The Grand Canyon is one of the most interesting – and controversial – geologic phenomena in the world. A few people do say that it’s “just a big hole in the ground”, but most people are astounded by the sheer vastness and extreme depth of the canyon. Geologically speaking, there is a lot to the Grand Canyon. Evolutionary geologists have a hard time explaining many of the geologic phenomena in the Grand Canyon. We creationists certainly cannot say we have it completely figured out or agree on every little thing about Grand Canyon geology, but we do have Biblical and logical answers to many of the Grand Canyon questions.
One of the first things I was intrigued by when I got my first good look at the Grand Canyon, after flying into Whitmore Wash was the elevation of 4,100 feet above sea level. Considering that Denver, Colorado is one mile (5,280 feet) above sea level and my hometown in the Texas Panhandle has an elevation of about 3,280 feet, it is rather striking that the outer part of the Grand Canyon would be so high above sea level. There is a reason behind it, though. The plateau that the Grand Canyon cuts through is called the Kaibab Plateau, which is named like the top layer of the canyon – the Kaibab Limestone.
The Kaibab Plateau has what geologists call a monocline, where several layers are curved together upwards. The layers were laid down (by Noah’s flood), then while they were still soft, they were bent up. Imagine if you set a piece of wire on a table top and put your thumb under part of the wire. If you want the wire to lay flat on both your thumb and the table top, you would bend the wire up and around the edge of your thumb and it would be flat again along the length of your thumb. That is the same concept of what the Kaibab Monocline is like, except with ten thick layers of rock extending for miles instead of a wire.
This brings up a big problem for the evolutionary models of the Grand Canyon. In order for these layers to bend, all ten of them had to be soft when they were bent. These layers span about 300 million years according to the evolutionary timescale. There is no way that bottom layer (the Tapeats Sandstone) could stay soft for 300 million years while all of the other layers were being laid down and then bent. Rock can bend after it hardens, but only under extreme heat and/or pressure, which would turn the sedimentary rock (limestone, sandstone, and shale) into metamorphic rock (marble, quartzite, slate, etc.). These layers are still sedimentary rock, so they must have been bent while they were soft, all at the same time. The flood is a good explanation for this.
