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Formation of the Grand Canyon: Stretching 277 miles through the Southwestern portion of the Colorado plateau, the Canyon is carved through sedimentary layers of limestone, sandstone, and shale, and into the basement of schist and granite. It descends over a mile into the Earth and is 18 miles wide at some points.


Explanation: How could the Colorado River carve through the 8,000 foot Colorado plateau when the river, in its upper reaches east of the plateau, is at less than 4,000 feet? As demonstrated at Mt. St. Helens, catastrophic processes provide a very plausible explanation for quickly carving canyons like the Grand Canyon. A global flood would provide just such a catastrophic mechanism.

Nautiloids: Fossils of these aquatic creatures, which averaged 18 inches in length, but reached as much as 6 feet, are related to today's squid and octopus. They are found in abundance in a 6-foot thick layer near the base of the 500-foot thick Redwall limestone.


Explanation: For fossilization to occur, the subject must be buried catastrophically, protecting it from decay. The Nautiloids, some reaching 4 feet in length and found buried standing upright, show that at least this layer within the Redwall had to be laid down very quickly, not at the bottom of a calm placid sea, the uniformitarian interpretation.

Contact point between sedimentary layers: Known as unconformities, many of these contact points form a distinct line that can be seen even from the rim of the canyon.

Explanation: If these unconformities represent from 10 to 125 million years of “missing time,” which is the uniformitarian interpretation, why is there no sign of either physical or chemical erosion between the layers? Why is there no sign of channeling, canyons or valleys, as we see with erosion of present-day topography? Could this be classic flood geology on a global scale?


The Great Unconformity: The contact point between the basement formations of schist and granite and the first sedimentary layer is called the Great Unconformity.

Explanation: Representing a billion years of missing time and material in a uniformitarian interpretation, the Great Unconformity shows the nearly flat erosion of the underlying surface. This hard surface appears to have been smoothed by an enormous regional-scale flow of water. This is just what would be expected in a global flood.

Folding: Folds, or bends in the rock, are found in some sedimentary layers.

Explanation: When there is movement along a fault today, it cracks the rock. The folding of the rock, sometimes across multiple layers, without cracking or the effects of heat from supposedly slow deep burial, indicates that the folding had to happen while the layers were still soft and immediately after rapid deep burial. Thus these folds show that the deposition and upheaval responsible for the folding were, in fact, one event.

Layering of Grand Canyon: The Grand Canyon exhibits 4,000 – 5,000 feet of geological strata in more than 30 separate formations of limestone, sandstone, shale and conglomerates overlying granites, schists and gneisses.


Explanation: How the sedimentary layers of the Canyon were deposited is a key difference between the two models (creation vs. uniformitarian). The upper layers are divided into 9 formations (Paleozoic era), with the lower (Precambrian) also containing 9 layers. Creation geologists consider the upper layers to be Flood deposits with the lower being pre-Flood and the underlying granites and metamorphics resulting from geologic processes during the original creation event.