"Sea Monsters" -- antediluvian life forms or creatures evolved over millions of years?

Watching a film at Netflix by National Geographic titled Sea Monsters. (I tried but couldn't get the "embed" function to work for the trailer.)

The film shows some geologists on a fossil hunt in Kansas, finding bones of prehistoric reptilian dinosaurian type sea creatures. They also find the more common ammonite fossil -- and it's interesting to see this as I had no idea what size to picture those creatures, and the fossil is a lot larger than I had visualized, about the diameter of a good sized serving platter I'd say.

It's the ammonite fossils they say tell them when all these creatures in the same vicinity lived, which is of course based on their Geologic Time Table that layers the physical world in time periods, just as Dr. A does as quoted in the post below. They always speak of the time element as fact although it is nothing but an imaginative construct that they impose on the sedimentary and fossil phenomena.

Speaking of it as fact is what I call "word magic." They don't need the actual processes of science to reify an imaginative construct into Reality and enforce it with indignant denunciations as "anti-science" of anyone who isn't convinced. "The poetry of reality" as Dr. A says, although it's just the poetry of fantasy.

Most of the film is animation of the creatures reconstructed from their fossils and shown swimming in the seas that supposedly covered the area for some huge length of time in the "Cretaceous" period, and the "Triassic" and "Jurassic." They do show the sea that bisected the continent of North America at one time, and I have no doubt there is evidence in shorelines that identify such a body of water that stood long enough for such markers to be evident, but of course I don't buy the millions of years explanation for anything.

No, I'm watching this as an interesting imaginative reconstruction of life forms that lived before the Noachian Flood and that were no doubt transported by that Flood to their resting places where they were buried and fossilized and where these geologists now find them.

The "sea" that bisected the continent was of course a temporary stage of the Flood after it had receded or at least begun to recede, as were all the ancient extinct large lakes of western North America such as Missoula and Lahontan and Bonneville. Simply large lakes that stood for some time after the Flood and then finally drained away, in some cases suddenly and catastrophically, probably due to the tectonic forces that occurred after the Flood and also built the Rockies. The catastrophic draining of one such great standing body of water is one very plausible explanation for the carving out of the Grand Canyon. Not a feat any ordinary river could have accomplished.

One funny thing: A few large fossils were found with food in their stomachs, one rather "stuffed to the gills" as it were, which prompted the speculation that it must have died of gluttony. Of another the narrator wondered why it would have died so suddenly after a good meal. Of course they conjured an explanation out of a hat as usual, but duh, folks, obviously the most reasonable explanation is that they were all caught in the same catastrophic event at the same time, some having just filled their stomachs.

Same phenomena, different interpretation, just as reasonable, no, really, more reasonable than the establishment interpretation.

More on the Flood, inadequate comparisons with local floods

There have been half a dozen posts at EvC recently, mostly on the Flood, that I've wanted to respond to but haven't been able to get to them, don't know if I will yet. But here's a new one:

Portillo says: Billions of dead things, which we call fossils, laid down by water all over the world.

And Panda answers: Although true: that is far too a general statement to be useful.

The following sentence is also true:

If 1000's of small floods occurred over millions of years, what would you expect to find? Billions of dead things, which we call fossils, laid down by water all over the world. And what do we find? Billions of dead things, which we call fossils, laid down by water all over the world.

Sorry, but this sentence is NOT true. Perhaps Portillo should have been more detailed in his remark but that probably wouldn't faze the sophists at EvC either. But anyway, No, from small floods even in the millions we could NOT get the billions of dead things that we find as fossils in the worldwide strata and we certainly do not get the depth and extent and amazingly consistent appearance of the strata themselves, an appearance that suggests to anyone really thinking that they all had to have been created in ONE event, not a series of events, and not a hodgepodge of little floods over time. This is just evo sophistry run amok.

There needs to be something to separate your claim from the more mundane floods that we see regularly, all over the world.

So, although correct, you statement needs to be more specific to rule out the everyday events.

As I've stated above.

And Dr. A adds his own two cents in the next post:

[Portillo]If a flood occurred, what would you expect to find? Billions of dead things, which we call fossils, laid down by water all over the world.

[Dr. A]Why? Is mass fossilization the usual sequel in the locale of a localized non-magical flood? Please provide evidence that this is the case.

If not, then I would have no such expectation.

Interesting. He's implying a disagreement with Panda's implication that local floods COULD have produced all those fossils. He's right, they could not. Mass fossilization is NOT the usual sequel to local floods, there is no comparison, which just highlights Panda's sophistry.

But he's also committing the error of thinking the Flood of Noah can be compared to local floods. About the only effect that they can be used to demonstrate is the destructiveness of even small floods, which ought to get across that there had to be huge effects from the worldwide Flood. And there are: The entire world has a wrecked and tumble-down appearance, but also the strata and the fossils around the world testify to it to anyone with eyes to see. NOTHING could have created all that BUT the Flood of Noah.

Earlier in the same thread Dr A responds to someone's claim that the Channeled Scablands of Washington show what would happen in the Flood:

[Coyote]One example of this is the evidence left by the Channeled Scablands of eastern Washington.

[Dr. A] I think I've expressed my doubts about the Channeled Scablands before, but this is a new thread, so I'll do it again.

The snag is that they were caused by the breaking of a natural dam so that a lot of pent-up water swept laterally across the landscape. Rather than by a lot of rain. Sure, it's a catastrophic flood, but is it a good model for the Flood

And in another post down a bit:

[Coyote] The massive amounts of rain would quickly seek lower levels, and we know from recent disasters how devastating that can be.

[Dr. A] Devastating, yes. Producing channeled scablands, no.

And if I'm following this correctly -- it's not as clear as it might be-- he's right, the Flood would not have created the Channeled Scablands. The Flood wouldn't carve land like that, simply destroy it, at least in the initial stages from the heavy rains -- but the Flood and ONLY the Flood could have deposited the strata -- in a later stage. As current Geology convincingly says about the Scablands, they were created by the breaking of a dam that released a massive amount of water from a standing lake. THAT kind of water flow COULD carve such channels.

However, in a sense it IS still all the Flood's doing, as a Floodist regards that enormous lake, known as Lake Missoula, to be water left after the Flood had drained away, along with other giant lakes such as Lahontan and Bonneville in the same general area. It's also seemed to me that a trigger for the breaking of the dam and the release of the water from not just Missoula but all the lakes could likely have been the tectonic forces that came into play some time after the Flood. They built the Rockies, pushed up the land, could have dumped the lakes as well. Something like that is surely what carved the Grand Canyon and Grand Staircase area. The canyon appears to have been formed first by deep volcanic eruption which raised the land in that area and cracked the upper strata which had been laid down to a depth of two miles or more originally. That admitted the residual standing Flood waters as an enormous cataract pouring in from all sides of the crack. Certainly something like that had to have been the case. The Colorado river even swollen to the max could not have done such a thing in billions of years.

LATER ADDITION:
Then Coyote, who repeats his mantra about the age of the strata and the fossils because he can't think any other way. He regards it all as fact to such an extent that his mind can't even produce a contrary thought.

Anyway, here's his comment:

If a flood occurred, what would you expect to find? Billions of dead things, which we call fossils, laid down by water all over the world. And what do we find? Billions of dead things, which we call fossils, laid down by water all over the world.

One problem with this scenario is that these fossils are spread over a billion or so years; they are far from being the same age.

Sorry, we believe your methods of dating are all wrong, don't believe a word of it. They ARE all the same age, you just have to learn to see with new eyes.

Another problem is that we can see evolution in the fossils. These layers of different ages show a progression of critters from older to younger. This progression had to take a lot of time to develop.

They SEEM to but you are of course ignoring anything that contradicts that perfect scenario and you are INTERPRETING the differences between varieties of the same type to be evolution of that type when all they are is VARIETIES that form from the BUILT-IN gene code for that species. Trilobites for instance obviously had a broad range of variation possible built into their genome. And there is really nothing about them to justify your categorizing those higher in the strata as younger or "more evolved" than those lower, that's just an artifact of your theory / figment of your imagination. I'm sure you can rationalize it but without any real justification, only by noting certain factors while ignoring others. And if you are talking about different species in the sense of Kinds (they're called something different from the other species) being older or younger with respect to each other, again that is PURELY an artifact of your theory, something you can possibly rationalize by making certain comparisons and ignoring others, but in reality they are simply SEPARATE SPECIES with their own species-specific gene code.

Also, floods don't produce fossils.

That is true, the ordinary everyday floods that go on in our time do NOT produce fossils. But the Flood of Noah did, because it moved such prodigious amounts of sediments and living things and deposited them in such thick layers all over the earth it created the ideal conditions for fossilization.

Shellfish fossils are produced in oceans, and sometimes lakes or marshes.

HOW DO YOU KNOW THAT? Meaning what is your evidence. But of course one would expect seashells to come from the ocean so that part's obvious. But the FLOOD WAS AN OCEAN FER PETE'S SAKE. You know, ALL THE WATER ON THE PLANET KINDA SORTA MINGLED TOGETHER IN THAT EVENT. As for "sometimes" lakes or marshes, HOW DO YOU KNOW THAT? Kindly give us the evidence that any lake or marsh since the Flood has produced a fossil. I don't say it's impossible, only that any of the billions of fossils in the strata were NOT produced by a lake or a marsh.

The most a flood could do is move a fossil.

This was not just "A FLOOD," this was THE Flood to end all floods. It did not MOVE fossils, it MADE fossils.

Ignoring the two problems above, what are the odds that the fossils could be ripped up from their original locations and sorted out by time and type in their new locations by chaotic flood waters?

The fossils weren't, but the question applies somewhat to the living things themselves that were buried by the Flood. The TIME element of course does not apply, that's just your usual presupposition that you can't seem to suspend even for a moment's consideration of another point of view, but the sorting by type is mostly a SEEMING sorting by type as I say above. However, the Flood wasn't as chaotic as you seem to think. Ocean water has layers and currents and streams in it and these carry things. We can only suppose that the living things were sorted by some physical factors as well as their original habitat and their having been found all together in one place at the time of the Flood.

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And now Nuggin following Coyote:

If a flood occurred, what would you expect to find? Billions of dead things, which we call fossils, laid down by water all over the world. And what do we find? Billions of dead things, which we call fossils, laid down by water all over the world.

When floods occur, they kill everything that can not get away. They sweep all the dead things downhill to form giant piles of dead things.

As is the case with most here, you are picturing an ordinary flood limited in space and time compared to THE Flood which covered the entire planet and lasted a year. It rained 40 days and 40 nights during which time mudslides would have occurred and living things would have sought higher ground, most likely flocking together in their own groups. When they are swept up in a mudslide they are all together with perhaps the odd misfit as well. They do not form just a bunch of giant piles because there is too much water. Some may stay buried but as the water rises it's going to continue to erode away the land including all the mud with the dead creatures in it and carry them in the water along with the sediments. We know water sorts sediments, and apparently there was enough of it in the Flood that it also sorted everything else and carried it along in its layers and currents and streams until whatever law of physics came into play at whatever was the right phase of the Flood and dropped them on the now-denuded land mass in interestingly separated layers of sediments with their peculiar creaturely contents.

Those dead things are not sorted.

Not in an ordinary little local flood. Think bigger, Nuggywuggy.

If you flood Upstate New York, you are going to get dead people, dogs, cats, horses, cows, deer, coyotes, raccoons, mice, rats, snakes etc. All the things in the environment.

When we look at fossil beds we do not see a vast collection of "everything". We see certain groups of things clustered together and then other groups of things clustered together in different strata.

If "The Flood" were to occur, we'd expect to find elephants AND mammoths AND mastadons AND rabbits AND T-Rex AND zebras all in one big piles
We never find that. Ever.

So, unless "The Flood" included magic sorting water, your claim just doesn't.... carry water.

. Yeah well you've got the usual commonsense notion based on no knowledge whatever or even a reasonable imagination of what a worldwide Flood would do that lasted an entire year, just the usual itty bitty flood you've seen with your own eyes on television. And it has its plausibility as an exercise of fallible human imagination but that's all it has.

Actually your objection to the way things are sorted is just as much an objection to the evolutionist explanation. OK you've got the strata sorted VERTICALLY into time periods so you can get away with explaining the sorting of the fossils in terms of time, but there's nothing in evo theory that accounts for the HORIZONTAL sorting that is also seen in the strata. There is some mixture, sure, but there are also whole beds of one family of creatures from trilobites to dinosaurs, sometimes so ridiculously packed together the idea that they died in anything other than an enormous catastrophe is just ludicrous. Why should that be? Do animals all go to the same place to die? Not in our world. They die willy nilly just as you picture those creatures from New York dying in your tiny little flood.

No, SOMETHING sorted all of it. Seems to me the Flood is the only reasonable explanation. Something to do with the characteristics of a huge body of water, not magic.

The Flood is Evident Everywhere Pt. 2

Some more from that same EvC thread:

[Dr. A] Genesis 7:19 makes it clear that there were "high mountains" pre-flood; and Genesis 8:7 and 8:13 describe the water as drying up from the fac of the Earth, not flowing away.

First consider the massive evidence indicated in my previous post which is foundational to any answer to these questions.

Either the expression "high mountains" refers to the highest of the pre-Flood hills or to the mountains that were built afterward that the new generations no doubt assumed had always been there. "High mountains" was written a thousand years after the Flood, and most likely no one had witnessed their building, nor been affected by the tectonic forces involved except perhaps as by an earthquake at a great distance. Most of the mountain building went on in parts of the world where Noah's descendants migrated much later.

"Drying up from the earth" describes how it appeared to those at land level, it doesn't purport to describe the mechanisms that took the water away. Some of it no doubt DID flow away, but the upshot was that the land got dry.

As for catastrophic tectonic events, might they not have been a little too catastrophic? I don't see what you're describing happening without tsunamis, which would have been inconvenient for Noah.

Not if he was up on a mountainside in the middle of a land mass rather than near the water.

Myself I don't think creationists need to try to hard to explain the how of the Flood, since your hypothesis involves a god with miraculous powers who can take care of these details. But the question of whether it happened at all is much more awkward.

There is no hint of anything miraculous occurring in the Flood scenario except that God apparently herded all the animals in Noah's direction.

[Percy] As I'm fond of saying, things that actually happen leave evidence behind. If around 4500 years ago water covered the Earth, and if the mountains rose and the valleys deepened, then there must be evidence of these events. Every geological event of Earth's history is accepted by geologists because of evidence, and they'll include the flood as one of those events as soon as evidence of the flood is discovered.

The evidence is everywhere but they interpret it away.

Evidence of the Flood is the worldwide strata chock full of fossils (see previous post), about as evident a mass of evidence as you'll find for any event. Evidence of mountain building is the strata of the mountains themselves and the marine fossils found at mountaintops, at the very least.

[Jonf]...the big problem with condensing events such as plate tectonics into a short time period is that there are certain characteristics of the events that cannot be scaled. E.g., radioactive decay releases heat and radiation, and X amount of radioactive decay releases Y amount of heat and radiation no matter the time period, so accelerated nuclear decay would leave subtle traces such as a molten Earth and all life destroyed twice over.

Similarly, mountain building by plate tectonics is inefficient (thermodynamically speaking) and releases heat, and creates earthquakes and tsunamis. It's difficult if not impossible to quantify the effects of catastrophic plate tectonics but it's pretty certain no life could survive it. And that's not even considering the extreme silliness of the scenarios that have been proposed for catastrophic plate tectonics.

IOW, the fact that we are here is strong evidence that plate tectonics and nuclear decay and other process have taken place over time scales many orders of magnitude greater than YEC time scales.

Whatever occurred did so in a period when there were few human beings on the earth, all of them concentrated in a small piece of geography by comparison with the whole planet. You don't know what happened, you are merely speculating of course, and if you are going to speculate you need first to take into account the MASSIVE evidence of the existence of the strata and their fossil contents, which can only be reasonably accounted for by a worldwide Flood (see previous post) and adjust your speculations accordingly. Obviously, whatever happened did NOT destroy Noah and his descendants.

[Jar says] I have yet to find a YEC that can explain how the lowest exposed material at the Grand Canyon got formed.

I've answered this many times both here and at EvC. The granites and schists were formed by underground volcanic activity toward the end of the strata-building of the Flood, compressed by the weight of the then-two-mile depth of strata above; the Great Unconformity was formed by the force of that same volcanic activity displacing the originally horizontal strata beneath the upper strata -- the upper strata remained more or less horizontal although raised by the force.

The dates for the local post-ice age floods fit within an overall framework, which includes fauna and flora, geology, sedimentation rates, and so on. The whole package fits together nicely, as worked out by scientists over 100+ years.

There are all kinds of absurdities involved in this supposedly neatly fitted scenario, as I note in my previous post. It's all concocted to fit the theory but if you think about the reality it's utterly absurd to suppose slow sedimentation rates, to turn fossils that were clearly catastrophically dumped into their current beds into time-period flora and fauna and so on.

If there were any real dating problems you can bet that various scientists and advanced students would be all over them, trying to figure out where the problems were.

Sounds good but apparently they are mesmerized by the theoretical edifice that has already been built. Their only option would be to turn YEC and if they do that they'll lose all credibility with the establishment.

A good way to become well-known quickly in a field is to find the answer to a long-standing puzzle. But at this point, the dating of the post-ice age floods is pretty well understood, as that site I referred you to shows.

It's pretty well accepted as understood, despite the holes in it as indicated in my previous post.

You note that you find no proof for the worldwide flood in "regular" science and that you get your support from creationist sources. That should be a clue.

Keep checking out the real science sites, and perhaps you will learn a few things. The information is out there, in plain sight.

The dogma is out there in plain sight of course, and the weight of establishment adherence to it can sway a half-educated person in its favor. It is accepted as evidence but it's very shaky evidence in reality. (See previous post and all my others on this subject).

The Flood is evident everywhere, odd they can't see it

Another example of this odd blindness from EvC:

[Coyote]But we do find evidence of localized floods. The channeled scablands of eastern Washington state are a good example.

[Dr. A] Arguably they're not a good example of what creationists should be looking for, since they were caused by a natural dam breaking and a sheet of water sweeping laterally across the landscape.

The question is, what results would Noah's flood have had if it had happened? I think not very much (in geological terms, biogeography is a whole other question).

Such blindness to the obvious is clear evidence that nothing anyone says is going to open their eyes short of an intervention by God.

The entire "geologic column," all the strata, all their fossil contents, is proof of the Flood. The current interpretation is sheer absurdity from many different points of view -- the absurdity of the idea that time periods could be characterized by discrete sediments; the absurdity of the idea that such an abundance of tossed and tumbled bunches of fossilized life forms, often found in beds of one kind alone, could have occurred piece by piece over millions of years, and in such slowly developing circumstances fossilization would be nearly impossible; the absurdity of explaining the worldwide distribution of marine fossils in such extravagant abundance as the result of many former localized changes in sea level; the absurdity of many risings and fallings of land and/or sea level at all; the absurdity of thinking in terms of billions of years for strata in some places a mile deep or more, that are clearly undisturbed by normal weathering and erosion all the way up to the top layers (absurdly considered to be "recent time" as opposed to ancient time), when and only when such disturbances finally occurred -- tectonic distortions, foldings and tiltings, breaking and canyon formation, volcanic distortions, liftings and tiltings, etc. etc.

But a worldwide Food and the tectonic / volcanic disturbances that followed it account quite well for all of it.

How odd they are so completely blind to it, something so obvious.

That's the evidence for the worldwide Flood. The "local floods" such as the one mentioned above that made the Washington scablands are clearly former huge lakes that broke through natural dams -- Lahontan, Missoula, Bonneville -- lakes most likely left after most of the Flood had drained away, dams that most likely broke under the tectonic and volcanic disturbances that followed the Flood, possibly even years afterward.

Yes, I know I'm repeating myself. But then that's all they do over at EvC too. Our positions are pretty well established by now. Either they get their eyes opened or the "debate" just continues along the same old lines indefinitely.

I do hope I have time eventually to get back to Lyell. That got shelved by what is known as "real life" outside the internet.

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Oh, and a side note on another EvC absurdity: Buzsaw got banned from the science forums for the mere infraction of correcting somebody's misunderstanding of his point of view. Simply describing his point of view, which is clearly all that is called for under such circumstances, is insufficient according to EvC administration, which is quite blandly insensitive to context.

Here's Buz explaining his position to Zen Monkey, who had gotten it wrong:

Zen, my position has never been that the rain or flood skewed the dating. It has always been that the implications of the make-up of the pre-flood planet and atmosphere would be the reason for skewing the conclusions reached via research methodology of conventional science.

A perfectly simple direct statement of his position which ZM had misunderstood, and a standard creationist position too.

And here's Admin completely missing the point:

Hi Buz,

It wasn't so long ago that you were restricted from posting in the science forums because of your inability or unwillingness to argue from evidence. You were permitted back in to the science forums after committing to keep your arguments focused on evidence, but you're not doing this. Efforts to reach an understanding with you about what was desired in terms of evidence have not been successful.

...You leave me no choice but to reinstate your restriction from the science forums. Please do not participate in threads in the science forums from this time forward.

Of course Buz is only too familiar with this sort of treatment, as is any creationist who hangs out there very long. I decided there was no point in continuing to subject myself to it, but Buz seems to manage to keep on keeping on despite it all.

Are Scientists Idiots?

Do I think geologists are stupid? That question always eventually comes up.

No, I think most geologists are practical workers whose jobs don't have anything to do with the theories about the age of the earth or particular geological formations. I think they have a fine grasp of terrain and the clues it holds to mineral deposits such as gold, where to drill for oil, where to dig a well for water, etc. Same with biologists. As long as their focus is on the actual phenomena before them they make great progress.

I don't even think the theoretical geologists are stupid. Or the biological theorists who believe in evolution.*

It takes a high level of intelligence to come up with the ridiculous scenarios they come up with and try to make it all work together with the facts that are often in collusion to defeat their efforts (not efforts that do serve the scientific work itself but efforts to keep gluing it all to the false theory of evolution).

No, I think they are simply blind, the way all fallen human beings are, trusting in their own fallible minds and without the aid of the Holy Spirit.

I think there are many actual physical facts they have discovered that are very useful to know. Such as about the ancient lakes Missoula and Bonneville. Such as medical discoveries in the areas of biological research. They just have the time factor all wrong and are laboring under prejudices against the Bible.

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* For the sake of a visitor here today, July 17, 09, I feel I should add that the same is true for biology as for geology. They do a lot of genuine science focusing on the actual phenomena before them that they THINK is done because of evolution, but it could be done just as well without evolution and possibly better. Biologists know how to study DNA for clues to heritable diseases, for instance, and they THINK they need the theory of evolution to make this possible but they don't.

Open your eyes. Noah's Flood is attested all over this planet.

This particular geological formation is simply one of the more dramatic examples of the effect of a huge quantity of water that couldn't have been created any other way. The world is covered with such examples. The entire world.

Sure, those who refuse to believe what the Bible says about a worldwide Flood some 4500 or so years ago of course make up the explanation that if it looks like it had to be formed by water, then it had to be a local flood. Of course no-one has ever seen a local flood make any such formations as we're talking about. Rivers lay down sediments in layers, and it happens to some extent in oceans too, but all that proves is that water does that sort of thing; no river or ocean ever laid down sediments to the depth or breadth of the layers we see in the formations of the Southwest, or anywhere on earth for that matter.

Take the Grand Canyon. The walls of the Grand Canyon expose the layers of sediments that form the entire plateau into which the Canyon was carved, for many hundreds of miles in all directions. You can see a higher level of layers exposed in the formations to the North, in the Grand Staircase and other formations of Utah, and there is every reason to believe those same higher levels originally extended over the Grand Canyon region as well before they were washed away. The whole stack of layers extends over a huge swath of land now divided by several States of the US.

Absurdly they try to explain this layering in terms of slow accumulation over millions of years. These are neat parallel horizontal layers of different sediments sharply separated from one another, not blurred together but sharply demarcated from one another, a limestone here, a sandstone there and so on, even up to a thickness of 1000 feet in places. Way too neat and separated from one another over hundreds of miles to allow for even a remotely plausible explanation in terms of long ages of time.

No, use your God-given sanctified imagination. There is no way those layers could have formed except by the action of water, and since we're talking about a stack of them that would originally have been at least two miles deep as well as multiplied hundreds of miles in horizontal extent we're talking about a prodigious amount of water, water that would have covered the entire Earth. Just as the Bible says.

And then of course it also took water to cut through that stack of layers to carve out the canyon itself and most of the other odd formations in the Southwest USA, water plus weather erosion. Most likely the water carving was the result of the release of a huge lake that still stood on the earth after the Flood, after the whole stack of layers had been formed, then released as a gigantic cataract. In the case of the Grand Canyon the water probably rushed into a large crack formed in the surface by earthquake activity -- A cross section of the Grand Canyon down to its base rock shows that it is cut into a mound obviously uplifted by an underground volcano, the force of which would have split the upper layers and allowed the release of any standing water into the opening. The rushing water would have sheared the walls of the canyon until it had all run out at the southern end where in fact you can see the accumulation of debris it left in its track on its way to the area that is now Baja California.

A similar scenario must have occurred in the Northwest US where in fact huge standing lakes have been shown by geologists to have existed at one time in the past. Of course they have their timeline wrong, by millions of years. Such a body of water would have been there for some unknown period after the Flood and then released by the breaking of whatever dam type formation held it back, to rush down various canyons where there is now a river still running to the sea. Probably the water would have been released during the compression of the tectonic plates that formed the Rockies, which would also have tilted the land enough in that region to start the water spilling over whatever natural dams existed. [Look up Lake Missoula and Lake Bonneville].

Occasionally you'll read of a search for evidence of Noah's Flood in some specific geologic formation, sometimes in one of the layers deeply buried, a perfectly silly idea. This is to use a microscope to locate a mountain, to study phenomena that are best seen at a distance. Since they can't find the sort of evidence they had in mind they declare the Flood not to have occurred, but BEHOLD! --all over the Earth the evidence is visible to the naked eye. It encompasses ALL of the layers as well as other kinds of formations. The researchers aren't imagining the gigantic scale of such a Flood, the gigantic forces it would have released.

Plenty more to say about this.