Comments on the Grand Canyon thread

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I can’t comment on the thread itself, so I thought to open a side thread.

Thank you for publishing these three articles. As a (retired) Earth Scientist I find them excellent, not just because they engage decisively with many of the YEC misconceptions, but in their own right as a good illustration of what sound geological analysis can tell us about the past.

I’m a European and haven’t (yet) had the opportunity to visit the Grand Canyon myself, but very recently I was on a brief excursion to a classic geological site here in England to the famous (at least among geologists!) De La Beche unconformity in Somerset:

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This is an abandoned quarry face where steeply bedded Carboniferous Limestone is truncated and overlain by the horizontal Jurassic Inferior Oolite. The interface between the two rock formations (with 3 persons standing on it) is a flat lying angular unconformity representing about 175 million years of time.

The grey Carboniferous Limestone was deposited when this part of the world was situated at tropical latitude, some 350 - 320 million years ago. It is thick bedded, and after deposition and lithification the entire formation was deformed and tilted, the beds are now dipping around 50 degrees. This happened during the Variscan orogeny, an extensive mountain building episode caused by the collision of the North American and ‘European’ continents. This collision formed the supercontinent of Pangaea and created a huge mountain chain extending for thousands of kilometers along the collision zone, much like the Himalayans of today.

Erosion immediately attacked the exposed land surface, and over time the mountains were worn down grain by grain. The erosion products were deposited as vast continental redbeds around remnants of the old mountain roots. Later still, the sea re-entered the now low lying landscape and deposited new rock formations, in this case the yellow Inferior Oolite limestone of Mid Jurassic age, 174 - 176 million years ago, that overlies the unconformity surface. These beds are virtually undeformed and still nearly horizontal, as they were when deposited. The reason we see them now on land is the relatively low global sea level of the present time.

These two rock formations contain entirely different fossil assemblages, because of evolution and also because of the intervening Late Permian Extinction, the biggest mass extinction event in the history of the planet that wiped out an estimated 81% of marine species. The unconformity surface itself contains worm borings and oysters that were living on the (then) sea floor.

I can’t even imagine the mental contortions one would have to go through to explain this outcrop as the result of processes operating in just one single year. That makes no sense whatsoever.

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Depending on where in the column you put the Flood, but given the usual claims, this unconformity is right in the middle of the Flood sediments. So a whole lot of limestone has to be deposited, tilted, and eroded into a more or less flat surface, and then new limestone has to be deposited on top of it, all within a few days or weeks. Do any creationists even attempt to explain how that would happen? The Great Unconformity is at least proposed to separate pre-Flood from Flood sediments, giving at least a couple thousand years for deposition, lithification, and deformation of the lower layers. While scarcely more credible than a few days, it’s at least an attempt.

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One very serious problem with Flood Geology is that they don’t have a way to correlate rocks between different places. In stratigraphy, paleontology is the main correlation tool. You can work out which sedimentary rocks are older, younger or of the same age as others elsewhere by their fossil content. In the YEC world, all fossils have the same age so that doesn’t work. The other mainstream tool is radiometric dating, and YEC also dismisses that.

As a result, terms like Carboniferous and Jurassic are devoid of meaning in the YEC world. They have no way to connect rocks in different places with each other unless really close by and unless they really are very similar to each other. In all other cases, i.e. virtually always, they can’t build a stratigraphic framework at all, nor can they do any mapping. Their version of geology just consists of myriads of tiny disconnected observations. Any attempt to build a larger structural or temporal framework will fail because the can’t make any connections between different rocks at different places.

As to your question, I’ve not come across a YEC explanation of the De La Beche unconformity. If there is one, it would probably just be waffle, just like everything else they present. They ought to give some consideration to rock mechanics and energy balances in their ‘models’, but they don’t, because they would fail.

How do you deposit hundreds of meters of limestone in a few weeks? Where would the material come from, how could there be any creatures living on the individual bed surfaces (evidence: trace fossils) whilst tons of material was continuously being deposited right on top of them? How could these sediments lithify in days or weeks? How could they be deformed in days or weeks without shattering into millions of pieces? Where does the necessary energy come from for this deformation, and where does the heat go that this process will produce?

How could these rocks get exposed again, and erode in such a short time, and where did the erosion products go? Where does the necessary energy come from for this deformation, and where does the heat go that this process will produce?

How could there be soils developing on the erosion surfaces, with in many cases plant roots preserved? Why would there then be a sudden new influx of a different limestone, containing a very different fossil assemblage than what was deposited a few days or weeks earlier? Why are there never any modern species found in any of these rocks?

So much they can’t answer, so much that makes no sense, yet still they believe their fairy tale. It tells you something about the strength of willful human ignorance.

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Particularly microfossils such as foraminifera, conodonts, and coccolithophores. Stephen Mitchell, one of the authors of the Grand Canyon article, wrote this introduction.

If there was a singlular global flood, all the microfossils contained in that event should have been deposited at the same time and we would see a homogeneous distribution.

Which is why YEC almost never talks about microfossil stratification. Their followers know about T-Rex skeletons, but most have no idea of the existence or significance of the microfossil record, and apologetic organizations are in no hurry to inform them.

Yes. Reaction kinetics. Self clouding limits the rate of calcification of ocean organisms, which requires photosynthesis at the base of the process. Limestone formation is exothermic and presents yet another heat problem for flood geology. YEC loves catastrophic high energy events, but have no idea where to get it from or where to put it when they are done.

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Don’t think that’s true. In creationist imagination, fossils are the same age in terms of geological time, but in flood geology the sequence doesn’t change, just gets compressed into a single year. Hydrologic sorting, ecological sorting, and other random excuses try to justify the actual fossil sequence. This applies to post-Flood geology too: the Paleocene is real, it’s just that it was only 20 years long rather than 10 million, and so on.

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If the YEC’s accept the fossil sorting, fair enough, but then they have to explain why all the trilobites died out in July and all the ammonites died out in November.

They will also have to explain how the world experienced an Ice Age in February and got back to average temperatures in March, followed by another Ice Age in June that vanished in July.
That will be fun to watch, more so because I expect a fair overlap between people who adhere to such ideas and people who deny current climate change :slight_smile:

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Picky, picky.

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Even that would not work, as they propose mega sequences that feature turbulence which would stir up everything together again, if any deposition would have been possible to begin with.

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That’s not the claim. The trilobites just lived in a different ecological zone than the ammonites, or maybe they sank faster in the water column, or something.

If you’re taking about the Permian glaciation, I don’t know if any creationist has ever mentioned it.

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Im know it isn’t their claim, but I think it is still a consequence of them accepting the sorting of the fossils and consequently the possibility of relative dating of strata.

The Ordivician glaciation would roughly be in February, and the Permo-Carbonbiferous one would roughly be in June. Just of the top of my head, assuming that the flood started in January with the deposition of the Cambrian. Please note that these dates have not been calibrated so don’t nitpick about a few weeks here or there :slight_smile:

Why would they mention it? It surely is just another example of fallible human interpretation…

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Now I don’t know if the more… intellectual sort of creationist would agree with this take, but according to the likes of AIG, because predators were initially created vegetarian, an extinct animal’s dentition tells us little to nothing about its diet.

By that logic, thick coats of subdermal fat or fur or equivalent is also not necessarily an adaptation to cold weather. Granted, there are other means by which we know of these ancient ice ages, but if we keep to the simple and obvious things, the sort one can safely explain to four-year-olds, the ecosystem’s reactions to such climate changes should be one of the more significant lines of evidence. Alas, it is one that would by this sort of argument end up dismissed, leaving precious little else so readily digestible for lay folk.

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Unfortunately there were no mammoths in the Paleozoic! Much of the evidence for pre-Pleistocene Ice Ages is geological and physical (isotopes). The fossil record is more difficult to analyse in terms of climate variations, but I think that work has been done on explaining fossil distribution patterns in terms of ice age cooling and resulting sea level falls.

I don’t know if YEC’s accept the evidence for Ice Ages ‘during the flood’ i.e. during the time that supposed flood sediments were deposited, but if not, that just means another vast amount of data they have to ignore (on top of the vast amounts of evidence for subaerial exposure, fluvial sediments, desert sediments and much more).

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Perhaps unsurprising, but Creation Science theories about Ice Ages tend to be very strange, like all the ice ages compressed into a 70-year period, is the one I recall.

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Yes, but those are the Plio-Pleistocene ice ages. No comment on any of the earlier ones, which apparently happened during the Flood.

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To understand Flood Geology it might be more useful to understand psychology than geology.

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My memories are fading as to the details—and by now could be quite corrupted a half-century after reading their book—but Morris and Whitcomb in “The Genesis Flood” (1961) insisted on just one Ice Age. They thought it lasted a few hundred years, if I recall. (I don’t remember how they came up with that estimate.) They claimed that volcanic activity during the upheavals of Noah’s Flood filled the atmosphere with water vapor and that that caused massive snows in the polar regions which soon spilled into the lower latitudes in the form of enormous ice masses. (Yeah, sounds like a 1950’s B-movie.)

Of course, they provided copious analysis of the thermodynamics of this period as well as calculations estimating the latent heat released during the downpours of the 40 days and 40 nights. Not really. Just kidding, obviously. I had academic and casual dealings with John Whitcomb in the latter decades of the 20th century and asked him on one occasion if he and Morris had ever tried to calculate the biomass represented by fossil deposits—including how the required solar energy could be collected by the biosphere in their very short YEC timeframe. He was not pleased by anything he considered to be a faithless “gotcha question”, no matter how sincerely it was posed. (Even so, I hasten to add that he was always very courteous with me.) He told me that I should direct those types of science questions to Morris. Of course, Morris didn’t address them.

When I knew Whitcomb, he was part of a fundamentalist seminary faculty—but in his old age he left and started his own seminary when he decided that that very traditional institution had become too compromising/liberal. It was very strange. I remember many of his colleagues were quite baffled. Interesting fellow.

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