In June 2010, John Matson wrote an article for the Scientific American Web site in which he reported about a huge catastrophic flood in Texas that occurred in 2002. Matson noted: “At Canyon Lake, a reservoir north of San Antonio, water rushed over the dam’s spillway, pouring into the valley below. Within days a 50-meter-wide channel now known as Canyon Lake Gorge had been carved into the soil and bedrock, drastically transforming the landscape on a short timescale” (Matson, 2010). Michael Lamb, a geologist from the California Institute of Technology who studied the effects of the flood, “found that the landscape below Canyon Lake had been remodeled in just three days or so, during which hundreds of thousands of cubic meters of rock and sediment were flushed downstream” (2010). Matson also stated: “The 2002 Texas flood was powerful, plucking meter-sized limestone boulders out of the bedrock and carrying them away to leave a channel that in places exceeds 12 meters in depth.”
The implications of such a flood are clear. If huge channels over three stories deep can be carved in bedrock in a matter of days, then catastrophic flooding on a larger scale could easily be responsible for carving much larger canyons in brief periods of time (cf. Butt, 2002; Butt, 2003; Butt, 2004). The false assumption of uniformitarianism, by which so many people have been taught to believe in billions of years of Earth history, cannot be logically sustained in the face of such clear evidence for the catastrophic origins of geological features like canyons.
REFERENCES
Butt, Kyle (2003), “Changing Their Tune About the Grand Canyon,” http://www.apologeticspress.org/articles/1811.
Matson, John (2010), “Data Deluge: Texas Flood Canyon Offers Test of Hydrology Theories for Earth and Mars,” http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=canyon-lake-flood.