Instant Grand Canyon
Just add water. An instant canyon created in Texas in 2002 when water flooded out of a spillway is being opened to the public. The Canyon Lake Gorge was created in the space of three and a half days and is up to 80 feet deep and a mile and a half long.
The mile-and-a-half-long gorge, up to 80 feet deep, was dug out from what had been a nondescript valley covered in mesquite and oak trees. It sits behind a spillway built as a safety valve for Canyon Lake, a popular recreation spot in the Texas Hill Country between San Antonio and Austin.
The reservoir was built in the 1960s to prevent flash flooding along the Guadalupe River and to assure the water supply for central Texas. The spillway had never been overrun until July 4, 2002, when 70,000 cubic feet of water gushed downhill toward the Guadalupe River for three days, scraping off vegetation and topsoil and leaving only limestone walls.
"Underneath us, it looks solid, but obviously it's not," said Tommie Streeter Rhoad of the Guadalupe Blanco River Authority, as she looked out over a cream-colored limestone crevasse.
The sudden exposure of such canyons is rare but not unprecedented. Flooding in Iowa in 1993 opened a limestone gorge behind a spillway at Corvalville Lake north of Iowa City, but that chasm, Devonian Fossil Gorge, is narrower and shallower than Canyon Lake Gorge.
Neither compares to the world's most famous canyon. It took water around 5 million to 6 million years to carve the Grand Canyon, which plunges 6,000 feet at its deepest point and stretches 15 miles at its widest.
The more modest Canyon Lake Gorge still displays a fault line and rock formations carved by water that seeped down and bubbled up for millions of years before the flooding.
I can attest that water is unbelievably powerful when it decides it wants to go somewhere. It can do an awe-inspiring amount of damage in a very short time indeed. There is a website for the gorge: http://www.canyongorge.org/. Not much in the way of photos there, however. There is a pretty good photo here, however. There is a pretty decent gallery of pictures here courtesy of the local Chamber of Commerce.
One question. If this gorge was cut in 3-1/2 days, how sure are they that it took millions of years for the Grand Canyon? Kind of makes you wonder, doesn't it?
By Quilly Mammoth, Saturday, 6 October , 2007 @ 7:59 am
Another one of those inconvenient questions like “Where are all the transitional species that Macro-evolution should be leaving all over the planet?”
By Rob, Saturday, 6 October , 2007 @ 10:55 am
Guess the spam filter ate my first try, and I’m not sure how often those traps get checked so I’ll try again.
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There are some good pics here on flickr:
http://www.flickr.com /photos/83379080@N00/sets/72157602252669336/
Definitely an interesting phenomenon. Thinking though, even if you sustained this rate for 40 days you’d only be half as deep as the Grand Canyon. And that would be assuming the same kind of single impact point deluge as this was. If the water was rising everywhere simultaneously, you wouldn’t have nearly the same forces. I’d guess the geologists are more correct on this one.
Also, there are a lot of transitional fossils, and partly it’s just a bad question. Every species is a “transitional” species:
http://www.talkorigins.org /faqs/faq-transitional.html
By Gaius, Saturday, 6 October , 2007 @ 11:07 am
I have no idea why your first try got caught and your second went through. Something hiccupped one way or the other. But I’ll discard your first try since you got one through.
By Rob, Saturday, 6 October , 2007 @ 11:15 am
I took out the link tags on the second try and added a space in the URLS. Lousy spammers ruining it for everyone…
Thanks