The Making of the Grand Canyon: Fact or Fiction?

On a recent set of articles sent to us by a reader regarding a comment made in one of our blog articles stating that the Grand Canyon was made in a very short time. Two of these articles state:
1. “The Colorado River has dramatically changed the role the river plays in a task begun millions of years ago: dredging the Grand Canyon." (Nature Series, "Grand Canyon: The Colorado River,” PBS, [http://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/episodes/grand-canyon/the-colorado-river/2283/].
2. “Over millions of years, the Colorado River has carved out the Grand Canyon from solid rock…The Colorado River flowing along the bottom of the Grand Canyon, has cut through layer upon layer of rock over millions of years exposing fossils long buried in sedimentary rock” (“General Science,” Prentice Hall, 1998, p174).

Showing the depth of the Grand Canyo

It should be noted that the general scientific consensus, updated at a 2010 conference, holds that the Colorado River carved the Grand Canyon beginning 5 million to 6 million years ago. Indeed, the Grand Canyon, which is in the northwest corner of Arizona, close to the borders of Utah and Nevada, is a very big hole in the ground, 277 miles long, up to 18 miles wide and more than a mile deep. It is unquestionably considered to be the result of constant erosion by the Colorado River over millions of years.
    The problem with all of this is that water simply does not flow upward—it flows downhill. After all, consider the fact that the Colorado River travels through the Rocky Mountains and enters the Grand Canyon at 2800 feet, flows downhill for 270 miles and exists the canyon at 1800 feet; yet, along that course, the Kaibab Uplift—the highest points of the mountains the river is supposed to have cut through—is 6900 to 8500 feet high. In other words, the river would have had to run uphill 4000 feet to then cut downward to the level it now is.
    Considering these different altitudes, we should notice the following points:
1. The top of Grand Canyon is higher than the bottom;
2. The river only runs through the bottom;
3. The Rocky Mountains are higher than where the river enters the canyon by over 4000 feet;
4. Rivers do not flow uphill.

The Colorado River would have had to flow uphill around 4000 feet in order to be able to cut through the middle section of the present Grand Canyon

It should be noted, that the Colorado, when anciently running into difficult terrain, altered its course, as is shown when the west running river turned south in southern Utah, raising the level of the Hopi/Bidahochi system in Arizona at about 6,300 feet above sea level as measured by current Bidahochi deposits in eastern Arizona. In fact, he elevation of the river, at the bottom of the canyon, averages out to around 2,200 feet; however, the average elevation of the south rim is around 6,800 feet with the highest spot, Grandview Point, being 7,400 feet. This alone shows that as the Colorado River cut through forming the canyon through which it now runs, it had to climb over 5000 feet.
    In addition, the river ran across the Kaibab Plateau, which reaches 9200 to 9240 feet elevation, and is bordered on the south by the Grand Canyon that is part of the larger Colorado Plateau. Tributary canyons of the river form the plateau's eastern and western boundaries, and tiers of uplifted cliffs define the northern edges of the land form, covering about 1,152 square miles, which are above 6000 feet elevation, with the southern plateau varying from 8,800 feet to slightly less than 6,000 feet. Yet, in order to cut through all this area of the river, it would have had to flow uphill for more than 30 miles.

The height of the plateau far above the level of the river through the Grand Canyon

 

In order to cut through those levels, geologists claim it took millions of year to do so; however, what they forget is that in order to do so, the river would have had to flow uphill from its 2800-feet entrance to the present canyon nearly between 4000 to 5000 feet, before dropping to run back downhill to its exit point at 1800 feet above sea level.
    Unless the Colorado River in nature can be shown to flow uphill against gravity, there is no way that the river made that canyon. In all respects, that leaves the Grand Canyon formed via a breached damn on much larger proportions than we are used to seeing.
    To better understand this, take the Teton Dam in Idaho, in which engineers noticed a small leak at approximately 7:30 to 8:00 a.m., Saturday, June 5, 1976, along the 305-foot-high, 3,200-foot-long earthen dam, just after completion and when it was first being filled. Foolishly, the Bureau of Reclamation, one of the eight federal agencies authorized to construct dams, built the damn in a valley of porous clay.

 

From a small breach in the wall, the water poured out of Tetan Dam at the rate of 251,000 acre feet of water moving at 2,000,000 cubic feet per second, has such tremendous force to have cut a wide swatch through an already existing canyon

The earthen dam experienced a small wet spot in the upper portion near one side of the downstream face 15 to 20 feet out from the right abutment at about the same elevation as the seepage coming from the right abutment rock. This wet spot developed rapidly into seepage, and material soon began to slough, and erosion proceeded back into the dam embankment. Between four and five hours later, the breach could not be stopped and the crest of the embankment fell into the enlarging hole as 80-billion gallons of water, at over 2,000,000 cubic feet per second, surged in a solid wall from the 251,000 acre feet of water behind the dam as it was just reaching full capacity. 
    The wall of water flowed down the valley of eastern Idaho for approximately eight straight hours, though the main part of the reservoir emptied in about five hours. The flow reached a height of 30-feet, wiping out farming towns and carving a new canyon through the six miles before spreading out and shallowing on the Snake River Plain in a matter of hours. This caused numerous landslides from banks caving in, as it moved at 15 miles an hour, killing 11 people and swallowing hundreds of homes and 18,000 head of livestock, as it carved and widened the Teton River Canyon.

The force of the water flowing through the collapsed dam reached 15 miles per hour; by comparison, the Amazon flows at 4 miles per hour; the Mississippi at 1.2 miles per hour—consider the power behind Noah’s Flood as it would have flowed off the high mountains and back into the sea

While evolutionists teach that canyons form with a little bit of water, and a lot of time, an assumption that cannot be verified in the lifetime of science, the reality of what we see in the world is that an enormous canyon forming very rapidly with a lot of water and little bit of time. We cannot observe the evolutionists' explanation because it would take far too long, and therefore becomes part of what they believe, not scientific observation. However, a rapid formation explanation from a breached dam can be observed naturally, and is scientific  

An enormous canyon hundreds of miles long across the Martian landscape, one of the largest and deepest canyons in the solar system as it stretches across the Martian highlands for some 2,485 miles, 124 miles wide and up to 6.8 miles deep

It should be note, when evolutionary geologists look at the photos of Mars and see giant canyons, far greater in size than the Grand Canyon, they conclude there must have been an enormous amount of water in a short amount of time to create that canyon. However, they deny the same conclusion when they can stand face-to-face with the Grand Canyon because in interpretation of a lot of water and a little time matches too closely with the Biblical explanation.