as if these layers were soft and pliant when the block was in their midst, and then hardened later!
But such a suggestion, that the layers were all soft and pliable, goes against all the assumptions upon which modern geology and stratigraphy are founded! Conventional geologists confidently tell us that the various layers of the Grand Canyon (and all the other layers found in the geological strata around the world) were laid down over many millions of years. In fact, they will tell you with great precision the date range of each of the layers of the Grand Canyon -- you can see them in this previous discussion in a blog post entitled "The Strata and the Great Flood."
If the quartzite block is from the "Pre-Cambrian" layers of the Grand Canyon "Supergroup" dated by conventional geologists as being laid down between 740 million to 1.8 billion years ago, how did it "float" upwards into the layers above which are dated between 525 million and 505 million years ago? How did those layers oblige by bending around it so gracefully? Perhaps that quartzite block was floating in the air for hundreds of millions of years while it waited for the other strata to be laid down around it.
This quartzite block and its intriguing location argues strongly for the possibility that the strata of the Grand Canyon were laid down rapidly, rather than hundreds of millions of years apart. As discussed in previous posts, and in much greater detail in his book, Dr. Brown has provided extensive evidence that this is exactly what did take place: the strata were laid down rapidly during a flood event, the result of a massive outpouring of sediments when the "fountains of the great deep" erupted with cataclysmic violence, abrading millions of tons of earth as they did so. He has explained that the hydrodynamic forces of liquefaction sorted these sediments into layers during the flood. Afterwards, some of these layers were still soft and pliable for some time, before hardening into sedimentary rock. This explains the graceful folds seen in some places where great pressures (also during the events surrounding the global flood) acted on them while they were still able to bend.
Regarding this particular quartzite block, Dr. Brown provides this explanation (again, be sure to check out his full discussion in his book itself):
Geology professor Arthur V. Chadwick brought this block to my attention in 197824 and later in a visit to my office. The block—a very hard material called quartzite—was lifted, transported from right to left, and deposited on layers which, at the time, were soft mud. Other mud layers then blanketed the block. (See the deformed layers below and above the block.) Professor Chadwick correctly identified the lifting force: a very dense, rapidly-flowing, sand/mud/water slurry, which plucked the block off the lower quartzite layer upstream (far to the right of these pictures). Part of that “pink” quartzite layer is seen in the first picture (lower right). The easiest way to lift and transport such a heavy block is in a dense liquefied (and therefore, very buoyant), sediment/water mixture.This rapid transport, which was immediately above the Cambrian-Precambrian interface, occurred during the compression event. Below the sliding slurry, a sand layer decelerated and compressed first. That compression squeezed up water that lubricated the slide and heated the quartz sand, so it became quartzite.25 Compression also tipped the layers up, causing them to be beveled by the overriding, sliding layers. The camera is looking north; therefore the slurry slid from east to west, which is consistent with the direction the Americas hydroplate slid away from the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.
This explanation is much more consistent with the location of this block and the appearance of the layers around that transported quartzite block than any explanation which tries to argue that the layers around the block were successively laid down over many millions of years.
There are many other places around the globe where the geology appears to provide evidence that the strata were laid down rapidly rather than over the course of many successive aeons of time the way that conventional geologists tell us in school. Take a look at the photograph at the top of this post showing graceful curving strata in the Gasteretal in Switzerland (south of Bern). Or the photograph below from the Chikmagalur in southwest India (Karnataka region, formerly Mysore).
Ask yourself whether, if you had to bet on it, you would say these layers appear to have been bent into these shapes while the strata were still partially wet and pliable (because they were all laid down during the same event) or whether it looks like they were laid down over millions of years and then somehow bent into these shapes when they were dry as a bone?
The question of whether the strata of the earth were laid down all at once, or over hundreds of millions of years, is a crucial question for the conclusions one draws from the various geological formations around the world. If one is looking at the geological clues, and working from a thesis or framework of thought in which the strata must have been laid down over successive ages spanning more than a billion years, then the evidence will be interpreted very differently than if one is open to the possibility that these layers were all laid down in a relatively short period of time.
The majority of conventional geologists absolutely refuse to even entertain the possibility that the strata may have all been laid down in a relatively short period of time. They should, however, reconsider that possibility.
