This is a deeper dig into the background of a claim made on YEC vs FE Part 1: Evidence for YEC, which I rebutted there.
This story starts over half a century ago, with an article on Kangaroo Island by Charles Rowland Twidale, an Australian geomorphologist. The age of the lateritized summit surface on Kangaroo Island and adjacent areas of South Australia (1974) He describes the island’s plateau as:
This description offers no evidence whatsoever that Kangaroo Island is “flat”.
This article is cited by Did Landscapes Evolve? (1983) by Steven A. Austin, which makes no direct mention of Kangaroo Island. The Austin article also cites a second article by Twidale, On the Survival of Paleoforms which makes only brief, passing mention of Kangaroo Island, and talks extensively about “paleoplain remnants” – i.e. fragments of a paleoplain that have survived, through idiosyncratic conditions, most of the erosion that the majority of the paleoplain has suffered.
Austin muddles this point when he claims:
C.R. Twidale,4 a physical geographer from Australia, argues that remnants of old paleosurfaces of low relief (what he calls “paleoplains”) constitute an important part of many contemporary landscapes in various parts of the world.
Austin goes on to state:
What is amazing is that these plains have survived without major stream channel erosion.
But Twidale was NOT saying that (entire) plains survived – only that “remnants” of them did, and as the above Twidale quotes explicitly demonstrates, that (in Kangaroo Island at least) they were subject to “stream erosion” where the plateau was “deeply dissected” by lowlands, especially in the island’s northeast.
In his 2009 article Age of the earth, Don Batten claimed, citing Austin’s artiucle, that Kangaroo Island is “an example” of a “significant flat plateaux that are ‘dated’ at many millions of years old (‘elevated paleoplains’).” Batten then repeats Austin’s quote from Tridale’s second article (which article barely mentions Kangaroo Island).
Then, a day ago @jeffb, on the strength of this, or some similar garbled YEC misrepresentation of these facts, stated:
It is clear that neither Batten nor Jeff bothered to look at a topographic map before making their claims. It is also likely that neither of them have read either of Twidale’s articles, which would appear to be ultimately the sole basis for their claims about the island.
Based on such grossly-inaccurate and slap-dash YEC ‘scholarship’, it would seem not unreasonable to describe such work as “speech intended to persuade without regard for truth”, i.e. "Bullshit. It would further not seem unreasonable to suggest that Jeff’s thread would be more accurately titled: “YEC vs FE Part 1: Bullshit that YEC has made up”.