A Shooting in the Badlands

I have rafted down the Grand Canyon twice and been to the rim numerous times, but it still takes my breath away. This is our third day here and we finally made it up to the eastern end of the South Rim. Tom is manning one camera out on the point. We are with Dr. Steve Austin, an incredibly smart geologist who has spent years below the rim studying nautiloid fossils and other features in this amazing place. Beyond the beauty, however, the Grand Canyon gives us the unique opportunity to see a stark display of sedimentary layers…layers that are found all over the world. They sit on top of a bed of metamorphic rock and extend, in some places, upward for three miles. The odds are you are standing on massive layers of sediment right now. The conventional story that is told in our schools and universities and even the signs in the National Parks is that all of this was formed over millions and millions of years by slow, gradual processes. The problem is that the evidence doesn’t match that story. We saw at Mt. St. Helens how complex geological formations can appear in a matter of hours or days. Even conventional geologists are beginning to look more toward a “catastrophic” answer to what they see, not only in the Grand Canyon, but around the world. Dr. Austin is one of many scientists that are finding that the history recorded in Genesis is accurate and gives us a true basis for understanding the geological story that is recorded in the earth. In the next few days, we will look at a some of that evidence. [Previous] [Next]

This is a picture from inside “Little Grand Canyon” at the base of Mt. St. Helens. The obvious is the film crew, Tom, Michael, Thomas, and Ian. Dr. Steven Austin, an incredibly smart geologist, is there as well (in blue). The other obvious things are the layered canyon walls and the stream. Here’s what is not obvious. Even though it might look really old, like a lot of the geological formations you might see around the world, all of these are younger than I am. Prior to the 1980 eruption of Mt. St. Helens, none of this existed. The various debris, ash, mud and pyroclastic flows filled the lower areas and created instant layers, perfectly sorted. In some places, large sections of glacier ice from the mountain were trapped beneath the hot flows. The ice turned to steam and was venting for days. It created a surreal landscape. When the steam built up too much pressure, they exploded and created “explosion pits” that resembled craters on the moon. Those pits were later filled in by more mud flows and then, on March 19, 1982, almost two years after the initial eruption, a mud flow cut through a breach and back cut what is now called the Little Grand Canyon. The standard geological story would look at a canyon like this and, using “the present is the key to the past”, calculate how much material is currently being removed by the little creek and give us a very old age. Several rocks there have actually been dated from 350,000 years old to over 2 million years. If we hadn’t witnessed this event, we would accept the standard story that this canyon was formed a long, long time ago. It is actually younger than my first two children. Dr. Austin calls the Mt. St. Helens event “the Rosetta Stone" for deciphering global catastrophic processes that the Bible says formed the earth. I agree. Standing in the bottom of that canyon, looking at the steep canyon walls, the layers, the complex geological formations, I was struck by how this looked just like all the other exposed layers around the world…layers that I had been taught required millions of years to deposit and then erode. However, when you come face to face with the facts from the past, it can radically change your perspective of the present. [Previous] [Next]