Through The Sandglass

Caption competition?

Well, sorry, no, this is just too easy: guess “World’s biggest bunker!” or “World’s biggest sand trap!” (depending on which side of the Atlantic your golfing perspective comes from), and you’d be – predictably – spot on.

When I first saw this image in our local paper, it seemed to be described as an episode in the current Abu Dhabi tournament, and this struck me as being one hell of a golf course. Only closer reading revealed that this was a promotional event in which two players were helicoptered out into the dunes (sorry, bunkers) of the Liwa Desert. As reported in the UK’s Daily Mirror:

Luke Donald will have no fears about playing out of the sand at this week’s Abu Dhabi HSBC Golf Championship after he successfully tackled the "world’s biggest bunker" – a mammoth dune in the Liwa Desert.

In Liwa, Donald was joined by triple and defending Abu Dhabi champion, Martin Kaymer, as the awe-struck pair stood among 250-foot sand dunes at the entrance to Rub Al Khali (Empty Quarter) - the world’s largest uninterrupted sand mass.

Donald used the stint in the desert to try out some new clubs ahead of the tournament, which features some of the world's best players.

Kaymer and Donald headline an Abu Dhabi field that is the strongest ever assembled at a Middle East tournament.

Or, from Today’s Golfer (where the image comes from):

Donald splashes out of world's biggest sand trap

World number one, Luke Donald, will have no fears about playing out of the sand at Abu Dhabi Golf Club for this week’s Abu Dhabi HSBC Golf Championship, after the Englishman successfully tackled the world’s biggest ‘bunker’ – a mammoth dune in Abu Dhabi’s Liwa Desert, the world’s largest uninterrupted sand mass.

In Liwa, Donald was joined by triple and defending Abu Dhabi champion, Martin Kaymer, as the awestruck pair stood amongst 250-foot sand dunes at the entrance to Rub Al Khali (Empty Quarter) - a desert made famous by British explorer Wilfred Thesiger’s 1940’s crossing and immortalised in the timeless book: Arabian Sands.

“Well that was no ordinary sand trap!” said Donald, who became the first player in history to top both the PGA and European PGA money lists last year.

“When you spend the vast majority of your time on the course, it’s easy to forget that Abu Dhabi is surrounded by such an enchanting desert landscape. Truly, I was awestruck at the gigantic enormity of it all.”

Interestingly, if you look closely at the crest of the dune behind Kaymer in the photo, you will see that it is hardly pristine – there are tire tracks across it. This is explained by the following image of an interruption to the photoshoot by local traffic:

 
This desert is spectacular, and you can see where the idea for this promotion came from (although, at the time of writing, the experience does not seem to have provided either player with a cutting edge or competitive sand wedge in the actual tournament).

 

[Photos Getty Images, websites linked above, and http://ca.sports.yahoo.com/golf/pga/photo?slug=8addeb5fe5448b221dbd13491442a3b3-getty-137681196]

Sunday sandy satellite scenes

I discovered that DigitalGlobe have recently held their contest for the best satellite image and GeoEye have issued their 2012 calendar images. Both are stunning galleries of our planet’s surface, natural landscapes and manmade features, but my eye was, of course, taken by the diversity of sand’s role in many of them.

The GeoEye image above is of Qatar:

This image of South Qatar shows how the ebb and flow of the tide can create some unusual formations. Here, water and sand conjure up the shape and color of a tree as the tide swirls into the Persian Gulf. Qatar, an Arab Emirate in the Middle East, is one of the region's wealthiest states due to its vast oil and natural gas resources.

And here is their image of the Algerian Sahara:

 

The Eastern Algerian portion of the Sahara is an otherworldly place, a region of great diversity with endless stretches of sand dunes and rocky platforms that can reach more than 2,000 meters. The Tassili n'Ajjer "Plateau of the Rivers" National Park is a vast plateau in southeast Algeria at the borders of Libya, Niger, and Mali, covering 72,000 square kilometers.

Then here is one of the finalists from DigitalGlobe, stunning channels of the  Betsiboka River as it flows into Bombetoka Bay, Madagascar:

 

Bombetoka Bay, Madagascar-May 2, 2011: This is a satellite image of Bombetoka Bay, a bay on the northwestern coast of Madagascar near the city of Mahajanga, where the Betsiboka River flows into the Mozambique Channel. (credit: DigitalGlobe)

And this image from New Zealand was DigitalGlobe’s winner:

 

Rakaia River, New Zealand-March 28, 2011: This is a natural color satellite image of the Rakaia River in the Canterbury Plains in New Zealand's South Island. (credit: DigitalGlobe) <www.digitalglobe.com DigitalGlobe

 

[P.S. Difficult though it is for me to believe, this is my 351st post!]

Tom, Dick, Harry, and George - sand and The Great Escape

 

The plan to dig down to the workshop at the starting point of the tunnel known as Harry, where the wartime fliers began their effort to tunnel beneath the barbed wire, was aborted when engineers failed repeatedly to prevent tons of sand from collapsing their own access tunnel.

“The tunnel known as Harry” was one of the incredible constructions by the prisoners of Stalag Luft III, the escape tunnels, laboriously and ingeniously built, that would be immortalised in the movie, The Great Escape. But this story did not need a movie for immortality – it was extraordinary enough in reality. And now a geoarchaeological project, led by Hugh Hunt, a Cambridge University engineering professor, has shed further light on just how extraordinary it was.

The prisoner of war camp was built, intentionally, on the sandy soils of the forests of today’s western Poland, along the banks of the Bóbr river. Intentionally, because the river valley is filled with sandy sediments deposited from melt waters of the Ice Age glaciers and carried by the ancestral Bóbr. And sand is difficult to tunnel through. Very difficult.

An earlier geoarchaeological expedition to the site of Stalag Luft III was reported in a fascinating article by Peter Doyle and his colleagues that includes a geological assessment of these soils. The following illustration of the sands is taken from their work:

A thin grey organic soil is underlain by glacio-fluvial cross-bedded sands, yellow and reddish-yellow in colour. As the authors point out, this in itself was a problem for the would-be escapers – the excavated sand from the tunnels was immediately visible if deposited against the darker topsoil.

There were numerous tunnelling attempts made at Stalag Luft III, each tunnel given a name, but the events captured in The Great Escape related to Harry. Harry was 330ft long, made from 4,000 bed boards and dug with thousands of pieces of cutlery. The ingenuity and engineering were astonishing – and, as Hunt discovered, impossible to reproduce without unacceptable danger. The movie was based on the book of the same name by Paul Brickhill, whose illustration of the project was reproduced in the article by Peter Doyle and his colleagues:

 
The escape would end in tragedy for all but three of the 76 prisoners who emerged from the tunnel on that March night in 1944. “Following the escape, it is estimated that 5 million Germans were mobilized to recapture them. Of the 76 that escaped, 3 eventually reached Allied territory, but the remainder were recaptured, and 50 of them were executed by the Gestapo.”

One of the remarkable details of Hugh Hunt’s recent project was that one of the team was Frank Stone. Now 89, Frank was waiting his turn to enter the tunnel that night when the escape was discovered. As reported in the Daily Mail, he demonstrated the use of the trolleys made to move men quickly down the tunnels:

Memorials now mark the sites of the entrance and exit to Harry:

 
Hunt’s work was the subject of a recent documentary on British TV, and compellingly described in the following piece from The New York Times:

Latter-Day Dig of ‘Great Escape’ Tunnels Humbles Modern Engineers

By JOHN F. BURNS

CAMBRIDGE, England — For scale, they were no match for the Great Pyramids of Giza or the Panama Canal. The labor took months rather than years and a work force of barely 100 men. As for materials, there were none, beyond what the captured Royal Air Force fliers who built them could scavenge, scrounge or improvise.

But by the measures of ingenuity, courage and persistence, the tunnels built almost 70 years ago in sandy scrubland near the small town of Zagan, 130 miles southeast of Berlin in what was then Hitler’s Germany and is today western Poland, were a legendary feat of engineering, although on a miniature scale.

Chronicled by the 1963 movie “The Great Escape,” the tunnel building is one of World War II’s great stories. In the decades since, the legend of the allied fliers’ mass breakout on the night of March 24, 1944, together with the ingenious planning and the Nazi retribution that followed — 73 of the 76 escapers recaptured, and 50 of them summarily executed on Hitler’s orders — has, in a way, eclipsed reality.

In an effort to establish more clearly how the escape was accomplished — and, in a sense, to reclaim the narrative of the breakout — British-based engineers, battlefield archaeologists and historians traveled into the pine forest outside Zagan last summer to unearth the secrets buried there for a television documentary by Wildfire Television in London that was broadcast in late 2011 in Britain. They were accompanied by modern-day Royal Air Force pilots, as well as veterans of wartime bombing raids, now in their 80s, who helped build the tunnels at the encampment known as Stalag Luft III.

The team’s task was to employ “reverse engineering” by uncovering the tunnels and what remained of the tunnelers’ jury-rigged equipment to replicate the wartime fliers’ ingenuity. Ultimately, the team members were stunned that, even without the menace of the ever-watchful Nazi camp guards, they were unable to match their wartime counterparts fully, particularly in the most crucial skill, digging a tunnel 30 feet below the camp surface without repeated collapses of the sandy soil above.

For years, veterans and others have pored over the camp’s ruins, laying memorial stones amid the outcroppings of broken brick and concrete scattered among the pine trees, all that remains of the 60-acre site built by the Germans to house 10,000 captured fliers. But no group matched the expertise of the 2011 team, which went determined to lay bare what Hugh Hunt, a Cambridge University engineering professor, described as “the final secrets of a remarkable story.”

A maverick Australian affectionately nicknamed Dr. Screwloose by his colleagues, Dr. Hunt went to Poland as a consultant to the current R.A.F. pilots, including some with combat experience over Iraq and Afghanistan. Their task was to use insights gleaned from the digs at the sites of wartime tunnels known as Harry and George to build a new 35-foot tunnel they called Roger, after Squadron Leader Roger Bushell, the principal organizer of the 1944 escape and one of those executed by the Nazis.

“What those men did at Stalag Luft III was an astonishing feat of improvisational engineering,” Dr. Hunt, 50, said in an interview at Cambridge’s Trinity College. “Their resourcefulness was beyond belief. It wasn’t a case of one man’s genius, more the accomplishment of a team, one man’s skills complementing another’s. And they had one precious resource, time. If you have time, somebody will eventually come up with something, and the others will say, ‘Let’s give it a go.’ ”

Like others who joined in the expedition to Zagan, Dr. Hunt has little quarrel with the escape story as told in the film version, which was based on Paul Brickhill’s book of the same name, partly because the tunnelers’ real-life drama required little embellishment. The wartime camp, for one thing, did not have a Virgil Hilts, the irrepressible American flier played by Steve McQueen, and there was no climactic sequence like his flight from German troops on a stolen BMW motorcycle and entanglement in a border fence, one of cinema’s great chase sequences.

The plan to dig down to the workshop at the starting point of the tunnel known as Harry, where the wartime fliers began their effort to tunnel beneath the barbed wire, was aborted when engineers failed repeatedly to prevent tons of sand from collapsing their own access tunnel. But Dr. Hunt and his team struck gold in the excavation of George, a tunnel built under the camp auditorium after the escape and designed to give inmates a place to hide as Nazi control east of Berlin collapsed before advancing Soviet troops.

Their dig yielded a set of rusting trolley wheels, the metal scavenged from remnants of a campsite stove and a coil spring taken from prison gramophones; wood paneling for the tunnel’s roof and sidewalls, fashioned from the prisoners’ bed boards; and a ventilation pump with a bellows and piping made from a prisoner’s kitbag, ice hockey sticks and tins of powdered milk. The pièce de résistance was a rusting radio made from a biscuit box, the wiring stolen from the prisoners’ huts and batteries scrounged from German guards.

The contemporary Royal Air Force fliers built Roger, the replica tunnel, but in a trench just beneath the surface; anything deeper was deemed too dangerous. With Dr. Hunt, they fashioned a trolley system, given its first run in the new tunnel by Frank Stone, 89, a camp veteran involved in preparing the 1944 escape plan. The 2011 team also built a replica of the original tunnelers’ ventilation system, with facsimiles of wartime milk tins and a World War II kitbag.

Mr. Stone, maker of the biscuit-tin radio found in the excavated remains of tunnel George, was one of those still waiting for his turn to escape when a German guard spotted one flier scrambling from the tunnel exit into the pine trees. He remained a prisoner until the camp was liberated in 1945, with a lifetime to grieve for the men who made it, if only briefly, to freedom. “People say to me, ‘How unlucky you were,’ ” he told the documentary makers. “But I say, no, I was lucky to have taken part in it at all.”

 

[Memorials images Lech Muszynski/European Press Photo Agency and http://www.raf.mod.uk/project104/gallery/stalagluftiiigallery.cfm?viewmedia=3]

Sunday Sand Scene

OK, the Paris-Dakar rally is controversial, but this is simply such a spectacular image.

 

[Peru, photo Reuters/Philippe Desmazes]

Sand critter guest post: the South Texas sand crab

By Zen Faulkes

South Padre Island in Texas has a world-class beach, with lovely fine-grained sand that is wonderful to walk on. The sand grains close up seem to be mostly grains of light or transparent quartz, with just the occasional bit of shell grit. At least, that’s what it looks like to my completely untrained eye.

 
I personally am not so much interested in the sand, however, as some of the creatures living in it. I have been spending the last few years digging around in the beaches there, studying a small local sand crab, Lepidopa benedicti. Because they are so little known, the species doesn’t have a common name; the entire superfamily is generally called “sand crabs” or “mole crabs.” I got started working with sand crabs for my doctoral research because I was interested in how they are able to dig so quickly and efficiently into the sand, and why they couldn’t walk like other crustaceans (Faulkes & Paul, 1997a, b).

  

For the last couple of years, I have been studying these crabs more from an ecological viewpoint. During my regular collections, I eventually made a conscious mental note of something that is incredibly obvious when you say it out loud. Some of these crabs are white, while others are almost a battleship gray.

 
When I looked in the scientific descriptions of these species, the colour of this particular species was never mentioned, and other Lepidopa species were usually described as white. Why are they different colors? We often think of colours as being important signals for animals; think of warning colours, for instance. Sand crabs spend almost all of their time buried in sand. In ten years of digging on this beach, I have seen these sand crabs above the sand twice (weirdly, on the same day!), and even then only for a couple of seconds. The crabs have small, poorly developed eyes. It seemed unlikely that they are using these different colors to signal each other.

Although the eyes of some sand crabs are small, they sometimes take note of their surroundings. Some very nice experiments with sand crabs showed how environmental factors can affect colour. For instance, mole crabs (Hippa) are found on either white coral beaches or black volcanic beaches, and they tend to match their background. What’s even cooler is that you take an animal from a white beach, and put it into black sand, and wait, it will tend to darken up after it molts (picture from Bauchau & Passelecq-Gérìn 1987; see also Wenner 1972).

This doesn't seem to explain the color differences I'm seeing in the local sand crabs, however, because they’re all being collected from one beach, which is a light tan as far as the eye can see.

Another idea that came to mind was that this was related to whether an animal was a male or female. That also turned out not to be the case, as each colour had an even split of sexes.

But two pieces of evidence suggest that these colours are not just incidental. There are more gray sand crabs than white ones. And the gray ones tend to be larger than the white ones, although there is overlap (data from Nasir & Faulkes 2010; carapace drawing by Boyko 2002).

Something that might help sort out this puzzling little question would be to look at other populations. The animals I have collected over the last few years are nowhere near the largest on record for the species. The largest individuals in this species have been found on the Atlantic coast of Florida (Boyko 2002). The average size of sand crabs there is about the size of the biggest individuals I’ve found on South Padre Island. And it makes me wonder, if the Atlantic L. benedicti are that much bigger, are they more likely to be that dark battleship gray?

References

Bauchau AG, Passelecq-Gérìn E. 1987. Morphological color changes in anomuran decapods of the genus Hippa. Indo-Malayan Zoology 4(1): 135-144.

Boyko CB. 2002. A worldwide revision of the recent and fossil sand crabs of the Albuneidae Stimpson and Blepharipodidae, new family (Crustacea, Decapoda, Anomura, Hippoidea). Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History 272(1): 1-396. http://dx.doi.org/10.1206/0003-0090(2002)272<0001:AWROTR>2.0.CO;2

Faulkes Z, Paul DH. 1997a. Coordination between the legs and tail during digging and swimming in sand crabs. Journal of Comparative Physiology A 180(2): 161-169. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s003590050037

Faulkes Z, Paul DH. 1997b. Digging in sand crabs (Decapoda, Anomura, Hippoidea): interleg coordination. The Journal of Experimental Biology 200(4): 793-805. http://jeb.biologists.org/cgi/content/abstract/200/4/793

Nasir U, Faulkes Z. 2011. Color polymorphism of sand crabs, Lepidopa benedicti (Decapoda, Albuneidae). The Journal of Crustacean Biology 32(2): 240-245. http://dx.doi.org/10.1651/10-3356.1

Wenner AM. 1972. Incremental color change in an anomuran decapod Hippa pacifica Dana. Pacific Science 26: 346-353.

 

[“Doctor Zen” first got in touch with me in the spring of last year to kindly point me to some research on bubbles behaving like granular materials. I had a look at his personal web page at the University of Texas-Pan American, and discovered his research interest in decapod crustacean behaviour, in particular the unusual crayfish, Marmorkrebs; I was particularly interested in his work on crustaceans digging in sand – the slipper lobster video on his site is strangely compelling. I asked if he would contribute a guest post and he kindly agreed. I hope that readers find this as fascinating as I do – I’m reminded of some of the intriguing evolutionary questions raised by beach mice and the bleached earless lizard. Thanks, Zen, for this – well worth waiting for!].

Sunday Sand: Wrangellia

 
A hundred million years ago, over the western ocean horizon, loomed yet another impending tectonic disaster. A gigantic plateau of volcanic rock was lurching its way eastwards towards an inevitable collision with North America, the oceanic plate that carried it being consumed beneath the continent. The plateau was far too massive to be digested, instead winding up accreted – welded, glued, uplifted – to an ever-expanding continent to form, amongst other things, the backbone of what is today Vancouver Island.

This collision and continent-building event took place along the entire stretch of western Canada and Alaska, one chapter in the saga of tectonic chaos that would continue along the whole margin of North America to the present day. It wasn’t simply one plateau of volcanic rocks that blundered into its final resting place, but a complex of oceanic bits and pieces, deep marine sediments, cherts, limestones, geo-flotsam and geo-jetsam, different terranes that have come to be grouped together under the name Wrangellia, after some fine examples in Alaska’s Wrangell Mountains:

 

In the vicinity of Vancouver Island, the Wrangellia terrane was uplifted and rapidly eroded, sand and mud pouring off the new mountains to form deltas and marine deposits, shallow and deep, accumulating to a thickness of five kilometers. This pile of sediments is referred to as the Nanaimo Group, and underlies much of the south-eastern coast of Vancouver Island, where a colleague of mine is lucky enough to live (when he’s not being a colleague of mine and working in Indonesia).

 
He looks out eastwards over the deliciously named Salish Sea to the hills of Lasqueti Island and the mainland, across a beach that is a broad bench, strewn with cobbles, pebbles, and gravel – between which can be found today’s Sunday Sand.

 
And, as usual, this sand consists of local ingredients, detritus of Wrangellia – and the detritus of the detritus of Wrangellia. It’s a young, angular, coarse sand, the grains not yet well-travelled – the photos are of the sample sieved to collect only the sand-sized fraction. The grains are of grey and greenish volcanic rock, originally erupted on to the floor of the ancestral Pacific Ocean, 200 million years ago, deep-sea sediments, red chert fragments, bits of limestone, the odd quartz grain, the occasional piece of broken shell.

The story of Wrangellia, recounted by this sand, was but an early episode in an ongoing series of events in which successive wandering foreign tectonic chunks accreted themselves to Western Canada – the Pacific Rim Terrane, the Crescent Terrane. And, as this cross-section shows, it’s still going on today. Out in the ocean, far to the west of Vancouver Island, lies the true edge of North America, sediments and oceanic material scraped off the top of the subducting Juan de Fuca Plate, in the fullness of time to make their contribution to the territorial expansion of Vancouver Island.

 

[Illustrations from Steven Earle’s The Geology of British Columbia and Vancouver Island – if you, like me, can’t get to the original, try the Google “quick view” version ; for more on Wrangellia, see this University of British Columbia site; and thanks, Brett, for the sand!]

Lying vehicles

It has become a sarcastic proverb that a thing must be true if you saw it in a newspaper. That is the opinion intelligent people have of that lying vehicle in a nutshell. But the trouble is that the stupid people -- who constitute the grand overwhelming majority of this and all other nations -- do believe and are moulded and convinced by what they get out of a newspaper, and there is where the harm lies. (Mark Twain, 1873)

The laurels on which I was complacently resting after my fervent New Year’s wish for Earth Science Literacy have instantly withered, and my understanding of the heroic – if not futile and stupid – nature of my wish cruelly underlined. I reproduce for you below, essentially in its entirety, a piece published on Tuesday by one John Trumbo of the Tri-City Herald in the State of Washington. This was taken up by a number of newspapers, both online (the sadly misnamed “Seattle Post Intelligencer”) and hardcopy. And it appeared as news. Read this and weep – scarcely a sentence goes by that does not include utter, mind-boggling-numbing, lying, rubbish. I despair.

Richland man sees sandstone proof of global flood

WEST RICHLAND, Wash. (AP) — A swirling, twisting sandstone formation in northern Arizona is evidence of Noah's flood, says a West Richland man who recently visited the unusual geologic phenomenon.

Greg Morgan, a nuclear safety engineer at Hanford, said he was amazed to see sandstone resembling waves, whirlpools and reversing currents that appear to have been frozen in place.

Morgan's photographs of The Wave and his article, "Flood Currents Frozen in Stone," are in the latest issue of Answers magazine, a quarterly publication of Answers in Genesis, a Christian creation research organization based in Petersburg, Ky. The nonprofit organization's 70,000-square-foot facility also houses the Creation Museum.

Mike Matthews, editor of Answers, said the way the layers of sandstone came to rest at Paria Canyon "fits with the viewpoint that these are flood layers."

But the strongest evidence of a global flood is in the sandstone itself, he said.

"It's that the layers themselves have been traced out worldwide, even to Europe and the Mideast," Mathews said.

The Wave at Paria provides a little more -- what Matthews called important "signature details."

Morgan, who is a mechanical engineer and worked in the aviation industry before coming to Hanford, said he was shocked when he first saw a picture of The Wave because it contradicted his original thinking about an ancient Earth and evolution.

Morgan, who became a Christian as an adult and takes the Bible literally, said the convoluted formations at Paria Canyon forced him to consider there must be another explanation.

"There are no broken rocks. All of this happened when it was still mud," Morgan said.

Morgan first visited The Wave at Paria Canyon in 2008 and again in September, each time taking many photographs he later could study.

The whirlpools suggest the stone was flowing, as if it was a slurry of sand that suddenly froze in place, he said.

"This is excellent evidence for Noah's flood. It is far better than what anyone believes for an ancient Earth," Morgan said.

The formation itself is classified as Jurassic Navajo Sandstone, and according to conventional "old Earth" geology, was formed 200 million years ago when seasonal winds laid down the layers to create the dramatic land forms.

Morgan explains it differently in his article for Answers magazine.

"Creation geologists believe huge sand waves were piled up and laid down deep under the ocean water. The fast currents then created tell-tale features, known as cross beds or 'striations,' with the steep cut-offs we see today," Morgan wrote in support of a global flood event.

The article also mentions that the sand at The Wave has been identified as having come from the Appalachians, about 1,800 miles to the east.

Moses' account in Genesis of Noah's flood describes a worldwide inundation that covered even the tallest mountains.

Morgan, who initially thought The Wave was just an example of water and wind erosion cutting through many layers of sandstone, says the evidence at Paria Canyon shows "what Moses wrote was true."

"I may be the first among creation geologists to openly promote this as evidence of Noah's flood," he said.

If such a cataclysmic flood event deposited the twisted layers of sand and whirlpools that later were to turn to stone, then how did the flood currents frozen in stone become exposed in a waterless desert?

Morgan believes a second flood catastrophe -- perhaps similar to the Ice Age floods that scoured Eastern Washington thousands of years ago -- unleashed icy waters that ravaged the Southwest, as well.

That would account for the rapid erosion in Paria Canyon and in the Grand Canyon, which is about 70 miles south of The Wave, he said.

"About half the people I've talked to say, 'Yeah, that's proof the Earth is young,' " Morgan said.

Andrew Snelling, who has a doctorate in geology and is a content editor for Answers magazine, said two items of evidence at Paria Canyon point to a massive flood event.

One concerns analysis of grinds in the sandstone at Paria, which match mineral sources in the Appalachians. It would take a lot of wave action to move sand that far, he said.

And the sheer size of the Paria sandstone cross beds, at more than 100 feet thick, would need a massive wave -- a tsunami-sized wall of water -- in order to be laid down as they are. Snelling said such a wave would have to be twice as high as the bed of sand it deposits, which is on the scale of a global flood.

"The volume of sand we see out there is enormous. We don't see anything like that happening today," Snelling noted.

Mr. Trumbo, you are welcome to get in touch with me – or any other professional geologist - should the bizarre notion of adding a counter-argument disturb your intellectual complacency.