Dr. Steve Austin shows Del the Great Unconformity in the Grand Canyon, and explains its significance as evidence of a global flood.
DEL: Everywhere we looked, Steve showed me evidence of the incredible power of moving water. They quickly laid down these enormous layers, then quickly eroded them away. Steve wanted to show me where the Flood waters first hit the continent, so he took me deeper into the canyon. Steve, when you said you were going to bring me to the bottom you weren’t kidding were you? We’re at the bottom, aren’t we?
STEVE AUSTIN: We’re in this big side canyon to the main Grand Canyon and we’re looking at the granite basement rock, which is the core of the continent if you will, and then we see the flat lying strata on top of it. The boundary between the granite rock below and the Tapeats Sandstone above is this surface we call the Great Unconformity.
DEL: Why does it appear to be such a stark line? I mean it’s clear.
STEVE AUSTIN: I think it’s an erosional boundary of colossal scale. We’re looking at something that shows the magnitude of flood flow over a surface.
DEL: And is it just here?
STEVE AUSTIN: The Great Unconformity is continent wide. I’ve seen it I believe in the Middle East. It’s over in Europe. It’s in Africa. And here it is under the North American continent.
DEL: So we’ve got this layer. How thick is this layer? What goes up from here?
STEVE AUSTIN: Well, we have the Sauk megasequence here if you will, a thousand feet of sandstone, shale, limestone that goes continent wide. There are four other big sequence packages of strata that sit above it. Those are also very continuous like this. What we’re seeing here is rather representative of the rest of the world.
DEL: It makes one really question the notion that this all happened because of a small local flood. We’re talking about something enormous.
STEVE AUSTIN: The power of moving water was beveling and pulverizing rock depositing great thicknesses of layers and calling our minds to think about a global flood.
DEL: The conventional story is entirely different though. It would say that there is a lot of time between each of these layers.
STEVE AUSTIN: Some people have said that the Great Unconformity boundary here represents half a billion years.
DEL: You mean between the granite we see in that first layer of the sedimentary rock?
STEVE AUSTIN: Yeah. They say that may be half a billion years there, okay, and that’s what their explanation of earth history would ask them to consider, yet when you come here and look at this it’s nearly a featureless plane. It’s not in exactly a plane, but it’s a gently rolling surface. And would that be the product of billions of years or would that be the product of the power of water planing off a surface? Time is foreign to a good explanation here, and so we want to explain what we see.
STEVE AUSTIN: Everywhere we look we see the power of water. And it’s water on a colossal scale and that’s the story here in Grand Canyon. It’s not a little water and a lot of time. It’s a lot of water in a little time.
