How Old Is The Grand Canyon? Park Service Won’t Say

Post Reply New Topic

Mixing politics with religions...

...

How Old Is The Grand Canyon? Park Service (under George Bush, Jr. Texas Methodist White House) Won’t Say

Orders to Cater to Creationists Makes National Park Agnostic on Geology
News Release, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, December 28, 2006

Washington, DC — Grand Canyon National Park is not permitted to give an official estimate of the geologic age of its principal feature, due to pressure from Bush administration appointees. Despite promising a prompt review of its approval for a book claiming the Grand Canyon was created by Noah's flood rather than by geologic forces, more than three years later no review has ever been done and the book remains on sale at the park, according to documents released today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER).

“In order to avoid offending religious fundamentalists, our National Park Service is under orders to suspend its belief in geology,” stated PEER Executive Director Jeff Ruch. “It is disconcerting that the official position of a national park as to the geologic age of the Grand Canyon is ‘no comment.’”

http://www.jewsonfirst.org/noahspark.html

---

Has the above approach been changed by the Barack Obama Democrat White House?

Anyone know?

---

http://www.beliefnet.com/

Science under a Republican White House

Science under a Democrat White House

That's just wacky.

The age of the canyon may be difficult to determine within say five percent. But the G.C. is at least tens of millions of years old. It takes time for a river to carve out a groove a mile deep.

One thing for sure. It is not just 6 thousand years old and it wasn't carved out by Noah's Flood which never happened.

ruveyn

Why dont they do like the Israelis do and just send up a couple of F15's to take care of the religious fundies?

Absolutely - according to recent study published in the magazine Science in 2008, the Grand Canyon began to open at least 17 million years ago (even though the oldest rocks are about 2000 million years old). The study used uranium-lead isotope dating to analyse calcite deposits found on the walls of nine caves throughout the canyon and it has been found that the canyon was completely cut through 5 to 6 million years ago - the age previously cited as the date when the canyon began to form.

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/a ... /5868/1377

I fear it is the religious fundies that are indirectly in charge of the F15's through the American administration!

America does some crazy things but withholding the age of the Grand Canyon is indicative of something fundamentally screwed up and even a little frightening going on there.

---

skafather84,

Agree 100%. In my view, the whole Texas Methodist Republican Bush, Jr. White House was 100% wacky on the topics of science and medicine and that doesn't include the fibs/lies which General Colin Powell told at the United Nations to get Bush, Jr.'s unjustified (many believe) Iraq War going. The Afghanistan War was justified (most believe) due to 09-11-2001.

That's my understanding.

- pgd

The simple fact is that we cannot know.

The idea of "millions of years" only works IF a river gradually eroded the features we see today. In fact, if the idea of an "ice dam" is true and a massive flood of water came cascading through the area, most of the canyon would have been formed in a matter of months. There is geological evidence to support this, so since the matter is in dispute, better to not say anything they know cannot be proven conclusively.

Yes we can know. If there had been a world wide flood less than six thousand years ago there would be plenty of evidence that it happened. There isn't any such evidence. So maybe it was a miraculous world wide flood that left no signs that it ever happened.

As to the age of the earth and the rate of erosion there is plenty of physical data to give a reasonably good estimate of how long it might have taken. So there are plenty of way of laying down reasonable hypotheses of how things came to be.

One thing is for sure. The physical evidence against the literal Biblical account of the origin of earth, the sun, the other stars and life on this planet is overwhelming swamped by the physical evidence. One would have to turn his brain into a pretzel to give any credence to the literal account as it is found in the Bible.. The oral tales which are the origin of the bible stories were told by bronze age dudes who knew nothing of atoms and bacteria.

ruveyn

---

ruveyn - Agree with your comments about the Grand Canyon. The Grand Canyon is amazing. It is a big hole (simplified) and it cannot be as young as about 6,000 years old.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wallch ... ld_History

The Wallchart of World History does not accurately timeline the Grand Canyon at all.

Your comments and those by others which report the Grand Canyon as being millions of years old is accurate (my view).

At the same time, if a movie director wants to make an entertaining movie about Noah's Ark cruising the Grand Canyon like the Love Boat - well, that's Hollywood - that's entertainment - it seems to me.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Love_Boat

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/That's_Entertainment!

---

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noah's_Ark

- pgd

Perhaps you need to study your geology a bit better. Unless you are going to claim that the entire canyon was carved from limestone, there is no possible way that a singular flood event, even a "breaking ice dam", could have gouged out such a hole. Even sandstone is not so easily eroded by water - in the variety of stone present in the canyon, such erosion must take place over a span of millions of years, not "months".

Please note that the Discovery Center, and other such YEC fronts, do not deal in real science, and are quite content to make up "facts" that will fit their preconceptions.

Still Canyons run deep topic

You could ask the old Grand One.

Aliens carved it millions of years ago.

Massive cascades of water can do things normal erosion will not do. Geologists have found massive boulders in the Grand Canyon that are not indigenous to the area and could not have been placed there without a massive force lifting them from many miles upstream. Only way that could happen is if there was a wall of water flushing through the area.

I never made a claim about a global flood, someone else attributed that idea.

Its not a very well-posed question to begin with, which is why there is such a variety of answers and debate. Asking how old something is pre-supposes that it had a definitive beginning at a singular point in time, that can be compared with now. As has been pointed out, the GC cuts through many geologic layers that have different ages, including some of the basal rocks that were first formed more than 2 billion years ago. So one possible answer is, its as old as the Earth, and another possible answer is its as old as the universe since the rocks in the GC originated during the big bang. So the way the question is worded provides a large number of possible answers that are not necessarily wrong.

I think the question, better posed, may be along the lines of: "When did the erosional processes responsible for the formation of the GC first begin?" Can we know the answer to this question? Certainly. The best fact-based answer so far is: