Addresses of All Authors
2727 W. Route 66
Flagstaff, AZ 86001
Author's Biography
Nate Loper is the Executive Director for Canyon Ministries, which provides Christian education and events to thousands of people each year through tours, hiking, backpacking, and river trips at the Grand Canyon and southwest from a biblical creation perspective for over 25 years. He has spent nearly 1,000 days studying and teaching geology, paleontology, and archaeology at the Grand Canyon and surrounding Colorado Plateau, including leading dozens of river trips on the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon.
Presentation Type
Poster Presentation
Proposal
Geologists both within and outside the creation community have long proposed a breached dam and lake spillover hypothesis for the formation of Grand Canyon in whole or in part. One major lake system pointed to has been dubbed Hopi Lake or Lake Bidahochi, with supporting evidence found within the Bidahochi Formation. The Bidahochi Formation in eastern Arizona overlies the Chinle Formation in many places and is described as a Miocene-Pliocene lacustrine deposit. As such, several creation geologists assign this to a depositional environment during the post-Flood Ice Age. Yet, there is a small group within the creation community who tend to disregard the Bidahochi Formation as being post-Flood and find no evidence for the large lake system proposed for its formation and the subsequent breaching of the Kaibab Plateau by Hopi-Bidahochi Lake and other linked lakes to the north in connection to a rapid and catastrophic formation for Grand Canyon in a post-Flood timeframe. This poster does not attempt to deal with the entirety of the lake system within the Colorado Plateau, but rather only Hopi-Bidahochi Lake found within the Bidahochi Basin. The data presented is based on multiple years of physical survey and ongoing field research that includes both fossil and geological evidence supporting a post-Flood large lake in the Bidahochi Basin, believed to be responsible in part for the formation of Grand Canyon. Included imagery will show transgressional terraces, stromatolitic tufa, preserved ice casts, and post-Flood lacustrine and avian fossils found near the proposed shoreline of this lake in elevations of ~5,800 feet and above. The poster presentation highlights multiple locations within the Bidahochi Basin where supporting evidence may be found, and draws from more than a century of published works by geologists and paleontologists in pursuit of unraveling the geology and landscape surrounding the Grand Canyon and its formation.
Disciplines
Geology
Keywords
Bidahochi Formation, Bidahochi Lake, Hopi Lake, Grand Canyon
DOI
10.15385/jpicc.2023.9.1.75
Print Reference
682
Disclaimer
DigitalCommons@Cedarville provides a publication platform for fully open access journals, which means that all articles are available on the Internet to all users immediately upon publication. However, the opinions and sentiments expressed by the authors of articles published in our journals do not necessarily indicate the endorsement or reflect the views of DigitalCommons@Cedarville, the Centennial Library, or Cedarville University and its employees. The authors are solely responsible for the content of their work. Please address questions to dc@cedarville.edu.
Recommended Citation
Loper, Nate
(2023)
"Physical Evidence for a Post-Flood Lacustrine Depositional Environment for Hopi/Bidahochi Lake,"
Proceedings of the International Conference on Creationism: Vol. 9, Article 70.
DOI: 10.15385/jpicc.2023.9.1.75
Available at:
https://digitalcommons.cedarville.edu/icc_proceedings/vol9/iss1/70
Submission Type
poster