Happy Evolution Sunday

[Mallon]

As it turns out, the physical evidence that we have fits a global flood model much more closely than a uniform one. For example, we have huge thick deposits spanning areas the size of continents. We have multiple layers again over such areas. We have different sets of layers in different locations. All of these are predicted by the global flood model, and require huge stretches to work out in a uniform model. In the uniform model, one ends up having to talk about gigantic floods, but the floods involved have a problem with transporting enough of the sediment. The global flood model provides a sufficient transport mechanism for the sediment. There is some exciting work going on modeling the dynamics, both on the surface and above the surface of a full global event.

I hear a lot of generalization, but few specific examples given. Which continent-sized deposits are you referring to laptoppop? Do they contain terrestrial footprints/nests/mucracks/coarsening-upward sequences/etc.? If so, then your theory is falsified. C'mon, pop, be specific. Which layers were deposited by The Flood?

 

[Xaero]

A holiday to celebrate god's creation. Good idea

Which layers were deposited by The Flood?

The millions layers of Green River must be post-flood

 

[laptoppop]

The millions layers of Green River must be post-flood

Actually, there is some debate among YECs if they are flood or post flood formed.

http://www.creationontheweb.com/content/view/4509/#Forumcontents

 

[Xaero]

Hi laptoppop,

thanks for the link - the GRF is a must for the creationist to explain in view of your model.
The 9 questions that G. Morton asked should be solved:

1. Why were the flood waters on layer after layer the depth of a bird leg as indicated by the footprints?

2. How were catfish able to leave so many coprolites on the layers if this is a rapidly deposited formation?

3. Why would God imprint orbital parameters and sunspot cycles on the thicknesses of the laminae?

4. Why do the radioactive dates seem to verify the slow depositional rates?

5. How could a bird take the time to nibble the lake floor during a global flood?

6. How are raindrop impressions preserved under the waters of a global flood?

7. Why did God produce a flood deposit which exactly matches the areal distribution seen in lakes? Did God deceive us?

8. Why do the oxygen-18 values decrease around the edges of Fossil Lake as would be expected of a modern lake?

9. The young-earth creationist must also ask him- or herself why the young-earth authors never tell him what I just told him.

taken from: http://home.entouch.net/dmd/greenriver.htm

 

[laptoppop]

Virtually all of these are discussed and dealt with in the multiple documents at the link I put up.

In general, however, I need to comment that G. Morton demonstrates a complete lack of understanding of the dynamics of a global flood. He makes the typical mistake of assuming a violent homogeneous event occurring over a short period.

 

[novacaine]

Next thing evolutionist will want is to declare Darwin's birthday an international holiday.

 

[shernren]

Virtually all of these are discussed and dealt with in the multiple documents at the link I put up.

In general, however, I need to comment that G. Morton demonstrates a complete lack of understanding of the dynamics of a global flood. He makes the typical mistake of assuming a violent homogeneous event occurring over a short period.

I think at least two of the three assumptions are warranted. Could the global flood be not-violent, or occur over a long period?

 

[laptoppop]

I think at least two of the three assumptions are warranted. Could the global flood be not-violent, or occur over a long period?

Absolutely -- ****in a particular region****. There has been some fascinating work modeling a world wide flood on computers fairly recently -- and the variety in intensity over various areas is amazing. I think that the models have a baseline issue in terms of the large number of assumptions required -- its a *huge* task -- but they are still revealing much about the variety and just how the geologic record that we have is consistent with what you would expect from such an event.

In particular, the thicknesses, size, and variety of the sedimentary layers are well explained in this context. The conventional interpretations have major difficulty explaining the transport mechanism for the billions of tons of silt over huge areas.

The Scriptures record that it took a good while for enough land to appear for Noah. I'm sure the planet took hundreds of years to rebalance overall after the global flood. During this time, there are lots of mini-events. For example, the carving of the Grand Canyon in the soft silt is likely to have been from a trapped inland sea that came out in significant force.

A couple of quick references:
http://icr.org/research/index/researchp_jb_largescaletectonics/
http://www.icr.org/research/index/researchp_as_platetectonicsl/

 

[laptoppop]

I hear a lot of generalization, but few specific examples given. Which continent-sized deposits are you referring to laptoppop? Do they contain terrestrial footprints/nests/mucracks/coarsening-upward sequences/etc.? If so, then your theory is falsified. C'mon, pop, be specific. Which layers were deposited by The Flood?

I'm not ignoring this post. The best maps I've found so far on the scale of various deposits is in a book, not online. (Does anyone know of others that are online?)

One quick example of a big ol' formation is the Lewis overthrust. Kilometers thick, 30,000 square kilometers in area, lack of expected grinding layers, out of order for conventional geography. The problems for the conventional model on how this "thrust" occurred without a set of huge deep mixing layers is much worse than the issues of how the GR "varves" were formed.

 

[shernren]

I'm not ignoring this post. The best maps I've found so far on the scale of various deposits is in a book, not online. (Does anyone know of others that are online?)

One quick example of a big ol' formation is the Lewis overthrust. Kilometers thick, 30,000 square kilometers in area, lack of expected grinding layers, out of order for conventional geography. The problems for the conventional model on how this "thrust" occurred without a set of huge deep mixing layers is much worse than the issues of how the GR "varves" were formed.

Reports of the death of conventional geology have been grossly exaggerated. The grinding layers expected by real geology do exist, even if the "grinding layers" Whitcomb and Morris' strawman models predict don't. Check this out: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/lewis/#strength , I think it's pretty conclusive.

Absolutely -- ****in a particular region****. There has been some fascinating work modeling a world wide flood on computers fairly recently -- and the variety in intensity over various areas is amazing.http://www.icr.org/research/index/researchp_as_platetectonicsl/

Really? I don't find anything of that in the references you provided, you'll have to pull out what you are referring to. But let me summarize in essence what the Flood model predicts:

40 days of massive water entry into the lithosphere, on the order of half a foot's depth a day;
followed by about at most a year's worth of massive global water redistribution to form oceans and mountains.

How do you input or transfer that amount of water in that little time without significant violence and turbulence? And how do you deposit rocks in a year?

Having said that, I especially like the second link; it neatly sets out many predictions associable with a naturalistic defense of the global Flood:

a) a consistent, worldwide, initiation event in the geologic column
b) most body fossils assigned to Flood deposits were deposited allochthonously (including coal, forests, and reefs)
c) most ichnofossils assigned to Flood deposits are grazing, moving, or escape evidences, and not long-term living traces
d) sediments assigned to the Flood were deposited subaqueously without long-term unconformities between them.

... it is possible on a short time scale to explain
a) the cooling of plutons and ocean plate material
b) regional metamorphism
c) canyon and cave erosion
d) sediment production and accumulation (including speleothems and precipitites)
e) organismal accumulation and fossilization (including coal, fossil forests, and reefs)
(f) fine sedimentary lamination (including varves)
g) radiometric data.

This is as close to a manifesto for a scientific global flood as I have ever found and I owe you for introducing me to this concise list of everything a global flood model needs to do. I would contend that the Flood really does none of these well, but that's a different thread, isn't it?

 

[Mallon]

I'm not ignoring this post. The best maps I've found so far on the scale of various deposits is in a book, not online. (Does anyone know of others that are online?)

That's okay, I'm not above reading books. Maybe you can list some of the formations here?

One quick example of a big ol' formation is the Lewis overthrust. Kilometers thick, 30,000 square kilometers in area, lack of expected grinding layers, out of order for conventional geography. The problems for the conventional model on how this "thrust" occurred without a set of huge deep mixing layers is much worse than the issues of how the GR "varves" were formed.

I'm a little surprised to hear you mention the Lewis overthrust, if only because I thought that was abandoned by creationists years ago. Creationist Walter Lammerts, the very man who supplied Morris with the photos of the Lewis overthrust for his book The Genesis Flood, took a hike up to Chief Mountain after the publication of the book and came down the other side "badly shaken", his confidence in the creationist interpretation of the fault shot (Numbers, 1992).
Then there's Kurt Wise's feelings on the matter:

The existence of an inverted section in a thrust belt region with slickenslides, dragfolds, and sheared rubble along the unconformity leaves no reasonable doubt that the Lewis Overthrust is in fact a result of overthrusting. It cannot be considered a contradiction to the geological column.

But all this ignores the MAJOR issue of the sedimentary rock record, taken as a whole. Creationists tend to get up in arms when scientists attack the "strawman" that the entire fossil record was deposited as a result of the Flood. Instead, they cite one formation here or there as having been catastrophically deposited by the Flood. But even assuming this is the case, there are still hundreds, even thousands, of formations that could not have been deposited by the Flood and could only have been deposited over a period of tens of thousands or even millions of years. So even if you were granted your Flood deposits, this YEC interpretation still does not square with the existence of deep time as represented in, say, the Joggins formation.

 

[laptoppop]

Reports of the death of conventional geology have been grossly exaggerated. The grinding layers expected by real geology do exist, even if the "grinding layers" Whitcomb and Morris' strawman models predict don't. Check this out: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/lewis/#strength , I think it's pretty conclusive.

Interesting article. I find myself totally unconvinced. Showing that there has been some movement in certain areas is drastically different than showing the results of kilometers thick strata -- a LOT of tons of rock (billions?,trillions?) grinding and sliding past each other over 30,000 square kilometers.

I think we all tend to grade things that disagree with us much harsher than our acceptance of papers, etc., that support our position. The people that I admire most are the ones who can admit weaknesses or flaws in their knowledge or position.

Really? I don't find anything of that in the references you provided, you'll have to pull out what you are referring to. But let me summarize in essence what the Flood model predicts:

40 days of massive water entry into the lithosphere, on the order of half a foot's depth a day;
followed by about at most a year's worth of massive global water redistribution to form oceans and mountains.

There's a paper I read recently that I'm still looking for which modeled the way the flood would flow over continents versus deeper oceans. I'm still looking for the link.

Yes, a lot of water flowed, both from below and from above. The key point to recognize is that just like a river can have calm pools and huge waterfalls and rapids, different parts of the world had different experiences during the flood.

I'm not at all sure I'd agree with your "one year" timeframe. Yes, a lot happened during that first period. However, I think the earth went through huge adjustments afterwards for quite a long time. Some of these would be extreme in a particular locality.

How do you input or transfer that amount of water in that little time without significant violence and turbulence? And how do you deposit rocks in a year?

You don't. In parts of the globe -- huge parts -- the disruption and violence of the flood was amazing. It is likely the planet had a good share of hypercanes. The key is that it is not the same everywhere.

The violence of the flood is required to explain the massive rock depositions. You need such violence to move and crush and dissolve the rocks,soil, and elements of the flood.

Depositing the rocks primarily in a year is no problem. Most fossils require some sort of rapid burial in order to be preserved. Most (all?) fossils lie in sedimentary rock, formed through deposition, typically floods. It is the right conditions of sediment, pressure, temperature, and binding elements that creates rock. The flood uniquely provides for these difficult aspects. It is also much easier to postulate a single event than a series of similar events.

However, given the right conditions, rocks (and to a lesser degree fossils) can form quite quickly. Think of concrete. With the right accellerants, I have seen concrete that dries to a rock in 15 minutes.

Interestingly, the eruption of Mount St. Helens has provided us with insights as to the formation of various fossil beds.

Having said that, I especially like the second link; it neatly sets out many predictions associable with a naturalistic defense of the global Flood:

Glad it might be helpful.

 

[laptoppop]

But all this ignores the MAJOR issue of the sedimentary rock record, taken as a whole. Creationists tend to get up in arms when scientists attack the "strawman" that the entire fossil record was deposited as a result of the Flood. Instead, they cite one formation here or there as having been catastrophically deposited by the Flood. But even assuming this is the case, there are still hundreds, even thousands, of formations that could not have been deposited by the Flood and could only have been deposited over a period of tens of thousands or even millions of years. So even if you were granted your Flood deposits, this YEC interpretation still does not square with the existence of deep time as represented in, say, the Joggins formation.

Interesting that you would mention the Joggins formation. Especially with the Mount St. Helens trees giving us known examples of trees flooding into place, this formation is solidly consistent with the YEC model. In other cases, the trees would have been virtually encapsulated in place. Another model that shows great promise in matching the observed evidence is that of floating masses of vegetation, including trees. It is quite reasonable that a particular area could represent a place in the currents of the flood that attracted such floating masses, and then buried them with some regularity. This would also perfectly deal with issues such as nests, raindrops, footprints, etc. deep in the strata layers. Check out
http://icr.org/article/445/

This type of explanation is much easier to swallow than saying that a particular area stayed in the same shape for ***MILLIONS OF YEARS*** with regular widespread burial.

 

[Mallon]

laptoppop, how can you say you have geological evidence for a global Flood, and then point to the sedimentary record with its heterogeneous composition and say "different parts of the world had different experiences during the flood"? Does such an argument not play in favour of various localized flood events rather than one global catastrophe? Evidence for a global flood should exhibit homogeneity on a global scale, otherwise you're arguing in favour of a bunch of separate localized events.

 

[Mallon]

Interesting that you would mention the Joggins formation. Especially with the Mount St. Helens trees giving us known examples of trees flooding into place, this formation is solidly consistent with the YEC model.

Yes, but here's the difference between Mt. St. Helens and Joggins: The sediment deposited at Mt. St. Helens is volcanic ash that fell from the sky following a major volcanic eruption. The sediment deposited at Joggins is clastic in origin and was deposited as a result of settling out of the water column. That's a HUGE difference in processes that creationists can never seem to get their heads around. One is a volcanic deposit. The other is a sedimentary deposit. You're comparing apples and oranges.
Not to mention the fact that the deposits of Mt. St. Helens do not exhibit layered forest sequences in which the rootlets of the trees are still embedded in the palaeosols.

This type of explanation is much easier to swallow than saying that a particular area stayed in the same shape for ***MILLIONS OF YEARS*** with regular widespread burial.

Not quite. It doesn't explain palaeosols, for example, and Joggins also exhibits palaeosols. How does your Flood model explain palaeosols? Are there palaeosols at Mt. St. Helens?

 

[laptoppop]

laptoppop, how can you say you have geological evidence for a global Flood, and then point to the sedimentary record with its heterogeneous composition and say "different parts of the world had different experiences during the flood"? Does such an argument not play in favour of various localized flood events rather than one global catastrophe? Evidence for a global flood should exhibit homogeneity on a global scale, otherwise you're arguing in favour of a bunch of separate localized events.

Not at all -- remember we're talking a *global* event. Its a pretty darn big globe. We don't have anything over the entire surface which is all the same - why would you expect a flood to be that way? Differences in temperature, in winds, in rainfall, in elevation (sea, continents, mountains, etc) would all affect the flow of the flood and the turbulence of the flood in a particular location.

One *would* expect large areas of strata to be deposited -- but not over the entire surface of the globe. Because of the way things settle out of water, especially water with differing currents and concentrations of dissolved solids and different temperatures, etc., one would expect a series of layers -- not just coarse to fine, but various combinations, various colors, various concentrations. I was able to demonstrate this in an aquarium in my front yard - its very easy to show how multiple layers get deposited simultaneously and the layers end up with different attributes.

 

[shernren]

Interesting article. I find myself totally unconvinced. Showing that there has been some movement in certain areas is drastically different than showing the results of kilometers thick strata -- a LOT of tons of rock (billions?,trillions?) grinding and sliding past each other over 30,000 square kilometers.

The problem is, I can show you sites where grinding should exist if the Lewis formation is an overthrust, and at these sites grinding exists. Can you show me sites where grinding that should be seen isn't seen?

Yes, a lot of water flowed, both from below and from above. The key point to recognize is that just like a river can have calm pools and huge waterfalls and rapids, different parts of the world had different experiences during the flood.

The problem is that a river can have calm pools and huge waterfalls and rapids only when the overall flow rate is very small. However, in the case of a global flood model, we are looking at transferring about 7 meters of water off the entire combined area of the continents onto the entire combined area of the oceans. For that to happen requires massive rapid flows that probably couldn't be peaceful anywhere.

I'm not at all sure I'd agree with your "one year" timeframe. Yes, a lot happened during that first period. However, I think the earth went through huge adjustments afterwards for quite a long time. Some of these would be extreme in a particular locality.

However, what sort of adjustments would lay down new sediments? The fact is that practically all sediments contemporaneous to the Flood would have to be laid down within that one year; after that year, while you can postulate any number of metamorphic events that alter the Flood sediments already laid down, you can't appeal to new events to lay down more sediments (other than the processes we see at motion today). The deposition has only about a year or so, no matter how much postdiluvean modification you want to posit.

Most fossils require some sort of rapid burial in order to be preserved. Most (all?) fossils lie in sedimentary rock, formed through deposition, typically floods.

Floods? If that were true, we would expect most of the rich fossil beds in the world to be witnesses to catastrophic action and deposition. These fossil beds are called "lagerstatte" and most of them tell quite a different story. For example, the Wenlock Series has fine layers of volcanic ash punctuating carbonate muds; how do you reconcile that with a global flood with all the volcanoes beneath water? Or the Bear Gulch Limestone, a Carboniferous deposit which contains evaporites - how are evaporites deposited during the Flood? Or the Hamilton Quarry - why are there many interbedded limestones, and why does each layer have different fossils in sequence if there was rapid deposition? Or the Xiagou Formation where extremely fine silt settled to form varves?

Why are so many fossil beds associated not with rapid deposition, but with phenomena only explicable via slow sedimentary deposition?

 

[Xaero]

@laptoppop:

I didn't find any of this claims answered in your papers, maybe you can cite the relevant passages.

Explaining the Milankovic cycles would be a start ...

 

[Mallon]

Not at all -- remember we're talking a *global* event. Its a pretty darn big globe. We don't have anything over the entire surface which is all the same - why would you expect a flood to be that way? Differences in temperature, in winds, in rainfall, in elevation (sea, continents, mountains, etc) would all affect the flow of the flood and the turbulence of the flood in a particular location.

What you're telling me, laptoppop, is that the evidence for a global flood would look just like evidence for dozens of localized floods around the world. How could we possibly tell the two interpretations apart, then? Science says that interpretations must be falsifiable. What sort of evidence do you feel would falsify a global flood scenario, pop?

 

[laptoppop]

Actually, I would expect that a global flood would create larger deposits than local floods. Still looking for maps, or even the book I have - but there are huge layers across big swaths of various continents -- totally consistent with global, hard to explain otherwise. To make a continent size deposit of significant thickness requires that a huge amount of material be dissolved and transported. I suspect, but cannot yet prove, that it might be impossible to account for the material transport without a global event.

Of course, for me its much easier to accept the concept of a global flood which lines up with special revelation than the conventional geological view of hundreds of floods, some continent size.

My preferred way of looking at this scientifically is to use two competing models, and to look at which model best fits the observable data with the least number of accomodations. It seems like people can explain just about anything -- on either the TE side or the YEC side. The TE side has a huge advantage in terms of number of researchers.

The concept of a global flood can indeed be falsfied, if it can be shown conclusively that there are formations which could not be explained in a preflood/flood/postflood model. There are various discussions going on in the YEC circles about what fits where -- but it is important to understand that some features represent preflood, most represent flood deposits, and some features are best explained post-flood. The YEC model does *NOT* require all deposits to be made at the same time, or even within the year of the flood.