Re: Coconino sandstone

Steven H. Schimmrich (sschimmr@calvin.edu)
Wed, 30 Sep 1998 11:18:16 -0400

At 09:23 AM 9/30/98 -0700, Art Chadwick wrote:
>
>> Your name recently came up, along with Elaine Kennedy, in a long
>> discussion on the Grand Canyon. I have seen the abstracts of the work
>> you and Elaine have done on the Tapeats sandstone, but I'm wondering
>> what your opinion is on the Coconino sandstone. Is it your position that
>> the Coconino is a subaqeous formation, and if so on what basis? Thanks.
>
> Leonard Brand has published a series of papers on the Coconino SS. In
> these papers, he establishes pretty definitively that the Coconino has to
> be water deposited based entirely on the vertebrate trackways there. I can
> get some references for you, and they are in the bibliography of his book.

The position that the Coconino sandstone is subaqueous is a Seventh-Day
Adventist geologist position (because they essentially need EVERYTHING to be
subaqueous to support their global flood tenet). Mainstream geology views it
a bit differently and Art and others have argued this on the ASA list in the
past (check out the archives at http://www.calvin.edu/archive/asa/). I would
recommend reading the chapter on the Coconino in "Grand Canyon Geology" by Beus
and Morales (Oxford University Press, 1990) for the mainstream view if that's of
any interest to you.

- Steve.

--   Steven H. Schimmrich, Assistant Professor of Geology   Department of Geology, Geography, and Environmental Studies   Calvin College, 2301 Burton Street SE, Grand Rapids, Michigan 49546   sschimmr@calvin.edu (office), schimmri@earthlink.net (home)   616-957-7053 (voice mail), 616-957-6501 (fax)    http://home.earthlink.net/~schimmrich/