Mouth of Colorado River doesn't have enough sediment for Grand Canyon (Talk.Origins)

Claim CD210:


 * There is nowhere near enough sediment deposited at the mouth of the Colorado River to account for 10 million years worth of erosion.

CreationWiki response:

The claim is that there is not enough sediment at the mouth of the Colorado River for 10 million years worth of erosion. Talk.Origins says that there is only enough for 2-3 million years, assuming current rates. 2-3 million years is less than 10 million years, so Talk.Origins has only succeeded in proving this claim to be 100% correct.

Much of this delta was probably formed by sediments from the recession of the flood. The river's flow rate and erosion rates would have been much higher than it is today. Furthermore if a later flood carved the Grand Canyon the resulting increased sedimentation rate would have helped build it up quickly.

What Talk.Origins is not saying is that the Colorado River flows south into its delta and that the entire delta is on the Pacific plate. As such not only would newer deposits tend to be further south than older ones no matter how fast the deposition rate was in the past, but the entire delta is moving in the same direction so this is most likely a calculation based on current plate movements and not any kind of objectively measurable displacement from the delta.

Exactly what would have occurred if the Canyon was carved by a catastrophic flood. This is not necessarily the Genesis Flood&mdash;it could have been a post-Flood event.

So what, this hardly negates the fact that the original claim is correct.

This fact helps to show that the Grand Canyon could have been carved quickly. It could have been sped up greatly by sulfuric acid, since limestone and dolomite dissolve readily in sulfuric acid.