70 Evolution and the Fossil Record
of deposit: a single layer of mud. Most floods inundate an area, and then the mud slowly
settles out of suspension from the standing floodwaters until it accumulates in a thin layer.
Even a worldwide flood would produce only one relatively thin layer of mudstone (not
shale, because that requires burial and compaction over millions of years).
How does this compare to the real Grand Canyon? It’s not even remotely close! Even a
cursory glance at the sequence of layers in the Grand Canyon (fig. 3.4) shows that it is highly
complex and cannot be explained by a single superflood (or even many floods, if that were
an option). For one thing, there is no great deposit of coarse gravel and boulders and sand
near the base representing the high-energy phase of rapidly moving water. For another, the
upper part of the Grand Canyon sequence is not just a single thin layer of mud. Instead, it is
a complex sequence of shales (not mudstones), sandstones, and limestones that alternate in
a sequence that resembles no known flood deposits.
Let’s start at the very bottom of the Canyon. Instead of coarse gravel, sand, and boulder
deposits that flood geologists might expect, we have the ancient rocks of the Grand Canyon
Series (fig. 3.7A and B). These are mostly quiet-water shales, plus sandstones and even some
limestones. Many of these limestones contain stromatolites (figs. 3.7B, 6.1, and 7.1), dome-
like mounds of layered sediment formed by algal mats that can only grow in the quiet waters
of a sunny coastal lagoon. The individual layers in these stromatolites testify to hundreds of
years of growth on each one—and there are multiple layers of stromatolites, each represent-
ing a separate episode of slow growth followed by burial, and then another phase of growth
on a new surface. And this was supposedly formed during a single huge flood event only 40
days in duration?
A clear refutation of the flood geology model is the abundant mudcracks (fig. 3.7A)
found in many of the shale units of the Grand Canyon Series. We’ve all seen mud dry up and
form cracks. Common sense should tell even the creationists that the entire muddy surface
was deposited and then dried up, not formed during the inundation of a flood. There’s not
just one layer of mudcracks, but hundreds, sometimes stacked in a long sequence. Clearly,
these rocks represent dozens of small episodes of mud deposition and then complete dry-
ing, not a single catastrophic flood. A few creationist books and websites try to squirm out
of this by mentioning unusual features such as syneresis cracks. What they don’t mention
is that even syneresis cracks still require drying and evaporation and shrinkage, so they are
completely inconsistent with the flood geology model.
Even more strongly falsifying the flood geology model is that in the middle of this Grand
Canyon Series sedimentary sequence are the Cardenas lava flows, dozens of individual
flows totaling almost 1,000 feet in thickness. If these rocks had erupted into the floodwaters,
they would be entirely composed of blobs of lava known as pillow lavas, which we can see
erupting from undersea lava flows today. Instead, the Cardenas lavas show clear signs that
they are normal subaerial eruptions and flowed downhill from their nearest volcano, much
like the lavas erupting from Mount Kilauea in Hawaii. The very top of the lava flows shows
evidence that they had completely cooled and were even weathered and eroded by wind
and rain before the next sequence of sedimentary rocks was deposited on top of them. This
is hardly consistent with the idea of lavas that erupted underwater during a major flood!
Finally, the clincher is that all these ancient Grand Canyon Series rocks at the base of the
Grand Canyon are now found tilted on their sides and eroded on the edges, and then the rest
of the Grand Canyon strata are deposited on top of them (fig. 3.4). A flood geologist simply
cannot explain this. If these rocks were all soft soupy sediments deposited by Noah’s flood,