Del: How long've you
been doing this, Steve? Steve: I've been looking
for a particular kind of marine fossil called
a nautiloid in Grand Canyon for about 25 years. It's taken me along about
100 miles of the Grand Canyon. And I've been finding
them all in one layer. So what I do is
I go find the layer in the Redwall limestone
where they occur, and then I study
the fossil content and that's what we get. Del: So what is nautiloid? Steve: A nautiloid is
a squid in a shell. It has a cone-shaped shell that has pressurized
chambers in it, and the body of the organism is
at the wide end of the shell. And the animal could
swim really fast. Del: Oh, it's very cool. Steve: And they're
the fastest- swimming predators you can imagine. Del: How big do they get? Steve: Some of these squid-
like organisms are up to one foot in diameter
and seven feet long. Del: That's a
pretty large creature. Steve: About the average length
of these things — about the length of your arm. Del: Hmm. Steve: And there are
small ones, medium ones, and big ones. Del: So you found them
out here somewhere? Steve: Yeah, right
here in the limestone below us we can see
an excellent display, a typical display of nautiloids. Now, look… take a look
over there you can see the cone-shaped organism
pointing this way. Del: I see it. Steve: And you can see
the curved chambers internal to the shell. Del: Uh huh. Steve: That might be originally
four feet long or so. And then I see over here — right in this area — and
that must be 1 or 2 feet long. And then I see the tip end of a nautiloid very
beautifully preserved… Del: oh, that one's cool. Steve: …with the internal tube
down the center. And then I see it looks like a middle segment
of a broken nautiloid with the chambers
coming through here. Del: Yeah. Steve: So there's
four nautiloids right there. Del: And, now, what is that? I mean it looks like somebody
drew a circle in the rock. Steve: Yeah it looks
like a circle sitting on the same plane as
the other four nautiloids. Could that be
a nautiloid pointing down? Del: So it's vertical! It's fossilized in
a vertical position. Steve: It is. Del: That seems strange to me. Steve: Yeah, about one
out of seven of the nautiloids that we're finding in this layer
are tip end pointing down. Del: So that's not rare,
you find that all over? Steve: Yes, on every location where I see many
nautiloids displayed, I'll always see the circle. And they're pointing down. Del: But the rest of these all seem to be pointing
in the same direction. Steve: You noticed that? Isn't that interesting? See I pointed
out four nautiloids, and the one's pointing this way, one's pointing that way,
one's pointing that way, and one's pointing this way. They're all in that general
trend running this way across the layer. So what does that argue? It's an aligned
condition of fossils. Del: And what would cause that? Steve: I think
that a current swept over this deposit
and it aligned them. If these organisms
died a natural death and fell to the bottom
of a calm, placid sea…. Del: It would be random. Steve: They would be randomly
pointing and they're not. And so something swept
over them and buried them. It froze very rapidly
to trap a nautiloid in vertical orientation. Del: Right. Yeah. Well, Steve, the
conventional story is that creatures are fossilized; when they die they
sink to the bottom, they slowly get covered up. What is the evidence
that you see here that supports the Genesis story? Steve: Well, there's
a lot of sediment here, you know, layers — but the nautiloids are all in this one plane
of the Redwall limestone. And I've seen it
through 100 miles of the canyon and it argues that there must be a billion
nautiloids around here. And so there's some type of mass kill or death
associated with this. And then the bedding
surface we're looking at is consistent with that: we see the orientation or the alignment
of fossils which argues that it wasn't a natural death
that killed these organism. They didn't fall
randomly to the bottom; something swept along
and moved them. Their bodies may be
still in the shells and they were buried
by being smothered here. So it's a mass kill on
a colossal dimension in an ocean current which brings to mind immediately
something like a global flood. Del: And it seems to me also,
just the detail — I mean that one
fossil over there, there's just exquisite detail
in that fossil, and it would seem to me that
if it was a long time… I grew up on a ranch, those things decay
and they decay quickly. So these must have
been buried rapidly. Steve: Those are really
mind- challenging things. So my original thought is
they may have been poisoned, but now I'm thinking that they have been
smothered alive by this fast-moving current. The fastest moving predator in the ocean is
probably a nautiloid and it can't survive whatever whumped on it
here some kind of curve. So the fossil deposit is kind of a Sherlock
Holmes detective story: we're looking here, trying to discern
the events that led to the killing and burial
of these marvelous creatures. Del: So all of that evidence
seems to point back again to the history we
have recorded in Genesis. Steve: Yeah, this is not a calm and placid sea; this is
not business as usual. This is something
really extraordinary. Del: So is this a mud layer
that's rolling in here? Steve: It could be muddy,
could be very much a slurry; and that's another story
that I'd like to tell you. Del: All right. You lead the way. Boy, this is really interesting. Steve: We're looking
at the bottom part of the Redwall limestone
here in the middle of the Grand Canyon. In the top we
see the thin-bedded, rather brown limestone and churt strata
with an abrupt boundary, with a thick-bedded
limestone underneath it. And that upper seven feet
is the nautiloid bed and then running right
down the middle of it is the coarse fossils zone, and that coarse fossil zone continues for 100 miles
down the Grand Canyon. It also goes to the west,
out in the Lake Mead area. I've even seen this bed in Frenchman mountain
next to Las Vegas, Nevada, eye level with
the Stratosphere Hotel. There's this seven foot layer. So it's extremely
very persistent and extensive. And we're just looking
at the general characteristics of it here. So in the middle there is the nautiloid layers with
all our coarse fossil material. Del: So that corresponds
to what we just saw when we saw the fossil, so we were looking
down on that surface. Now we're looking
at it in cross-section. Del: Well, Steve, I've heard that limestone
just takes a long time to form. How do we explain this? Steve: On the Great Bahama
Banks limestone accumulates about a thousand years per inch
— lime sediment and lime mud. And maybe that is
some people's thinking about the conventional way, but thinking about
this limestone later here in the Grand Canyon
causes me to just jettison that idea almost immediately. Del: Is there a difference
between this and that? Steve: Very much a difference. Remember the fossils are all
along one horizon in the bed? They're not distributed
vertically throughout the bed. And then you notice that it's very extensive
— extremely extensive — down 100 miles of canyon. And then remember the alignment of the fossils provide
evidence of a current? Together, these three
observations need of an excellent
and good interpretation, and that led me to do
some very serious reflection and it challenged me
to do my best work. And the experiment that I had
with my son February 3rd, the year 2000, in the giant sandbox
is worth talking about. With a dad and his kid
with the sandbox, it started with pouring sand. And you know,
pour sand — it's in friction. When you pour sand fast,
it forms mounds. Okay. But when you throw sand, it can stream out
over a surface like a blanket. Del: Right. Steve: And I was throwing out sand with little
leaf fragments in it, thinking about nautiloids, when the idea of a high
velocity flow came to my mind. Rather than thinking about
granular friction — you know, the grains as they
bounce along and in a… as you throw the grains out,
the frictional flow. I imagined little springs
between the sand grains, holding them apart. And if that could happen, the sand could flow
almost endlessly. And my brain entered a domain — I call it “no friction land." I started thinking
about high speed, no friction, flow of sediment
slurries — concentrated, sediment slurries over
the surface of the earth — on low low slopes
and that kind of thing. It led me into a four year
thought experiment, if you will, about how sand grains,
and sand-sized particles, and large fossils might move. How did the fossils — the coarse fossils — get
in the middle of the bed? That is the mind-
challenging thing. I could imagine how they could get
at the bottom of the bed: just fall out. Or, I could imagine how they get
to the top of the bed. But how could they
get in the middle? That was really interesting. Del: And how did you
figure that out? Steve: Well, I'm thinking
about the sand flowing out, I'm looking at those leaf
fragments and I'm thinking, in the wake of a high speed flow
there could be a turbulent eddy, and that's how the nautiloids could fall out
with the sediment. Concentrated sediment
would fall out first, and then the fossils
would be buoyed up, and they would fall out and then
finally the light stuff, the finer texture
would fall out. And so it seemed
to explain things. In no friction land, I can imagine
how this occurred. I worked out the equations
in 2D of a dynamic pressure and static pressure
on a fast- moving flow. You know when you have
your hand out in the car at 60 miles an hour, you feel that really
strong current that's flowing past your hand. That's called dynamic pressure, and a fast moving slurry
like a mud slurry with lots of of organisms in it would generate
that kind of pressure. The faster it goes,
the more pressure it develops. When that pressure developed
in front is equal to the weight, the submerged weight, of the flow —
the mud flow, if you will — it causes
a property called hydroplane. And in hydroplane
there's no friction with the surface underneath. Del: Just like what happens
on the highway. Steve: Just like
right on the highway. So this thing — by its speed
it generates its own cushion, if you will, that makes it detach
from the earth. And it flows on a hydroplane. Del: So all those
particles are suspended in their same position, and then traveling
at a very fast rate. Steve: Yeah. So the boundaries
of this thing are high shear. But internally, this thing
is very laminar and it flows along almost endlessly
and with low friction. And so I gave it to a modeler — a computational fluid dynamicist
— to model that condition. I gave him a couple of months to
do the 2D computer simulation, and I remember getting
a phone call one day and I said, "How you doing on that computational fluid
dynamics problem of simulating an underwater mudflow” —
50 percent sediment, 50 percent water, moving at a speed of about
seven meters per second, twenty one feet per second
— something like that. And he said, “wow, they fly! ”. Del: Huh. Steve: And then he noticed
they generated wing shape as these flows moved
under the water, over the sediment surface. They generate a wing shape
and they, essentially, fly. So now we have flying sediment flows on a hydroplane
moving over the ocean floor. Del: And so we can
get material, then, transported very long distances. Steve: Yeah, and very fast. And then the breakup of the wake of this flow
creates the conditions that allow the nautiloids and the other coarse
fossils to fall out in the middle of the flow. Del: Is that towards
the tail of this, then? Steve: The tail of the flow. Del: Uh huh. Steve: And so that theory
has now been modeled in computer and it seems to explain
the… the essentials of what this is like. Del: Well then everything
is happening very quickly. Steve: The sediment sequence
can be explained and modeled by computational fluid dynamics
very quickly — minutes, not millions of years. So it's a completely different
explanation for the origin of limestone layers. Del: And it's not just
the limestone layers. I mean we've been
here in the canyon for a number of days
and it seemed like everywhere we look — whether we're talking
about the layers all being laid down rapidly
and all the evidence to show that it was a rapid deposition, and then the carving of
the canyon — the evidence shows that happened rapidly, all the way down
to the mud flows, and how those form rapidly. With all of that
evidence before us, why do people still hang on
to the conventional model? Steve: I think it's not because of the sedimentary
evidence, ultimately. I think it's something else. Most people have a high regard
for radioisotope dating and maybe that's the last part of their thinking
about millions of years. And so we need to talk
about that subject as well. Del: Well that's always
been a tough issue. Do you want to talk about that? Steve: Well, I have
a friend: Andrew Snelling. He's a geologist from Australia who has done some dating
on Grand Canyon rocks with me. Del: I know Andrew — I floated down
the river with him. So I look forward
to seeing him again. Well before we go, though, we started out talking
about the history in the rocks. And these rocks
have told us a story. Steve: A powerful
story, haven't they? And, you know, the children of
Israel were crossing into the Promised Land 1400 B.C. And as they crossed
the Jordan River, it dried up. And Joshua said, hey pick up 12 stones,
pile these up in Gilgal. These stones will be a monument. Steve: And then Joshua said when your sons
and daughters asked what mean these stones, you shall tell them
they are a monument — or memorial —
to the great things that God has done. And, boy, right here in the Grand Canyon
we have a monument or memorial to the great things that God has done
in creation and the flood. Del: They're a memorial to the judgment of God,
are they not? Steve: Ultimately. And… and it's a…
a beautiful world that was judged —
and then look at the product for us to study today and the testimony
about the character of God here in the rocks in…
of all places, Del: Yeah. Steve: the Grand Canyon. Del: And just like God, he will take
the great destruction that is evident here and turn it
into something beautiful. Steve: Yes. Del: That's the grace of God. Well, unfortunately,
it's getting late. I'd like to stay
here a long time. I guess we better go. Steve: Well, Del, I'd love to show you
many more rock formations here in Grand Canyon. Del: I would love to see them. Steve: And there are
many places with nautiloids. There is the Coconino Sandstone,
there is the Kaibab…
