Polystrate whales in Peru

[laptoppop]

Polystrate fossils are difficult to explain in a uniformitarian context. Here is an example of whales which cut across a huge number of diatom layers. There are a couple of research papers, but here's a free link. The article is called "Taphonomy of fossil whales in the Micoene/Pliocene Pisco Fm., Peru"

http://www.llu.edu/llu/grad/natsci/brand/whale.html

 

[shernren]

You might get in trouble trying to use this article to support flood geology.

Conclusions: The well-preserved whale skeletons, absence of invertebrate fauna associated with the whales (modern dead whales are fairly quickly colonized by large numbers of invertebrate scavengers), and fine preservation of the original texture and position of non-bony structures (baleen and spinal cord) indicate rapid burial of the whales. Paleogeography and sedimentary structures indicate that these whales were buried in a shallow bay, above wave base, in an environment not likely to be anoxic. It appears that a combination of factors led to rapid accumulation of diatoms and burial of whales. These probably included: high levels of nutrients from upwelling and from volcanic input, leading to rapid diatom reproduction; self-sedimentation of diatom flocks and mats (from secretion of sticky gels that form diatom aggregates), as occurs in modern blooms; lack of dissolution of diatoms because of the shallow water; possible concentration of diatoms in the bay from storm-related currents (as indicated by sedimentological evidence).

(emphasis added) You aren't going to get any burial "above wave base" in a global flood, especially one purportedly 15 feet above the highest mountains.

 

[busterdog]

Polystrate fossils are difficult to explain in a uniformitarian context. Here is an example of whales which cut across a huge number of diatom layers. There are a couple of research papers, but here's a free link. The article is called "Taphonomy of fossil whales in the Micoene/Pliocene Pisco Fm., Peru"

http://www.llu.edu/llu/grad/natsci/brand/whale.html

Thanks for doing the work. Interesting article.

 

[Mallon]

Polystrate fossils are difficult to explain in a uniformitarian context.

Polystrate fossils are easy to explain in a uniformitarian context because, despite the oft-touted YEC strawman, not all sedimentary layers take millions of years to accumulate. Some layers accumulate over a matter of days, some over a matter of years, and some over a matter of millenia. We see this happening today. No secret there.

 

[laptoppop]

Yes, in a large flood context -- diatoms in particular are hard to explain without a large large amount of supersaturated water because they typically accumulate very slowly.

Shernren - how do you see this as incompatible with a flood and storms and volcanic activity? The whales got stranded during one phase, and then got buried during another. Its hard to understand their burial *without* a MAJOR event -- and its perfectly compatible with a flood model.

 

[Mallon]

What exactly do you mean by "supersaturated water", pop? This is a word you often use in reference to the Flood, but rarely define. What were the Flood waters "supersaturated" with? Surely your complex model must make some predictions here...

 

[laptoppop]

In this case, there has to be some mechanism to force the diatoms out of the water. As the article below references, the "normal" rate of deposition is 3-4 orders of magnitude slower than what is seen here. As I understand it, the best explanation is a supersaturate, or slurry if you will, proceeding laterally.


If you have access - this article may explain better:

Brand, L. R., R. Esperante, A. V. Chadwick, O. Poma, and M. Alomia. 2004. Fossil whale preservation implies high diatom accumulation rate in the Miocene-Pliocene Pisco Formation of Peru. Geology, 32:165-168.

 

[shernren]

Yes, in a large flood context -- diatoms in particular are hard to explain without a large large amount of supersaturated water because they typically accumulate very slowly.

Shernren - how do you see this as incompatible with a flood and storms and volcanic activity? The whales got stranded during one phase, and then got buried during another. Its hard to understand their burial *without* a MAJOR event -- and its perfectly compatible with a flood model.

Not perfectly compatible. Here's a picture of the "wave base":

(from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave_base ). Put alternatively, the whales had to be buried in shallow water, and where do you get shallow water during a global flood?

Not all water features are floods.

 

[laptoppop]

"Put alternatively, the whales had to be buried in shallow water, and where do you get shallow water during a global flood?"
Early and late flood periods. Where do YOU get the mass of diatoms?

 

[Mallon]

You're contradicting yourself again, pop. You told me previously that the Flood deposits were likely Palaeozoic/Mesozoic in age. Now you're arguing that the post-Mesozoic deposits mentioned in the above article were also deposited by Noah's Flood.
I think you're complex model needs tweaking. It isn't even internally consistent.

 

[gluadys]

Shernren - how do you see this as incompatible with a flood and storms and volcanic activity? The whales got stranded during one phase, and then got buried during another. Its hard to understand their burial *without* a MAJOR event -- and its perfectly compatible with a flood model.

Part of the question is "which flood model"? It is not compatible with floodwaters 15 feet above the highest mountains. So you want to place it during another "phase" of the flood. But a vague reference to another phase is not sufficient. You need to be able to model that phase and place it geographically and temporally with other phases of the flood.

Maybe flood geologists are not at the point of being able to do that yet. In that case, you cannot say it is perfectly compatible with a flood model, since the flood model with which it is perfectly compatible does not exist yet.

All you can say is that it may fit into a possible model that is not off the drawing board yet. And maybe it will not fit into any possible flood model. As shernren says, not every underwater event is a flood event. You need to be able to discriminate between ordinary oceanic events and flood events.

 

[laptoppop]

You're contradicting yourself again, pop. You told me previously that the Flood deposits were likely Palaeozoic/Mesozoic in age. Now you're arguing that the post-Mesozoic deposits mentioned in the above article were also deposited by Noah's Flood.
I think you're complex model needs tweaking. It isn't even internally consistent.

My current position is that each deposit needs to be evaluated locally. There are a couple of different positions with creationist researchers, but one of them argues pretty convincingly that the uniformitarian identifications of layers is convenient, but deceptive -- and sites need to be looked at locality by locality.

 

[laptoppop]

Part of the question is "which flood model"? It is not compatible with floodwaters 15 feet above the highest mountains. So you want to place it during another "phase" of the flood. But a vague reference to another phase is not sufficient. You need to be able to model that phase and place it geographically and temporally with other phases of the flood.

Maybe flood geologists are not at the point of being able to do that yet. In that case, you cannot say it is perfectly compatible with a flood model, since the flood model with which it is perfectly compatible does not exist yet.

All you can say is that it may fit into a possible model that is not off the drawing board yet. And maybe it will not fit into any possible flood model. As shernren says, not every underwater event is a flood event. You need to be able to discriminate between ordinary oceanic events and flood events.

For flood waters to get to that stage, they have to start out lower and grow. Afterwards they shrink. Please use at least a tiny bit of reality when considering the possible flood conditions. Computer modeling of the flood has shown that the conditions would vary dramatically in different parts of the globe and at different times in the flood. The work is ongoing, but even the early work reveals sedimentary transfer consistent with the observed strata.

 

[gluadys]

For flood waters to get to that stage, they have to start out lower and grow. Afterwards they shrink. Please use at least a tiny bit of reality when considering the possible flood conditions. Computer modeling of the flood has shown that the conditions would vary dramatically in different parts of the globe and at different times in the flood.

Certainly the flood has to begin and end with less water than at its full. The question is where does this particular fossil find fit---at the beginning or at the end, or somewhere in the middle with an explanation of why the water was shallow in this place. A general statement that conditions vary is simply not sufficient.

The work is ongoing, but even the early work reveals sedimentary transfer consistent with the observed strata.

Which observed strata? Again the point is not just that a certain process can happen, but that it did happen in a particular place at a particular time.

And what about strata that are obviously due to different processes of sedimentation? What flood process explains these?

Finally, given that these processes are supposed to concord not only with geology but with scripture as well, how do they fit with scripture? How does the hugely catastrophic YEC model fit with the apparent immediate resumption of normal natural processes when the flood is over--even before it is over (e.g. finding a living olive leaf even before the Ark is evacuated).

 

[Assyrian]

The whales got stranded during one phase, and then got buried during another. Its hard to understand their burial *without* a MAJOR event -- and its perfectly compatible with a flood model.

Sorry Laptoppop, we are not talking about a single major event where the whales are stranded in one phase and buried in the next.

We have a repeated sequence of events through 130 meters of strata. A whale get stranded above the wave base and is buried. Layers of diatoms die and bury the whale and new wave lines form in the bay. Then another whale get stranded dies is buried and new wave base is formed in the sediment. This site contains layer upon layer of stranding and burial events with plenty of time for diatom to reproduce, form blooms and die in between.

 

[theFijian]

Is anyone else noticing a strange parrallel? It seems that pop is saying that apparently the global flood was just like lots and lots of local floods. Likewise macroevolution is just like lots and lots of microevolution, but for some reason that isn't acceptable to the Creationist. Just thought it was an intruiging inconsistency.

 

[shernren]

Look carefully at the diagram there that Assyrian put up. Look carefully also at the geographical distribution with altitude of the whales that you can find in the original photograph. Now, it would be a pretty mean feat for you to argue that 100 meters' worth of diatomaceous earth and whales were buried in the first 40 days of the flood, or about 2.5 meters of diatomaceous deposits a day (roughly 10cm an hour - before compactification during lithification). You'd do better to argue that those are post-flood deposits during the second half of the flood year, because you have much more time.

But, during the end phase of the flood year, the waters are receding. So any aqueous carcasses should be carried with the flow, what more microscopic diatoms, no matter how much they self-sediment. Immediately you face a problem: why are most of the whale fossils and partial-fossils concentrated at the summit*? As you go down, the fossils get sparser and sparser, and the lowland study area has only 5 whale fossils where a comparable highland area would have something like 12. But dig even deeper. Water is receding, and you have to posit that the diatoms and whales were left on high ground by the currents. (And remember that this is wave-base deposition, so you can't claim that the surface waves did not affect the bottom and that there were totally different currents in deep water.) If that is the case, they would only have been under flood water for about 100 days at most, then the only pressure left on them would have been atmospheric pressure. Lithification takes long enough with a significant hydrostatic head; but if you leave a bunch of diatoms out in the field, how long should it take you to get diatomaceous rock? Furthermore, you should then see subaerial weathering. There were already olive trees for Noah's dove to pluck leaves from within about a hundred days; how long do you think it would have taken for vultures to descend on whale carcasses? (That raises an interesting question: shouldn't birds have been more able to escape than mammals, and thus found way higher up in the fossil record? But I digress.)

Essentially, you need a hundred days of receding water to deposit whales and diatoms preferentially on higher ground. Simple physics says there's no need for a complex flood model to figure this out.

*there are topo maps of the region here: http://www.topozone.com/map.asp?lat=34.7889&lon=-106.394&datum=nad27&u=4&layer=DRG&size=l&s=25 (the lines on the aerial photo are marker bed lines, which as far as I would know are not topo contour lines ... essentially, while Cerro Blanco is lower than its eastern bordering regions (upper right corner of the aerial photo on the paleontology site), it is still a local peak in its immediate surroundings. My arguments still hold, as far as I can tell, and even if you propose that the whales and diatoms flowed off the eastern heights onto Cerro Blanco, there still *is* a *local* trend towards concentrating fossils on higher ground that needs to be explained.

 

[laptoppop]

Essentially, you need a hundred days of receding water to deposit whales and diatoms preferentially on higher ground. Simple physics says there's no need for a complex flood model to figure this out.

So whats the issue? The flood grew for 40 days, but Noah and his family were on the ark over a year as the flood waters receded.

 

[Deamiter]

So whats the issue? The flood grew for 40 days, but Noah and his family were on the ark over a year as the flood waters receded.

Are you claiming that the water remained supersaturated with diatoms for a full 100 days without any of these wildly changing environments you keep invoking to account for differing depositions?

Remember, this isn't just an issue of it needing to be under water for 100 days. You need to deposit 10 cm per hour MINIMUM for every hour of that 100 days -- and this is above or at the wave base where there's not a ton of room for vast currents of millions of tons of diatoms to be dumped 24-7 for months...

I'm having a bit of trouble understanding why you DON'T see a problem here.

 

[shernren]

So whats the issue? The flood grew for 40 days, but Noah and his family were on the ark over a year as the flood waters receded.

Whoa! Is your flood model biblical? According to your interpretation of the Bible, the flood started in the seventeenth day of the second month of Noah's six hundredth year. The flood waters rose for 40 days, and the "earth was flooded for 150 days", and "at the end of 150 days the water had went down". This can either be after the 40 days or concurrent with the 40 days (in the latter case, meaning 40 days of water rising plus 110 days of water receding). The ambiguity is settled when we read that the end of the 150 days was the seventeenth day of the seventh month, which means that only 5 months (and not 6 and a third) had passed between the flood's start and the Ark resting on Ararat, showing that the second scenario (40 days start simultaneously with 150 days) is the right way to look at it, also showing that the lunar calendar was expected by culture (as each month was uniformly 30 days). By the first day of the first month of the next year, the "waters have dried up from the earth", and the twenty-seventh day of the second month Noah exits the ark (and the earth is "completely dry" - a desert?).

The timeline of this then is:

40 days - water rises
110 days - water recedes and the Ark lodges on Mt. Ararat.
73 days - water recedes further until the tops of the mountains become visible.
90 days - water dries up
57 days - water really dries up.

By no stretch of the imagination were the waters receding for over a year. Certainly, since Cerro Blanco is a few km above sea level (Everest is "only" 8.8km), its water recession would have been done early in the 90 days period above. Since we observe shallow-water deposition all through the layers, the deposition couldn't have started early in the 110 days either, since then the waters would still be many km deep over the area.

So 100 days is pretty much a good estimate. You could stretch it to 200 days, but then you'd still get the pretty respectable sedimentation rate of 2cm per hour. (Deamiter, the 10cm/hr rate only applies if he tries to stuff it into the first 40 days. The situation improves for them if they locate it post-Flood, but not that much.) For comparison, a typical sedimentation rate for diatoms is about 100m per megayear, so that your model requires a megayear deposit to be laid down in 200 days.

And even if you could manage that feat, you would then need to explain the topological positioning of the whales, which makes no sense in a receding-water scenario.