Notes on MicroSoft's slideshow lately.
Lots of great photography for W10 users. Lately there were a couple geologic ones, and here are my comments.
1, Grand Canyon. The caption says the Colorado is mighty. So I guess they've never been to Taku or the Fraser in peak. Maybe they never heard of Lake Missoula bursting. The Colorado is not mighty. There are no geologists who think the canyon formed the way the river is today.
All over north America and beyond, you can see some interesting riverbed-to-canyon ratios, usually with one sub-canyon. For ex., Ennis Creek, Port Angeles WA. At the end of summer, the stream is 1h x 8. It's peak flow, in the same bed is about 3h x 12. That is the 'sub-canyon' within the larger. Everyone sees this rise and fall every year. The next size up, on top of the existing, is the "low" when Ennis was rapidly draining off something cataclysmic from the Olympics. The low was prob 10h x 50, at the same location that is now 1h x 8. There is just enough room for people to build homes along the edge of the stream and into the bank. The lines of such a flow are found in detail where the plant growth is cut away. The broad shape of it is visible by just driving by. The peak flow seems to have been twice the height and maybe 10 foot wider. Above that you are back to the dominant ground level in the Port Angeles area, about 150 feet higher.
There are about 8 of these drainage streams/creeks in Port Angeles, and they were a real headache when the state highway came through: there was no way to afford to bypass the city with bridges over them and to build a decent 4 lane main road through the town, so none of these streams were bridged. At the highway crossing of Morse creek, which is also an ice-break river like Lake Missoula, the canyon is a half mile shoulder to shoulder. The cataclysmic drainage peak was nearly that wide at the same location. Currently, the Morse low is 1d x 20 and its peak is 3d x 30.
The city has two difficult 200 ft deep canyons further west, both about 1/4 mile wide and side-by-side, Tumwater and Valley. They have the same ratio patterns to their streams. The big cut took place catastrophically and finally settled into the size we have today.
The Grand Canyon had catastrophic flows that scoured it out to the size we see today, with the additional feature of there being maybe 3-4 subcanyons. anyone with a mind will realize that the larger flows happened first (broadest horizontal impact), then lesser and narrower. Not the reverse. The Colorado as is (current size) did not make Grand as is. Monterey Canyon (submarine) is 3x the size of Grand and has the same features. So does Juan De Fuca, but it has not been mapped as well, in fact, mapping is just starting.
These features happened during catastrophic flooding and slurry flows that moved around features of whole continents, the same as the Centralia, Australia, area and now the finding of the massive subterranean slurry deposit in China with the features listed above.
2, another beautiful shot was the hexagonal columns, though I did not catch the location. We have some in our area on a shoulder of Mt Rainier. Granitic or magmatic bursts came up and met ice and a 6 sided form results, reminding us of snowflake design. Dr. Ager, who does not believe Noah's deluge has anything to do with anything, says that granite like that or Yosemite can happen in 6 hours. There is no intrinsic reason why the caption for the Microsoft picture needs to say this happened over millions of years. It happened because of serious and rapid catastrophic tectonics, disruption, forcing together elements like we find in the national parks of Iceland.
