Global Flood

[Frumious Bandersnatch]

GETTING BACK TO THE FLOOD:

The majority of the geologic community believe that low energy processes and long time periods account for the geologic record. Creationists believe that high energy processes and short periods of time account for the geologic record.

Virtually all geologists, except for a tiny handful of creationists understand that while the geologic record does show evidence of some rapidly deposited sequences in high energy environments, much of the geologic column must have been deposited slowly and over long periods of time and that the global flood is a myth. Fine grained shales for example will not deposit in pure layers in a "high energy" enviroment.
I recommend you read History of the Collapse of "Flood Geology" and a Young Earth by Davis Young an Evangelical Christian and member of the Affiliation of Christian Geologists.
Former YEC Glenn Morton has more than 2 dozen web pages with pictures and description showing why geology shows slow deposition on his Web Site. One of the best is his article on Burrows.

PLEASE READ THESE TWO ACCOUNTS:

Mt. St. Helens Explosion Gives Creation Evidence
http://www.drdino.com/articles.php?spec=7

I have already addresses Dr Dingbat's nonsense on the Grand Canyon. Let's have a look at his nonsense about St. Helens.

The sediments laid down during the violent mud and ash flows were not a homogenized mixture but rather a series of finely layered horizontal strata. They look quite similar to the horizontal layers of rock which can be observed in road cuts as you travel our interstate highways. These types of horizontal bands of rock strata are often assumed to indicate millions of years of earth history, but Mt. St. Helen's has provided geologists with a scale model of how this same type of horizontal strata could be laid down rapidly by flowing water.

What the lahar flow from the 1980 St. Helens eruption did was cut through layers of poorly consoldiated materials deposited by previous eruptions of St. Helens. There was some layering in the pyroclastic flow but this is a well known phenomonon and the layers are nothing like the rock layers in the geologic column. Here is picture of a place where the flow cut through some previous deposits.

The bouldery material at the bottom of the sequence is from an old lahar. That is overlain by the deposits of two separate tephra falls (yellow and orange colours) and then by pre-1980 lahar deposits. The 1980 lahar deposits are visible at the top.​

The picture and caption come from This Site which has several other pictures of the layers from previous lahars and tephra falls that the 1980 lahar cut through. ​

Next Dr Dingbat says

Subsequent to the Mt. St. Helen's explosion, a new river canyon was formed in one day (March 19, 1982) as backed up water broke through the newly deposited sediment. This canyon is 100 feet deep and looks amazingly like a 1/40th scale model of the Grand Canyon. Had no one been present to see this area form, we might assume that the small stream presently located at the bottom of the canyon had cut the canyon over millions of years. This is the story of most of us have been taught about the Colorado river and the Grand Canyon. Many geologists are now coming to acknowledge that just as the Toutle River canyon at Mt. St. Helen's formed rapidly , the Grand Canyon was also formed over a short period of time by a massive flow of water.

No geologist would mistake the "canyon" that the Toutle river carved through unconsolidated material for canyon that had be slowly carved from solid rock. I have been to the volcano site twice. The material that was carved by the Toutle River is still so unconsolidated you can dig it up with your bare hands with a bit of effort. You won't get very far with that approach on the Redwall Limestones of the Grand Canyon.​

The sides of the "little grand canyon" imediately began to slump into the river and unlike the Grand Canyon the so called little Grand Canyon is clearly not an equilibrium drainage system. It is broader in comparison to its height and is U-shaped. It does not have side canyons flowing in at right angles like the Grand Canyon.
Jon Woolf has a picture of the "canyon" cut by the Toutle river HERE along with a comparison of the two canyons.​

Not surprisingly to those of us who have studied YEC the picture of the St Helens events presented by YECs is far different from reality.​

F.B.​

 

[A4C]

Fine grained shales for example will not deposit in pure layers in a "high energy" enviroment.

No but they could be deposited by the relative calm of the Flood scenario after the water had risen to its max and before the catastrophic events of receding waters

 

[Steezie]

No but they could be deposited by the relative calm of the Flood scenario after the water had risen to its max and before the catastrophic events of receding waters

There is nothing that would "calmly" make the water's rise. A tsunami is a violent and swift affair. Torrential rain would not cause a regional flood and it would have to rain for months for the sea level to rise even a few feet. Plus there isnt enough WATER to rain that long

 

[A4C]

There is nothing that would "calmly" make the water's rise. A tsunami is a violent and swift affair. Torrential rain would not cause a regional flood and it would have to rain for months for the sea level to rise even a few feet. Plus there isnt enough WATER to rain that long

There were peaceful times of the Flood and there were times more violent than thousands of tsunamis. Could you show me how you came to the conclusion that there was not enough water/rain for the Flood to be a reality ?

 

[lemmings]

There were peaceful times of the Flood and there were times more violent than thousands of tsunamis. Could you show me how you came to the conclusion that there was not enough water/rain for the Flood to be a reality ?

Tsunamis go in, then they leave. They do not create water from nothing.

Tsunami from 2004

Your flood Earth

Do you notice a difrence between the two?

 

[Steezie]

There were peaceful times of the Flood and there were times more violent than thousands of tsunamis. Could you show me how you came to the conclusion that there was not enough water/rain for the Flood to be a reality ?

We have no serious geological evidence to support a violent flooding event. No silt deposit, no marine fossils, no archeological ruins that support the idea of a massive sustained flood.

Water, like any liquid, flows to fill any avalible space. Hence why the ocean is flat. In order to make the water level rise in one area of a container of water (Say a lake) you must raise the water level in the entire lake. In order for there to have been a flood that occured by massive ammounts of rain or a rise in water level with no violent cause, there would have had to have been a world-wide rise in water levels.

And since there is no geological evidence for a world-wide rise in water levels....

There is also not enough water on the planet to cause a large global flood via rain. The rain has to come from somewhere. Water vapor in the clouds comes together to form droplets that, when they achieve the right weight, fall from the clouds as rain. The water vapor comes from water evaporating off standing water on the Earth's surface.

So for it to rain continuously for 40 days and 40 nights, there would have to be a continuous stream of water vapor feeding the rain clouds. So now you've set up a cycle. Rain falls, evaporates into clouds, falls again...which means global water levels do not rise significantly because all the water that falls simply evaporates again back up into the clouds.

And the idea of the rain being simply regional cloud activity is equally implausible. High-altitude winds push clouds along in the atmosphere. A rainstorm system may last for many days in one area but will eventually stop as it is pushed away from the area by wind. So unless you have ZERO high-altitude wind and a raincloud that is fed continuously (Both meteorological impossibilities) the idea of the flood being caused by a rain storm is impossible. And thats BEFORE you factor in that all that rain would simply wash out to sea before causing any serious flood dammage.

Annother point that hasnt been adressed by flood advocates is vegetation. The area where the flood allegedly occured is desert. With such an abundance of water, plant life would have taken hold. Scruffy weeds and hearty plants yes, but plants just the same. If the flood was global, why are there any deserts period?

The flood is a nice story but it does not hold up to any scientific inquiry

 

[Wiccan_Child]

Could you show me how you came to the conclusion that there was not enough water/rain for the Flood to be a reality ?

I can't speak for him, but I'll show you the mathematics:
1.26*10^21 liters of water on the Earth.
The Earth is not submerged.
Therefore, >1.26*10^21 liters of water needed to submerge the Earth .
Therefore, there is not enough water to submerge the Earth.
QED.

 

[Frumious Bandersnatch]

No but they could be deposited by the relative calm of the Flood scenario after the water had risen to its max and before the catastrophic events of receding waters

Except that shales are found throughout the geologic column and not just near the top as one would expect if they were deposited at the peak of the flood when the water was "relatively calm" and these shales often have animal burrows in them indicating that the animals burrowed into the shales after they were deposited. Here is a quote on one of the burrows that Glenn Morton discusses on his web page on burrows.

Once again, young-earth creationism fails to explain this data. There are around 15,000 feet of sediment beneath this burrow and stratigraphically another 5,000 above it.

When one looks at the Grand Canyon sedimentary layers we find shales in several places including the Bright Angel Shale which don't fit with your scenario for several reasons. First they are well down in the Canyon below thousands of feet of other layers that are supposed flood deposits. Second, if they were deposited from a single influx of still water we would expect them to be more coarse at the bottom and fine at the top as the settling of find particles is determined by Stokes's law. There are some sequences in the Bright Angel that do fine as they ascend but other that coarsen as they ascend. The following quote comes from Grand Canyon Geology by Beus and Morales,

"Upward coarsening sequences are up to 25 feet (8 m) thick and typically can be traced for several 10's of kilometers.

Further, the Bright Angel Shale contains both the body fossils and the feeding tracks of trilobites. How were these animals making feeding burrows with huge amounts of sediment being deposited on them each day as the sediments of the Colorado Plateau were being deposited by this supposed global flood?

Above the Bright Angel Shales there are several layers of limestone that also represent low energy depositional environments and above the Temple Butte and Redwall Limestones there is the Supai formation with alternating layers of limestone and sandstone. Above the Supai is the Hermit Shale and above that the Coconino Sandstones. Some flood prominent "flood geologists" have claimed that the Coconinos represent flood deposits but their claims are easily shown to be totally absurd.

There is simply no scenario that allows the reconcillation of the the earth's geology with the global flood as promoted by modern YEC "flood geologists".

F.B.