The latest from Crevo's Creationism and Baraminology Research blog, where Crevo is reviewing Steven Austin's book on the Grand Canyon:

I have been working through Steven Austin's Grand Canyon: Monument to Catastrophe. Geology is by far my worst subject. Perhaps programming computers makes learning about outdoors difficult :)

This is part one of a book review. I'm doing it in multiple parts for a few reasons:

• There's a whole lot of information in the book.


• It's taking me a while to go through the book, and I don't want the blog to go stale.


• It's a great book and worth the extra exposure.

I'm half-way through chapter four. So far, a few things have really stuck out that I like about the book:

• It can basically be used as an introduction to geology. It defines numerous terms, helps to read geological maps, and helps acquaint you with geological terminology. In fact, this is one of the reasons I started with this book. Geology is one of my worst subjects, but there have been a lot of geology articles in CRSQ lately.


• Austin is fair to those he disagrees with. Austin tries to give a good overview of the evidence used against the creation hypothesis, and while he provides rebuttals, he does so very respectfully, which is sometimes missing in creationist literature.


• The book is very well footnoted. Depending on what I find interesting, there are a whole lot of footnotes to research for further information. Chapter 3, for example, contains 121 footnotes, most of which are references to other work.

Since I'm supposed to be educating my readers about creationist research, I'll point out some of the experiments and research referenced in the first few chapters:

• In the Coconino sandstone, there are lots of footprints. Austin references an experiment that was performed to determine what kind of environment the footprints were laid down in. The experiment referenced observed the tracks of animals made on most sand, on dry sand, and underwater. The tracks observed in the Coconino sandstone match those made in the underwater environments.


• Austin himself has done research on nautiloid deposition in the redwall limestone. I'll probably report more on this later. He shows that the orientation of nautiloids along a northwest to southeast axis indicates water moving in a single direction with a significant current.


• Austin points to research done on investigating the relationship between water depth, water velocity, sand wave height, and depositional characteristics. He uses the work of Rubin and McColluch to show that some of the Grand Canyon sandstone was deposited at a depth of 180 feet, with a minimum velocity of three feet per second.


• Austin also points to grain-size research which indicate that Coconino sandstone was deposited under water.

This just scratches the surface of the information available in the book. Austin goes in to some detail about how interpretation of geological strata works, and many of the different types of unconformities, faults, and other structures important for interpretation, and what they point to.

 Continue reading at Creationism and Baraminology Research News.