At 11:23 PM 12/1/97 -0600, bpayne@voyageronline.net wrote:
>Glenn Morton wrote:
>
>> Even if I grant this, that is hardly a Grand Canyon with 5000 feet of
>> erosion and it is for a short distance, not the hundreds of miles of length.
>> Has anyone on your side calculated how much water would be required to
>> suspend the quantity of sediment needed to excavate the Grand Canyon? Could
>> that lake you all propose have held that amount of water? It is time for
>> you all to do a calculation. :-)
>
>>From "Grand Canyon: Monument to Catastrophe", Steven A. Austin, Editor,
>Institute for Creation Research, 1994, pp 92-93.
>
> "If Grand Canyon were blocked by material filling it to an elevation of
>5,700 feet, an enormous lake would form on the saucer-shaped plateau.
>Figure 5.8 shows the outline of the lake which would formtoday if Grand
>Canyon was blocked and the basin to the northeast was allowed to fill
>with water. The lakes would cover an area of more than 30,000 square
>miles and contain 3,000 cubic miles of water."
>
>Loose sand is about 1/3 air, so I would think a slurry of 50% water and
>50% sand would be flowable as a "mud flow." If rock were solid with no
>porosity (overly conservative), and abraded into a sand, then a 50-50
>slurry with 3,000 cubic miles of water would carry 3,000 cubic miles of
>rock. If Grand Canyon were 100 miles long, 1 mile deep and 10 miles
>wide (assume a flat bottom and vertical sides), then the volume of the
>Canyon would be 1,000 cubic miles. I would think there is enough water
>to cut the Canyon catastrophically.
Your solution would only work if the canyon were already filled with sand.
it wasn't. A slurry, as you envision it would not move very far. Try such a
mixture along the curb in front of your house and see how far it moves. It
won't move to your neighbor's house. The reason is that you have mixed water
and rock volumetrically, not according to mass.
In order to move the rock with a velocity of only 2 miles per hour (1 m/s)
the water has to initially have a velocity Calculated as follows. the
density of water is 1000 kg/m^3 rock 2500 kg/m^3. The momentum of the
initial water must equal the momentum of the rock + water. (vwat=velocity of
water)
1000*vwat= 1000*(1)+2500*(1)
or vwat= (1+2.5)=3.5 m/s or 8 mph.
But this is a frictionless calculation. A slurry has a high, high viscosity
and if it does not have enough energy to overcome the massive friction, it
will set like concrete. The most rapidly moving water ever measured in a
stream is of the order of 20 mph. And one cannot ignore the friction. really
don't want to perform a hydrodynamic calculation on this.
Also, your dimensions of the canyon are wrong. In my previous post, I used
the dimensions in km. Press and Siever say that the canyon is a mile deep,
11 miles wide but 280 miles long!
glenn
Adam, Apes, and Anthropology: Finding the Soul of Fossil Man
and
Foundation, Fall and Flood
http://www.isource.net/~grmorton/dmd.htm