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CREATIONISM VS EVOLUTION, (CONT.)
II) SCRIPTURAL TESTIMONY & PHYSICAL EVIDENCE OF A RECENT CREATION, (cont.)
B) SCRIPTURAL TESTIMONY & PHYSICAL EVIDENCE FROM EARTH WHICH TESTIFY TO A RECENT CREATION, (cont.)
5) PERIOD OF A WORLDWIDE FLOOD, (cont.)
c) PHYSICAL EVIDENCE OF A WORLDWIDE FLOOD, (cont.)
4) UNPRECEDENTED SEDIMENTARY ACTIVITY POINTS TO A WORLDWIDE FLOOD
The unprecedented sedimentary activity resulting from the worldwide Flood is what is responsible for nearly all of today's geological formations and of its fossils.
[p. 406-408]
"Many types of sedimentary deposits are said to be explainable only in terms of long periods of time. It is natural to think that great thicknesses of water-laid rock beds, perhaps thousands of feet thick, must have taken ages to form. But this is reckoning in uniformitarian terms. It is not difficult to see how they could be formed in a short period, if the aqueous and sedimentary activity were intense enough, as it undoubtedly was during the Deluge...
...With an abundance of organic matter available, not to mention water, it is thus obvious that conditions after the Deluge would be highly favorable to rapid initiation of diagenetic [recombination] processes, with resultant early lithification [rock formation]...
[The so-called mysteries of sedimentary formations] could be resolved if they were approached not on the basis of uniformity with present processes but were envisioned in terms of rapid deposition of great masses of sediments mixed with various chemicals and organic matter; Deluge conditions quite obviously afford an ample source of silica, calcite, and other cementing materials.
The problem of lithification of sediments is, therefore, not at all a serious one for Biblical geology. Rather, it is highly consonant with the whole character of the catastrophic action attending deposition of the Deluge sediments to infer the processes of compaction, cementation, drying, etc. leading to final lithification [which] could have been accomplished quite rapidly."
[p. 123]
"The entire account [of the Flood in Scripture] plainly yields the inference that tremendous quantities of earth and rock must have been excavated by the waters of the Flood. Many factors must have contributed to this - the driving rains, the raging streams resulting from them, the earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, the powerful tidal waves, then later the waves and other currents generated by the rising of the lands and sinking of the basins, and perhaps many other factors which we cannot now even guess. Never since the world was formed could there ever have been such extensive erosion of soil and rock beds, on a global scale, as during the Genesis Flood. And the materials that were eroded must eventually have been redeposited somewhere, and necessarily in stratified layers, such as we find everywhere around the world today in the great sedimentary rock systems."
[pp. 265-266]
"The picture then is of awesome proportions. The vast 'waters above the firmament' poured forth through what are graphically represented in the Scriptures as the 'floodgates of heaven, ' swelling the rivers and waterways and initiating the erosion and transportation of vast inland sediments. At the same time, waters and probably magmas were bursting up through the fractured fountains of the great subterranean deep. In the seas, these 'fountains' not only belched forth their waters and volcanic materials, but the corresponding earth displacements must have been continually generating powerful tsunamis [= volcanic/earth quake induced giant tidal waves].
This tremendous complex of forces, diastrophic [relative to deformations, earthquakes, volcanoes, etc.] and hydrodynamic [relative to fluid motion mechanics], must beyond any question have profoundly altered the antediluvian topography and geology of the earth's crust. Powerful currents, of all directions and magnitudes and periods, must have been generated and made to function as agents of immense eroding, transporting, and depositional potency. Under the action of this combination of effects, almost any sort of deposit or depositional sequence becomes possible and plausible. An immense variety of sediments must finally have been the result, after the Flood had run its course.
And yet, in spite of the complexity of physical agencies involved and the resulting variety of formations and sediments, certain general semblances of order might be anticipated in the deposits when the waters abated. The creatures of the deep sea bottoms would universally be overwhelmed by the toxicity and violence of the volcanic emanations and the bottom currents generated thereby and would in general be mixed with the inorganic materials simultaneously dislodged from the bed, transported and eventually redeposited on the bed.
In similar fashion, the fish and other organisms living nearer the surface would subsequently be entrapped by either materials washing down from the land surface or the shallow coastal sea bottoms or by materials upwelling from the depths. Again these sediments would be transported and redeposited either on the sea bottom or occasionally on top of other sediments already laid down.
On the land, the raging rivers would carry great quantities of detritus seaward [detritus = eroded away matter], occasionally entombing animals or reptiles, together with great rafts of vegetation. These would normally be deposited finally in some more or less quiescent [quiet] reach of stream or finally in the sea on top of other deposits or perhaps on the exposed bottom itself.
As far as land animals and man were concerned, their greater mobility would have enabled most of them to escape temporarily to higher ground as the waters rose, only occasional individuals being swept away and entombed in the sediments. Eventually, of course, the floodwaters overtook even those who had fled to the highest elevations, but in most cases these men and animals would not be buried but simply drowned and then carried about by the waters on or near the surface until finally decomposed by the elements. Certain spectacular exceptions to this rule might occur when groups of animals, huddled together in a cave on some hillside or on a summit, were swept away by a sudden, sediment-laden wave of water to be buried en masse at another place.
Even after the first forty days, when the greatest of the rains and upheavals diminished, the Scriptures say that the waters 'prevailed' upon the earth for one hundred and ten days longer. [Gen 7:24] This statement - together with what one might infer from the prevalent unique meteorologic conditions during that period, with a universal ocean still reacting to the great dynamic imbalance so recently imposed on the earth - would certainly imply that extensive hydraulic and sedimentary activity continued for a long time, with many earlier flood deposits perhaps re-eroded and reworked. Some sediments may well have been transported and deposited several times before reaching their final resting-place."
[pp. 99-102]
[Critics maintain] that 'the rise and fall of waters of the Mosaic deluge [i.e., the Noahic Flood about which Moses wrote in Genesis] are described to have been gradual and of short duration' and that they would have produced comparatively little change on the surface of the country they overflowed.' [i.e., that the Flood period was a tranquil one...
...However] ...Today, when the continents and oceans are in a state of equilibrium, there are tremendous oceanic currents. One of these, the south equatorial current, carries six million tons of water a second northward across the Equator. But how much more powerful must the currents have been when the oceanic waters, impelled onward by the breaking up of the fountains of the great deep and suddenly swollen by the opening of 'the windows of heaven' rose above the highest mountains of the earth within a period of forty days and then after five months began to return 'from off the earth continually.'
Nelson clearly indicates the impossibility of the tranquil theory:
'As the sea began to rise, each twice-daily current could come higher and higher up the rivers and valleys, spreading farther and wider inland each time, and would then recede. In places, doubtless, the incoming movements would be as fierce and violent as in the Bay of St. Michael or the mouth of the Amazon, and even more so. The directions of the tidal currents and their violence would change with the changing contours of the surfaces being encroached upon. We do not say that the Flood was brought on by the gradual raising of the sea bottoms, though it may have been. But that being the gentlest manner in which a universal Deluge could be brought about, shall we, in view of what we know of tides, say there could be a universal flood and no violence be done to the earth? Can we think it possible there were no currents, no movements, no motions of the waters back and forth and hither and yon?'
[Nelson, op. cit., p. 4.]
Even the relatively small amounts of water involved in river floods have caused damage that staggers the imagination. Bridges, houses, immense boulders, and trees are torn up and swept along as mere pebbles and matchsticks. Such floods seldom attain a depth of more than a few dozen feet and their main force is expended within a few days or hours. But when we begin to speak in terms of a Flood that 'grew mightily upon the earth' and 'prevailed upon the earth one hundred and fifty days' and covered 'all the high mountains which are under all the heavens.' [Gen 7:18, 19, 24] we must face the fact that we are no longer dealing with phenomena that are familiar to modern science.
It therefore cannot be denied that a universal Flood must, of absolute necessity, have accomplished a vast amount of geologic work in a relatively short period. Erosion and sedimentation must have taken place on a gigantic scale. Previous isostatic adjustments, of whatever sort they were, must have been entirely unbalanced by the great complex of hydrostatic and hydrodynamic forces unleashed in the flood waters, resulting very likely in great telluric [terrestrial] movements. Associated with the volcanic phenomena and the great rains must also have been tremendous tidal effects, windstorms, and a great complexity of currents, cross-currents, whirlpools, and other hydraulic phenomena. After the floodgates were restrained and the fountains of the great deep stopped, there must still, for a long time, have been much more geologic work accomplished as the masses of water were settling into new basins and the earth was adjusting itself to new physiographic and hydrologic balances.
Leupold insists that 'note should be taken of the tremendous geological possibilities that lie behind the breaking open of the fountains of the great deep. The vastness of these eruptions must be in proportion to the actual depth of the Flood.'
[p. 102]
And he adds further, with regard to the significance of Genesis 7:18-20 for modern science:
'What opportunity for working vast geologic changes lie dormant in these 'mighty' waters! The native force of gabhar is enhanced by one me'odh, 'exceedingly' in verse 18 and by the doubling of the same adverb.. a Hebrew superlative... in verse 19. When will geologists begin to notice these basic facts? [Ibid., p. 301]
[pp. 271-272]
"But now we must consider the all-important question of the sequence of deposition of these stratified beds. This supposed order has been made the basis of the accepted system of geochronology and historical geology. It is the backbone of the theory of organic evolution, with its purported display of gradual development of all forms of creatures from simple beginnings, through the various geological ages, as [supposedly shown] in the fossils contained in the sedimentary rocks. Thus, the very plainest testimony to the great Event in which the 'world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished', (II Peter 3:6) has been transformed instead into a supposed rock record of gradual organic evolution!
We have already noted, however, at some length, that this record proves extremely fragmentary and contradictory upon closer examination. It has been shown that the supposed divisions between the various systems are more often than not non-existent. We have pointed out that anything approaching the complete geologic column is never found at any one place on the earth's surface, but only one or a very few systems at most. Even those that are found at a given locality quite commonly have one or more important systems missing, as compared with the [supposed] standard column, often without any physiographic evidence that the supposed intervening period of erosion or non-deposition ever really occurred. And it is not at all unusual for strata to be found completely out of the approved order, with the 'old' strata resting conformably on top of 'young' strata. And all of this, as we have repeatedly emphasized, bears extremely hard on the theory of uniformity and the geologic ages.
But it is just what one would expect in the light of the Biblical record! In some areas [there] would be deposited one assemblage of sediments, and in other areas entirely different assemblages depending on the source areas and directions of the deposition currents. Thus, in the tremendous complex of flows and waves and sediments with their entrapped organisms, a variety of different types of sedimentary rocks would even be laid down directly on the crystalline basement. Again quoting Dr. Spieker, of Ohio State:
'Further, how many
geologists have pondered the fact that lying on the crystalline basement
are found from place to place not merely Cambrian, but rocks of all ages?'
[E. M. Spieker: 'Mountain-Building Chronology and Nature of Geologic Time Scale,' Bulletin, American Association of Petroleum Geologists, Vol. 40, August 1956, p. 1805]
...This seems to be a rhetorical question, because neither Spieker nor anyone else seems to attempt to answer it. It seems incapable of satisfactory explanation on the basis of orthodox geology, although Spieker seems somehow to think it to be evidence of extreme uniformity of geologic process in space and time. Actually, of course, it is perfectly consistent with the Flood record.
It is interesting to note, in passing, that even if the Cambrian rocks were accepted as actually the oldest of the fossil-bearing strata, the problem of evolution would still be far from solved. As Ladd says:
'Most paleontologists today give little thought to fossiliferous rocks older than the Cambrian, thus ignoring the most important missing link of all. Indeed the missing Pre-Cambrian record cannot properly be described as a link for it is in reality, about nine-tenths of the chain of life: the first ninetenths.'
[H. S. Ladd: Ch. I, 'Introduction,' in Treatise on Marine Ecology and Paleoencology, Vol. II, Geological Society of America Memoir 67, 1957, p. 7]
...Similarly, T. N. George says: 'Granted an evolutionary origin of the main groups of animals, and not an act of special creation, the absence of any record whatsoever of a single member of any of the phyla in the Pre-Cambrian rocks remains as inexplicable on orthodox grounds as it was to Darwin.' ('Fossils in Evolutionary Perspective,' Science Progress, Vol. XLVIII, Jan. 1960, p. 5)..."
[p. 124]
"All of these Biblical inferences from the Flood record are clearly supported in at least a general way by the actual records of the rocks. Almost all of the sedimentary rocks of the earth, which are the ones containing fossils and from which the supposed geologic history of the earth has been largely deduced, have been laid down by moving waters. This statement is so obvious and so universally accepted that it need neither proof nor elaboration. Sedimentary rocks by definition are those that have been deposited as sediments, which the Oxford Universal Dictionary defines as 'earthy or detrital [worn away by erosion] matter deposited by aqueous agency.' Obviously these great masses of sediments must first have been eroded from some previous location, transported, and then deposited (perhaps, of course, more than once) - exactly the sort of thing which occurs in any flood and which we have seen must have occurred on a uniquely grand scale during the great Flood of Genesis."
[Dr. Don R. Patton, op. cit., tape #1]:
[People say that] "The earth just looks old when you see all of these bedded [geological] structures and everybody knows that it takes millions and millions of years to form the fossils in all of those layers. And so it has to be old...
[But] Invariably we will find that all of those geologic processes are extremely rapid inspite of what's taught in many of the textbooks... [For example] the standard for how long it takes to form limestone [is] 2700 years to form a foot of limestone back in the [so-called] Paleozoic, and at least 2400 years back in the [so-called] Cenozoic and so if that's the case and we've got many thousands of feet of limestone then obviously the earth is very old. But where do these conclusions come from? Obviously, no one watched for 2700 years to see a foot [of limestone] form. And what we actually find is that this is based on the first assumption that the earth is old. Assuming the age of a particular formation, they then divide the age into the rocks, then they come up with so many feet per thousands of years. And so it is the assumption that determines the rate - the sedimentation rate, not observation...
But we look at the strata... and those who study stratigraphy know [that] it has to be formed slowly... the rocks look like they took that long to form. No. That's really the opposite of the truth. Consider the statement in the book 'PRINCIPLES OF STRATIGRAPHY', by Dunbar and Rogers, one of the leading textbooks used in colleges across the country to study stratigraphy or the strata, the layers...
'Use of the lead-uranium ratio, however, soon demonstrated its age to be more than two thousand million years...
[And that's based on the assumption... (previously discussed). Is that what they expected? No. Dunbar and Rogers cite]:
To some thoughtful stratigraphers this amazing discovery presented a dilemma, for if the known stratified rocks have been accumulating throughout this vast span of time the average rate of deposition must have been extremely slow, yet there is very good evidence that individual beds accumulated rapidly...
[He goes on to give us some examples, and one that we would use to illustrate would be the... [fossil] of the fish... actually in the process of eating his supper... [another fish] Now these are species that we can identify... and virtually cannot distinguish from modern species. But here in the process of eating supper, we've got a fish eating fish. Now, when you look at that and try to imagine it forming at the rate of 2700 years per foot, I think you can see that's absurd. I know some people who take a long time to eat supper, but 2700 years to get covered up like this would be ridiculous... That indicates that this formed rapidly...]
Thus Schuchert ...found that if a geologic column were built up by superposing the thickest known part of each of the geologic systems in North America, from Cambrian to the present, the composite record would be about 259,000 feet thick. If we combine his results with the latest estimates of time based on radioactive minerals, we get the figures in Table 5, in which the last column indicates the estimated average rate of deposition... Abundant fossil shells likewise indicate rapid burial, for if shells are long exposed on the sea floor they suffer abrasion or corrosion and are overgrown by sessile organisms or perforated by boring animals. At the rate of deposition postulated by Schuchert, 1000 years, more or less, would have been required to bury a shell 5 inches in diameter. With very local exceptions fossil shells show no evidence of such long exposure.'
So you look at the strata and the fossils in it and you see indication[s] of rapidity... For example, we look at the fossil fern and we notice the minute detail. This fossil hasn't even had time to wilt. How long does it take a fern to wilt. Obviously, this rock formed rapidly, even before the fern wilted. We look at the dragonfly encased in the limestone, and the minute detail is obvious; the three dimensional effect, [and] the salt parts of the body were preserved... When you see very minute... creatures with detail preserved... in the limestone, then it is obvious: these things can't happen slowly.
I was speaking to a high school group not too long ago and I raised the question, 'How do fossils form?' And one of the fellas stood up in the back and said, 'Well, a fish dies, or a shrimp, he falls to the bottom of the ocean and over millions of years a rock grows around him. And I smiled and thought a minute, 'How many of you have ever seen a rock grow.' Well, rocks don't grow they deteriorate. We see them coming apart, don't we?... And obviously, when we see animals like this preserved in the limestone it is impossible to conceive of this kind of a fossil [not] forming rapidly. We just think about it. Wives put shrimp in the refrigerator and [they'll] stay there for 30 or 40 years... Oh, we know better than that, maybe a day or two. A week and you're in trouble, aren't you? And yet this [fossil] is preserved perfectly and beautifully in the limestone. And we see abundant evidence of that... The mosquito preserved in the limestone. What would do that? Limestone forming at 2700 years a foot?
Or something like concrete hardening basically overnight would have to be the explanation for something like this, wouldn't it? There is absolutely no way to explain it otherwise. The evidence of the strata is of rapid burial.
Looking again to the book PRINCIPLES OF STRATIGRAPHY by Dunbar and Rogers, they say, 'Internal evidence in the strata, however, belies these estimates...
[That is the long thousands of years. Now, they believe it took that long, but [they say] you look at the evidence and he says [that] it really doesn't go together]
In the Coal Measures of Nova Scotia, for example, the stumps and trunks of many trees are preserved standing upright as they grew, clearly having been buried before they had time to fall or rot away. Here sediment certainly accumulated to a depth of many feet within a few years. In other formations where articulated... [That is, assembled] skeletons of large animals are preserved, the sediment must have covered them within a few days at the most.
[We have beautifully preserved dinosaurs that are very very large, some of them even [have] their soft parts and their skin preserved... We see in some places in Argentina where large ground sloths are preserved - much of the soft material likewise preserved. And they're the size of small elephants. Now this thing lays down and dies at the rate of 2700 years per foot? What's going to happen to that creature? Well, obviously, it's not going to be preserved as we see it in the strata. What we see there, if we stop and think about it, says obviously this had to happen fast. There is no way to imagine it happening otherwise. Consider the ichthyosaurs... about 30 feet long. Now this is a large creature and he is beautifully preserved in detail. Some of them so much so that if we'll look closely at the internal section we can actually see the embryo - the small ichthyosaurs - inside the mother. And in one of the fossils that's in the museum in Berlin that birth process where this youngster is born live is seen in process, preserved in the limestone!... Is it conceivable that you could do this at the rate of even 1000 years a foot? It's just absolutely impossible. The quotation referring to the tree standing upright in the sediment: here is one of the illustrations that accompanied an article in Scientific American several years ago. [The] tree was 43 feet high with hundreds of layers surrounding it, just as well preserved at the top as at the bottom. Now, can you look at that and imagine 2700 years a foot?... And in another illustration in a similar article, we see 50 trees described. Now this was from France. Now what would possibly explain this kind of phenomena? You see trees buried standing upright with huge amounts of sediment. No, it takes something like a large flood - a catastrophic flood - to [deposit sediments which] bury a forest and cover the trees and then [to have these sediments] form into rock rapidly in order to preserve the detail that we see in these trees as well at the top as at the bottom... I think that's an excellent description and estimate of what happened and it fits best with the evidence. A beautiful example of this phenomenon is seen near Cookville, Tennessee in the coal measures there. This tree standing upright in the sediment actually extends through two cyclotherms. A cyclotherm is a series of ten different rock units where we find coal forming. And this sequence - this series - of ten rock units repeats some 50 to 100 times. Trying to explain those cyclic deposits by normal uniformitarian processes gets very entertaining. I think the tidal forces of a huge flood are much better at explaining the cyclic forces. But if we look at the picture and notice that we've got coal down near the bottom that extends through numbers of layers up into another layer of coal above, what we're seeing there is a picture that demonstrates you can't form coal over hundreds of thousands of years. It has to be basically a catastrophic event that deposits this sediment and covers it and forms it into rock rapidly or you don't get this kind of picture with the tree standing upright well preserved from top to bottom in it. Actually, experiments with the formation of coal show, contrary to what we read and hear continually, does not take a long period of time [to form]. Consider the quotation from Chemtech of several years ago giving the results of an experiment where a fella for years and years to form coal in the laboratory and couldn't get it to happen. He says the reason is [that] he assumed it took a long time. But rather accidentally he found out that he could do it if he did it rapidly. He says, 'A rather startling and serendipitous discovery resulted... These observations suggest that in their formation, high rank coals, ...were probably subjected to high temperature at some stage in their history. A possible mechanism for formation of these high rank coals could have been a short time, rapid heating event.' [Six hours]
[George R. Hill, Dean of College of Mines & Mineral Industries, Chemtech, May, 1972, p. 292]
By short time, he relates in the article he's talking about 6 hours.... With temperature and pressure, you can get coal formed from wood in just a few hours. And it doesn't happen slowly. Of course, you study the strata, the environment in which coal is formed and you would learn that from the trees and from... minute details in beautifully preserved fossils... The same kind of picture is seen when we experiment with the formation of oil. Notice the quotation from the Sentinel Star down in Orlando, Florida back in 1982 [Feb. 26]. And we're doing this at Texas A & M by the way. But this was reporting from an experiment in London where we are told, 'British scientists claimed to have invented a way to turn household garbage into oil suitable for home heating or power plant use...
[And we are told here that] '''We are doing in 10 minutes what it has taken nature 150 million years to do''', said Noel McAuliffe of Manchester University's Institute of Science and technology.'
[The article] goes on to say [that the oil] is comparable in quality to Middle Eastern crude. Ten minutes, but it took nature 150 million years. Of course, nobody sat around and watched it happen. And when we look at the environment in which we find it, we find beautifully preserved, large fossils that demand a rapid burial. And we know when we do observe it forming, that it happens rapidly. What's the most scientific explanation for its formation? Billions of years or just a short event. Well [a short event is] what we observe. That's what science is supposed to be about...
Perhaps the most common sedimentary feature in rocks - in the layers - involves what are known as the ripple marks. And in this illustration we see a picture that I took down here at Junction Texas. It looks like what you would see in the bottom of a stream of water running over loose sediment. If you had concrete poured which is basically what you have with limestone and then a stream running over the top of it, it might leave features like this. And they might be preserved in the limestone, or in the 'concrete,' if it happened rapidly. But how do you get such ephemeral structures formed if it takes millions and millions of years to form these layers? When you look at the fossils and you look at the rocks, it should be obvious to the people that will think that this has to be a rapid process... I was making a lecture similar to this down at Texas A & M, when one of the professors interrupted and [said], 'We know all of this. We know that the rocks themselves form rapidly but the time is in between. This is what we are teaching our students.' I said, 'Well, thank you. I wish that were put in the textbooks, however, because the textbooks often leave the impression that it takes many many years to form the layers. But you're saying that the rocks themselves form rapidly. Well of course we can see this and prove this. The internal evidence in the strata demonstrate that. Well. where do you get the evidence for time?' He said, 'Well, that's in between the rocks.' I said, 'You mean where there is no evidence?' And he just sort of cleared his throat and sat down. Well, that's exactly where the evidence is: Where it isn't: in the cracks, in between. That's the evidence for time and it is a non-existing evidence.
We'll look at great expanses of layers of rocks like we see in the grand Canyon. And there's a beautiful and great place to study statigraphy and it is absolutely devastating to the concept of great age of the earth. We're looking at a spot headed toward Horsehoe Mesa. And this is... Redwall limestone. This is the Moave limestone underneath it. And here of course we see the interface... It's just perfectly level for hundreds of miles. Now the unique thing about this location is that the bottom layer, the Moave limestone, is Cambrian. That's at the bottom of the geologic column. You step up almost 200 million years to the Mississippian limestone which is the Redwall. You skip almost 200 million years as you go from one to the other. Well the explanation [that the evolutionist gives] is that there must have been an erosional surface here - there was erosion going on - during... almost 200 million years... [But] what does an erosional surface look like - especially one that has survived erosion for hundreds of millions of years. Why, just 30 or 40 years of erosion can leave huge gullies... But here's a perfectly straight line for hundreds of miles that's supposed to represent 200 million years of erosion? I think that's a little hard to swallow. But that's not the most difficult part of this explanation. There's something much more significant... As we go from the Moave Cambrian we see a little layer the Redwall and then some of the Moave and then the Redwall and then the Moave and then the Redwall. We see it interbedded, changing back and forth some 6 times. How do you skip 200 million years 6 times? That's absurd. When they are interbedded... they are contemporary. They're laid down at the same time, they have to be if they're interbedded. There is no physical way for it to be otherwise. And yet the evolutionary theory based on the fossils in the rocks tells us they're separated by 200 million years. But they're interbedded.... It will not work when we look at the facts and the evidence in the strata... There is abundant evidence that the typical [evolutionists'] explanation cannot be. What is the significance of all these layers - this bedded sequence? Many think it takes millions of years to form that. But as the professor that was trying to correct me said, 'No, the rocks themselves the beds, we know were formed rapidly that's easy to document.'
We notice for example, a statement by Alan Van Jopling, one of the leading authorities in statigraphy. He has performed very elaborate experiments with very experiments at Harvard University there with the department of geological science. He's reporting
in the Journal of Sedimentary Petrology when he says, 'It is reasonable to postulate a very rapid rate of deposition; that is a single lamina [or layer] would probably be deposited in a period of seconds or minutes rather than in a period of hours.
[So not only is it not hundreds of thousands of years, but these individual layers are not even hours in duration but they are deposited in seconds or minutes. Now, why did he say that.? He said,]
...There is factual evidence from both field observation and experiment that laminae composed of bed material are commonly deposited by current action within a period of seconds or minutes.'
[You go out and you watch it happen. You set up... the experiments, the apparatus and you can reproduce it in the laboratory. There is factual evidence... from field observation experiment. And so... we know... we don't have to imagine. We don't have to extrapolate. We see this happen and it takes seconds...]
[Alan V. Joplin, Dept. of Geology, Harvard, 'Some Deductions on the Temporal Significance of Laminae, Journal of Sedimentary Petrology, Vol. 36, No. 4, pp. 880-887]
[Compare another quotation from Dr. Patton's notes:
'This proves instantaneous deposition of the individual beds, as postulated by the turbidity-current theory. The sandy layers of the Flysch did not accumulate gradually but were cast instantaneously by turbidity currents each bed in its entire thickness, in a matter of hours or less.'
[ADOLF SCILACHER, Geologisches Inst., Univ. Frankfurt, Journal of Geology, Vol. 70, p. 227]
This is what we know, though it's not taught in very many undergraduate courses. Beds happen rapidly. When we realize the sediment transport principle, we know that a new bedding plane is formed if it [the current of sediment bearing water] changes direction, if the water changes temperature, if it changes velocity - which can be caused by the texture of the bottom, by the rate of drop, [etc]. There are about 17 factors that have to remain absolutely constant in order to have one homogeneous bed formed. And [if] you change any of it and you've got a new bedding plane. [So] How long can you maintain all of those factors perfectly uniform - seconds, maybe minutes? And that's what we see illustrated in the fossil record - rapid formation of the rocks, which is obvious to people that will look and will think. Understanding that, one of the more famous evolutionists in the world, Stephen Gould of Harvard, made a very interesting statement about the rocks in their formation. He says, 'Catastrophists...
[And of course these are the ones that oppose the uniformitarians which were the evolutionists. And talking about the situation of course years ago:]
'Catastrophists [who were the creationists, he said] were as committed to science as any graduate. In fact, they adopted the more objective that one should believe what one sees and not interpolate missing bits of gradual record into a literal tale of rapid change.'
[Stephen Gould, Harvard, University, NATURAL HISTORY, 86:5, p. 12]
Now what we actually see is rapidity. But they quote no, that this was deposited over billions of years and so they divide the time into the rocks and they say, 'This is at least the average time it was formed. But the actual time is, of course, in between the rocks because we see indications that they were all formed rapidly.' They're interpolating missing bits into a literal tale of rapid change. I think I'd just rather take it literally - just the facts as they are without imposing the philosophy upon it. And... [imposing such a philosophy is] what's necessary in order to come out old. That's not the literal story. That's the imagined scenario that's imposed on the actual facts.
One indication of great age
is often argued from the formations that we see in caves... We're told
[that] the speleotherms, the stalactites and stalagmites take thousands of
years. The statement in one of the geology textbooks from which I was
taught says it takes 100,000 years
to form one cubic inch. Now that's an absurd statement and most geologists
know better but that's what is in some of the textbooks... We have seen
these [stalactites, drapery formations and stalagmites] form very very
rapidly... I was told by an
individual who was a researcher with the National Speleological Society
that in Indiana [near Blue Springs] at the George Rogers Clark Memorial...
in the basement there were formations just like you find in caves. Now
this stone that forms this
memorial was quarried just six miles from Blue Springs Cave... And the
water percolating down through the cracks in the rocks of these limestone
blocks has produced formations... just like you find produced when the
water percolates down through the cracks in the caves.... [There in the
memorial] we found just exactly what we find in the caves. If we'll notice
these drapery type formations hanging from the fixtures in the basement.
We also see the stalactites and the stalagmites that were formed in a
building that was at that time less than 40 years old. In fact, there were
large columns [of limestone deposition] that we found... eleven feet tall.
And there were five of them like this eleven feet tall! Now, if this can form in less than 40
years, I look around... [considering that some say that] the earth is
supposed to be billions of years old. Where are the huge ones, I mean
really huge ones?... No. It does not take a long time to do this. It's
dependent upon the concentration of minerals, the rate of flow, the
ventilation. A number of factors control it. But when the factors are
right, they form very, very rapidly...
We can summarize the geological phenomenon [and] the evidence regarding the age of the earth this way. We look at the fossils, we see their detail, they are polystrate - that is many strata - up like the trees through many of the layers - prove that these layers could not form slowly. We see merging flow structures - interconnected over large expanses that cannot form slowly, gradually. We see the ripple marks in all kinds of rocks, all 'ages' of rocks... The most common formation.... indicate[s] a rapid formation. We see bedded layers, many of them extending for thousands of miles. The Glen Rose limestone begins up in Oklahoma and extends... half way down through Mexico - thousands of miles. And that's not unusual. We're looking at a global phenomenon that calls for a global... catastrophic phenomenon that would deposit huge layers [of rock]. And a catastrophic flood would do precisely that. We see... interbedded periods... that are supposed to be 200 million years apart that cannot [be]... We see the rapid coal and oil formed through experimentation. We see the speleotherms that form large [structures] in just... tens of years. The phenomena are all rapid... Whatever you're looking at looks young..."
[Compare a reference from Dr. Patton's notes, op. cit., tape #1, which indicates that 'according to Anti-Creationist, W. D. Stansfield, Prof. Biological Science, Cal. Polyt. State Univ., SCIENCE OF EVOLUTION, 1977, p. 84, all of the following points to a young earth:
Water from volcanoes, Uranium accumulation, Meteroic dust in strata, Helium in atmosphere, Pressure in oil reservoirs, Meteorites in strata, Lava from volcanoes, Human population, Radiocarbon in atmosphere]
b) SEDIMENTARY STRATA CANNOT BE EXPLAINED BY UNIFORMITARIANISM
[pp. 144-148]
"Most of the sedimentary rocks of the earth's crust, which are the ones containing fossil remains and which therefore provide the chief basis of geologic interpretation of earth history, have been laid down as sediments by moving water (some have apparently been formed by wind, glaciers, or other agencies, but by far the largest part of sedimentary rocks are aqueous in origin). It is even possible that many metamorphic [rocks] (including 'granitized' rocks, ordinarily classed as igneous) were originally sedimentaries.
Sedimentary rocks have been formed through a process of erosion, transportation, deposition, and lithification [the forming of stone through tremendous pressure] of sediments. The deposition occurs, of course, when the running water containing the sediments enters a quiescent [quiet] or less rapidly moving body of water, the lowered velocity resulting in a dropping out of part or all of its load of moving sediment. If the sediment happens to contain organic remains, [then] these are buried by the sands or silts accompanying them... The remains of such plant and animal forms, as discovered in the present sedimentary rocks of the earth, have of course served as the basis of [the evolutionists' idea of] our modern divisions of the strata into units of geologic time and have provided paleontology with the materials upon which the bulk of the [falsely interpreted] evidence of organic evolution rests today.
Here is where the principle of uniformity is [falsely] applied most insistently [by evolutionists]. To be consistent with uniformitarianism, the various types of sedimentary rocks must all be interpreted in terms of so-called environments of deposition exactly equivalent to present-day situations where sediments are being laid down. Rocks are thus said to have been deposited in 'deltaic' [re: river deltas], 'lacustrine,' [re: lakes] 'lagoonal,' or other [modern day] environments.
The many different methods of attempting to classify depositional environments have become more complex with the passing of time... The very fact that so many different environments are postulated, and indeed so many different systems of classifying environments suggested by different authorities, plainly would indicate that it is impossible to apply, successfully, strictly uniformitarian principles to modern processes and environments of deposition with the hope of arriving at a satisfactory and workable means of classifying ancient sediments...
...The most spectacular and quantitatively significant sedimentary rock deposits of the world are found in... ...geosynclines [? great downward folds in the earth's crust] which are supposed [by the evolutionists] to have been great troughs of continuing subsidence [continuous settling of sediments @ bottom of the seas, rivers, etc.] in shallow seas. The [evolutionists'] concept has been that large masses of sediments were being more or less continuously deposited at shallow depths as rivers entered the seas and that the region subsided at a rate just sufficient to balance the incoming sediments. Then later, the entire geosyncline was somehow uplifted to form one of our present mountain ranges, thus supposedly accounting for the tremendous beds of sedimentary, stratified rock found in all the continents.... ...The problem is how to account for the origin of the geosyncline in the first place, then how to explain the continued subsidence (for which, incidentally, there is little or no direct evidence... ), how to account for the source areas from which these great volumes of sediments must have been eroded, and lastly, how to account for the uplift and deformation of these geosynclines to form the present mountain ranges. None of these basic questions has yet been solved on the basis of uniformity. Dr. L. G. Adams, only a decade ago, called this problem of the origin of geosynclines one of the major unsolved problems of geology...
[Ref: L. H. Adams: "Some Unsolved Problems of Geophysics," Transactions, American Geophysical Union, Vol. 28, October, 1947, p. 676]
...and there has been nothing significant accomplished in the intervening period to solve it. Dr. George C. Kennedy, Professor of Geology at U.C.L.A., has said recently:
'These deep troughs filled with sediments may contain 50,000 to 100,000 feet of sediments and may be 1000 or more miles long and 100 miles in width.... The mystery, then, of the downsinking of the sedimentary troughs, in which low density sediments apparently displace higher density rocks, is heightened when we note that these narrow elongate zones in the Earth's crust, downwarped the most, with the greatest accumulation of rock debris, shed by the higher portions of the continents, become in turn the mountain ranges and the highest portions of the continents.' "
[George C. Kennedy: "The origin of Continents, Mountain Ranges, and Ocean Basins," American Scientist, Vol. 47, December 1959, p. 495]
c) INNUMERABLE GEOLOGICAL FORMATIONS CANNOT BE EXPLAINED BY UNIFORMITARIANISM
[pp. 148-154]
"...There is evidence that in the past there were great peneplains at various places and times. These were vast surfaces of erosion which had been worn down almost to flat, plain surfaces, as the word means...
...Once again, assuming that there actually have been in the past many of these extensive plains of sub-aerial erosion [erosion @ the earth's surface], as the evidence seems to indicate in some places, the lack of anything in the present to correspond to them shows that the present is not the key to the past!"
"Other striking erosional features unmatched by modern equivalents would include the great numbers of dry canyons and falls. Particularly picturesque are the so-called 'scabland' areas, of which the best known in this country is in the Columbia Plateau. Here, vast and intricate dry canyons or coulees, hanging valleys, dry waterfalls, rock-rimmed basins and other bizarre features are found in profusion. These things are obviously not being formed anywhere at the present time, so there is much disagreement among geologists as to their explanation. The man who has made the most thorough study of the area is Harlan Bretz, whose theory envisaged a sudden vast flood as being the only agency capable of creating these forms. Thornbury's coment here is interesting:
'(Bretz) has been unable to account for such a flood but maintained that field evidence indicated its reality. This theory represents a return to catastrophism which many geologists have been reluctant to accept.'..."
[W. D. Thornbury: Principles of Geomorphology (New York, Wiley, 1954), p. 401]
iii) FLUVIATILE PLAINS & ALLUVIAL SLOPES
"...Nor are the geosynclines the only depositional features of physiography which seem unrelated to any sort of deposits being formed at the present time. The large central region of the United States, known as the Great Plains, stretching roughly from the Rockies to the Mississippi and from Canada to Mexico, consists largely of remnants of a single great fluviatile plain [= produced by stream or river action] or alluvial slope...[= slope formed of material deposited by running water: clay, sand, silt, gravel, etc.] ...here again one must visualize a phenomenon for which there is no parallel in the modern world except on a much smaller scale. The principle of uniformity is misnamed if, to interpret ancient phenomena on the basis of the present, the expedient of extrapolation [beyond normalcy] must so continually be employed and to such a great degree... ...Almost everywhere one looks, he can find evidence of widespread deposition, either alluvial or deltaic in nature, of magnitude quite beyond that of any deposits being formed in the present...
....Mountain-burying sediments [in the Uinta Mountains of Utah] are believed [by evolutionists] to have been derived from the wearing down of more than 7,000 cubic miles from the summit of a great fold, filling in the surrounding area to a depth of at least several thousand feet, up almost to the summits of the remaining mountains themselves! After the formation of the now anomalous [abnormal - not in accordance with present day processes] rivers on these tremendous alluvial deposits, another uplift is postulated [by evolutionists]... ...still another evidence that present-day rates of erosion and deposition cannot account for the ancient deposits as they are found..."
iv) LARGE, HIGH PLATEAUS AND SPECTACULAR CANYONS WITH UNIFORM HORIZONTAL STRATA
"Another major difficulty of the uniformitarian concept of sedimentary processes is found in those great areas of very thick deposits which have gone through one or more cycles of uplift and submergence and yet remain marvelously horizontal and continuous. A good example is found in the Colorado plateaus. Describing this province, Fenneman says:
'The first distinguishing feature is approximate horizontality of its rocks... The second distinguishing feature of the province is great elevation. Aside from canyon bottoms, no considerable portion of it is lower than 5,000 feet. Between this and 11,000 ft., there are plateaus of all altitudes, some of them being higher than the nearby mountain ranges.'...
[N. M. Fenneman: Physiography of Western United States (New York, McGraw-Hill, 1931), p. 274]
...This region occupies some 250,000 square miles, including most of Utah and Arizona, with large segments of Colorado and New Mexico. The Grand Canyon and many other spectacular canyons have been excavated through thousands of feet of these flat-lying sedimentary rocks.
The remarkable thing is that this entire region has somehow been uplifted from far below sea level, since most of its sediments are of marine origin, to over a mile above sea level, without disturbing the horizontality of the strata or summit levels!... ...And this has happened not once, but many times, since there are several disconformities in the stratigraphic sequences of these sediments, each [according to the evolutionists] supposedly representing a period of uplift and erosion followed by subsidence and deposition. No wonder Kennedy says:
'The problem of the uplift of large plateau areas is one that has puzzled students of the Earth's crust for a very long time.'...
[George C. Kennedy, op. cit., p. 493]
...Uniformist concepts have apparently proved incapable of providing a satisfactory solution. It seems much more likely that the sediments all were deposited more or less rapidly and continuously, followed by a single great regional uplift. Subsequent rapid canyon downcutting then ensued [from the draining flood waters] while the sediments were still relatively soft and the rivers were carrying much larger discharges... ...Spectacular exposures of flat-lying sedimentary rocks such as in the Grand Canyon provide ample visible evidence of Deluge deposition. In this area, there are thousands of squares miles of horizontal strata, thousands of feet thick, supposed to have been deposited over about half a billion years! The strata include limestones, shales, and sandstones. According to uniformist concepts, numerous changes of environment with great regional subsidences and uplifts, must have been involved, but this would appear quite impossible. [underlining added]
The strata simply could not have remained so nearly uniform and horizontal over such great areas and great periods of time, while undergoing such repeated epeirogenic [deforming] movements. By far the most reasonable way of accounting for them is in terms of relatively rapid deposition out of the sediment-laden water of the Flood. Following the Flood, while the rocks were still comparatively soft and unconsolidated, the great canyons were rapidly scoured out as the waters rushed down from the newly-uplifted peneplains [large erosion formed plain] to the newly-enlarged ocean basins.."
v) SINUOUS, MEANDERING RIVERS AT CANYON BOTTOMS
"The canyons in these plateau regions present another mystery, for which uniformitarian explanations have proved inadequate. Many of them are strongly sinuous and meandering in their courses, looking very much like the typically meandering mature rivers winding across alluvial plains, except that the canyons are hundreds of feet deep and the meander patterns are even sharper than in alluvial rivers. These are called incised [carved] or entrenched [eroded downward], meanders, in view of their presumed 'entrenchment' in the regional bedrocks during the process of uplifting. That is, it is supposed [by evolutionists] that the entire area was once near sea level, with an alluvial blanket [of sediment] on its surface. [Evolutionists go on to say that] On this surface flowed typical alluvial rivers with typical meandering patterns.
Then, according to the [evolutionists'] theory, the process of regional uplift was initiated. The rivers, which before had been eroding laterally, now began to erode vertically, but in the process maintained their same meandering course, thus incising the pattern deep into the rocks of the plateau.
Much study has been devoted to the subject of the mechanics of meandering rivers, since it involves engineering problems of considerable importance [for the defense of the evolutionary models]. In particular, extensive model tests have demonstrated that the phenomenon of meandering is associated only with non-resistant banks...
[Ref: Joseph F. Friedkin: 'A Laboratory Study of the Meanderings of Alluvial Rivers' (Vicksburg, U.S. Wa@ays Ecperiment Station, Mississippi River Commission, 1945)]
...If the bed is subject to down-cutting at all, it will be eroded rather than the banks, since the greatest tractive [= drawing, pulling, adhesive friction] stresses are directed along the bed rather than at the sides of a stream. A stream which is degrading its bed tends to straighten its course, with sharp-radius bends being eliminated by 'cut-offs.'...
[So water tends to erode river bottoms first - straightening the river's course until the river bottom becomes relatively resistent to erosion, THEN the water tends to cut laterally into the sides of the river forming a meandering course whenever the banks are soft and susceptible to erosion. But the problem with claiming that canyons are caused by years of erosion is that there are innumerable and highly winding deep canyon rivers which have always had extremely resistant river banks - these banks being composed of solid rock all the way down! Thus, how the courses of these deep canyon rivers got to be so winding cannot be explained by the uniformitarian principles of years and years of erosion. Picture an immensely large flat area - a plain covering thousands of square miles, completely covered with water. This immense plain is then uplifted by unimaginably great underground forces causing the water to rush off with immense force, taking with it loosely packed sediment deposits wherever it flowed. This sudden and massive draining away of an immense amount of the loosely packed sediment left behind a newly formed canyon of hard rock with erosion resistant, winding canyon sides and a meandering river at the bottom. On a smaller scale, picture a slope of loosely packed dirt which is heavily rained upon. After the rain there remains many miniature canyon shaped grooves carved into that slope where streams of water tore away the loosely packed dirt. Some areas of the slope remain untouched while others have deep grooves worn into them shaped similarly to a canyon - some having straight courses, some meandering]:
..This would happen [the causing of a meandering river course], in fact, even before the alluvial blanket [the blanket of loosely deposited sediment] was eliminated and, certainly, no substantial amount of lateral shifting could be initiated once the stream had cut down into bedrock. Intense meandering, when slopes and velocities are high, would require that the bed rock be extremely resistant to erosion, so that excess energy could be dissipated in no other way than by lateral cutting. But if this be so, then the deep meandering gorges could never be cut... [Underlining mine]
..The familiar meandering pattern of streams in alluvial valleys primarily results from a small stream gradient, inhibiting further down-cutting, and weak banks, permitting side-cutting by local curvilinear water motions. Occasionally, however, strong meander patterns are found in valleys of steep gradients and strong rock banks, such as in the San Juan River in Colorado... ...This anomaly is commonly [and falsely] attributed by geologists to a former alluvial blanket [of water deposited sediments] that supposedly once overlaid the rocks and since has been eroded away; the meander pattern is said to have developed in the normal way on the alluvium [water deposited sediments], and then 'entrenched' in the underlying rocks when the region was uplifted. However, such an explanation is highly questionable in terms of known principles of stream mechanics. It would seem that the only way in which such strong lateral cutting could take place simultaneously with down-cutting would be for the banks to be less resistant than the bed, and this implies that most of the meander formation must have taken place when the horizontal beds were still soft and unconsolidated, soon after deposition during the Flood period...
[Underlining mine]
Nevertheless, such incised [carved] meanders are a common phenomenon in uplifted plateau or other mountainous regions. It would seem that some sort of avulsive [flood] origin for them must be postulated. Great systems of vertical fissures might be imagined, which have been widened, deepened, and rounded by subsequent drainage through them. If erosion processes must account for the complete excavations, however, then it would seem necessary to postulate much greater volumes of water in the streams than now present, together with much less resistant walls than the rocks of which they now consist."
[Ergo, we are back to a catastrophic flood of immense, worldwide proportions]
vi) 'ANACHRONISTIC' MOUNTAIN STRATA
[pp. 180-199]
"In every mountainous region on every continent, there seem to be numerous examples of supposedly 'old' strata superimposed on top of 'young' strata....
..In the absence of definite structural evidence to the contrary, one would naturally suppose that the lowermost strata must necessarily have been first deposited and, therefore, be 'older'. But the fossils often seem to belie this assumption, and it is the fossils which govern the assigned formation age [according to evolutionists].
As noted previously, the official explanation of this sort of anachronism is in terms of what is variously called an 'overthrust,' 'thrust-fault,' 'low-angle fault,' 'nappe,' 'detachment thrust,' or similar term. The concept is of a large section of stratified rock being elevated and slid over on top of the adjacent rocks, so that the 'older' rocks on the bottom of the moving mass will then be on top of the 'younger' rocks on the top of the stationary rocks. Subsequent erosion then is usually assumed to have worn off the younger rocks on top of the displaced topography.
It is recognized that phenomena of this sort have taken place on a small scale, in certain localities where there is ample evidence of intense past faulting and folding. However, these visible confirmations of the concept are definitely on a small scale, usually in terms of a few hundreds of feet, whereas many of the [so called] great overthrust areas occupy hundreds or even thousands of square miles. It seems almost fantastic to conceive of such huge areas and masses of rocks really behaving in such a fashion, unless we are ready to accept catastrophism of an intensity that makes the Noachian Deluge seem quiescent by comparison! Certainly the principle of uniformity is inadequate to account for them. Nothing we know of present earth movements - of rock compressive and shearing strengths, of the plastic flow of rock materials, or of other modern physical processes - gives any observational basis for believing that such things are happening now or ever could have happened, except under extremely unusual conditions. As Hubbert and Rubey admit:
'Since their earliest recognition, the existence of large overthrusts has presented a mechanical paradox that has never been satisfactorily resolved.'...
[Hubbert and Rubey, "'Role of Fluid Pressure in Mechanics of Overthrust Faulting,' (Bulletin of Geological Society of America, Vol. 70, Feb. 1959, p. 122]
..To illustrate the character of these important areas, we might consider the well-known Heart Mountain Thrust of Wyoming. This supposed thrust occupies roughly a triangular area, 30 miles wide by 60 miles long, with its apex at the northeast corner of Yellowstone Park. It consists of about 50 separate blocks of Paleozoic strata (Ordovician, Devonian and Mississippian) resting essentially horizontally and conformable on Eocene beds, some [so called] 250,000,000 years younger!...
..Pierce shows many pictures of the 'fault-line,' all of them looking for all the world like any other normal contact between chronologically deposited strata... An even more mysterious factor is that there appear to be no source beds from which the thrust blocks could have broken off.
'The Heart Mountain thrust has long been structurally perplexing because there are no known structural roots or source from which it could have been derived. Furthermore, there is no known surface fault or fault zone within or adjoining the region from which the thrust sheet could have been derived.'
[William G. Pierce: "Heart Mountain and South Fork Detachment Thrusts of Wyoming.", Bulletin of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, Vol. 41, April 1957, p. 592]
Not only is there no indication of where the superposed rocks could have come from (unless of course they were normally deposited on top of the underlying Eocene strata, as all appearances indicate), but there is no physical or mechanical explanation of how the fifty-odd blocks could all have individually slid into place. Pierce's best guess is simply 'gravity,' but he acknowledges this explanation to be essentially inadequate...
a close-up of the Heart Mountain thrust plane plainly reveals a lack of any real evidence of thrusting...
..the really pertinent question is: Why is not the entire fault-plane heavily brecciated and distorted? The fact that there are many places where the contact line is clean-cut and sharp, looking very like a normal bedding plane, as it certainly appears to be, that means that, at least at this locality, the Eocene series was laid down before the strata of the Ordovician, Devonian, and Mississippian. Uniformitarians and evolutionists of course absolutely refuse even to consider such a possibility and so will continue to call this the Heart-Mountain 'thrust,' all physical evidence to the contrary notwithstanding...
..[The Lewis overthrust of Montana] is one of the most famous (and unbelievable) of the supposed overthrust regions, being, according to recent estimates, some 350 miles wide and six miles thick, with an inferred horizontal displacement of at least 35 or 40 miles! The black rocks on the upper half of the mountain... ...are Pre-Cambrian, the lighter-colored rocks below Cretaceous, about 500,000,000 [so called] years younger. Although there are slight indications of folding, both above and below the contact line, these are certainly no greater than at any other normal uncomformity. It is clearly only uniformist assumption that says the [350 miles x 40 miles of] upper beds were deposited before the lower beds were laid down... [and then 350 miles x 40 miles of lower beds were thrust under them later by a force so large that it is not even feasible and then leaving no evidence of such a catastrophic event!]
....It requires a tremendous and entirely unwarranted extrapolation to infer from... ...small-scale folds and thrusts that over-thrusting can occur on the infinitely greater scale required to account for the Lewis 'overthrust' and others like it. If such had occurred, it would seem that every part of the overriding block [350 miles long x 40 miles wide x 6 miles thick] would be intensely deformed and that the plane especially would everywhere be brecciated, [rock formations consisting of broken up sharp rock fragments and fine grain sand or clay embedded in other rocks - usually as a result of some great forces imposed upon them], deformed and perhaps metamorphosed.....
....Another difficulty with the concept of the Lewis overthrust is that it should have produced a large mass of broken rock in front of it and along the sides. But this has not been found....
...Such a [gigantic 350 mile] slab moving over ground as is now believed to have existed should have scarred and broken the hills and have itself been broken to a greater or less extent, depending on local conditions. No evidence of either of these things has been found.'.....
[C. P. Ross and Richard Rezak: The Rocks and Fossils of Glacier National Park, U. S. Geological Survey Professional Paper 294-K, 1959, p. 424]
...The almost perfectly horizontal nature of the Lewis Overthrust contact line... is revealed in this photograph [p. 190]. There is certainly no apparent indication of any substantial amount of shearing distortion along this surface. Slight differential movements on the two sides of the bedding plane, due to differences in the structural characteristics of shale and limestone, have caused some slight distortion, particularly opening up a clear-cut split along the contact. All along this contact line, for at least a half mile, a very thin (1/16" to 1/8") layer of shale-like material made of fine clay particles is found, adhering in some places to the upper Algonkian limestone and in some to the underlying Cretaceous shales, which are lithologically quite distinct from the layer itself. It seems inconceivable that this very fine layer would have been left so intact if the limestone had actually been thrust over the shale as the Lewis 'Overthrust' interpretation demands... 'Careful study of the various locations [of the Lewis 'Overthrust'] showed no evidence of any grinding or sliding action or slicken-sides such as one would expect to find on the hypothesis of a vast overthrust.
Another amazing fact was the occurrence of two four-inch layers of Altyn limestone intercalated [inserted in layers] with Cretaceous shale. These always occurred below the general contact line of Altyn limestone and shale. Likewise careful study of these intercalations showed not the slightest evidence of abrasive action such as one would expect to find if these were shoved forward in between layers of shale as the overthrust theory demands.'...
[Walter E. Lammerts, Personal Communication, November 27, 1957]
...In light of such physical evidence as cited.. ...how is it possible to defend any longer the grand fiction of the 'Lewis overthrust'? There ought to be no reasonable doubt that the limestones were actually deposited after the shales on which they lie and, therefore, that they are younger in geologic age!
The problem of overthrusting becomes still more difficult when an attempt is made to understand it from the viewpoint of engineering mechanics. The mass of rock in the Lewis overthrust slab, for example, must have weighed approximately eight hundred thousand billion tons! Assuming for the sake of argument that sufficient force could somehow be generated in the earth's crust [which by the way would NOT be a normative - uniformitarian event by any stretch of the imagination] to start such a mass moving with both a vertical and lateral component (moving vertically against the force of gravity and laterally against the frictional force along the sliding plane), it still does not follow that really large blocks could be moved in this manner. It can be calculated, on the basis of known friction coefficients for sliding blocks, that so much frictional (shearing) stress would be developed in a large block that the material itself would fail in shear or compression and, therefore, could not be transported as a coherent block at all. As Hubbert and Rubey point out:
'Consequently, for the conditions assumed, the pushing of a thrust block whose length is of the order of 30 km. or more, along a horizontal surface, appears to be a mechanical impossibility.'
[Hubbert and Rubey, op. cit., p. 126]
The impossibility is compounded, of course, when it is noted that the block does not simply move along a horizontal plane but must also move vertically in order to ride up over the strata on the other side of the fault plane...
[Finally, consider the Matterhorn and other mountains in the Alps]:
...THE MATTERHORN.
This famous Swiss mountain is only one of many in the Alps that are out of the standard geological order. The Matterhorn is supposed to have been thrust from some thirty to sixty miles away, over younger rocks, with substrata in the equally famous Mythen Peak of the Alps are, in ascending order, Eocene, Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous, and it was thought to have been pushed all the way from Africa into Switzerland!...
..The principle of uniformity is unable to yield a real understanding of the processes by which the great tectonic structures of the earth have been produced. And this is exactly what we have been contending...
..In the... [Deluge hypothesis] ...it is postulated that the earth's great complex of faults and folds was produced fairly rapidly when the strata were still soft and plastic. [In the order that they appear in today - without any massive rearranging type thrusting processes] No mysterious and unknown properties of the materials or extravagant attributes of the time dimension need to be invented at all!"
[pp. 408-498]
"Other types of sedimentary deposits which have been conceived as longtime accumulations can also be otherwise explained. For example, the great coral reefs, which appear to represent the accumulations of the calcium carbonate remains of the coral organisms over aeons of time could just as well have been formed in relatively short periods. The total mass of material in a reef is a function not only of time but also of numbers of the multiplying reef-building corals.
There is little direct evidence relating to the vertical rate of growth of coral reefs, but such as is available is compatible with the hypothesis of fairly rapid growth.
'Little has been discovered of the growth rate of reefs by direct measurement. Sluiter found that a new reef established in Krakatau after the eruption of 1883 had grown to a thickness of 20 cm. in 5 years, or 4 cm. per year. Other investigators have estimated reef growth at 0.1 to 5 cm. per year.'
[Ph. H. Kuenen: Marine Geology, (New York, Wiley, 1950), p. 421]
This rate of growth could certainly account for most of the coral reef depths found around the world even during the few thousand years since the Deluge. But it is also possible that many coral reefs are of deceptive thickness.
'Many colonies of reef corals are round and with [few which will have] become perfect boulders. When such boulders are transported, an appreciable percentage of them will come to rest in 'position of growth,' whether they be moved a mile across a reef or a mile down a seaward talus slope. Even elongated or slablike colony may end their journey right side up.'
[H. S. Ladd: "Paleoecological Evidence," Ch. 2 in Treatise on Marine Ecology and Paleoecology, Geological Society of America Memoir 67, vol. 2, 1957, p. 35]
Particularly during the Flood, the extensive reefs formed in the warm waters of the antediluvian seas would have been eroded and re-deposited, often giving the appearance now of an ancient reef of great extent. In any case, it is evident that it is possible to explain coral reef formation, whether ancient or modern, in terms of Biblical geochronology."
"Similarly, it has been claimed that the unconsolidated sediments of the deep sea floor accumulate at extremely slow rates and that their great thicknesses must, therefore, represent immense spans of time. However, evidence is recently indicating both that these thicknesses are not as great as imagined and that the ocean bottom is subject to too many disturbances to permit any kind of gradual undisturbed accumulation.
'The thickness of unconsolidated sediments on the ocean floor is much less than was anticipated in view of the probable great age and permanence of the great ocean basins. Why this is so is an unsolved problem at the present time.'
[Edwin L. Hamilton: "The Last Geographic Frontier: The Sea Floor," Scientific Monthly, Vol. 85, Dec. 1957, p. 296]
That the oozes of the deep sea floor are not in an environment of perpetual calm is proved by the fact that ripple marks, long considered evidence of shallow-water deposition by land geologists, were found in the deep sea. Two remarkable photographs taken on the top of Sylvania Seamount in the Marshall Islands area established the fact that the soft, Globigerina ooze between the manganese-coated boulders was definitely rippled. Recently Carl J. Shipek of the Navy Electronics Laboratory has found well-defined ripple marks down to a depth of about 6000 feet.'
[Ibid., p. 311]
It may be uncertain whether ripples require shallow water or not, but hydraulically it is certain that they at least require substantial motions of the water above them, and this fact militates strongly against any assumption that the oozes have been settling calmly in static water over great periods of time.
But there is evidence of much greater activity than mere ripple-forming currents over great portions of the deep ocean. Somehow even fresh-water deposits have been formed, and that recently in many such areas. In analyzing the deep-sea cores obtained by the Swedish Expedition of 1947-48, in the Atlantic Ocean particularly, a surprising fact was discovered:
'One of the most interesting observations was the unexpected presence of many fresh-water diatoms in certain cores taken by the expedition's ship Albatross parallel to the coast line of equatorial Africa at a great distance off the coast... The novelty of the present observations lies in the constant occurrence of fresh-water diatoms in Atlantic deepsea cores, the large number of individuals, and the relatively great variety of species. More than 60 fresh-water species, belonging to various ecological groups, were observed: plankton and benthonic forms, species typical for habitats rich in nutrients and even for some poor in nutrients, most forms being common cosmopolites - that is, species of world-wide distribution.'
[R. W. Kolbe: "Fresh-Water Diatoms from Atlantic Deep-Sea Sediments," Science, Vol. 126, November 22, 1957, p. 1053]
The presence of fresh-water organisms in deep-sea deposits can mean one of only two things: either the originally fresh-water deposits have been moved into the deep ocean by some kind of strong currents or other disturbances or else the present sea-bottom was once a continental area which has since sunk thousands of feet to its present position.
Similarly, there are numerous places in the deep ocean where shallow-water sediments are found. Speaking of the cores taken in the supposedly ancient and undisturbed sediments of the deep ocean floor, Hamilton says:
'The surprising result has been the discovery that there is, in many areas, only a superficial carpet of the expected deep-sea sediment and that under this thin carpet there is an alternation of thin layers of sediments which could have come only from shallower water.'
[E. L. Hamilton, op. cit., p. 298]
Referring to recent discoveries of the Woods Hole and Lamont Geological Observatory deep-sea expeditions, Parker Trask remarks:
'Many of these cores show interstratified layers of sand. Some of these sand layers are in many thousands of feet of water and are remarkably well sorted. Similar sand bodies have been reported by investigators of Scripps Institution of Oceanography in water off the coast of southern California. The origin of these sand bodies has not been satisfactorily explained.'
[Parker D. Trask: Recent Marine Sediments, (Tulsa, 2nd Ed., Society of Economic Paleontologists and Mineralogists, 1955), p. xix]
We have already pointed out the evidence of the great amount of volcanic and tectonic activity on the deep sea floor, as well as the capacity of submarine turbidity currents to move large masses of sediments great distances along the ocean floor. The lesson so obviously to be learned from all these facts is that the sea bottom is not the quiet, inactive place it has been thought for so long to be, but rather can and does experience frequent and varied disturbances of such intensity as to bring shallow-water and even fresh-water deposits down into the deepest depths. This can mean only that any supposed method of geochronometry based on the supposedly slow, regular deposition of deep-sea (or shallow-sea) oozes or other sediments is basically unreliable. One can never be sure in any given situation that the particular deposit has not been disturbed or that the deposition rate has been constant.
In fact, it is doubtful that even such a semi-uniformitarian process as turbidity currents can explain some of the phenomena. Continuing his consideration of the fresh-water diatoms found two miles deep in the mid-Atlantic, Kolbe says:
'Even if we should accept the faint possibility of a turbidity current flowing from the African coast and dumping its load of fresh-water diatoms at a distance of 930 km. from this coast, it remains to be explained how it was possible for this current not only to carry its load such a distance but, at the same time, to climb uphill more than 1000 m. before dumping the load on top of a submarine hill.'
[R. W. Kolbe: "Turbidity Currents and Displaced Fresh-Water Diatoms," Science, Vol. 127, June 1958, p. 1505]
These phenomena not only demonstrate the meaninglessness of any evidence for great ages of time that might be inferred from the deep-sea sediments but actually demonstrate once again the barrenness of the principle of uniformity as the determinative basis of historical geology...
'Can we, as seekers after truth, shut our eyes any longer to the obvious fact that large areas of sea floor have sunk vertical distances measured in miles? Why not accept this, and devote the cerebral horsepower now being wasted on futile attempts to explain away the truth to finding out the mechanism which produces these drastic sea-level changes?'
[Kenneth K. Landes: "Illogical Geology," Geotimes, Vol. III, March 1959, p. 19]
[pp. 412-417]
"Another type of sedimentary deposit that may seem difficult to compress into a short span of time is found in the great beds of so-called 'evaporites.' These consist mainly of salt, gypsum, and anhydrite (calcium sulphate) beds. The term 'evaporite' is applied to these deposits because it is believed that they were formed by long-continued evaporation from inland seas or lakes containing saline water. A supposed modern example is the Dead Sea, where the evaporation rate is very high (about 120 inches annually) and where the water continually entering the lake has no other outlet than evaporation.. The Dead Sea, of course, is known to have an extremely high concentration of chemicals of various kinds as a result, and it is believed that this process, if continued over long ages, would produce beds of evaporites such as are found in many places in the geologic column. But, at present rates, this process would obviously require hundreds of thousands of years to produce such beds as are actually found in the strata...
...But there is always the possibility that the evaporite bed was formed by transportation from some previous location, where it may have existed since the Creation. And there is also the possibility that it may have been formed by intense application of heat for evaporation of large quantities of water in a short time rather than ordinary solar heat acting over a long time.
One of the most important types of evaporite deposits is the salt dome. These structures are often associated with petroleum and so have important economic implications. Their tremendous size is indicated by the following:
'The salt core generally stands vertical or nearly vertical and has a roughly circular or oval horizontal section, measuring from 1000 ft. to two miles or so in diameter. It extends downward 15,000 and even 20,000 ft.'
[F. H. Lahee: Field Geology (5th ed., New York, McGraw, 1952), pp. 190-191]
It would seem the height of absurdity to imagine that these huge thicknesses of salt had been built up by evaporation of standing water. It would require complete evaporation of a body of sea water about 8000 ft. deep to produce a depth of only 100 ft. of salt! Nevertheless evaporation or other precipitation from solution was considered for a long time to be the proper explanation for such beds. However, a much more realistic interpretation is now generally accepted.
'Although many theories have been proposed to explain the origin of these salt domes, the view most commonly supported in America until the early 1920's was that the salt was deposited from ascending waters. However serious objections to this theory have been presented. In Europe, where the domes are often laid bare to considerable depths by erosion, and where, consequently, a more certain idea of their structure and origin is obtainable, geologists came to believe that the salt was thrust upward into the sediments like a punch, principally by mechanical means, assisted by the ordinary processes of granulation and recrystallization supposed to accompany the development of schistosity in metamorphic rocks.'
[Ibid., p. 192]
In terms of Biblical geology, it would seem reasonable to attribute these original salt beds to the activities of the Creation period, with the intrusions forming the salt domes being associated with the other volcanic and tectonic activity during the Deluge period...
And if tectonic activity can suffice to explain these most spectacular of the various types of evaporites, there seems to be no reason why it cannot also explain, at least in part, many of the others. As a matter of fact, the principle of uniformity has been quite unsuccessful in accounting for the more extensive evaporites of all kinds, as well as for the salt domes...
[For example] ...the relict sea - by which is meant a basin formerly freely connected with the ocean but which is now nearly isolated and, therefore, gradually drying up...
But none... ...has produced evaporites at all comparable in scope to those in the older strata! ...tremendous depths of water are indicated to account for the deposits; or else, there must be continuing subsidence together with a continued influx of marine waters into the relict sea. There is no place in the world today where this combination of features is found; hence there must again be added to the uniformitarian principle a sizeable increment of pure imagination to account for the great salt and gypsum beds..
In view of the difficulties encountered by uniformitarianism in attempting to explain the great evaporite beds and the need to postulate either some special kind of brine which does not now exist or else some special conditions of evaporation and metamorphism that are not known to exist at present, perhaps it is not too presumptuous to suggest that these unusual brines may have been generated during the volcanic upheavals accompanying the Deluge and that unusual conditions of vaporization and separation of precipitates may likewise have been caused by the locally high temperatures accompanying these same upheavals...
...the catastrophic environmental factors associated with the Flood provide a more satisfactory framework within which to develop a satisfactory hypothesis than does the alternate procedure of pure speculation!"
x) CAVE DEPOSITS: STALACTITES & STALAGMITES
[p. 417-418]
A different form of
evaporite which is popularly believed to require long periods of time for
formation is the familiar stalactite or stalagmite found in limestone
caverns. These are formed by the evaporation of lime-bearing waters
percolating through the cavern rood. Obviously, the rate of such cave
travertine formation [layered calcium
carbonate deposits] depends mainly on the rate of percolation of the
source water. The fact that this rate may be very slow at present
certainly does not mean it has always been so.
Thornbury says:
'Various attempts have been made to estimate the rate of formation of cave travertine [layered calcium carbonate deposits], but so many variable factors affect the rate of deposition that it is doubtful if cavern ages arrived at by this method are accurate.'
[Wm. D. Thornbury, op. cit., p. 338]
The caverns themselves are believed by most cave geologists to have been formed by solution of the limestone rock at a time when the rocks were saturated. With the gradual lowering of the water table, it is obvious that percolating waters would for some time be still quite plentiful, only gradually lessening in amount. Thus, the rate of formation of stalactites and stalagmites would be rapid at first, gradually leveling off to present rates.
Even under modern conditions, it is quite possible for these formations to develop rapidly. The speleologist [cave exploration specialist] Hendrix says, for example:
'How long does it take for a stalactite to grow? ...there is more than a little evidence that growth is considerably rapid. First of all, stalactites are found in man-made tunnels that are only a few years old... Second, certain conditions are so favorable to dripstone growth that as much as several cubic inches a year may be deposited in a single stalactite... Third, there are many examples of large stalagmites growing on blocks of stone that have fallen from cave ceilings.'
[Charles E. Hendrix: The Cave Book (Revere, Mass.: Earth Science Publ. Co., 1950), p. 26]
Consequently, to attribute great lengths of time to the formation of such cave deposits is not only unnecessary but unreasonable as well."
[Don R. Patton, op. cit., tape #1]:
"One indication of great age is often argued from the formations that we see in caves... We're told [that] the speleotherms, the stalactites and stalagmites, take thousands of years. The statement in one of the geology textbooks from which I was taught says it takes 100,000 years to form one cubic inch. Now that's an absurd statement and most geologists know better but that's what is in some of the textbooks... We have seen these [stalactities, drapery formations and stalagmites] form very very rapidly... I was told by an individual who was a researcher with the National Speleological Society that in Indiana [near Blue Springs] at the George Rogers Clark Memorial... in the basement there were formations just like you find in caves. Now this stone that forms this memorial was quarried just six miles from Blue Springs Cave... And the water percolating down through the cracks in the rocks of these limestone blocks has produced formations... just like you find produced when the water percolates down through the cracks in the caves.... [There in the memorial] we found just exactly what we find in the caves. If we'll notice these drapery type formations hanging from the fixtures in the basement. We also see the stalactites and the stalagmites that were formed in a building that was at that time less than 40 years old. In fact, there were large columns [of limestone deposition] that we found... eleven feet tall. And there were five of them like this eleven feet tall! Now, if this can form in less than 40 years, I look around... [considering that some say that] the earth is supposed to be billions of years old. Where are the huge ones, I mean really huge ones?... No. It does not take a long time to do this. It's dependent upon the concentration of minerals, the rate of flow, the ventilation. A number of factors control it. But when the factors are right, they form very, very rapidly...
LIMESTONE STALACTITES CEILING TO FLOOR IN LESS THAN 225 YEARS
Scientists
have discovered that the formation growth rates of stalactites and
stalagmites are driven by several variables. However, experiments have
discovered that one primary factor involves the acidic level of the
water...
[Compare two quotations from Dr. Patton's notes which indicates that the rate of precipitation of cave formations is subject to change:
'Changes in atmospheric partial pressures of carbon dioxide produce corresponding changes in carbon dioxide solubility. Because of these relations, there is a direct connection between atmospheric carbon dioxide and that amount of dissolved calcium ion in sea water... If the carbon dioxide dissolved in seawater decreases, some bicarbonate ions change to carbonate, thereby causing precipitation of calcium carbonate.'
[W.C. KRUMBEIN, L.I. SLOSS, Dept. of Geol., Northwestern Univ., STRATIGRAPHY AND SEDIMENTATION, p. 223[
'Hanging from a ceiling beam in the 40-year-old building's basement are several rows of formations not usually seen so close to ground level. Stalactites. Yep, stalactites - more than 100 of the squiggly, slippery rock formations that thousands of people pay to see in places named Carsbad and Mammoth... They are natural cave ornaments, pure and simple... Deputy Chief Ray Hawkins has been parking in the basement of the building at Harwood and Main streets since the 1960's and can't remember a time when the mineral-sicles weren't hanging around.'
[Dallas Morning News, 4/4/1994 p. 13A]
[pp. 418-421]
"Another important type of sedimentary phenomenon that seems at first to require much longer periods of time than the Bible would allow is found in cyclically repeated deposits, each cycle of which seems to require a certain more or less measurable time in which to be formed. An often-quoted example is a [so-called] succession of buried forests on Amethyst Mountain in the northwestern part of Yellowstone National Park.
J. L. Kulp discusses these as follows:
'In Yellowstone Park there is a stratigraphic section of 2000 ft. exposed which shows 18 successive petrified forests. Each forest grew to maturity before it was wiped out with a lava flow. The lava had to be weathered into soil before the next forest could even start. Further this is only a small section of stratigraphic column in this area. It would be most difficult for flood geology to account for these facts.'
[J. L. Kulp: "Flood Geology," Journal of the American Scientific Affiliation, January 1950, p. 10]
[However, what is represented in the oft quoted reference above is simply not the case]:
'Many of these trees are prostrated and in various positions; those that are upright apparently remained in that position due to the weight of their root system and attached soil as they were rafted into their final burial place...
The so-called petrified forests are in reality only stumps; there are no limbs or fossil foliage as one would expect if the complete trees had suddenly been inundated by a shower of volcanic fragments and ash. Neither are the root systems complete; only occasional trees remain upright and show some parts of the root system still attached.
The stumps give every appearance of having been in some manner sheared off by some overwhelming force (possible tsunami-driven debris), then uprooted and transported and sorted out from other materials and then suddenly buried beneath a volcanic shower. Then came another wave of sediment and stumps (several layers of sediment, however, appear to be without any stumps), possibly resulting from the tsunami generated by the preceding eruption, then another volcanic shower, and so on. The whole formation, as does the volcanic terrain all over the Yellowstone region and the Pacific northwest, literally proclaims catastrophic deposition!"
[Dr. Don R. Patton, op. cit., tape #1]:
"The quotation referring to the tree standing upright in the sediment: here is one of the illustrations that accompanied an article in Scientific American several years ago. [The] tree was 43 feet high with hundreds of layers surrounding it, just as well preserved at the top as at the bottom. Now, can you look at that and imagine 2700 years a foot?... And in another illustration in a similar article, we see 50 trees described. Now this was from France. Now what would possibly explain this kind of phenomena? You see trees buried standing upright with huge amounts of sediment. No, it takes something like a large flood - a catastrophic flood - to [deposit sediments which] bury a forest and cover the trees and then [to have these sediments] form into rock rapidly in order to preserve the detail that we see in these trees as well at the top as at the bottom... I think that's an excellent description and estimate of what happened and it fits best with the evidence."
FOSSILIZED TREES CUT THROUGH "MILLIONS" OF YEARS OF ROCK LAYERS
After the erruption of Mount Saint Helens the trees covered the surface of spirit lake in the thousands– snapped down like toothpicks.
Polystrate trees (upright fossilized trunks pushing through many rock layers) are also called polystrate fossils. These specimens indicate rapid burial of the tree in mud slides and molten rock layers over a very short period of time and not over millions of years. These upright tree trunks are found all around the world. Some are found in rock layers while others are found in coal seams in The King Billy pines, Celery Top pines, and in southern hemisphere coal. There are also polystrate tree trunks in the Yellowstone fossilized forests and in Nova Scotia and many other places throughout the world. Polystrate fossilized trunks occur in northern hemisphere coal, indicating rapid burial.
As
the tree logs become saturated with water they begin to float upright
and eventually fall to the bottom of the lake into deep sediments.
https://answersingenesis.org/fossils/how-are-fossils-formed/do-fossils-show-signs-of-rapid-burial/
Yellow stone fossilized stumps with the tree
split off just like Mount St Helens.
Yellow stone polystrate trees– no trunks.
These were split and set in sediments–
not rock layers over millions of years.
The
evolutionary, uniformitarian explanation for petrified forests (with
polystrate tree specimens) find the lowest level of trees represents
the most ‘ancient’ soil level and forest, and each level above
represents another forest (less ‘ancient’). The layers consist of
mature trees (in some areas) trees have up to 1,000 growth rings. In
the first forest, the trees were growing in their natural habitat,
when they were covered with volcanic ash and other debris. Over
time, the trees petrified, and the surface ash turned to volcanic clay,
and to a soil layer. Another forest of trees grew up, matured, and was
also buried by volcanic ash.
http://www.mandley.com/advdemo/mod05/adv5430.htm
Stump at Mount St. Helens
Evidence from the Mount St. Helens erruption clearly indicates that all the layers (thought to being ‘ancient’) could form over perhaps a decade or two as water saturates the logs and pierces them into the soft soils at the bottom of bodies of water. After the water dries, over perhaps hundreds or thousands of years, the logs petrify and become the petrified forests we find around the world.
[pp. 421-429]
"'varved clays'... ...are banded sediments, each band usually quite thin with color grading from light to dark. Each varve has been [falsely] interpreted as an annual deposit, the light-colored portion representing coarser deposits presumably formed during the summer months and the darker portion representing winter deposition, all on the bed of a former lake. If this interpretation is valid [and it is not], varves can be used not only as qualitative indices of time duration but as actual measures of years during which the deposit was being formed...
There are several important difficulties with the varve method however, one of which is the impossibility of knowing that the bands actually represent annual layers. Many other phenomena could produce such bands; for example, variation in flow and sediment burden of the stream or streams feeding the lake. Any brief flooding discharge into the lake would cause an initial layer of larger-sized particles followed by gradual settling of the finer particles, and this would give the appearance of a lamination. And there are other causes. As Pettijohn says:
'The cause of such laminations are variations in the rate of supply or deposition of the different materials. These variations might result from changes in the quantity of silt, clay, or calcium carbonate, or organic matter in the sea water or to changes in the rate of accumulation of these materials. Such variations have been attributed to the fortuitous shift in the depositing currents, to climatic causes (especially cyclical changes related to diurnal or annual rhythms), and also to aperiodic storms or floods.'
[F. J. Pettijohn: op. cit., p. 163]:
[Neither can more extensive varve deposits such as at Green River which consist of great thicknesses of thinly-laminated shales be interpreted over a long period of time]:
"...'The most thorough study of rocks thought to be varved are the Green River shales... ...Wyoming and Colorado... The shales are very thinly layered; and each layer consists of two laminae, one of which contains considerably more carbonaceous matter than the other. The paired laminae are interpreted as representing the sediment laid down during one year, in short, a varve, an interpretation which is strengthened by the fact that the varves fluctuate in thickness in a cycle corresponding to the sunspot cycle. The varves average less than 1/2000 of a foot in thickness, and as the Green River shales are 2,600 feet thick, the time represented by their accumulation is about 6 million years.'
[Adolph Knopf, "Time in Earth History," in Genetics, Paleontology, and Evolution, ed. by Jepsen, Mayr, and Simpson, (Princeton, N.J., Princeton Univ. Press, 1949), p. 4]
[However]...in the [above] study itself, only two very inadequate reasons are given for believing the layers to be annual.
One is a calculation purporting to show that the amount of sediment in the formation is of the same order of magnitude as the probable amount of erosion from the ancient drainage basin contributing to the lakes whose beds are supposed to form these shales. But obviously anything so hypothetical as a calculation involving a watershed of entirely speculative extent, slope, character, erosibility and drainage characteristics, all taken as a basis for estimation of average rates of erosion - a type of calculation which almost everyone now admits to be nothing but rank guesswork - can hardly warrant so far-reaching a conclusion as that the accumulation of the formation required about 6 million years!
The other reason for concluding the laminations to be annual varves was their similarity of appearance to the varved clays of the [so called] Pleistocene and, to a lesser extent, banded sediments found in certain modern lakes. This is the old principle of uniformity again! The resemblance, however, is largely superficial... The [so called] Pleistocene varves are much thicker than the Green River laminations (which average less than 6/1000 of an inch in thickness) and reflect glacial melt-water deposition, whereas the Green River shales are denoted mainly by a cyclic repetition of organic and inorganic matter. The organic layers [of the Green River shales] are quite rich petroleum deposits... [unlike the thicker 'Pleistocene' lake deposits]
...With respect to the Green River shales, in particular, several factors make it highly doubtful that they could possibly represent annual varved layers. For one thing, they are entirely too thin and uniform and extend over too wide an area to have been deposited in a normal lake bed. No matter how calm a lake may be ordinarily, occasional storms stir up the bottom sediments, and occasional river floods dump into the lake large quantities of sediment, which would then settle out on the lake bottom in an essentially graded series. To imagine that such an extensive lake, fed as it must have been by many rivers, could continue so impossibly quiet and inactive and undisturbed for six million years is somewhat ridiculous.
The Green River shales are also rich in fossils, a fact which is hard to reconcile with the supposed quiet manner of its formation. Miller observes:
'The Green River formation is a fresh-water lake deposit composed largely of evenly stratified soft shales as much as 2000 feet thick. Many fossils, including fishes, insects, and plants occur in it.'
[W. J. Miller: An Introduction to Historical Geology (New York, Van Nostrand, 1952), p. 366]
How does one explain, for example, a dead fish lying on the bed of a lake for about two hundred years while the slowly accumulating sediments gradually cover it and then fossilize it?...
Other significant features include the extensive deposits of volcanic ash mingled with the shales and the almost complete absence of any graded bedding in the oil-rich shales such as would be normally encountered in any lake-bottom sediment. Also, there is evidence of brecciated conditions in many parts of the formation. All of these features... ...seem difficult to harmonize with the postulated character of the beds...
The absence of graded bedding in the shales is significant. If the individual layers had been deposited by simply settling to the bottom of a quiescent lake, it seems certain that each layer would be marked by a gradual decrease in particle size with increasing elevation. The laminations are marked strictly by thin layers of black organic-rich matter, and the location and frequency of these seem quite irregular...
....The only certain conclusion, from the very nature of the deposits, would seem to be that they could not have been formed as cyclic varves as claimed. A possible plausible explanation might be in terms of a vast sedimentary basin formed by the gradual uplift of the land surrounding it, in the later stages of the Deluge period. A complex of shallow turbidity currents, carrying the still soft surface sediments and organic slime from the surface of the rising lands would then enter the basin, mingle, and deposit their loads. Slight changes in velocities or compositions of the turbidity currents would account for much of the laminated appearance of the central deposits, although it is possible that the accumulation of the organic matter into a succession of thin seams was also partly caused by later physico-chemical factors affecting the sedimentary mass. The general appearance of the Green River formation as a whole seems consistent with this sort of concept...
....banded deposits need not be explained as annual deposits at all or even chronologically cyclic deposits in many cases. Various types of chemical reactions are known to be capable of producing this type of phenomenon. R. L. Handy says:
'A third school of thought is that the bands represent a cyclic precipitation, or so-called diffusion banding or Liesegang phenomenon. Reacting solutions of chemicals do this if over-saturation is required for the reaction to start. The reaction starts, uses up all the chemicals in the vicinity, and makes a band; then it won't start again until the same point of over-saturation is again reached farther down or farther out.'
[R. L. Handy: Screenings from the Soil Research Lab, publ. by Iowa Engineering Experiment Station, Ames, Iowa, Vol. 3, Mar.-April, 1959, p. 4]
[pp. 429-437]
"Uniformitarian geology is frequently defended on the ground that it has worked so well in leading to the discovery of economically important deposits of petroleum and metals. It is maintained that it must be basically correct, or else it could not have served so well as a guiding philosophy in economic geology.
But two replies can quickly be given to this sort of statement. In the first place, it has apparently not worked very well, as the discovery of valuable deposits of any kind is hardly on anything approaching a fully scientific basis as yet. In the second place, such techniques as have actually been found helpful in exploration do not really depend on the historical aspects of geology at all but only on recognition of the structural and sedimentary markers that experience has shown are associated with such deposits....
[As a matter of fact]...oil discovery is still not very efficient scientifically. The following comment points up a few of the pertinent statistics, coming as it does from one of the country's leading petroleum geologists:
'Oil is getting harder to find. The high risks inherent in the research for oil are unusual in the business world. Statistics show that only one wildcat well in nine discovers oil or gas; only one in 44 proves to be a profitable venture; only one in 427 discovers a field of 25 million barrels; and only one in 991 finds a real payoff - a major pool with 50 million or more barrels.'
[R. D. Sloan: "The Future of the Exploration Geologist," Geotimes, Vol. III, No. 1, 1958, p. 6]
[Consideration of the Biblical point of view of geology could hardly do worse in finding oil than the track record of the evolution minded geologists]
...As yet, in fact uniformitarian geology has not been able to develop even a generally acceptable theory as to the origin of oil or its basic source material...
'While agreement is nearly complete on the organic source of petroleum, there are wide differences of opinion on the process by which it was formed and on the nature of the organic matter from which it was derived... Further differences of thought arise when an attempt is made to explain the transformation of organic source material into petroleum. Heat and pressure, bacterial action, radioactive bombardment, and catalytic reactions - each has its proponents as the chief source of energy responsible for the conversion.'
[A. I. Levorsen: Geology of Petroleum (San Francisco, W. H. Freeman & Co., 1954), p. 476]
It is apparent that once again, and in this most important (both economically and in numbers of geologists concerned) of all geological disciplines, the principle of uniformity has proved impotent. Although some use is made of micropaleontology in correlation of oil-bearing strata, its economic applicability is almost entirely local. That is, geologists can identify a given formation from two or more well logs by the microfossils contained in the cuttings and thus orient the log with respect to some plane of interest, but this can only be done on a local scale within the confines of the given formation. The process has virtually no value or significance for regional correlations.
Even on the local scale, the microfossils are not nearly so important as other factors revealed by the well logs....
'Professional geologists working in the petroleum industry are apt to lose sight of the importance of fossils, for within the confines of one oil field and even one sedimentary basin, bed tracing by lithologic characters and by electric logging makes fossils appear superfluous.'
[Walter H. Bucher; "International Responsibilities of Geologists,"]
[As a matter of fact, the Biblical doctrine of a universal catastrophic flood best describes the occurrence of oil]:
...One important fact accounts in large measure for the difficulty in explaining the origin and geological history of oil, namely that oil has been found in rocks of practically all [so called] geologic ages except the [so called] Pleistocene. It is a feature essentially common to all the stratified rocks and, therefore, cannot be easily located by means of the usual stratigraphic and paleontologic criteria for identifying rocks [upon which the model of evolution is based] This fact also gives strong testimony that such a universal phenomenon as oil, found as it is in all the rock systems, must have a universal explanation. The conditions of its formation must have been essentially the same everywhere. Rather than supporting thereby the concept of uniformity in time, this fact seems rather to evidence the fact of uniformity of manner of origin and formation and thereby to imply one global event which somehow brought about the genesis of all the great oil reservoirs of the earth's crust! This universal occurrence of petroleum is indicated by Cox, as follows:
'Petroleum occurs in rocks of all ages from the Cambrian to the Pliocene inclusive, but no evidence has been found to prove that any petroleum has been formed since the Pliocene, although sedimentation patterns and thicknesses in Pleistocene and Recent sediments are similar to those in the Pliocene where petroleum has formed.'
[Ben B. Cox: "Transformation of Organic Material Into Petroleum Under Geological Conditions," Bulletin, Amer. Assoc. Petroleum Geologists, Vol. 30, May 1946, p. 647]
We would suggest that there must be a connection between the fact that Pleistocene and Recent sediments are post-Diluvian and the fact that in these only has no petroleum deposit been found. Otherwise the reason for this fact is quite mysterious...
A very few oil deposits have been noted in both pre-Cambrian and Pleistocene deposits, but these are known to have migrated into them after earlier formation and deposition in other sedimentary rocks. The absence of oil in Pleistocene rocks is all the more mysterious in view of the fact that some petroleum hydrocarbons have been found in Recent sediments, indicating that long ages are not required for the formation of such hydrocarbons.
[Ref. P. V. Smith, Jr.: "The Occurrence of Hydrocarbons in Recent Sediments from the Gulf of Mexico," Science, Vol. 116, October 24, 1952, pp. 437-439]
At the same time, these hydrocarbons are definitely not petroleum, which evidently requires special conditions of some kind before it will form...
...W. E. Hanson says: 'Although hydrocarbons form an important part of the organic fraction of recent sediments, crude oil as we know it has not formed in these sediments even well beyond the zone of major bacterial activity.' ('Some Chemical Aspects of Petroleum Genesis,' Researches in Geochemistry, ed. by P. H. Abelson, New York, John Wiley and Sons, 1959, p. 114).
About all that is definitely known is that petroleum occurrences seem to have no particular relation to particular stratigraphic sequences or to structural forms. Neither the paleontologic history nor the deformational history appears to bear any necessary relation to actual oil deposits.
'Reservoir rocks that contain petroleum differ from one another in various ways. They range in geologic age from pre-Cambrian to Pliocene, in composition from siliceous to carbonate, in origin from sedimentary to igneous, in porosity from 1 to 40 percent, and in permeability from one millidarcy to many darcies.
There is a wide variation also in the character of the trap that retains the pool. The trap may have been formed as the result of causes that are entirely structural or entirely stratigraphic, or from any combination of these causes... The geologic history of the trap may vary widely - from a single geologic episode to a combination of many phenomena extending over a long period of geologic time. Pools trapped in limestone and dolomite reservoir rock, for example, have the same relations that pools trapped in sandstone rocks have to such things as the reservoir fluids, oil-water and oil-gas contacts, and trap boundaries. Yet the chemical relations of the reservoir rock and the effects of solution, cementation, compaction, and recrystallization are quite different in sandstone and carbonate reservoirs.'
[A. I. Levorsen: op. cit., pp. 523-524]
The most immediately apparent conclusion from all this is that the accumulation of petroleum into traps must have occurred after all, or practically all, the strata were laid down, since they are apparently entirely independent of the particular type of rock but are, nevertheless, similar to each other in hydraulic characteristics. The main feature that all such deposits have in common is that of being associated with water:
'Nearly every petroleum pool exists within an environment of water - free, interstitial, edge, and bottom water. This means that the problem of migration is intimately related to hydrology, hydraulics, and groundwater movement.'
[Ibid., p. 523]
Another extremely important fact is that apparently all petroleum is organic in origin. There have been inorganic theories of origin in the past, but the accumulated evidence now is overwhelming that petroleum has an organic basis...
The exact nature of the organic material has been as yet quite unsettled, but there seems little doubt that the vast reservoirs of organic remains, both plant and animal, in the sedimentary rocks constitute a more than adequate source...
...the Deluge once again appears to offer a satisfactory explanation of the origin of oil, as well as the other stratigraphic phenomena. The great sedimentary basins being filled rapidly and more or less continuously during the Flood would provide a prolific source of organic material, together with whatever heat and pressure might have been needed to initiate the chemical reactions necessary to begin the transformation into petroleum hydrocarbons...
Recent studies indicate that certain dilute soap solutions seem to be associated with petroleum formation, in that these can act as solubilizers for the hydrocarbons in the deposited sediments which, when further diluted with water, permit the dissolved hydrocarbons to appear as discrete oil droplets.
'Thus, it would seem that crude oil originates during the compaction of a sedimentary basin by virtue of the fact that sediment hydrocarbons dissolve in waters containing natural solubilizers and then come of solution as oil droplets. The composition of crude oil as now understood is consistent with this hypothesis.'
[E. G. Baker: "Origin and Migration of Oil," Science, Vol. 129, April 3, 1959, p. 874]
Different specific types of solution mechanisms appear to account for the different types of crude oils. Constituents for the solubilizers would certainly be available at many places during the Deluge, especially in areas of heavy organic deposition of marine animal remains.
This process of oil formation implies, too, that oil was formed over wide areas, rather than in the relatively limited locations in which it is found.
'Such a mechanism would lend credence to the suggestion that the source leads of petroleum are not necessarily unique accumulations of hydrocarbons in a limited area but, rather, may generally be coincident with the area from which water is expressed into the porous strata that eventually form the reservoirs.'
[Ibid.]
...the general picture of vast organic remains, somehow dissolved and transformed chemically into petroleum hydrocarbons, then eventually reprecipitated as oil, is basically valid and harmonizes well with the concept of catastrophic burial and dissolution during the Deluge.
The process of gradual accumulation into oil pools and reservoirs is, then, from here on basically a hydraulic problem. The oil droplets, by buoyancy, tend to rise up through the surrounding water and thus gradually to accumulate at the upper surface of the water. The extent of this transportation and the amount accumulated will depend on the hydraulic gradients and permeabilities of the containing strata. This, of course, has nothing to do with the fossil contents of the strata and very little to do with the tectonic history of the region, except to the extent that particular formations which are either permeable or impermeable, as the case may be, may have been distorted in some way...
These hydraulic processes have been continuing since the Deluge, gradually concentrating the oil that was formed at that time, or soon after, into traps. But there is no reason at all to think that these processes may have required long ages of time to be accomplished. As already seen, even under some modern conditions, petroleum hydrocarbons can be formed rather quickly.
'More recently a school of thought has developed which believes that oil formation may begin soon after deposition of the organic matter in the sediments... One of the surprising results of this study has been the discovery of liquid hydrocarbons in Recent sediments from the Gulf of Mexico.'
[P. V. Smith, Jr.: "Occurrence of Hydrocarbons in Recent Sediments from the Gulf of Mexico," Science, Vol. 116, October 24, 1952. p. 437]
Similarly, the traps that form the pools need not have taken long to form. Although no primary oil deposits are found in Pleistocene strata, it has been shown that certain of the traps found in earlier strata were actually formed during Pleistocene time, which as we have seen is, in our framework, post-Deluge.
'An example is the Kettlema Hills pool in California; the oil and gas of this pool are in the Miocene Temblor formation, but the fold is parallel to the Pleistocene rocks at the surface of the ground. This places the accumulation in late Pleistocene or post-Pleistocene time... An illustration of the short time for a pool to adjust itself to a change in conditions may be seen in the tilting of the Cairo pool in Arkansas. The tilt occurred within a period of 10-12 years; if it had gone on for a few years more, at the same rate, the oil would probably have moved completely out of the trap. Thus the time it takes for oil to accumulate into pools may be geologically short, the minimum being measured, possibly, in thousands or even hundreds of years.'
[A. I. Levorsen: op. cit., p. 524]
...[So] The character of petroleum deposits, and such information as has been accumulated regarding the origin and migration of oil, harmonize quite well with the Deluge hypothesis."
[Dr. Don R. Patton, op. cit., tape #1]:
A beautiful example of this phenomenon is seen near Cookville, Tennessee in the coal measures there. This tree standing upright in the sediment actually extends through two cyclotherms. A cyclotherm is a series of ten different rock units where we find coal forming. And this sequence - this series - of ten rock units repeats some 50 to 100 times. Trying to explain those cyclic deposits by normal uniformitarian processes gets very entertaining. I think the tidal forces of a huge flood are much better at explaining the cyclic forces. But if we look at the picture and notice that we've got coal down near the bottom that extends through numbers of layers up into another layer of coal above, what we're seeing there is a picture that demonstrates you can't form coal over hundreds of thousands of years. It has to be basically a catastrophic event that deposits this sediment and covers it and forms it into rock rapidly or you don't get this kind of picture with the tree standing upright well preserved from top to bottom in it. Actually, experiments with the formation of coal show, contrary to what we read and hear continually, does not take a long period of time [to form]. Consider the quotation from Chemtech of several years ago giving the results of an experiment where a fella for years and years to form coal in the laboratory and couldn't get it to happen. He says the reason is [that] he assumed it took a long time. But rather accidentally he found out that he could do it if he did it rapidly. He says,
'A rather startling and serendiptious discovery resulted... These observations suggest that in their formation, high rank coals ...were probably subjected to high temperature at some stage in their history. A possible mechanism for formation of these high rank coals could have been a short time, rapid heating event.' [Six hours]
[George R. Hill, Dean of College of Mines & Mineral Industries, Chemtech, May, 1972, p. 292]
By short time, he relates in the article he's talking about 6 hours.... With temperature and pressure, you can get coal formed from wood in just a few hours. And it doesn't happen slowly. Of course, you study the strata, the environment in which coal is formed and you would learn that from the trees and from... minute details in beautifully preserved fossils... The same kind of picture is seen when we experiment with the formation of oil. Notice the quotation from the Sentinel Star down in Orlando, Florida back in 1982 [Feb. 26]. And we're doing this at Texas A & M by the way. But this was reporting from an experiment in London where we are told, 'British scientists claimed to have invented a way to turn household garbage into oil suitable for home heating or power plant use...
[And we are told here that] '''We are doing in 10 minutes what it has taken nature 150 million years to do,''' said Noel McAuliffe of Manchester University's Institute of Science and technology.'
[The article] goes on to say [that the oil] is comparable in quality to Middle Eastern crude. Ten minutes, but it took nature 150 million years. Of course, nobody sat around and watched it happen. And when we look at the environment in which we find it, we find beautifully preserved, large fossils that demand a rapid burial. And we know when we do observe it forming, that it happens rapidly. What's the most scientific explanation for its formation? Billions of years or just a short event. Well [a short event is] what we observe. That's what science is supposed to be about...
[pp. 437-438]
"Ores of all kinds may be found in rocks of all geologic ages, nearly always associated with igneous intrusions. Thus, historical geology can be of no real aid in locating such deposits. Neither is the origin of ore bodies any better understood than the origin of petroleum deposits...
The formation of ore deposits is seemingly a phenomenon that occurred in the past, independently of the particular geological stratum and by means of agencies... ...which most likely were catastrophic in character, associated with volcanism...
'...mineralization is not a rare phenomenon nor a vagary of Nature, as is sometimes assumed, but is, instead, a common geological process, almost invariably accompanying volcanic activity as a final phase thereof, while it is probably an attendant feature of most igneous intrusions within the uppermost four miles of the Earth's Crust.'
[Walker and Walker, op. cit., p. 336]
...it would seem that its [ore formation's] universality in both geographic location and supposed geologic time, its almost invariable association with igneous activity, and its apparently catastrophic manner of deposition are most easily visualized in our basic Deluge framework. During the Flood, as we have seen, volcanic activity of all sorts continued globally during most of the Flood period, and therefore volcanic rocks are now found throughout the world and throughout the geologic column. Formation of mineral deposits of great extent and variety was undoubtedly possible during the Flood and can best be understood in this context. Of course, the very extensive pre-Cambrian ores may well be attributed to the Creation period itself in many cases.
Although there is much yet to be learned about the earth's great oil and mineral deposits, it is surely obvious that the evolutionary concept of historical geology is of little practical utility in their discovery and exploitation. Such as is known about the character of these deposits and their formation fits equally well or better into the framework of Biblical geology. It simply is incorrect to assert that such success as has been attained by the disciplines of petroleum and economic geology is evidence of the validity of orthodox historical geology."
[Dr. Don R. Patton, op. cit., tape #1]: "Perhaps the most common sedimentary feature in rocks - in the layers - involves what are known as the ripple marks. And in this illustration we see a picture that I took down here at Junction Texas. It looks like what you would see in the bottom of a stream of water running over loose sediment. If you had concrete poured which is basically what you have with limestone and then a stream running over the top of it, it might leave features like this. And they might be preserved in the limestone, or in the 'concrete', if it happened rapidly. But how do you get such ephemeral structures formed if it takes millions and millions of years to form these layers? When you look at the fossils and you look at the rocks, it should be obvious to the people that will think that this has to be a rapid process... I was making a lecture similar to this down at Texas A & M, when one of the professors interrupted and [said], 'We know all of this. We know that the rocks themselves form rapidly but the time is in between. This is what we are teaching our students.' I said, 'Well, thank you. I wish that were put in the textbooks, however, because the textbooks often leave the impression that it takes many many years to form the layers. But you're saying that the rocks themselves form rapidly. Well of course we can see this and prove this. The internal evidence in the strata demonstrate that. Well. where do you get the evidence for time?' He said, 'Well, that's in between the rocks.' I said, 'You mean where there is no evidence?' And he just sort of cleared his throat and sat down. Well, that's exactly where the evidence is: Where it isn't: in the cracks, in between. That's the evidence for time and it is a non-existing evidence."
Compare from Dr. Patton's notes:
"The chief significance of ripple lamination in the geologic record is that it is an indicator of environments involving large and rapid sand accumulation.... areas where addition of new sand normally is at a slow rate, have little chance of developing into superimposed ripple lamination... In contrast, areas in which sand accumulates periodically but rapidly, as in river flood plains [where] sand laden waters of strong floods suddenly lose velocity are very favorable for building up ripple-laminated deposits.'
[EDWIN D. MCKEE, 'Primary Sedimentary Structures and Their Hydrodynamic Interpretation, Society of Economic Paleontologists and Mineralogists, p. 107]
