Rapid erosion on Mt. St. Helens shows Grand Canyon could form suddenly (Talk.Origins)

Claim CH581.1:


 * Rapid erosion of sediments along the North Fork of Toutle River, flowing out of Spirit Lake on Mt. St. Helens, carved a canyon like a miniature Grand Canyon, showing that the Grand Canyon could form suddenly.

Source:
 * Austin, Steven A. 1986. Mt. St. Helens and catastrophism. Impact 157 (July). http://www.icr.org/pubs/imp/imp-157.htm http://www.icr.org/index.php?module=articles&action=view&ID=261

CreationWiki response:

This is a misstatement of the claim, as no one is saying that "the Grand Canyon could form suddenly." Rapidly, yes. Suddenly, no. Undoubtedly it would seem sudden to uniformitarians like Talk.Origins but the correct view is rapidly. It may have taken days, weeks or even months. Mt. St. Helens simply demonstrates the possibility of rapid erosion; no one claims that it is a perfect duplication of the Grand Canyon.

Furthermore Mt. St. Helens simply provides a model for how rapid erosion occurs&mdash;those processes need to be scaled up considerably to apply it to the Grand Canyon&mdash;but the same basic processes can be applied to the Grand Canyon.

Yes, the Grand Canyon's rocks are well consolidated now; as is Mt. St. Helens' volcanic ash; but they may not have been when the Grand Canyon' was carved. This can be shown to be the case based on the obvious slumping in the Grand Canyon as can be seen in the following pictures from the canyon floor. This shows that the rocks the Grand Canyon is carved through were at least partially unconsolidated when it was carved. Similar slumping patterns can be seen at Mt. St. Helens.
 * Image D0484
 * Image D5697
 * Image D_3516
 * Image D_3767
 * Image D_1755
 * Image D3203
 * Image D3143


 * The Toutle River
 * USGS/Cascades Volcano


 * Muddy River drainage
 * USGS/Cascades Volcano
 * large image


 * Upper Muddy drainage
 * USGS/Cascades Volcano

Both locations show this same type of slumping at the bottom, suggesting that neither location was well consolidated when the respective canyons were carved.

Which Mt. St. Helens canyon is Talk.Origins referring too? It has several. All of the above images show places with vertical canyon walls, as do the images on the Answers in Genesis web-site of the Engineer's Canyon and a recently-carved cliff face.. Therefore, this Talk.Origins claim is baseless.

Once again this is a misstatement of the claim, as no one is saying that "the Grand Canyon could form suddenly." Rapidly, yes. Suddenly, no. As said above, undoubtedly it would seem sudden to uniformitarians like Talk.Origins but the correct view is rapidly. It may have taken days, weeks or even months. Mt. St. Helens simply demonstrates the possibility of rapid erosion. No one claims that it is a perfect duplication of the Grand Canyon.

And the Talk.Origins point is? None of the canyons in question were carved entirely by rivers. It does show that a faster water flow at the Grand Canyon would have carved it faster. What the Talk.Origins article does not mention is the Colorado River would have to flow uphill from it's source to form the Grand Canyon

The laws of physics are still the same. All that is needed is to proportionally increase the water and/or speed of flow. It is not uncommon in science to study events on a smaller scale to understand larger-scale events. A star is many trillions of times larger than the pellets used for nuclear fusion experiments, but they help provide an understanding of how stars work. It is simply a matter of scaling up the smaller event to extrapolate it to the larger.