Details Relating to Brown’s Proposal (Hydroplate Theory)
1. 
Layering,
Fossils. Pages
203–
214 explain how the flood produced sharp, parallel, generally uniform sedimentary layers, each with a somewhat unique mineral and fossil content. If the Canyon’s strata formed over millions of years, wind and water would have eroded obvious irregular surfaces between all layers, and the organisms would have decayed or been eaten before they fossilized.
PREDICTION 17: After the flood, hydraulic pressure generated by the weight of the sinking Rocky Mountains lifted the Colorado Plateau and produced thousands of deep vertical cracks. Drainage of groundwater through those cracks widened many. Some became slot canyons. Cobbles and sediments filled those deep cracks and will be found miles below the floors of slot canyons.
Figure 24: Slot Canyons. Slot canyons have rough, vertical sandstone walls and can be a few hundred feet deep but only a few feet wide. They are usually found on the Colorado Plateau, along tributaries that feed into the Colorado River.73 The above pictures (in true color) were taken in Upper Antelope Canyon, 8 miles southeast of Glen Canyon Dam. Conventional thinking says that slot canyons were carved by streams or flash floods eroding down from the surface. However, that would produce V-shaped canyons with smooth walls, not extremely narrow, vertical canyons with jagged walls (as seen, for example, at the black arrow). Besides, this quarter-mile-long slot canyon (at 36°51'46.14"N, 111°22'30.24"W) cuts through a ridge that rises 120 feet above ground. If the crack were not already there, a stream would flow along or around the ridge, not through it. Also, why would slot canyons be cut primarily through warped sandstone layers on the Colorado Plateau? Why are slot canyons not more uniformly scattered worldwide?
“Plateau Uplift” on page 234 explains why hydraulic uplifting of the Colorado Plateau warped horizontal layers and produced vertical fractures through those sedimentary layers. After Grand Lake breached, thin, vertical fractures that had penetrated wet layers of porous sand (aquifers) would have become drainage channels if flow could occur down to what would soon become the Colorado River. Subsurface drainage into and then along those fractures eroded slot canyons and exposed warped, curved layers that were later cemented into sandstone by the silica-rich subsurface water. These vertical fractures produced slot canyons and streams; streams did not produce slot canyons. If all this happened millions of years ago, slot canyons would be much wider and shallower.
Figure 3 on page 227 accurately shows how cut up the top layer (Kaibab Limestone) is, relative to all the smooth, parallel, generally softer layers below. Despite the hardness of Kaibab Limestone, its exposure to erosion has been much greater than that of the layers below. (Some people mistakenly believe that each of those lower layers were, in turn, top layers subject to erosion for millions of years.)
2.
Limestone. As pages
268–
273 explain, way too much limestone exists on Earth to have been produced by processes and chemistry at the Earth’s surface. Almost all limestone came from the subterranean water chamber (including the pure Hualapai Limestone) and was deposited during the flood, before the Grand Canyon formed. Once the Grand Canyon was carved, the Colorado River could flow.
3.
Why Here?
Forces, Energy, and Mechanisms. At the end of the flood, crashing hydroplates pushed up mountains and thickened continents. As the flood waters drained off these continents, basins were left full of water. Therefore, lakes were abundant immediately after the flood. Many breached their banks and carved small canyons. Massive mountain ranges settled into the upper mantle, hydraulically lifting adjacent regions, forming plateaus.
Atop the rising Colorado Plateau were two very large and growing lakes: Grand Lake and Hopi Lake. They had great potential energy relative to the base of the plateau and, therefore, huge erosion potential. (The higher the water, the greater its potential energy.) That energy was “cashed in” as Grand and Hopi Lakes breached and released their water down the western edge of the mile-high Colorado Plateau. Also released were large volumes of high-pressure subsurface water surrounding Grand and Hopi Lakes and the freshly cut canyons. The subsurface water released into the Grand Canyon may have exceeded the water in Grand and Hopi Lakes combined. The resulting 216-mile “erosion gully” extending down through the western edge of the Colorado Plateau is the Grand Canyon.
Although lakes at high altitudes experience high evaporation, the newly formed Rocky Mountains intercepted the moist eastward-moving winds generated by the warm Pacific Ocean, which was heated by extensive flood basalts for centuries after the flood. [See pages 157– 200.] This produced considerable precipitation and drainage west of the Rockies, feeding lakes on the western slopes. Spillage from higher elevations also contributed to the final breaching of Grand Lake, which in turn breached Hopi Lake. Surging water from both giant lakes quickly swept off the Mesozoic sediments from at least 10,000 square miles south and west of the funnel.
4.
Why So “Recently”? Did the Grand Canyon form during the last one-thousandth of Earth’s history? Only if (1) radiometric dating is correct, and (2) the Colorado River carved the canyon. As explained earlier in this book, both ideas are problematic. [See especially
“The Origin of Earth’s Radioactivity” on pages
391–
429.] Besides, so many earlier rivers, having more time to flow, should have carved many deeper and longer “Grand Canyons.”
Figure 25: The Wave. The beauty of this frequently photographed region on the Colorado Plateau (45 miles north of the Grand Canyon at 36°59'35.87"N, 112°00'28.26"W) should not distract us from the obvious question, “What caused it? ” Rocks don’t bend, but water-saturated sediments deform when confined and subjected to great pressures and powerful movements, as also seen in Figure 50 on page 117.
Recall that the compression event rapidly lifted the Rocky Mountains. The Rockies then began subsiding toward their equilibrium depth. That sinking created hydraulic pressures that lifted the adjacent Colorado Plateau. [See pages 234–235.] Thousand of blocks were fractured and lifted, warping what were initially thin, horizontal, water-saturated layers sorted during the flood, months earlier, by liquefaction. Iron bearing minerals, dissolved and uniformly distributed in portions of those flood waters, give these sediments their red (rusted) color. Similar warped layers (“red waves”) are also seen in slot canyons, which the uplift of the plateau also produced.
5.
Marble Canyon. Marble Canyon began as a tension fracture. Therefore, Marble Canyon has narrow vertical walls and follows a fairly straight path. (The Nankoweap region, at the southwestern end of Marble Canyon, is an exception that is explained in item 13 below.) Marble Canyon ends where Hopi Lake breached—at “Hopi Falls”—where today the Little Colorado River intersects the Colorado River. Notice in Figure 2 on page 226 that the torrent flowing away from “Hopi Falls” eroded, smoothed, and widened the region just south of the yellow perimeter.
All the thin strata in the walls of Marble Canyon and in Echo and Vermilion Cliffs rise to the south, because so much mass was rapidly removed from the Grand Canyon to the south. Figure 9 on page 236 shows that these strata also rise toward Marble Canyon, because the spillage from Grand Lake stripped off so much mass above and flanking what is now Marble Canyon. Also, Marble Canyon is a deep vertical crack and, thus, a line of bending weakness and uplift. Had these 2,800+ (2,000+ + 800) cubic miles of debris been removed over millions of years, instead of in weeks, the slow buildup of stresses would have been distributed over a wider area, resulting in less dramatically tipped layers.
6.
Side Canyons,
Distant Cavern Connection. Subsurface water—released by faulting and the rapid downcutting of Marble Canyon and Grand Canyon far below the high postflood water table—carved dozens of large side canyons. They, in turn, released groundwater on their flanks.
7.
Barbed Canyons. As thousands of cubic miles of rock were removed from the Grand Canyon area, the land below it rose. That lifting tipped the land around Marble Canyon, so subsurface water drained northward (although the Colorado River’s flow has always been southward through Marble Canyon). Those subsurface flows then joined the subsurface flow already spilling out of the newly opened walls of Marble Canyon. Naturally, the east wall’s water was spilling to the west, and the west wall’s water was spilling to the east. Therefore, the generally northward paths of the subsurface flows hook in and enter both sides of Marble Canyon at right angles. With so much material removed by this subsurface flow, the land above those flows sank, becoming barbed canyons, which then captured most of the water spilling out of the walls of Echo and Vermilion Cliffs.
8.
Slot Canyons and Colorado Plateau. See Figure 24 and “Plateau Uplift” on page 234.
9.
Missing Mesozoic Rock. Sheet flow from the sudden breaching of Grand and Hopi Lakes could easily sweep 99% of the soft and crumbly Mesozoic sediments (at least 1,000 feet thick) off the hard, flat Kaibab Limestone. On the Colorado Plateau, these sediments are generally missing southwest of Grand Lake’s basin and west of Hopi Lake’s basin, but almost nowhere else. Millions of years of rainfall and meandering rivers would not do the job and would leave meandering erosion patterns.
10.
Perpendicular Faults,
Arching,
Inner Gorge. With so much material removed by the eroding waters of Grand and Hopi Lakes and by escaping subsurface water, the basement rock, directly below all the flood-deposited sedimentary layers, arched upward and cracked. This opened the deep, steep, narrow, and rough inner gorge of the Grand Canyon, allowing even more erosion and removal of sediments above the crack. Hydraulic pressure, driven by the sinking Rocky Mountains, lifted deep blocks, whose tops were then eroded by the violent water, thereby continuing the uplift. (These blocks were fractured along the vertical planes of greatest weakness—perpendicular to the 216-mile-long axis of the canyon.)
PREDICTION 18: The inner gorge is a tension crack. Acoustical or seismic instruments should be able to detect this deep V-shaped crack far below the bed of the Colorado River.
The Colorado River seldom turns and follows these faults, because the violent, draining waters had already carved most of its channel down off the western rim of the Colorado Plateau before the faults formed.
11.
Missing River. There is no evidence for a precanyon Colorado River, because the river never existed before the Grand Canyon was excavated. The river is a consequence of that excavation, not its cause.
12.
Missing Talus,
Kaibab Plateau. The torrent of water spilling southward from Grand Lake swept away much of the talus that would otherwise be at the base of Echo and Vermilion Cliffs. That torrent undercut Hopi Lake’s northwestern boundary, releasing a wide, powerful waterfall. (It was roughly thirteen times higher than Niagara Falls and, for a few weeks, discharged more than a hundred times more water each second than Niagara Falls.) The violent flow of water to the west eroded a path through the rising Kaibab Plateau. [See also Endnote 44 and Figure 32 on page 267.]
John Wesley Powell correctly described this process whereby the river cuts a deep channel as the land rises. However, Powell had no idea why the Kaibab Plateau rose or why it rose so rapidly and contained so much water. Nor did he know about Hopi Lake or the forces, energy, and mechanisms involved. Thus, Powell invoked the standard, but vague, explanation: “millions of years.” He did not realize that millions of years of flow would not deepen the river’s channel unless the thick layer of large boulders at the bottom of the channel were removed, so the basement rock they rested on could be eroded. That requires a very powerful, sustained flow.
13.
Unusual Erosion,
Nankoweap Canyon. Had Nankoweap Canyon and its side canyons (shown in Figure 2 on page 226) been carved by water from one locale, such as a lake, multi-directional erosion would not have occurred. Had rainfall, over long periods of time, provided the water that carved these canyons, the erosion would not have been concentrated in that region of unusual erosion. However, subsurface water inside the rapidly rising Kaibab Plateau would drain from many directions, and Marble Canyon would act as a gutter, preventing spillage onto the lower terrain east of Marble Canyon.
Figure 26: Here’s the Dirt. It’s right where we would expect it if we understand the Grand Canyon’s rapid and violent formation. Hidden beneath the flat floor of the Gulf of California’s Northern Basin are at least 6,000 cubic miles of sediments. That basin, bounded on the south by the largest islands in the Gulf, has an area of 15,000 square miles (220 miles long and 60–100 miles wide). Sediment depths are up to 1.2-miles thick!75 About half the basin’s sediments were rapidly transported from the Grand Canyon (on the figure’s northern horizon), along the path now occupied by the Colorado River.
Why is the Northern Basin’s 15,000-square-mile floor so flat? As the Grand Canyon formed a few centuries after the flood, thousands of cubic miles of sediments were swept into the basin within weeks. Larger particles settled out first, near today’s shoreline. Finer particles settled out last, but until they did, the muddy water, because it was denser, flowed to the basin’s deeper regions where the mud eventually settled—smoothing the seafloor.
At the end of the global flood, draining surface water swept sediments to lower elevations. For years afterward, swollen rivers, flowing down to the lowered sea level, cut channels and small canyons into these deposits. Over the next few centuries, sea level rose and covered some of these channels; today, they are called submarine canyons. [For details and evidence, see the Hydroplate Overview chapter that begins on page 111.] The Gulf’s submarine canyons not buried in sediments are all in the southern end.76 Why? A few centuries after the flood, when the Grand Canyon formed, the sediments swept into that basin from the north quickly lost their momentum and did not travel far enough to bury the southern submarine canyons.
Had the relatively shallow Colorado River—which today flows slowly in its 310-mile southward journey—deposited these sediments over millions of years, we would see a river delta hundreds of miles long rising slightly out of the water. Waves and tides would have formed many fan-shaped channels. The tiny dot at the tip of the arrow shows the tiny delta that built up above sea level since the Grand Canyon formed. Only the powerful flow that carved the Grand Canyon could have deposited all the sediments that are on the floor of the Gulf.
The vast volume of subsurface water in the Kaibab Plateau could excavate Nankoweap Canyon and its tributaries, support humans and their agriculture for decades, carve a channel through thick mud deposits (exposing rounded boulders 200 feet high along Nankoweap Creek), deposit slumps, landslides, and rockfalls on top of what later became Nankoweap Mesa, and create the largest delta within the Grand Canyon. (Because all this happened only a few thousand years ago, the Colorado River has not yet removed Nankoweap Delta.) Humans left Nankoweap Canyon when their water source could no longer support them.
Figure 27: High-Velocity Flow. After the Colorado River exits the Grand Canyon, it turns sharply south and travels 310 miles to the Gulf of California. Much of the land east and west of the river resembles a wide, flat floodplain, but the volume of sediments there falls far short of the 2,800 cubic miles excavated to form the Grand Canyon. Here, south of Bullhead City, Arizona, 1 mile east of the Colorado River and 100 feet above it, are well-rounded boulders whose transport required extremely high-velocity water. (My pencil, in the two insets, provides the scale.) But where is all the dirt?
14.
Missing Dirt. At least 2,000 cubic miles of Mesozoic sediments were stripped off the layers surrounding and above what is now the Grand Canyon. Only then could the 800 cubic miles of sediments be removed from inside the Grand Canyon. There was plenty of water to transport all that dirt downstream from the Grand Canyon, primarily into the northernmost 220 miles of the Gulf of California. [See also “California’s Imperial Sand Dunes” on page 242.]
Relatively few sediments were deposited along the Colorado River as it flows south toward the Gulf of California. Rounded boulders mixed with sand and clay are often seen where today’s side streams have cut channels 100–200 feet deep. Those rounded boulders show that they were tumbled and transported by high-velocity water. Unsorted mixtures of sand, clay, and boulders show that the turbulent, muddy water suddenly slowed, dumping the unsorted mixture. [See Figures 27 and 26.]
In 2011, the United States Geological Survey completed a detailed study of the broad, 400-mile-long flood plain between the western end of the Grand Canyon and the Gulf of California. The study concluded that the Colorado River recently had a single, rapid flooding event in which almost all sediments below the flood plain were deposited.74 [That flooding and gigantic deposition of sand and mud resulted from the breaching of Grand and Hopi Lakes. W.B.]
15.
Tipped Layers below the Great Unconformity. This tipping is explained on pages
208–
209, beginning with the section, “Liquefaction During the Compression Event.”
16.
Time or Intensity? Intensity: The sudden release of the mile-high water in Grand and Hopi Lakes quickly produced a tremendous amount of erosion, beginning with the Great Denudation. Also, ground water released into the Grand Canyon from the water-saturated sediments probably exceeded that of all the lake water. The deeper the erosion, the more subsurface water was released.
17.
Other. The Colorado River and its tributaries flow through and cut the rims of many basins upstream from the Grand Canyon. This strongly suggests that various upstream lakes breached after the flood waters drained. The breaching of one lake suddenly added water to a lower lake, causing it to breach. Many lakes probably breached sequentially, like falling dominoes. Two of the Colorado Plateau’s last big lakes to breach were Grand and Hopi Lakes.