“CURVY ROCK LAYERS UNDERMINE MILLIONS OF YEARS”, article by Gavin Cox in the latest issue of Creation Magazine. Go to http://www.creation.com to sign up for this must have creation resource.

The Bible indicates that the Flood, which lasted just over a year, was a global tectonic event, with much vertical and horizontal earth movement. This provided the forces required to mould sediments and fold rocks. Genesis 7:11 tells us how the Flood started, when “all the fountains of the great deep burst forth.” Genesis 8:1–3 tells us how the Flood ended: “And God made a wind blow over the earth, and the waters subsided. The fountains of the deep … were closed … and the waters receded from the earth continually.” These verses are also describing vast global geological activity. Furthermore, Psalm 104:6–9 clearly describes Noah’s Flood: “The waters stood above the mountains. At your rebuke they fled … The mountains rose, the valleys sank down to the place that you appointed for them … so that they might not again cover the earth.” Evidently, huge earth-moving forces were involved that transported vast amounts of freshly deposited, wet sediments. The Flood provides all the factors necessary to fold strata quickly.

In the Grand Canyon, the rock appears as though it has deformed like wet clay. It becomes thinner where the fold has been in tension (not showing tensional fractures), and thicker where it has been in compression (but not showing signs of being crushed). This is powerful evidence that the sediment was still wet and plastic, like clay, and not solid rock, when it was bent.

Long-agers can accept that an individual rock layer could have been wet and plastic when folded. But not when there are multiple layers clearly bent together, with the top and bottom layers supposedly separated by millions of years. This is because they know it would be unreasonable to think that rock layers would stay soft for millions of years. So, at least the bottom layer of any such folded sequence would have had to be solid when bent.

In the Grand Canyon, where the folded strata are part of a larger formation called the Kaibab Upwarp (figure 3), the deepest layer (the Tapeats Sandstone) is supposed to be 550 million years old. The topmost of the folded layers (the Kaibab Limestone) was allegedly deposited 300 million years later. (The bottom layer is supposedly millions of years older than any of the intervening layers.) So, since they were all folded together in plastic fashion, the straightforward understanding of the evidence is that they were all still wet and pliable when folded.

Long-agers must therefore find some way around this. To preserve long ages, rocks must be seen as able to bend without breaking—in the unobservable past, over huge time periods.

Conclusion

The supposed millions of years to bend rock strata into folds is an illusion. Folded strata do not constitute evidence for vast amounts of time in the rocks. Furthermore, no one has waited for eons to watch if it really takes that long to form folds in strata. ‘Deep time’ is a philosophical idea (derived from uniformitarianism), not a scientific observation.