Uh, oh. Wait till the Young Earth Creationists (YEC) get a hold of this report:
In the summer of 2002, a week of heavy rains in Central Texas caused Canyon Lake -- the reservoir of the Canyon Dam -- to flood over its spillway and down the Guadalupe River Valley in a planned diversion to save the dam from catastrophic failure. The flood, which continued for six weeks, stripped the valley of mesquite, oak trees, and soil; destroyed a bridge; and plucked meter-wide boulders from the ground. And, in a remarkable demonstration of the power of raging waters, the flood excavated a 2.2-kilometer-long, 7-meter-deep canyon in the bedrock.
According to a new analysis of the flood and its aftermath -- performed by Michael Lamb, assistant professor of geology at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), and Mark Fonstad of Texas State University -- the canyon formed in just three days.
Our traditional view of deep river canyons, such as the Grand Canyon, is that they are carved slowly, as the regular flow and occasionally moderate rushing of rivers erodes rock over periods of millions of years.
Such is not always the case, however. "We know that some big canyons have been cut by large catastrophic flood events during Earth's history," Lamb says.
I hold no settled position on such questions as the age of the earth and the rate at which geological change has transpired, but the YEC folks do, and this finding confirms a claim that they've been making for sixty years or more that structures like the Grand Canyon were the result, not of gradual wearing away of sediment, but by rapid catastrophic erosion in the wake of the global Noahican flood.
I'm not qualified to venture an opinion on this matter, but I will share an anecdote. About ten years ago I took my wife and daughter on a trip through the national parks in Utah. As I sat and gazed at the rock formations at Arches N.P. and Bryce Canyon N.P. I couldn't help but think that they showed all the signs of having been scoured and sculpted by massive amounts of turbulent water. This isn't the official explanation for these landscapes, of course, but it wasn't hard to imagine, sitting in these Utah parks, how vast amounts of water pounding and swirling from north to south could carve out these canyons and rock arches, and ultimately dig out the Grand Canyon in northern Arizona.
Arches N.P.
Bryce Canyon N.P.
The article above seems to make that layman's interpretation of the visual evidence plausible, and confirm the possibility of a world-wide flood such as is recorded in the Old Testament and other ancient documents, but then, that can't be right. If it is then the age of the earth could perhaps be revised dramatically downward and evolution of the Darwinian sort would become even less likely than it already is. Since Darwinian evolution is as well-established as any fact of science, or so we're often told, it follows that rapid catastrophism on such a scale must be wrong.
QED. Or something.
RLC
