Fossil Fish

[HairlessSimian]

THen did God set a rainbow in the sky as a sign that he would never make another local flood?
The rainbow is not strictly linked to the flood. It is a symbol of God's promise.
As.

Rainbows occur when the low-lying sun's light passes through misty air and diffracts. Often shows on the eastern horizon in late afternoon when storm clouds pass and let the western sun through while the air is still moist or while it's still raining.
Also occurs on most sunny days in Niagara Falls.

A sign? A symbol? That's up for interpretation. I suggest the rainbow merely occurs. Often, and in many places on the globe.

As to the OP fish, there are too many possible scenarios that can give rise to that fossil to necessitate an explanation based on a biblical flood. Given the wealth of problems of a biblical flood explanation, it must be set aside.

 

[Jet Black]

the sun doesn't have to be low lying though. The issue is that rainbows always subtend an angle of 40-42 degrees. what I mean by this is that the rainbow is part of a circle, and if you draw an imaginary line from the sun, through your head that line will pass through the centre of the circle on which the rainbow. sits. now if you draw another line from your eye to one of the edges of the rainbow, the angle between the two lines will be about 42 degrees. This means that if the sun is above 42 degrees in the sky, the only place the rainbow can appear is underground so you can't see it. This does not apply however if you are high up and looking down towards mist, so for example if the sun is high behind you, and you are looking down towards a waterfall, you will see the rainbow down there. An extreme example is sometimes you can see them in the clouds as complete circles with the shadow of the aircraft at the center.

ah and it's a combination of diffraction and reflection

 

[Jet Black]

The only manner in which I can see that fossils of sea life would be deposited on top of mountains is if at the time the mountain was below sea level.
I understand geological uplift, but I cannot see how it would place the mountains below sea level. Also, I cannot see how continental drift could place the mountains below sea level--- where the mountain is far from the sea during the whole process of continental drift.

at the time, the mountains weren't mountains. If you look at the geology of these ranges like the alps and the himalayas, you can see that the rocks are all bent because of the pressures of the plates pushing into each other, so that the rocks of a particular layer that are at ground level in say italy, are also found at the top of the alps. there are lots of other bends and shears and thrust faults which make this more complex, but to do a really simple (literally tabletop) experiment, take a sheet of paper and lie it flat on the table in front of you. now in the middle of the paper, draw a lake with a fish in it. Now you are going to simulate the effect of the convection currents in the magma below the plates: Press the ends towards one another, and through the magic of electromagnetic forces and the pauli exclusion principle (stops the electrons passing through each other and ensures that matter doesn't collapse) you will see the middle of the paper rise. you might even get a couple of lumps and a dip in the middle. suddenly little fishie, who was in a lake is now on top of a mountain.

For geology it is a bit more complicated than this, because the rocks might snap and slide over one another (thrust faults if I am not mistaken) and two sections of the plate might be pushed at different rates, causing bending of the mountain range, but hopefully you see the principle of it

 

[rjw]

Nvxplorer--Thanks! I've go to go now, but could I take you up on that sometime? I should be on tomorrow GMT -8. 7:15



OC1--A toxic environment in which two fish were living?



Thank you all for your insight and comments!

Gidday RWG,

I have been noticing an exchange between yourself and several others on this board, concerning the nature of the Himalayas and how sea shells could get to the top of the mountains.

As with others in this thread, I am no geologist. Nor am I a scientist. However there are many good mainstream geology books around which describe the process as it is currently understood.

One thing needs to be pointed out. These text books are distilled and summary versions of what can be found in the technical scientific literature. To write the technical scientific literature, people have to go into the field and collect data to support their arguments. Hence it is the quality of that data which is so important to the interpretation placed upon it.

What I am about to give you is an explanation offered in “Understanding Earth” by Frank Press and Raymond Siever (3rd ed). It represents the conventional explanation.

1) You need to imagine an earth some 60 million years ago when the plate upon which India sat began to interact with the plate upon which Tibet sat. India was hundreds of km away from Tibet then. Don’t be alarmed at my figure of 60 million years – it can be measured using radio isotope dating. We have plenty of direct and indirect evidence that the earth is 4.6 billion years old. This is roughly 80 times as long as 60 million years. We also know (from direct measurements) that continents can move 1, 2, 3, or 4 cm a year. In 60 million years, the Indian plate would have traveled 60,000,000 x 1 cm = 60,000,000 cm. Now this equals (60,000,000 cm / 100,000 cm/km), 600 km at 1 cm/year, or 1200 km at 2 cm/year. It equals 1800 km at 3 cm/year.

2) Now imagine India approaching Tibet at 1, 2 or 3 cm/year, and it is 600km to 1200 km away! What happens to the ocean floor between the two continents? Remember that the ocean floor has sediment continually being loaded onto it. But this sediment also buries sediments from millions of years before. Well all of this begins to get squeezed. As the distance between the continents closes, some of the squeezed sediments gets pushed up, while some goes under the Tibetan continent.

3) As the closure continues, to the point of contact, the sediments – mud, shells and all go up, and up and up as the Himalayas grow.

4) Today, India is still ramming northward into Tibet (and earthquakes occur). This can be measured. Furthermore the Himalayas are growing – that is they are popping up more than they are being eroded away. This too can be measured. Again, look at the calculations. If the Himalayas have been pushed up by (let me be very rash) – an average of 0.2mm/year for the last 60,000,000 years (this is the net rise or uplift minus erosion) then they would have risen 12 km!

5) The result is ocean sediments and other sediments sitting perhaps 12km above where they were deposited!

Now the above is a very simplified explanation of what the text book offered which was itself a very simplified version of what most geologists think happened after doing lots of field work. Not all geologists would agree. However, most who disagree would accept this description in broad principle.

Geologists think that it happened this way because they do the experiments which confirm this.

Do you see how this concept of sea floor being squeezed between two colliding continents can explain the occurrence of sea shells high up in the Himalayas?

If you can, get hold of some mainstream geology books. They should, if they are good ones, give you an idea of what we think and why we think that way. By “why we think that way” I mean that the books should either directly inform you of the data which demonstrates what is being claimed or they should give you plenty of references which will allow you to check it out.


Regards, Roland

 

[Jet Black]

Those fish could have been buried by a local flood.

there are far more things that could bury a fish than a flood. Remember that when we suggest a flood burying a fish, it it not the water that bothers the fish (because they are already fairly familiar with water) but the sediment. I'll give an example:

This is Holbeck Hill in Scarborough, England. at the top you can see half a hotel, because the other half fell in the sea (fortunately nobody was injured). Now looking at the line of the cliff there you can see how much material has fallen away and how large an area this has covered. At the bottom are many rock pools containing lots of fish, crabs and so on. Now this happened overnight. the people in the hotel closed their curtains, and woke up in the morning to see the garden had disappeared and the cliff was rapidly approaching their bedrooms. any fish under the hotel would have been buried.

Now landslides aren't limited to happening above the sea and can happen quite alot

http://www.mbari.org/news/homepage/socal-canyons.html

However, as it was pointed out, one of the photos I gave was of a deepwater predator (Thanks, Dr. GH, I'm afraid I'm not that well up on my fish varieties!) How would a deepwater predator be affected by a mere local flood? How would it come to be buried rapidly, except by such a calamity as a world-wide flood? How did it come to be that so many examples can be found?

there are lots of calamities that occur and affect things underwater, such as those I have mentioned above, and these calamities are quite common. When you look at underwater terrain, there are lots of rocky outcrops and cliffs which can collapse, and often fish live in these areas because of the protection offered.
floods or large surface water movements are not that likely to affect deep seas, because the sediments would only settle slowly.

 

[Jet Black]

Now what puzzles me, is how a global flood would deposit so much meterial on the top of a mountain that the whole of the top of the mountain would consist of limestone. The two creationist suggestions are rapid formation of the continents in the days of peleg, or soemthing like Baumgardner's catastrophic plate tectonics, which is basically rapid formation of mountains.

http://www.answersingenesis.org/home/area/faq/tectonics.asp

in either case, the rocks with the fish in started off underwater and rose into mountains the same as geology, except well, the timeframes are wildly different.

 

[RightWingGirl]

Just off the top of my head, the Appalachians, Rockies, and the Alps also formed in the same general way (i.e., colliding tectonic plates).

And this resulted in what are now mountains being covered by sea?

 

[RightWingGirl]

Now what puzzles me, is how a global flood would deposit so much meterial on the top of a mountain that the whole of the top of the mountain would consist of limestone. The two creationist suggestions are rapid formation of the continents in the days of peleg, or soemthing like Baumgardner's catastrophic plate tectonics, which is basically rapid formation of mountains.

http://www.answersingenesis.org/home/area/faq/tectonics.asp

in either case, the rocks with the fish in started off underwater and rose into mountains the same as geology, except well, the timeframes are wildly different.

I've heard about Baumgardner's plate tectonics--quite the interesting study!

So, correct me if I'm wrong; Both the Evolutionist and Creationist models agree that basicly the whole earth was covered by water. With this distinction---the Evolutionist model calls for this "flooding" happening at various times, (resulting in fossils of sea life spread over deserts, mountain ranges, etc.) over a large span of time, and of course the Creationist model dictates one world-wide flood.

 

[OC1]

So, correct me if I'm wrong; Both the Evolutionist and Creationist models agree that basicly the whole earth was covered by water. With this distinction---the Evolutionist model calls for this "flooding" happening at various times, (resulting in fossils of sea life spread over deserts, mountain ranges, etc.) over a large span of time, and of course the Creationist model dictates one world-wide flood.

Not quite. The scientific model (I refuse to call it the "evolutionist" model, because it has nothing to do with evo) says that in the past, like today, there were landmasses, and there were oceans. The oceans accumulated sediment, and through the process of plate tectonics, some of those ocean sediments were uplifted, and became dry land.

The sedimentary rocks that make up the Rockies were under water (below sea level) when they formed, but since then the rocks have been pushed up to their present 8,000 ft elevations. The Rocky Mountains, as they exist today, were never under water.

 

[OC1]

BTW, the problem with Baumgardner's catastrophic plate tectonic model is that all those continental plates galloping around at many feet per minute generate a huge amount of frictional heat, which would melt a good chunk of the crust.

The link seems to be broken, but if I remember correctly even he recognizes the heat problem (and proposes a miracle to deal with it!)

 

[Jet Black]

I've heard about Baumgardner's plate tectonics--quite the interesting study!

interesting, but fundamentally flawed, but I thought I would raise it to make clear that many of the creationists don't think the flood was 30,000 feet deep and laid a layer of limestone on top of the himalayas One of the biggest contradictions is this; the reason that the plates move about is the result of friction between the solid bits of the plate and the convection currents in the mantle. That friction generates tremendous heat, and if the plates were to be thrown around at the rates he suggested, then it would cause huge volumes of heat to be produced, which would boil the planet. Joe Meert and a chap with the moniker TrueCreation used to debate about this here alot, have a look for their threads on the topic. Other problems are that the sediments would and could not have bent like they are under that model; they are too brittle. I'm not going to go into this though, because I am no expert. perhaps glenn morton could fill in more

So, correct me if I'm wrong; Both the Evolutionist and Creationist models agree that basicly the whole earth was covered by water. With this distinction---the Evolutionist model calls for this "flooding" happening at various times, (resulting in fossils of sea life spread over deserts, mountain ranges, etc.) over a large span of time, and of course the Creationist model dictates one world-wide flood.

not exactly. The Standard scientific model has the plates drifting around and snapping and bending and so on, sometimes parts of the plates are below sea level, somtimes parts are above. It is not really flooding any more than claiming that the base of the atlantic and pacific oceans are flooded. What we can say though is where there are aquatic fossils, those bits of the landscape were at one time underwater.

 

[dad]

...
in either case, the rocks with the fish in started off underwater and rose into mountains the same as geology, except well, the timeframes are wildly different.

Exactly, which is the key issue. If mountains were formed quickly, the fossils may be from pre existing pre flood seas, or areas pushed up.

 

[Valkhorn]

Exactly, which is the key issue. If mountains were formed quickly, the fossils may be from pre existing pre flood seas, or areas pushed up.

Why is it again that you wish to debate science when you have no scientific background or education?

 

[rjw]

BTW, the problem with Baumgardner's catastrophic plate tectonic model is that all those continental plates galloping around at many feet per minute generate a huge amount of frictional heat, which would melt a good chunk of the crust.

The link seems to be broken, but if I remember correctly even he recognizes the heat problem (and proposes a miracle to deal with it!)

Gidday OC1,

The link seems to be broken, but if I remember correctly even he recognizes the heat problem (and proposes a miracle to deal with it!)

While I cannot comment directly on Baumgardner’s methodology of recognizing a major problem with a YEC model then invoking miracle to deal with it, this is a tactic YEC authors frequently use.

Of course, no evidence is ever cited for the actuality of the miracle. It is introduced merely to let the YEC “get out of gaol free”. It raises the question that if one miracle can be invoked with out supporting evidence, then why not invoke a thousand miracles? That is why bother to explain anything in a YEC model naturalistically – why not put the whole thing down to miracle?

Because of this invocation of miracle, the YEC models I have seen are generally unconstrained speculations. Often this unconstrained speculation is made worse by the fact that YECs can never tell their audience the difference between that which was created from that which was formed naturalistically. Thus, in talking about the Flood and evidence for it, YECs generally have to point to things and speculatedthat they resulted from the Flood while being unable to distinguish them from things what they would also argue, in another context, formed naturalistically.


Regards, Roland

 

[dad]

Why is it again that you wish to debate science when you have no scientific background or education?

Who wants to debate science? The speculations that I responded to were about yec ideas of rapid continental movement, and uplift, in a time when there was no science, and if there were, it may well have been very different than the current present science. WE are talking about the past, and how thing worked then, any suggestion from you thet it was all present science limited, is not science, but opinion, and without basis, except in belief and assumption. So don't get holier than thou with me. I wouldn't waste my time debating present science when it comes to the future or far past, even if I spent 2000 yrs studying how the present works, as it apparently may not apply there.

 

[RightWingGirl]

not exactly. The Standard scientific model has the plates drifting around and snapping and bending and so on, sometimes parts of the plates are below sea level, somtimes parts are above. It is not really flooding any more than claiming that the base of the atlantic and pacific oceans are flooded. What we can say though is where there are aquatic fossils, those bits of the landscape were at one time underwater.

We don't have to call it flooding, but in the Evolution model almost all of the world was covered by water at various times?

 

[OC1]

We don't have to call it flooding, but in the Evolution model almost all of the world was covered by water at various times?

There are probably some places on earth (like the Canadian Shield, and other old igneous rock complexes) that have always been above sea level.

But a big chunk of the earths surface was below sea level at some time in the past, and has since been uplifted to it's current elevation. Different places were below sea level at different times, of course.

 

[Valkhorn]

We don't have to call it flooding, but in the Evolution model almost all of the world was covered by water at various times?

But a big chunk of the earths surface was below sea level at some time in the past, and has since been uplifted to it's current elevation. Different places were below sea level at different times, of course.

Precisely. Just because certain places were below water at one time doesn't mean they were underwater at the same time.

Remember, the concept of a global flood isn't just dismissed by whether places were above/below water at once - it is also dismissed by the lack of water to accomplish the job, the bottleneck it would have given to genetic diversity (which never happened so recently), the lack of other cultures (like Egypt) not noticing this, etc.

Maybe instead of trying to cling to the global flood so bad, why don't you study how it was falsified 200 years ago? You might be surprised.

 

[dad]

Remember, the concept of a global flood isn't just dismissed by whether places were above/below water at once - it is also dismissed by the lack of water to accomplish the job, the bottleneck it would have given to genetic diversity (which never happened so recently), the lack of other cultures (like Egypt) not noticing this, etc.

Egypt came after the flood, as I understand it, and the dating, was based on things that were not perfectly reliable. They seem to have been missing a record of their mighty army being drowned in the parted sea as well, Ha. Bottlenecks didn't occur, I contened, because the flood was a century before the split of the spiritual from the physical, therefore life abounded in a different way than at present. The lack of water also, being at a time when different than present conditions applied can be explained. And as for things not ever being under water, I say, prove it, I don't believe you.

 

[Valkhorn]

Egypt came after the flood, as I understand it, and the dating, was based on things that were not perfectly reliable. They seem to have been missing a record of their mighty army being drowned in the parted sea as well, Ha. Bottlenecks didn't occur, I contened, because the flood was a century before the split of the spiritual from the physical, therefore life abounded in a different way than at present. The lack of water also, being at a time when different than present conditions applied can be explained. And as for things not ever being under water, I say, prove it, I don't believe you.

You are the best person I've ever seen at denail. It really is quite remarkable.

Some parts of the world have not been underwater in a very long time - the canadian sheild is one example. The appalachian mountain chain is another. In fact, the Cheaha Mountain range in Alabama is a 420 million year old orogeny containing marine fossils yes, but marine fossils which existed 420 million years ago.

Of course, this would require you to know a lot about geology, which you don't.

So, really I have no reason to believe a word you say since you stonewall, deny anything that doesn't fit your narrow world view, and think you're right no matter any evidence to the contrary.

Coupled with the fact that you obviously have little or no science education in subjects as basic as biology and geology and even chemistry I really see no reason to keep arguing with you unless you step off of your high horse, get rid of your arrogance, and try to actually listen for once. You might be surprised how ignorant of the real world you really are.