At 11:20 PM 12/1/97 -0600, bpayne@voyageronline.net wrote:
>Mon, 01 Dec 1997 05:01:04 -0600 Glenn Morton wrote:
>>
>> Hi Bill
>>
>> At 09:53 PM 11/30/97 -0600, bpayne@voyageronline.net wrote:
>
>> >> The Grand
>> >> Canyon has many different lithologies. The situation at Spirit Lake is
quite
>> >> different from the Grand Canyon.
>> >
>> >Correct, in scale only. I understand several hundred cubic MILES of
>> >water would be impounded behind the Kaibab Uplift if it were not cut by
>> >Grand Canyon. This natural dam would have trapped water as the Flood
>> >receded. A breach in the dam would have eroded out rapidly and allowed
>> >the impounded lake to discharge within perhaps a few weeks, cutting
>> >Grand Canyon catastrophically.
>
>On what basis, Glenn, do you say that this could not have happened?
Since the paragraph immediately above your reply was written by you,I am
confused. I did not write the last paragraph here and am not sure what you
are referring to specifically here. See my post to David Tyler tonight for
why I think the glacial lake collapse theory is highly flawed. It would
require 14 different glacial lakes to carve out each arm of the Grand
Canyon. That is why I don't think it could happen.
>
>> >Question, Glenn. If the Canyon eroded slowly (over millions of years)
>> >as it is doing today, where is the delta? [snip]
>
>> There are two places. The older is: [snip]
>
>OK, I yield on the delta. Is the volume of material in the deltas
>approximately equal to what we know was removed from Grand Canyon and
>the Plateau?
Bill, you are an honest man and I appreciate that about you. According to
Press and Siever, The Earth, (Freeman, 1982), p. 26-27, the Grand canyon is
1.6 km deep, 6.5-29 km wide and 450 km long. Using an average width of 15
km and giving the canyon a v-shaped profile along this length we can
estimate that
2 x 7.5 x1.6 x 450 = 10,800 cubic kilometers of rock removed from the canyon.
Considering that rock is 2.5 times the density of water, one could reason
that at a minimum one would need an equivalent mass of water to move the
rock. This would represent 27,000 cubic kilometers of water. In order to
erode this much rock (and remember this is the minimum amount of water) one
would need a lake with a volume 2.5 times that of the Grand Canyon. Where
is there evidence of this huge repository of water upstream of the canyon?????
I also don't think this accounts for the volume removed from some of the
side canyons either. And even if you assume that an a volume of water equal
to the volume of rock is sufficient, you still need a reservoir upstream
from the grand canyon equal in volume to the grand canyon. This is not
observed.
I must confess that it is frustrating that people like Austin, who is very
smart, won't do these types of calculations before they propose a theory for
explaining the Canyon. The people they are talking to are, for the most
part, not physicists or geologists and so they won't do the calculation either.
I will categorically state that there is no basin of this size updip of
the Grand Canyon. With the lack of a repository for the water, and the need
to have a lake for each arm of the canyon, I think the lake theory of the
grand canyon just sank.
glenn
Adam, Apes, and Anthropology: Finding the Soul of Fossil Man
and
Foundation, Fall and Flood
http://www.isource.net/~grmorton/dmd.htm