Rainfall catchment for Carnarvon Gorge is not large enough

Tourists to the spectacular Carnarvon Gorge in Central Queensland, Australia, are told that Carnarvon Creek, carved the Gorge. When you look at the size of the gorge, with its inner walls reaching up 200 metres and the outer walls in the far distance rising 600 metres, it’s seems beyond belief that the creek could do that job. But the Gorge is there before your eyes.

But, how could such a small creek carve such an enormous gorge into a rocky plateau that is capped by 300 metres of hard basalt? Rather than question the story, the paradox becomes a source of wonder. Marvel at the power of water; ponder the immensity of geological time.

Perhaps we need to think outside the box.

One excellent tool at our fingertips these days is Google maps. We can look at geographic features anywhere in the world. As we zoom in and out we gain a perspective that has not been available to earlier generations. When we look at Carnarvon Gorge with Google Maps (above figure) we can see the size of the gorge in relation to the rest of the landscape.

The major problem Google reveals with the conventional story is rainfall. Google shows that the gorge is a huge erosional feature carved into the countryside, but it also reveals that the rainfall catchment is not particularly large. It’s not much larger than the Gorge itself (figure). And the rainfall in the area is not particularly high, less than 1000 mm per year on average.

The more we look the more the evidence suggests that a lot more water was involved in eroding the Gorge than Carnarvon Creek could provide. But where would that come from? The suggestion that Carnarvon Gorge was carved during the retreating stage of Noah’s Flood makes a lot of sense. The water today in Carnarvon Creek is miniscule compared with the water that ran off the country at that time.

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