Dr. Andrew Snelling shows how the rapid deposit of the earth’s rock layers reveals a young earth.
DEL: Alright, so you wanted to come here because you see evidence of a young earth because of what’s here. What do you see?
ANDREW: Yes, well, the first thing we notice is the extent of these layers. It’s like a stack of pancakes. For example, the red unit that goes all the way across our field of view, that’s the Schnebly Hill Formation. And above that you can see the first white unit is the Coconino Sandstone. And above that you’ve got the Toroweap and at the horizon you’ve got the Kaibab Limestone, which is the rimrock of the Grand Canyon. And here we are 70 more miles from the Grand Canyon and these layers are still here.
DEL: It’s almost hard to imagine the volume of material that that represents.
ANDREW: Yes, take the Coconino Sandstone. We can trace it from here right across New Mexico, Colorado right over towards Kansas and Oklahoma or even into Texas. We’re talking at least 200,000 square miles for this one rock unit that’s consistent for mile after mile after mile. That’s not the scale that we see today with localized sedimentation. And to get it flat lying like this over such a large area it’s like you have to make your pancake all at once, very rapidly. And so these layers show evidence of rapid sedimentation, the extent of these layers.
DEL: Well, Andrew, you were talking about that red formation, but that doesn’t sound familiar to me.
ANDREW: No, that’s the Schnebly Hill Formation. It’s not in the Grand Canyon. In the Grand Canyon we go from the Coconino into the Hermit Formation. There’s that knife edge boundary and there’s no evidence of erosion there, which means that the Hermit Formation was rapidly deposited and then immediately the Coconino was deposited on top of it. But here we’ve come 70 miles from the Grand Canyon and we’ve got this Schnebly Hill Formation between the Coconino and the Hermit. And this Schnebly Hill Formation – 800-1000 feet thick over an area of 1000 square miles – had to have been formed very rapidly. If that took millions of years, we ought to see evidence of millions of years of erosion back in the Grand Canyon at that same boundary. We don’t. So that means that this Schnebly Hill Formation in this area had to have formed in a matter of hours. So, it tells you that only is there a lack of erosion but there’s no time between those boundaries. The whole sequence of layers was very rapidly deposited.
