June is Grand Canyon Month at RSR! Real Science Radio host Bob Enyart interviews Bryan Nickel about his video on the origin of one of the seven wonders of the world, the Grand Canyon. At 277 miles long, a mile deep, and 10 miles wide, there is much evidence that disproves the claim that the Colorado River carved the canyon. Some of the world's leading geologists admit both a lack of evidence for the river hypothesis and that they don't know how it could have done so. See the list of problems just below Bryan's video. - Rivers don't continually erode deeper and deeper into their beds partly because they have bottom sediments that prevent them from continually eroding downward. - No other river has carved anything like the Grand Canyon even though more than 140 other rivers have much greater volume (discharge) than the Colorado, from 3 to 300 times the Colorado's relatively meager flow of 640 cubic meters per second. - The inner gorge is a crack in erosion-resistant and sediment-protected crystalline rock that is much harder than the sedimentary layers of the main canyon. River water would instead have excavated the softer sediments on the banks rather than cut into the bed’s much harder solid rock and like rounded river rocks, would have smoothed the walls of the gorge, which instead are jagged. This 1,000-foot-deep, 46-mile long tension crack opened in the floor of the Grand Canyon when the weight of the overlying rock was removed. - None of the geologic faults in the area could have helped the river carve the canyon because they run perpendicular to the river. - Rivers don’t flow uphill, which the Colorado would have had to do to, flowing through the uphill topography with the highest rim of the canyon at 4,000 feet elevation above where the river flows into the canyon. The river proponents claim two actions were coordinated for millions of years, that at approximately the same rate that the Colorado Plateau was uplifted, the river eroded downward. As an analogy, consider the Faint Young Sun problem, whereby the Earth's atmosphere changed over hundreds of millions of years to trap less heat as the Sun evolved to today's stability and temperature. The river eroding downward at the same rate as the plateau uplifted is another of the countless "just so" stories that make up the uniformitarian belief system. - Rivers don't ignore all their paths of least resistance which the Colorado would have had to do for millions of years if it carved the canyon. - The massive side canyons cannot be explained by the river carving the canyon because rivers don't take dozens of abrupt right and left turns to flow out some miles and then back in on themselves. - The many side canyons cannot be explained by multiple rivers carving them because there is no evidence of dozens of ancient rivers and there are no sufficiently sized drainage basins to feed the non-existing ancient rivers. - The side canyons cannot be explained by rainfall erosion, which is the only option left in a river-carved-the-canyon model. The relatively minimal rainwater provided by the canyon's arid climate could not perform the needed massive erosion and sediment transport. Arizona is the fourth driest of the 50 U.S. states. Further, the claim that the massive side canyons were carved by rainwater contradicts the condition in the scores of layers of the Grand Canyon showing flat gaps, i.e., the amazingly parallel boundaries, called paraconformities, with characteristically little to no evidence of rain erosion. The many ways to disprove the uniformitarians is that they want to have it both ways: a lot of rain erosion for the side canyons and virtually no rain erosion throughout the far greater extent of the strata itself. - Marble Canyon's dozen barbed side canyons can't be explained by the Colorado River. As part of Grand Canyon National Park, Marble Canyon leads directly into the main canyon. As an analogy, consider that the Mississippi River's tributaries flow, as expected