How Are Water Gaps Formed?

If you saddle up and ride in some mountainous areas, you may come across a notch where water is flowing between parts of the range. Ever see one form? Me, neither. Nobody has. Old Earth advocates will tell you that the water carved it out, but that doesn't square with the geologic evidence. For one thing, simple physics tells us that water flows around barriers instead of up and over them.

Glen Helen Gorge image credit: NASA / Eric Christian's Field Journal (use of image does not imply endorsement).

One tale they tell is that the river was there already, and the range uplifted, so the water carved out the gap. That may be remotely plausible if there was just one instance, but that explanation doesn't hold water when it happens a heap of times. Then there's the lack of scree (rock debris) that should be there if it took millions of years to happen. It didn't happen that way, old son. Uniformitarian reasoning fails here, too. The most rational explanation to fit observed evidence is the Genesis Flood.

Why does the Finke River at the Glen Helen Resort flow straight through the range, forming Glen Helen Gorge? Geologists call this a water gap. In Central Australia the Finke River flows across the grain of all the McDonnell Ranges and water gaps are common. In fact, water gaps are a global phenomenon, with more than 1000 across the earth.

No one has ever seen a water gap form, so stories that attempt to explain these unexpected geological features are conjecture. The rims of at least three of the ranges that the Finke River flows through have been ‘dated’ by evolutionary geologists as some 400 million years old. How erosive processes could have continued for so long defies belief. For example, using standard uniformitarian geology, it would only take about 17 million years to erode a whole continent.

To read the rest, rock on over to "Glen Helen Gorge, Australia — How did it form?"