it sounds like they don't know the difference between 1 billion years and 100 million years and since there is a clear lack of explanation for that, this may never actually get solved.
@@campsitez2355 in the ~100 million year period, not only was very little new rock laid down, rock that was deposited over the previous ~1.1 billion years were ground down. I don't see the issue? It's like cleaning a house. 1 day of deep cleaning getting rid of many days of built-up dust, leaving only very old dust in long-forgotten spaces behind.
@@bluerendar2194 wow that's one creative "absence of evidence is automatically evidence for whatever I want it to be"... tell me, are you a practicing psychopath or are you just naturally like that?
@@michaeltaylors2456 Yes, the Grand Canyon was made by water erosion.. However we're not talking about the Grand Canyon here, but rather what the erosion of the canyon revealed the story that told us about the billion+ years of missing rock strata. I guess if you are in that need of a pick me up, I hope the rest of your month is great.
I think the origins of the great uncomformity can be traced back to the first upwelling of the chocolate mantle plume which burnt & twisted & contorted & basically evaporated that missing time frame until nick moved the plume to nevada where it melted back into the crust & formed mount chocolate. 😅🤣
Can't have glaciers everywhere there's unconformity. It's not the answer. The unconformity is so vast, and at various elevations. But it that answer means you can sign off on it in your head- that's what all athiests are doing. Not like it's very telling that its huge sedimentary rock directly above it, across the globe. Jake
I didn't realize this was a mystery? I remember in my Geo 1010 class (nearly 20 years ago?!) my professor talking about the Snowball Earth Erasing/Skipping so much Rock history just before Animals were beginning to evolve.
I don't think its so much of a mystery anymore rather that the exact conditions aren't agreed upon fully within the community. It is important to note that it wasn't just snowball glaciation occurring you also had tectonic forces which contributed to the widespread erosion with the formation and break up of two supercontinents having likely contributed to the situation including seeding the Cryogenian glaciations in the first place the question is how much is attributed to both.
Well the one thing I've realized is we only get bits of real information because they are so busy trying to make things up. So much brainwashing, such little time.
if the earth is "missing so much rock history" the working assumption is that the method of "estimating rock history" is clearly flawed and layered so much in assumptions that the truth may never actually get revealed.
@@campsitez2355 Not really. It's a "mystery" because mysteries generate clicks. If the Great Cooling (snowball earth) involved a mile of almost stationary ice, not much sedimentary action would happen. Contrarily, moving ice (in the quantities mentioned here) is INSANELY abrasive! It will scour the underlying rock pretty thoroughly, when the glaciers break back up. There are no "clearly flawed" aspects of our understanding of geology.
Truth is.... I took the 1.2 billion years of rock for my own keeping. I sneaked around the Earth taking rocks and dirt wherever I went.... Sold it to some Aliens for a pretty good price. I got several thousand pounds of Reeses Cups, a few cases of Vanilla Coke, and a Special Edition Magazine the Aliens made on their home world of Voltan called: "How We Killed and Ate Earth's Dinosaurs". Since then, I got bored with the Magazine and sold it on "Space Ebay" to some Xenomorphs
Another Great Unconformity outcrop occurs in southeast Missouri due to the Ozark Dome uplift. If you look just west of Fredericktown, Missouri, in Google Maps, the small rounded hills are exposed fossil islands from the end of the erosion period, when shallow seas reformed. The view driving west from Fredericktown is a bit unique since there aren't too many places in the world where you can view not just a fossil, but an entire fossil landscape from over half a billion years ago.
Yea', Missouri is very interesting itself', from the ice factories in the hills of Kansas City to the Ozarks where my ex's Grandfather', the last of the Mob had to hide out', and when we went to see him I met Roy Sessions', guitarist for George Jones', crazy world'''''''LoL.
Not billions of years. The Great Unconformity shows evidence of erosion. On top of this is sandstone with Cambrian fossils of sophisticated creatures. This happened from a global flood. The Great Unconformity is global! The rocks verify RAPID sedimentation happened, and fossils take rapid burial to preserve. Billions of years is false.
the bigger the lie, the better it works. everyone knows that. Pretty sure that if there were 1 billion years of time on that piece of the earth there is a significant chance the plate tectonics would have generated a volcano there by now and destroyed any of the evidence you wish you had in the first place. "but hey let's not include that as a possibility" because why?
Living in Western Australia you realize how friggen flat the place is and how much topsoil is missing, it's crazy here. There is supposed to have been a mega-tsunami hit the west coast after a massive meteorite impacted off the coast of South Africa, a wall of water 4 to 500 feet high and this is in recent times just before the pyramids were built.
@@Muskoxing That's why science is cool. People might think because scientists always disagree that science isn't trustworthy, but science is built upon the fact that bitching at your lab partner that the sodium hypochlorate caused the reaction and not the arsenic pentoxide is required for it to work.
At the start I was thinking "wasn't Snowball Earth near the end of that period?" Cool to see agreement on a potential cause. Though I'd love to see scientists underpin it better than just hunches.
Where do you think research starts when dealing with something that happened on the earth hundreds of millions of years?? Are the researchers supposed to wait indefinitely before out any proposals for how to explain what we clearly see in the geologic record. And in this case the Great Unconformity is very real geologic phenomena indeed!!
Is it possible a previously unidentified nearly-worldwide geological catastrophe needs to be considered? It seems to me that geology relies on some assumptions around ‘slow and gradual’ that discount catastrophic events.
Your point about non-uniformitarianism is sort of true, but these things aren't entirely unconsidered by geologists. What kind of catastrophe could remove such massive amounts of rock?
@@PatMcCarthy420 When did I mention the Younger Dryas? I just said modern geology doesn't think like they did 60 years ago. Still even 60 years ago they left room for major catastrophes, but also were committed to Lyell's Uniformitarianism maybe a bit too much.
I can appreciate how fast and violent geologic time can pass. We have been witnessing mountains falling, the leveling of cities and towns by floods. tornadoes, fires, rock and landslides.👩🌾☀️ And earthquakes and wars.
Gracias por compartir esa hipótesis, muy interesante, un saludo desde Barranquilla Colombia Sur América. Aquí tenemos 3 volcanes q están muy inestables : Volcán del Ruiz, Cerro Bravo, en el centro del país, de tipo explosivo y Puerto Escondido en Córdoba en la costa caribe, este último muy preocupante porque hay movimiento de tierra hacia el mar.
It's a fundamental point you've made that the Great Unconformity is not world wide. I wondered this after watching the PBS episode on it. Thanks for clearing it up. The snowball earth hypothesis as a cause for it seems to be less sure, now. If snowball earth caused the great unconformity, then there would be similar occurrences world wide to be viewed. The other hypothesis is that the erosion caused 'snowball earth'. And 'Cryogenian' is definitely appropriate!
Thank you for this really quick overview on that topic. I was trying to watch another video which was supposed to go 30 minutes and didn't get to the point, just drama talking and music. Appreciate when creators keep it short.
The Great Unconformity is also clearly visible at Buffalo Bill Reservoir on the Shoshone River in Cody Wyoming. I suggest you take look, it is fascinating.
It seems very clear to me. There has been a period where the Vishnu Schist has had the time to become vertical. Before subcomming to layers of new organic debris forming on top of it. It would explain the time gap and the visual difference between the two rock formations.
No, it's quite obvious how this extends throught the globe. Not going to be ice rivers/ glaciers that achieved it globally. They are kidding themselves, but people are buying it. Jake
Seen the Ouray, CO location at Box Canyon Falls State Park. So cool to see that. Was a Park Ranger at Black Canyon of the Gunnison NP so am very familiar with the Precambrian layers.
An interesting unconformity exists in the Ouray-Silverton area (Silverton Caldera) thousands of feet of San Juan Breccia are on top of the Telluride Conglomerate. In the Motherlode of California, basalts can be seen covering rivers where huge paleo placer deposits of gold have been mined.
Glaciers were my first thought. I've been living in Seattle for the past dozen years, and glaciers from the last ice age maximum carved some really unique features in the landscape, like deep north-south parallel gouges like some giant just raked their fingers through the earth.
Great video and narration. very well done. fascinating topic...intriguing that we can still learn so much from not direct methods...I also always appreciate a narration that admits as scientists it is much less worthwhile to say we KNOW this happened, instead of we THINK this MAY have happened. Cheers thanks a lot.
The rocks exposed in the Tonapah range, outside of Death Valley, show continuous deposition across the Great Unconformity, which is fairly unusual. This unconformity is widespread, but not planet-wide. I got hooked on geology when my introductory geology instructor showed us a map of the ages of the oceanic crust and asked “why is there no oceanic crust older than the Jurassic?” He gave us the evidence and let us come to our own “discoveries” about plate tectonics, the then just-accepted theory of geology that changed everything and explains the many mysteries we hadn’t previously understood. What was meant to be a summer course to meet my physical science requirement, turned into a lifelong passion and career. It was a grueling 3-hour class four evenings a week and I loved every minute of it. I realize not everyone wants to become a geologist, but I suggest everyone take such an introductory geology course, at least, you’ll never see the earth in the same way and will enjoy what you do see a hundred times more, even from a plane, looking at satellite images or even road maps. Geology is a wonderful exciting and satisfying career and it consistently reports the highest job satisfaction compared to every other profession. It has the two things most workers most long for: autonomy and variety.
Nice video as always! I think this is the first time that I have heard of the term "Cryogenian" and I think it is appropriate word to describe the "ice age." A topic that I would like to suggest for a future video is Nisgah's lava bed in Canada and the volcanoes in that area. Thank you for educating us on Geology!
Although the first unconformity Hutton found was on Arran it wasn't very clear and he only got it half right. The term is generally used for the very clear unconformity at Siccar Point (on the east coast of Scotland about 20 miles ESE of Edinburgh), where gently dipping Devonian red sandstones overlie almost-vertical Silurian mudstone and greywackes forming the north edge of the Southern Uplands.
The follow up video needed for this is on plate tectonics as I am curious as to why that part of Michigan and California produced geologic products during The Great Unconformity time. Were they in the tropical zone at this time? Were these in sheltered areas? Is there a list of the current areas that made it through this time unscathed?
Its a bit tricky to say which were at play where but many of the locations where rocks were preserved were those sites where the glaciers dumped their loads onto what were ten continental shelves and or interior basins. The Great lakes region which is probably where that rock from Michigan came from was notably a major failed rift zone with the presence of vast rift lakes that represent failed ocean basins that would subsequently in the modern ice age be largely re-excavated to form the modern great lakes. Actually thinking about the timeline for the rifting that pretty much occurred during the timeframe erased by the great nonconformity, thus in all likelihood the reason these areas preserved rocks is that they were low lying areas that didn't get subducted. The Geology of California and the western US in general is extremely complicated and not well resolved as recent work shows that existing models are incompatible with observations. Nick Zentner's recent Baja BC controversy A to Z livestream series provide a lot of food for thought on this with the most comprehensive big picture perspective being Robert Hildebrand's work which seems to be painting a far more complex picture with Laurentia having piled up lots of terrane fragments somewhat like bugs on a windshield where the "bugs" are bits of past collisions which stayed with North America after the bulk craton/continent detached and that is before the Jurassic to Paleogene story of North America colliding with a major mature volcanic arc microcontinental complex or the Cenozoic extensional rifting/unzipping of the continent. When working on a term paper back in grad school related to climate science I remember reading a paper describing the geology of the death valley region which included rocks of this age notably in the form of glacial dropstones from the Cryogenian mixed with volcanic products This at the very least suggests that the region was likely costal at the time though unfortunately in light of the bigger geological picture its hard to say where the rocks in question actually originally came from. The main commonality though for other sites I read about when writing that term paper was they either seemed to be costal dropzones and or frigid dry valleys which didn't receive enough precipitation to become ice covered so its really just the same old depositional environments of any other time on Earth' s history. Glaciers like other forms of erosion preferentially carve away the highlands and soft rocks. Its also important to note that the timeline of the great unconformity includes the assembly and break up of two supercontinents so its very unlikely that all the erosion happened at once in fact there is pretty good evidence that in some places it didn't occur at once . Towering mountain ranges rose and fell during this interval which some work has made a fairly strong case were likely responsible for much of perhaps most of the great Unconformity as Columbia gave rise to Rodinia and Rodinia violently broke apart, likely triggering the Cryogenian glaciations through associated flood basalt eruptions and a new interior seaway opening up pelagic(open ocean) habitats for aerobic life for the first time in Earth's history which had previously been confined to continental shelves bays estuaries and freshwater environments, before rejoining on the other side of the world as Pannotia/Greater Gondwana. As for interesting rocks related to the great unconformity timeframe there is a bit of obducted(opposite of subduction i.e. oceanic on top of continental crust) seafloor which got docked to North America when the continent collided with the mature volcanic arc complex known as Avalonia. Obduction happens when a closing ocean basin brings a formerly oceanic oceanic subduction zone towards the passive costal margin of a continent. slab pull brings the continental shelf down with the closing oceanic crust before the buoyancy of the continental crust breaks it off from the slab leaving the continental margin beneath the section of former ocean floor turned volcanic arc saving that section of ocean crust from getting subducted back into the mantle. This provides a valuable window into a Neoproterozoic abyssal plain environment with the Mistaken point Ediacaran biota a series of soft bodied fossils which were entombed and preserved by the volcanic ash from the volcanic arc complex. The sequence preserves part of the ancient Mohorovicic discontinuity as well. The lack of major deposition during the Cryogenian could perhaps be taken as evidence that the then open ocean arc environment was probably beneath the ice but I don't know how robust that is.
Look up Midcontinent Rift System. It was tropical with raging volcanos. There are areas in Michigan where exposed rock is 3.5 billion years old. So yes - protected from calamities all those years.
A video about Scotland's geology would be greatly appreciated, to see it described nicely yourself, believe it's the birthplace of the field and should have a mention ae
The Magratheans had a major public holiday the weekend before this was supposed to be installed, to celebrate the very rare double-eclipse of their moon and both suns, Soulanis and Rahm. Then, when they came back to work, the shifts were re-organised, some paperwork went astray and that entire slab of geology was never installed, just left lying about the building yard. All that rock was taking up too much space, so the rock was installed in another client’s custom planet, which had their geologists scratching their heads over the _extra_ 1.2 billion years in their geological record.
He also makes up a bunch of shallow minded guesses. Glaciers had nothing to do with it. Glaciers always leave rubble. Debris. This is CLEAN, AND GLOBAL. Jake
Immanuel Velikovsy studied ancient writings which revealed that "the Earth turned over" in the past whereby mountains were displaced due to most likely a magnetic pole shift, causing this great unconformity, in my humble opinion.
This does no trouble me, any more than the absence of dark matter for sale in the stores. “-They are mysteries. And I am both terrified and reassured that there are things in the universe beyond our explaining.” - G’Kar, on the phenomena associated with Sigma 957
Well''''' I finally had to subscribe', because I keep on ending up watching your videos', mainly because of your Titles, something is always interesting'.
I have a question about the hypothesis outlined. If ice sheets eroded most geologic features across large portions of the earth, why don’t we see deposits from the American southwest in the ocean? Like if ice sheets were effectively sanding the earth, and depositing the sediment in the ocean, shouldn’t we be able to core a coastline and see minerals from all across the continent? Particularly in places where there aren’t a ton of rivers that connect inland to ocean. This is one defense I’ve heard people use to show how the Grand Canyon wasn’t carved by a single, rapid event.
You should use some sort of suspenseful mysterious background music as it would make the video even more intriguing and adds to the mysterious feel of the video. Great video regardless! 💫
Yeah, like music they use at magic shows, where slight of hand is used- fooling people into believing glaciers could possibly have achieved all unconformities. People will believe anything now days. No chance did glaciers achieve it globally. There's a very good explanation. But let's all pretend that is not what we see. (Tectonic flood, look it up). Jake
I've never heard of that theory of the Great Unconformity. I think most textbooks steer clear of it because of the lack of information to teach students.
That anomaly has been found around the World. The Snowball Earth theory was proposed in 1998. Myron Cook has a YT video about it. He's an experienced oil & gas geologist that has several YT videos that explains geologic formation creation, their erosion and deposition of the sediments.
Well I was watching a channel on engineering and he said that people can't control river's because of the build of moving silt and other things in the rivers and it can build up in dam's and cause issues later.
That's true, Lake Powell is heavily silted up, but it has saved Lake Mead to a large degree, but not wholly so. Eventually, decades, Powell will not be able to hold half as much water as now and will have to have something done.
@@MountainFisher I was thinking about the same thing while I was watching that and I'm just a lay person but my dad sparked a lot of things inside my head just watching him was wow, and has kept my mind sharp until I can put everything in my head to real life.
Uranium-lead dating can accurately date zircon crystals in crystalline (igneous/metamorphic) rocks to within a few million years. Dating sediments is harder - you can go by the date of the youngest zircon in the sediments, but it's usually more accurate to date volcanic ash or lava layers in the sediments.
@@Muskoxing I distrust any form of radiometric dating. Too many assumptions... 1. Decay rate is a constant, 2. The starting number of parent and daughter atoms. It's a known fact that you can have a rock formed in a labratory, or better yet, rocks that we know the exact date they were formed (IE: Mt. Saint Helens) still date millionsto billions of years old
If we have rock dated back to the billions of years BEFORE the time of the unconformity that it is simple logic to assume the Great Unconformity is real. This video provides the best explanation I have heard to date.
Found this in my feed and thought I'd take a look. I noticed something at the 3.07 mark, looking over a rocky outcrop offshore, a white tic tac shape shoots across the sky from left to right. The object doesn't look like a bird or a plane. Just thought I'd point this out. Interesting video.
Myron Cook has a series of YT videos about Geology that are easy to understand (could be named Geology for Dummies). He has a video about Snowball Earth that discussed the Great Unconformity, how that occurred and what broght about the extreme change in temperatures. All of his videos are well worth viewing several times to get a good grasp of the terms and geologic processes.
The material is not actually missing, as in dissappeared, it has simply been transported to elsewhere by geologic processes. Probably by ice, but partially by atmospheric processes.
The great unconformity is truly a captivating geological mystery. I am not a geologist, but to explain the sediments deposited during the Snowball or Slushball Earth events, I believe that the Snowball Earth events had interglacial periods too, like the Cenozoic Ice age right now.
...or an ancient alien civilization strip mined earth on a large scale at some point. There is some evidence that earth was slightly more massive at one point.
Error bars are taken into consideration, but yea all the dating techniques have huuuge error bars, meaning on a 1 billion year scale they could be off by 250m years or more even. Other than that, the techniques are pretty solid. Solid as in, people tried to debunk it and failed. That's not to say it's infallible. This still yields a high guarantee that something like 800-1200 million years of soil deposition didn't happen, or this many years of soil was crushed to dust by glaciers before new soil could be deposited.
That wouldn't explain how the unconformity is of different sizes in different regions - if you take the two layers of rock from the biggest of this unconformity, then look at them in other parts of it you see more layers of rock in between. Even if we were off with the dating (we're not, at least not in a relevant way - there's error bars but the ordering and separation is solid) that wouldn't explain the intermediate rock layers in *some* places but not all. But an erosive hypothesis does explain that - in some regions they got scraped off, and in other regions they didn't (possibly due to different levels of glacial activity, or varying uplift heights, or any number of other candidate explanations). Now, a non-erosive hypothesis can also explain it, but that hypothesis is a failure-to-deposit one, where the regions with larger time gaps just didn't form rock for a while. I'm not qualified to judge between the erosive and non-depositive hypotheses (note: there are definitely unconformities that are caused by each one, it's just this specific one that is in question) but the maker of the video likes the erosive one better and I have no reason to gainsay him on that.
@@Yezpahr Your first point about uncertainties in U-Pb dating just isn't true. Many billions-year-old rocks have been confidently dated to within a few million years.
By my calculations, one square mile of ice, one kilometer thick would weigh something on the order of 2.7 billion tons. Surely, thousands of square miles of ice would be more capable of massive erosion more so than any flood of epic proportions which, would certainly be of less duration than the slow incessant movement of glacial ice.
first, am I correct in inferring that most rocks created after the cryogenic are composed of the great unconformitiy's missing material that has been recycled by subduction followed by intrusion and/or volcanism ? and second, are there any places where the eroded material still exists as sediment ?
In Sweden we have at least two peneplanes. One on which the sedimentary rocks are deposited. If the boundry is flat the cause is likely water erosion since water will erode until most of the rock is about 1m or 3feeet below the water. This will create a flat plane. I am not sure, though, when the planet was almost entirely covered in water. It was prior to continental drift. Maybe big icesheets could have also made a flat plane, but I doubt it. The bedrock peneplane is visible in my hometown Vänersborg and Trollhättan. The second peneplande I think of is up in the Scandian mountainrange. The Caledonian mountainrange that is also represented by eastern Greenland, the Appalacians and northern Scotland: The Scandinavian portion was eroded to near sea level until it got lifted up again. The topography later got sculpted mainly by glaciers, resulting in the very scenic landscape we see today, especially in Norway. In Dovrefjell, Norway the old peneplane is visible as flat mountaintops.
Hello, greetings from Tlalnepantla, Mex, MX. If a large glacier once covered the area, then there was somewhere melting, else the ice would be stuck. The question is: Due to the glasier how much no deposition and how much erosion?
One possibility is the Snowball Earth, when widespread ice sheets covered the land during the Cryogenian period. The other is the action of plate tectonics during the breakup of the supercontinent Rodinia. Could you explain these two events and how you distinguished between them?
Try Google Earth and Google Street views. Then see if anyone has posted videos of the morning sun rising up from the east to gradually reveal the canyon.
You also have to consider the configuration of land masses during the unconformity. Which supercontinent existed then, and where was it located with respect to the equator?
The supercontinents during this era were Columbia (1.8-1.5 Ga) and Rodinia (1.1-0.75 Ma). Though those might be more accurately thought of as one single long-lived supercontinent. Plate tectonics didn't quite work the same then as it does now.
The reason this unconformity even exists is because the way geological material is dated might actually be wrong. The Earth might be younger or older than we thought and the way these things form may be so incredibly alien in process compared to what we've been told. The Grand Canyons well as other canyons all over the globe were carved by fire and lightning. The water filled in after. 😉 Just something to think about. 🙂
@@Muskoxing Not sure if I should answer. You're coming across like one of those trolls that end sup wasting time in comments ready to get into arguments with random people.
@Brian Beard Is that all you've got? Side stepping the discussion of evidence for what? Mockery? I'm not a flat earther. So what caused the unconformities? You have no idea do you. Jake
I have just spent good 20 minutes trying to explain to our 9 year old daughter what you needed less then 5 minutes for :) Her main question was; “And how do we know that rock is 1.7 billion years old?”. I guess I will need to brush off my nuclear physics studies on the subject of dating and try to explain it to her 😁
No, it's like earth copped a tectonic global flood, just as we have been told in Genesis. Nothing else can explain this unconformity, throught the globe. And the amount of creatures found in the Rock. Animals don't fosilise ordinarily. Jake
I don't know the specific reason, but I'm sure it's something to do with the following: The great flood; advanced civilizations with technology we can only dream of; aliens; A nuclear war 1.2 billion years ago; God got bored and skipped some steps when creating the world 4000 years ago.
candicevee They are Scientific Theories which are different to a casual theory or idea. We certainly don't have it all figured out and we never will as that's the nature of learning anything. Everything we discover usually leads to more questions but that's the fun of it.
So, do you also think “Cryogenian” is an appropriate name for one of Earth’s coldest geologic periods?
It fits, 100%.
It fits!
Yes!
Absolutely yes .
It’s suitable. There is more to learn. It’s a good thing rocks can talk.😊
Of all geological mysteries, this topic, The Great Unconformity, is the most interesting ever since I’ve heard of it on this channel in the past.
Semi frightening, semi awesome.
it sounds like they don't know the difference between 1 billion years and 100 million years and since there is a clear lack of explanation for that, this may never actually get solved.
@@campsitez2355 in the ~100 million year period, not only was very little new rock laid down, rock that was deposited over the previous ~1.1 billion years were ground down. I don't see the issue?
It's like cleaning a house. 1 day of deep cleaning getting rid of many days of built-up dust, leaving only very old dust in long-forgotten spaces behind.
@@bluerendar2194 wow that's one creative "absence of evidence is automatically evidence for whatever I want it to be"... tell me, are you a practicing psychopath or are you just naturally like that?
Calling it an unconformity is saying reality does not conform to the theory. Wrong. The theory must conform to reality or it is a false theory.
"1.2 Billion Years of Rock is Missing"
Well don't look at me! I didn't do it!
I barely knew the guy...🍊
sorry guys it was under my couch pillow
@@hello-rq8kf 🤣
"Mr. Henning, where were you between 1700 and 520 million years ago and is there someone who can vouch for that?" 😂
@@nkronert I was at home in bed the whole time! My wife can vouch for me.
One of those mysteries that makes being a living being so neat.
I’d rather be a rock 🪨
Grand Canyon was caused by water erosion 😂
@@michaeltaylors2456 Yes, the Grand Canyon was made by water erosion..
However we're not talking about the Grand Canyon here, but rather what the erosion of the canyon revealed the story that told us about the billion+ years of missing rock strata.
I guess if you are in that need of a pick me up, I hope the rest of your month is great.
I'm going to guess extreme and prolonged glaciation that ground the rock away in that area.
I GOT SOMETHING RIGHT
I think the origins of the great uncomformity can be traced back to the first upwelling of the chocolate mantle plume which burnt & twisted & contorted & basically evaporated that missing time frame until nick moved the plume to nevada where it melted back into the crust & formed mount chocolate. 😅🤣
lol
Can't have glaciers everywhere there's unconformity. It's not the answer. The unconformity is so vast, and at various elevations. But it that answer means you can sign off on it in your head- that's what all athiests are doing. Not like it's very telling that its huge sedimentary rock directly above it, across the globe.
Jake
@@UserRandJ didn't have to be everywhere just more common
I didn't realize this was a mystery? I remember in my Geo 1010 class (nearly 20 years ago?!) my professor talking about the Snowball Earth Erasing/Skipping so much Rock history just before Animals were beginning to evolve.
I don't think its so much of a mystery anymore rather that the exact conditions aren't agreed upon fully within the community. It is important to note that it wasn't just snowball glaciation occurring you also had tectonic forces which contributed to the widespread erosion with the formation and break up of two supercontinents having likely contributed to the situation including seeding the Cryogenian glaciations in the first place the question is how much is attributed to both.
Well the one thing I've realized is we only get bits of real information because they are so busy trying to make things up. So much brainwashing, such little time.
if the earth is "missing so much rock history" the working assumption is that the method of "estimating rock history" is clearly flawed and layered so much in assumptions that the truth may never actually get revealed.
@@campsitez2355 Not really. It's a "mystery" because mysteries generate clicks. If the Great Cooling (snowball earth) involved a mile of almost stationary ice, not much sedimentary action would happen. Contrarily, moving ice (in the quantities mentioned here) is INSANELY abrasive! It will scour the underlying rock pretty thoroughly, when the glaciers break back up. There are no "clearly flawed" aspects of our understanding of geology.
@@campsitez2355I mean how do you think they know it's missing to begin with exactly?
Truth is....
I took the 1.2 billion years of rock for my own keeping.
I sneaked around the Earth taking rocks and dirt wherever I went....
Sold it to some Aliens for a pretty good price.
I got several thousand pounds of Reeses Cups, a few cases of Vanilla Coke, and a Special Edition Magazine the Aliens made on their home world of Voltan called: "How We Killed and Ate Earth's Dinosaurs".
Since then, I got bored with the Magazine and sold it on "Space Ebay" to some Xenomorphs
Another Great Unconformity outcrop occurs in southeast Missouri due to the Ozark Dome uplift. If you look just west of Fredericktown, Missouri, in Google Maps, the small rounded hills are exposed fossil islands from the end of the erosion period, when shallow seas reformed. The view driving west from Fredericktown is a bit unique since there aren't too many places in the world where you can view not just a fossil, but an entire fossil landscape from over half a billion years ago.
Yea', Missouri is very interesting itself', from the ice factories in the hills of Kansas City to the Ozarks where my ex's Grandfather', the last of the Mob had to hide out', and when we went to see him I met Roy Sessions', guitarist for George Jones', crazy world'''''''LoL.
@@manomyth11 Jesse James's hideout in Elephant Rocks!
Not billions of years. The Great Unconformity shows evidence of erosion. On top of this is sandstone with Cambrian fossils of sophisticated creatures. This happened from a global flood. The Great Unconformity is global! The rocks verify RAPID sedimentation happened, and fossils take rapid burial to preserve. Billions of years is false.
Another one at the base of Frenchman mtn. East of Las vegas.
It's hard to wrap my head around years in the billions. You explained this very well. Thank you.
the bigger the lie, the better it works. everyone knows that. Pretty sure that if there were 1 billion years of time on that piece of the earth there is a significant chance the plate tectonics would have generated a volcano there by now and destroyed any of the evidence you wish you had in the first place. "but hey let's not include that as a possibility" because why?
Ah its a thousand, thousand, thousands!
Billion times bigger than 1
1000 times bigger than a million
It's hard for everybody
@@danquaylesitsspeltpotatoe8307 The numbers aren't difficult
@@mrloop1530 You said they hard for you! For a lot of people they are not!
Living in Western Australia you realize how friggen flat the place is and how much topsoil is missing, it's crazy here.
There is supposed to have been a mega-tsunami hit the west coast after a massive meteorite impacted off the coast of South Africa, a wall of water 4 to 500 feet high and this is in recent times just before the pyramids were built.
I am open to all explanations but I believe your conclusion is correct on this one.
I find it incredible that I just left the Grand Canyon 5 days ago for a short field camp!
Would you do a video on how plate tectonics might have got started, or how and when the Earth’s Core formed, and what effects it had?
There's no accepted answer for when and how plate tectonics started. Lots of geologists strongly disagree with each other!
@@Muskoxing That's why science is cool. People might think because scientists always disagree that science isn't trustworthy, but science is built upon the fact that bitching at your lab partner that the sodium hypochlorate caused the reaction and not the arsenic pentoxide is required for it to work.
Plate tectonics is most likely wrong. Earth was smaller.
@@ObsidianRadio Sure, buddy.
@@ObsidianRadio Yep, the place was so cold it shrank
At the start I was thinking "wasn't Snowball Earth near the end of that period?" Cool to see agreement on a potential cause. Though I'd love to see scientists underpin it better than just hunches.
Where do you think research starts when dealing with something that happened on the earth hundreds of millions of years?? Are the researchers supposed to wait indefinitely before out any proposals for how to explain what we clearly see in the geologic record. And in this case the Great Unconformity is very real geologic phenomena indeed!!
Is it possible a previously unidentified nearly-worldwide geological catastrophe needs to be considered? It seems to me that geology relies on some assumptions around ‘slow and gradual’ that discount catastrophic events.
That applied about 60 years ago, but not anymore. Modern geology takes into account such things as catastrophes, local, regional and global.
Your point about non-uniformitarianism is sort of true, but these things aren't entirely unconsidered by geologists. What kind of catastrophe could remove such massive amounts of rock?
@@MountainFisher people still think the Younger Dryas events didn't happen. You're giving the scientific community way too much credit lol
@@PatMcCarthy420 When did I mention the Younger Dryas? I just said modern geology doesn't think like they did 60 years ago. Still even 60 years ago they left room for major catastrophes, but also were committed to Lyell's Uniformitarianism maybe a bit too much.
I can appreciate how fast and violent geologic time can pass. We have been witnessing mountains falling, the leveling of cities and towns by floods. tornadoes, fires, rock and landslides.👩🌾☀️
And earthquakes and wars.
Gracias por compartir esa hipótesis, muy interesante, un saludo desde Barranquilla Colombia Sur América.
Aquí tenemos 3 volcanes q están muy inestables : Volcán del Ruiz, Cerro Bravo, en el centro del país, de tipo explosivo y Puerto Escondido en Córdoba en la costa caribe, este último muy preocupante porque hay movimiento de tierra hacia el mar.
Fascinating stuff!!
It's a fundamental point you've made that the Great Unconformity is not world wide. I wondered this after watching the PBS episode on it. Thanks for clearing it up. The snowball earth hypothesis as a cause for it seems to be less sure, now. If snowball earth caused the great unconformity, then there would be similar occurrences world wide to be viewed. The other hypothesis is that the erosion caused 'snowball earth'. And 'Cryogenian' is definitely appropriate!
Is there a way you could do more of a deep dive into this topic? Fascinating!
Thank you for this really quick overview on that topic. I was trying to watch another video which was supposed to go 30 minutes and didn't get to the point, just drama talking and music.
Appreciate when creators keep it short.
The Great Unconformity is also clearly visible at Buffalo Bill Reservoir on the Shoshone River in Cody Wyoming. I suggest you take look, it is fascinating.
It seems very clear to me. There has been a period where the Vishnu Schist has had the time to become vertical. Before subcomming to layers of new organic debris forming on top of it. It would explain the time gap and the visual difference between the two rock formations.
Yeah, it's detailed very well if you research tectonic flood. It's as simple as that.
Jake
One of my favorite mysteries! So much is still debatable. I love it!
No, it's quite obvious how this extends throught the globe. Not going to be ice rivers/ glaciers that achieved it globally. They are kidding themselves, but people are buying it.
Jake
Seen the Ouray, CO location at Box Canyon Falls State Park. So cool to see that. Was a Park Ranger at Black Canyon of the Gunnison NP so am very familiar with the Precambrian layers.
An interesting unconformity exists in the Ouray-Silverton area (Silverton Caldera) thousands of feet of San Juan Breccia are on top of the Telluride Conglomerate.
In the Motherlode of California, basalts can be seen covering rivers where huge paleo placer deposits of gold have been mined.
Glaciers were my first thought. I've been living in Seattle for the past dozen years, and glaciers from the last ice age maximum carved some really unique features in the landscape, like deep north-south parallel gouges like some giant just raked their fingers through the earth.
Great video and narration. very well done. fascinating topic...intriguing that we can still learn so much from not direct methods...I also always appreciate a narration that admits as scientists it is much less worthwhile to say we KNOW this happened, instead of we THINK this MAY have happened. Cheers thanks a lot.
I figured it might have had something to do with the Cryogenian period. Both of them happened roughly during the same-ish time period.
Always learn something from your videos. And this was very interesting.
The rocks exposed in the Tonapah range, outside of Death Valley, show continuous deposition across the Great Unconformity, which is fairly unusual. This unconformity is widespread, but not planet-wide. I got hooked on geology when my introductory geology instructor showed us a map of the ages of the oceanic crust and asked “why is there no oceanic crust older than the Jurassic?” He gave us the evidence and let us come to our own “discoveries” about plate tectonics, the then just-accepted theory of geology that changed everything and explains the many mysteries we hadn’t previously understood. What was meant to be a summer course to meet my physical science requirement, turned into a lifelong passion and career. It was a grueling 3-hour class four evenings a week and I loved every minute of it. I realize not everyone wants to become a geologist, but I suggest everyone take such an introductory geology course, at least, you’ll never see the earth in the same way and will enjoy what you do see a hundred times more, even from a plane, looking at satellite images or even road maps. Geology is a wonderful exciting and satisfying career and it consistently reports the highest job satisfaction compared to every other profession. It has the two things most workers most long for: autonomy and variety.
Nice video as always! I think this is the first time that I have heard of the term "Cryogenian" and I think it is appropriate word to describe the "ice age." A topic that I would like to suggest for a future video is Nisgah's lava bed in Canada and the volcanoes in that area. Thank you for educating us on Geology!
This is one of the most interesting things I have ever heard, thank you so much!
Theres one in Scotland called Huttons Unconformity on the Isle Of Arran.
Although the first unconformity Hutton found was on Arran it wasn't very clear and he only got it half right. The term is generally used for the very clear unconformity at Siccar Point (on the east coast of Scotland about 20 miles ESE of Edinburgh), where gently dipping Devonian red sandstones overlie almost-vertical Silurian mudstone and greywackes forming the north edge of the Southern Uplands.
The follow up video needed for this is on plate tectonics as I am curious as to why that part of Michigan and California produced geologic products during The Great Unconformity time. Were they in the tropical zone at this time? Were these in sheltered areas? Is there a list of the current areas that made it through this time unscathed?
Its a bit tricky to say which were at play where but many of the locations where rocks were preserved were those sites where the glaciers dumped their loads onto what were ten continental shelves and or interior basins.
The Great lakes region which is probably where that rock from Michigan came from was notably a major failed rift zone with the presence of vast rift lakes that represent failed ocean basins that would subsequently in the modern ice age be largely re-excavated to form the modern great lakes. Actually thinking about the timeline for the rifting that pretty much occurred during the timeframe erased by the great nonconformity, thus in all likelihood the reason these areas preserved rocks is that they were low lying areas that didn't get subducted. The Geology of California and the western US in general is extremely complicated and not well resolved as recent work shows that existing models are incompatible with observations. Nick Zentner's recent Baja BC controversy A to Z livestream series provide a lot of food for thought on this with the most comprehensive big picture perspective being Robert Hildebrand's work which seems to be painting a far more complex picture with Laurentia having piled up lots of terrane fragments somewhat like bugs on a windshield where the "bugs" are bits of past collisions which stayed with North America after the bulk craton/continent detached and that is before the Jurassic to Paleogene story of North America colliding with a major mature volcanic arc microcontinental complex or the Cenozoic extensional rifting/unzipping of the continent.
When working on a term paper back in grad school related to climate science I remember reading a paper describing the geology of the death valley region which included rocks of this age notably in the form of glacial dropstones from the Cryogenian mixed with volcanic products This at the very least suggests that the region was likely costal at the time though unfortunately in light of the bigger geological picture its hard to say where the rocks in question actually originally came from.
The main commonality though for other sites I read about when writing that term paper was they either seemed to be costal dropzones and or frigid dry valleys which didn't receive enough precipitation to become ice covered so its really just the same old depositional environments of any other time on Earth' s history. Glaciers like other forms of erosion preferentially carve away the highlands and soft rocks.
Its also important to note that the timeline of the great unconformity includes the assembly and break up of two supercontinents so its very unlikely that all the erosion happened at once in fact there is pretty good evidence that in some places it didn't occur at once . Towering mountain ranges rose and fell during this interval which some work has made a fairly strong case were likely responsible for much of perhaps most of the great Unconformity as Columbia gave rise to Rodinia and Rodinia violently broke apart, likely triggering the Cryogenian glaciations through associated flood basalt eruptions and a new interior seaway opening up pelagic(open ocean) habitats for aerobic life for the first time in Earth's history which had previously been confined to continental shelves bays estuaries and freshwater environments, before rejoining on the other side of the world as Pannotia/Greater Gondwana.
As for interesting rocks related to the great unconformity timeframe there is a bit of obducted(opposite of subduction i.e. oceanic on top of continental crust) seafloor which got docked to North America when the continent collided with the mature volcanic arc complex known as Avalonia. Obduction happens when a closing ocean basin brings a formerly oceanic oceanic subduction zone towards the passive costal margin of a continent. slab pull brings the continental shelf down with the closing oceanic crust before the buoyancy of the continental crust breaks it off from the slab leaving the continental margin beneath the section of former ocean floor turned volcanic arc saving that section of ocean crust from getting subducted back into the mantle. This provides a valuable window into a Neoproterozoic abyssal plain environment with the Mistaken point Ediacaran biota a series of soft bodied fossils which were entombed and preserved by the volcanic ash from the volcanic arc complex. The sequence preserves part of the ancient Mohorovicic discontinuity as well. The lack of major deposition during the Cryogenian could perhaps be taken as evidence that the then open ocean arc environment was probably beneath the ice but I don't know how robust that is.
Look up Midcontinent Rift System. It was tropical with raging volcanos. There are areas in Michigan where exposed rock is 3.5 billion years old. So yes - protected from calamities all those years.
@@W1se0ldg33zerThat rifting started well after the Great Unconformity.
Yeah. 1.2 billion years of rock missing.
They're at Mar-A-Lago.
NOPE, Pedo Joe sold it. He'll take 10% of everything.
bahahaha!
With Hillary's emails too
And the 18 minutes of missing Nixon tapes.
Silly
A video about Scotland's geology would be greatly appreciated, to see it described nicely yourself, believe it's the birthplace of the field and should have a mention ae
On UA-cam BBC Men of Rock 1 of 3 Deep Time presented by geology professor Ian Stewart.
@@viona-6408 Seconded, anything Ian Stewart does is great
Snowball Earth?
Yep, what I thought when you first started the video. I agree, Snowball Earth had something to do with it.
Surely the rock can’t disappear? It’s ground down but is it still traceable?
If it gets ground down into sand/silt/dust later it can get washed to sea or otherwise basically completely removed, so no, it wouldn't be traceable.
He explains what happens to the missing rocklayer in the video, dude, it's only 5 mins long.
Probably alluvium or colluvium or became aggregated in sediment layers.
@@zGJungle Agentlandy no watch to end, see banana in kitchen, he make banana his own. Banana good.
He tells you that sea bed doesn't last more than 200 M years before it slips down a subduction zone.
Awesome topic. Love your channel.
Very interesting. I'm mostly a history nerd but I do enjoy learning about geology and forces that have influenced our planet. Good content. Thanks.
Great video, thanks!
Both of my ears enjoyed this video.
I would like to see a video on the periodic springs in Wyoming.
Awesome discussion, dude! Thanks!
FIRST! (And not missing any layers)
I think I beat you by 4 seconds. But, you can have it for the record books. Cheers.
@@scillyautomatic
The Magratheans had a major public holiday the weekend before this was supposed to be installed, to celebrate the very rare double-eclipse of their moon and both suns, Soulanis and Rahm. Then, when they came back to work, the shifts were re-organised, some paperwork went astray and that entire slab of geology was never installed, just left lying about the building yard.
All that rock was taking up too much space, so the rock was installed in another client’s custom planet, which had their geologists scratching their heads over the _extra_ 1.2 billion years in their geological record.
Today I learned that Kermit the Frog grew up to be a video commentator for UA-cam nature videos.
He also makes up a bunch of shallow minded guesses. Glaciers had nothing to do with it. Glaciers always leave rubble. Debris. This is CLEAN, AND GLOBAL.
Jake
Immanuel Velikovsy studied ancient writings which revealed that "the Earth turned over" in the past whereby mountains were displaced due to most likely a magnetic pole shift, causing this great unconformity, in my humble opinion.
This does no trouble me, any more than the absence of dark matter for sale in the stores.
“-They are mysteries. And I am both terrified and reassured that there are things in the universe beyond our explaining.” - G’Kar, on the phenomena associated with Sigma 957
Well''''' I finally had to subscribe', because I keep on ending up watching your videos', mainly because of your Titles, something is always interesting'.
I'm so happy we live in a lovely warm period of geological time.
I have a question about the hypothesis outlined. If ice sheets eroded most geologic features across large portions of the earth, why don’t we see deposits from the American southwest in the ocean? Like if ice sheets were effectively sanding the earth, and depositing the sediment in the ocean, shouldn’t we be able to core a coastline and see minerals from all across the continent? Particularly in places where there aren’t a ton of rivers that connect inland to ocean.
This is one defense I’ve heard people use to show how the Grand Canyon wasn’t carved by a single, rapid event.
Very intresting. Thx:)
One of the least known topics in geology and seismology. THA K YOU FOR COVERING THIS.
Thanks!
You should use some sort of suspenseful mysterious background music as it would make the video even more intriguing and adds to the mysterious feel of the video. Great video regardless! 💫
Yeah, like music they use at magic shows, where slight of hand is used- fooling people into believing glaciers could possibly have achieved all unconformities. People will believe anything now days.
No chance did glaciers achieve it globally. There's a very good explanation. But let's all pretend that is not what we see. (Tectonic flood, look it up).
Jake
It's amazing what a whole lotta water can do in an extremely short amount of time. 😏
I've never heard of that theory of the Great Unconformity. I think most textbooks steer clear of it because of the lack of information to teach students.
It's a rediculous concept that people are accepting. The unconformity is throughout the globe. Glaciers would not achieve all of it.
J
That anomaly has been found around the World. The Snowball Earth theory was proposed in 1998. Myron Cook has a YT video about it. He's an experienced oil & gas geologist that has several YT videos that explains geologic formation creation, their erosion and deposition of the sediments.
Well I was watching a channel on engineering and he said that people can't control river's because of the build of moving silt and other things in the rivers and it can build up in dam's and cause issues later.
That's true, Lake Powell is heavily silted up, but it has saved Lake Mead to a large degree, but not wholly so. Eventually, decades, Powell will not be able to hold half as much water as now and will have to have something done.
@@MountainFisher I was thinking about the same thing while I was watching that and I'm just a lay person but my dad sparked a lot of things inside my head just watching him was wow, and has kept my mind sharp until I can put everything in my head to real life.
Wow…. That ice sheet was one Planet-sized sandpaper indeed 😮😅, and I suppose that coincided with the Pangaea phase of tectonic movement as well?
thanks you for making this a short video!
How do you date individual samples of rocks or minerals such as those you described in this video?
Uranium-lead dating can accurately date zircon crystals in crystalline (igneous/metamorphic) rocks to within a few million years. Dating sediments is harder - you can go by the date of the youngest zircon in the sediments, but it's usually more accurate to date volcanic ash or lava layers in the sediments.
@@Muskoxing I distrust any form of radiometric dating. Too many assumptions... 1. Decay rate is a constant, 2. The starting number of parent and daughter atoms. It's a known fact that you can have a rock formed in a labratory, or better yet, rocks that we know the exact date they were formed (IE: Mt. Saint Helens) still date millionsto billions of years old
@D R Yeah, but the dates he's looked up come from radiometric dating.
Vishnu meets Tonto. That is some weird fan fiction!
Is it really a mystery if we know what happened to it?
Perhaps the 1.2 billion years just simply never existed. Perhaps this time is incorrectly assumed to have existed.
There is still the unconformity.
If we have rock dated back to the billions of years BEFORE the time of the unconformity that it is simple logic to assume the Great Unconformity is real. This video provides the best explanation I have heard to date.
Maybe Noah's flood explains it eh?
Found this in my feed and thought I'd take a look. I noticed something at the 3.07 mark, looking over a rocky outcrop offshore, a white tic tac shape shoots across the sky from left to right. The object doesn't look like a bird or a plane. Just thought I'd point this out. Interesting video.
True. This great unconformity ( the missing parts) exists in the entire Norther hemisphere. 1.2 billion years of rock strata are missing.
Myron Cook has a series of YT videos about Geology that are easy to understand (could be named Geology for Dummies). He has a video about Snowball Earth that discussed the Great Unconformity, how that occurred and what broght about the extreme change in temperatures. All of his videos are well worth viewing several times to get a good grasp of the terms and geologic processes.
The material is not actually missing, as in dissappeared, it has simply been transported to elsewhere by geologic processes. Probably by ice, but partially by atmospheric processes.
The great unconformity is truly a captivating geological mystery.
I am not a geologist, but to explain the sediments deposited during the Snowball or Slushball Earth events, I believe that the Snowball Earth events had interglacial periods too, like the Cenozoic Ice age right now.
...or an ancient alien civilization strip mined earth on a large scale at some point. There is some evidence that earth was slightly more massive at one point.
Check out the little cave drawing on the copper nugget @2:17
Great video any thanks
I grew up in the Upper Peninsula (da UP), and my Dad worked at thise mines. Very incredible!
Could it be that dating techiqes are off?
Error bars are taken into consideration, but yea all the dating techniques have huuuge error bars, meaning on a 1 billion year scale they could be off by 250m years or more even. Other than that, the techniques are pretty solid. Solid as in, people tried to debunk it and failed. That's not to say it's infallible.
This still yields a high guarantee that something like 800-1200 million years of soil deposition didn't happen, or this many years of soil was crushed to dust by glaciers before new soil could be deposited.
Everyone knows that the dating scene in the 21st Century is pretty dicey now.
That wouldn't explain how the unconformity is of different sizes in different regions - if you take the two layers of rock from the biggest of this unconformity, then look at them in other parts of it you see more layers of rock in between. Even if we were off with the dating (we're not, at least not in a relevant way - there's error bars but the ordering and separation is solid) that wouldn't explain the intermediate rock layers in *some* places but not all.
But an erosive hypothesis does explain that - in some regions they got scraped off, and in other regions they didn't (possibly due to different levels of glacial activity, or varying uplift heights, or any number of other candidate explanations).
Now, a non-erosive hypothesis can also explain it, but that hypothesis is a failure-to-deposit one, where the regions with larger time gaps just didn't form rock for a while.
I'm not qualified to judge between the erosive and non-depositive hypotheses (note: there are definitely unconformities that are caused by each one, it's just this specific one that is in question) but the maker of the video likes the erosive one better and I have no reason to gainsay him on that.
@@Yezpahr Your first point about uncertainties in U-Pb dating just isn't true. Many billions-year-old rocks have been confidently dated to within a few million years.
I would love to see something on the Scotia plate and the South Sandwich plate. Particularly the similarities to the Caribbean plate
By my calculations, one square mile of ice, one kilometer thick would weigh something on the order of 2.7 billion tons. Surely, thousands of square miles of ice would be more capable of massive erosion more so than any flood of epic proportions which, would certainly be of less duration than the slow incessant movement of glacial ice.
Do a video on the step by step formation of the Himalayas
The answer is obvious: billions of years ago the Borg needed material to build ships and simply took it.
first, am I correct in inferring that most rocks created after the cryogenic are composed of the great unconformitiy's missing material that has been recycled by subduction followed by intrusion and/or volcanism ? and second, are there any places where the eroded material still exists as sediment ?
I think aliens mined the missing rock layers to build a civilization on Mars.
In Sweden we have at least two peneplanes. One on which the sedimentary rocks are deposited. If the boundry is flat the cause is likely water erosion since water will erode until most of the rock is about 1m or 3feeet below the water. This will create a flat plane. I am not sure, though, when the planet was almost entirely covered in water. It was prior to continental drift. Maybe big icesheets could have also made a flat plane, but I doubt it. The bedrock peneplane is visible in my hometown Vänersborg and Trollhättan. The second peneplande I think of is up in the Scandian mountainrange. The Caledonian mountainrange that is also represented by eastern Greenland, the Appalacians and northern Scotland: The Scandinavian portion was eroded to near sea level until it got lifted up again. The topography later got sculpted mainly by glaciers, resulting in the very scenic landscape we see today, especially in Norway. In Dovrefjell, Norway the old peneplane is visible as flat mountaintops.
Hello, greetings from Tlalnepantla, Mex, MX. If a large glacier once covered the area, then there was somewhere melting, else the ice would be stuck.
The question is: Due to the glasier how much no deposition and how much erosion?
Brilliant.
One possibility is the Snowball Earth, when widespread ice sheets covered the land during the Cryogenian period. The other is the action of plate tectonics during the breakup of the supercontinent Rodinia. Could you explain these two events and how you distinguished between them?
I want to do to the grand canyon but sadly can't go there
Try Google Earth and Google Street views. Then see if anyone has posted videos of the morning sun rising up from the east to gradually reveal the canyon.
I love this stuff.
You also have to consider the configuration of land masses during the unconformity. Which supercontinent existed then, and where was it located with respect to the equator?
The supercontinents during this era were Columbia (1.8-1.5 Ga) and Rodinia (1.1-0.75 Ma). Though those might be more accurately thought of as one single long-lived supercontinent. Plate tectonics didn't quite work the same then as it does now.
Plus the amount of oxygen vs CO2
👽 Nice Place
Earthshake! 😮
I’m no geologist but how did I solve this puzzle in 1.62 seconds? Must be having a slow day
I guessed immediately the missing rock was carved out during the Cryogenic period. No other widespread explanation.
Will you discuss expansion theory?
The reason this unconformity even exists is because the way geological material is dated might actually be wrong. The Earth might be younger or older than we thought and the way these things form may be so incredibly alien in process compared to what we've been told.
The Grand Canyons well as other canyons all over the globe were carved by fire and lightning. The water filled in after. 😉
Just something to think about. 🙂
What are you talking about?
@@Muskoxing Not sure if I should answer. You're coming across like one of those trolls that end sup wasting time in comments ready to get into arguments with random people.
@@ObsidianRadio Troll
You're sounding more and more like a YEC.
Most logical answer to the unconformity I have ever heard.
It's an absurd explanation.
J
@@UserRandJ Oh good the flat earthers are here.... LOL
@Brian Beard Is that all you've got? Side stepping the discussion of evidence for what? Mockery? I'm not a flat earther. So what caused the unconformities? You have no idea do you.
Jake
Perfect sense.
Except that there is no subduction and at that time there were no ocean basins. So where did all of the scoured layers of sediment go?
I guess Kermit the frog became a geologist 😂
I have just spent good 20 minutes trying to explain to our 9 year old daughter what you needed less then 5 minutes for :) Her main question was; “And how do we know that rock is 1.7 billion years old?”. I guess I will need to brush off my nuclear physics studies on the subject of dating and try to explain it to her 😁
She's not wrong.
I’m a amateur parapsychologist.
It's not. Much of the sediment between the layers is still wet here in Australia.
And we have the precise same unconformities here.
Jake
It's like Earth wiped it's browser history with ice. Neat :D
No, it's like earth copped a tectonic global flood, just as we have been told in Genesis. Nothing else can explain this unconformity, throught the globe. And the amount of creatures found in the Rock. Animals don't fosilise ordinarily.
Jake
What a great hypothesis!
I don't know the specific reason, but I'm sure it's something to do with the following: The great flood; advanced civilizations with technology we can only dream of; aliens; A nuclear war 1.2 billion years ago; God got bored and skipped some steps when creating the world 4000 years ago.
That's a great and logical hypothesis
I’ve long suspected that the geology theories are just that….theories. I don’t think we’ve got it all figured out yet…..and maybe we never will
candicevee They are Scientific Theories which are different to a casual theory or idea. We certainly don't have it all figured out and we never will as that's the nature of learning anything. Everything we discover usually leads to more questions but that's the fun of it.