Posted on 08/22/2021 10:16:24 AM PDT by BenLurkin
Think of the red bluffs and cliffs of the Grand Canyon as Earth's history textbook, explained Barra Peak, lead author of the new study and a graduate student in geological sciences at CU Boulder. If you scale down the canyon's rock faces, you can jump back almost 2 billion years into the planet's past. But that textbook is also missing pages: In some areas, more than 1 billion years' worth of rocks have disappeared from the Grand Canyon without a trace.
It's a mystery that goes back a long way. John Wesley Powell, the namesake of today's Lake Powell, first saw the Great Unconformity during his famed 1869 expedition by boat down the rapids of the Colorado River.
The difference between those two types of rocks is significant. In the western part of the canyon toward Lake Mead, the basement stone is 1.4 to 1.8 billion years old. The rocks sitting on top, however, are just 520 million years old. Since Powell's voyage, scientists have seen evidence of similar periods of lost time at sites around North America.
Roughly 700 million years ago, basement rock in the west seems to have risen to the surface. In the eastern half, however, that same stone was under kilometers of sediment.
The difference likely came down to the breakup of Rodinia, a gigantic land mass that began to pull apart at about the same time, Peak said. The researchers results suggest that this major upheaval may have torn at the eastern and western halves of the Grand Canyon in different ways and at slightly different times—producing the Great Unconformity in the process.
(Excerpt) Read more at phys.org ...
What can you make of this?
Should have pinged you on #3.
bookmark
Randall Carlson has some theories on this that are outside of mainstream acadamia but still offer a feasible explanation.
Interesting.
Perhaps, there has been more turmoil than Scientists currently know about, and Geologist
Hank Johnson was right.
Makes sense to me. Rock isn’t constantly being created so there should be gaps. It’s entirely possible for an area to be formed, and then no lava or sedimentary layers are added to it for geological periods of time.
There have been multiple, major unconformities throughout geologic history. If you are standing anywhere above sea level right now, that rock will not be preserved but eroded into the ocean.
Hmmm. Igneous rock underneath, devoid of fossils, then layers upon layers of sandstone and metamorphic rock containing bazillions of mixed fossils, now, what forces on earth could have brought about such a cataclysmic chafe, all of a sudden like?
Hmmm. Water. Flood, laminar deposition, channular erosion of massive amounts of sediments....
World wide flood?
Nah. That fits another paradigm and we reject the basic premise of that one, but replace it easily with untold, unobserved eons of time.
Well... This certainly answers a lot of questions that crossed my mind in 1975 when we (family) visited the Grand Canyon...
Erosion
I think they are exactly right. Either that or it’s something else.
Psst, don't tell anyone but I think they're here in the Ozarks.
It all can be explained if you look at is from a Biblical, global disaster.
Check out Kent Hovind - Creation Seminar 1 on YouTube to get started... If you dare.
During President Biden's last press conference, didn't he mention discussing the Afghan situation on the phone, with the Prime Minister of Rodinia?
;^)
Bingo we have a winner
“Barra Peak”
Cool name for a geology student.
The missing terrain around mesas, volcanic throats and inside the Grand Canyon was catastrophically scrubbed away by one or more enormous floods, in fairly recent history geologically speaking. Floods caused possibly by the sudden draining of an inland sea. That process created significant “discontinuities” which are clearly visible on the surface today.
500 million years from now perhaps most of those discontinuities will be buried under sediment and volcanic ash, and maybe someone will be excavating and puzzling over them.
Like a Bond movie girl. Maybe a hot nerd in glasses.
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