How hard is it to make sand fer Pete's sake?

Yeah, who's Pete?

Anyway, here's an old thread recently resurrected at EvC asking how sand was made, implying that creationists have no answer to the question.

To get sand you need more than just weathering, you need the active transport and tumbling that then reduces the flakes to sand grains.

But the directionality is always the same, higher objects get weathered and then transported to lower locations.

So the conventional model still rules, first you have to uplift stuff before you can wear it down.

Ya don't say.

Do you HAVE to "uplift" stuff to wear it down? What if it's already "uplifted?" That is, what about the rapid catastrophic pummeling that a worldwide Flood would have exerted on the land masses that were of course higher than sea level at the time anyway? Not to mention all that heavy rain that went on for forty days and nights, that had never before occurred on this planet, that beat against the land with force. All that water must have sent whole hills sliding and tumbling to lower ground as per the requirement given above.

This is the opening post to that thread:

The current model for making sand is pretty simple. Start with a mountain, a big sucker of a rock. Then the daily transition between warm day time and colder night time, and between hotter summer and colder winter will cause expansion and contraction of the rock, gradually over long periods of time opening small cracks.

Again over time, water will fill the cracks and when it freezes enlarge the cracks, eventually breaking off pieces.

Again, over time the pieces are transported from higher elevations to lower ones by wind, water and gravity. During transportation they are broken up further, becoming smaller and smaller pieces.

Nothing is needed other than processes we can see at work today and lots of time.

So what is a Flood model for making sand?

Surely it ought to be obvious that a worldwide Flood, one that could have pulverized and separated land mass into the sediments that it then deposited in layers two miles deep in some places, one that could have gouged out the Grand Canyon from those layers after laying them down, one that could have scoured the Southwest US leaving all those layered buttes and hoodoos and canyons and the Grand Staircase, and so on and so forth, could on other parts of the planet also have pounded rocks into sand to the extent of creating the Sahara Desert. Sand is created all the time in the oceans even now and washed up on shores all over the planet. Same thing as what the Flood did, only it did it a lot faster and in huge quantities all at once.

What the opening post is describing is the much slower process of breaking down rock SINCE the Flood, accounting for the "skirts" of debris at the base of the hoodoos, canyon ledges and buttes of the Southwest for instance - which could easily have been created in the time since the Flood. Sure, it would take a LONG LONG time to create the Sahara that way -- or the sand that became the sandstone of the Coconino layer in the Southwest USA -- but it didn't happen that way, slowly over time. As the post I quote at the top says,

... you need the active transport and tumbling that then reduces the flakes to sand grains.

Just what a Flood would be expected to provide.

Must also comment that along with the silly evolutionist parodies of creationist thinking on that thread, there are also some silly creationist answers as well. Too bad. It's really not hard to recognize what the Flood would have done once you break yourself of the habit of thinking in terms of huge time periods -- and a tiny little flood. Give up gradualism and recognize catastrophism on a worldwide scale.

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Consider how much damage can be done in a MINOR mudslide by comparison with what the Flood would have done:




Rocks tumbled down, no doubt parts of them broken off and pounded into smaller pieces, trees uprooted, people killed, in a very SMALL flood event by comparison with a worldwide Flood. Multiply by forty days of soaking of ALL land in the world, dissolving whatever could be dissolved into fine sediment and sending it all tumbling day after day from higher levels to lower in mudslides by the bazillion, then further soaking and underwater tumbling as the water stood over the land, then further tumbling and breaking as the water receded carrying huge quantities of rock and mud to their final resting place, such as the enormous amount of material gouged out of the Grand Canyon that washed across Southern California on into the Gulf of California, and the enormous amount scoured off the flat lands surrounding the buttes and mesas and hoodoos of the Southwest USA and so on and so forth.