Flood Geology, Again

Oh good, you’re an expert on buried trees now. :slightly_smiling_face:

Please give us your YEC explanation for the over 40 sequentially buried forests at Specimen Ridge in Yellowstone Park. The forests were buried in situ by a series of volcanic lahars over a span of several million years - one forest was buried, another grew on top of it then it was buried, another grew on top of it, etc. The trees are know to have been buried in place because of the paleosols (ancient soils) found with their roots.

In the beds of the streams and gulches coining down into the Lamar River from Specimen Ridge and the fossil forests one may observe numerous pieces of fossil wood, which may be traced for a long distance down the Lamar and Yellowstone Rivers. The farther these pieces of wood have been transported downstream, the more they have been worn and rounded, until ultimately they become smooth, rounded “pebbles” of the stream bed. The pieces of wood become more numerous and fresher in appearance upstream toward the bluffs, until at the foot of the cliffs in some places there are hundreds, perhaps thousands of tons that have but recently fallen from the walls above. One traversing the valley of the Lamar River may see at many places numerous upright fossil trunks in the faces of nearly vertical walls. These trunks are not all at a particular level but occur at irregular heights; in fact a section cut down through these 2,000 feet of beds would disclose a succession of fossil forests (see fig. 4). That is to say, after the first forest grew and was entombed, there was a time without volcanic outburst—a period long enough to permit a second forest to grow above the first. This in turn was covered by volcanic material and preserved, to be followed again by a period of quiet, and these more or less regular alternations of volcanism and forest growth continued throughout the time the beds were in process of formation.

THE FOSSIL FORESTS OF THE YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK

I bet you can’t find a CMI pre-canned article with an explanation. Let’s hear yours.

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I couldn’t say. Why not email him and ask about this?

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I just showed you a polystrate telephone pole. Were there telephone poles in Noah’s time? Has there been a global flood since telephone poles came into use?

Name one.

Of course we expect that from earth history, from the Channeled Scablands to the millions of turbidity flows. But those aren’t global catastrophes, just local ones.

Again, this evidence is of quite local events. The afore-mentioned Channeled Scablands, the filling of the Black Sea and Mediterranean, etc.

That’s evidence against a single event for many reasons. First, the sheer number of fossils can’t possibly be accommodated within the biota of a single year. Second, there’s all that sorting, for which YEC has only the lamest possible explanations. I’ll stop there.

Not a geological term, and I don’t know what’s intended.

Those are evidence of a lower sea level in the past, not a global flood.

How does the existence of giant rock arches match your claims of massive catastrophic erosion? They’re quite delicate and transitory structures.

That’s not about a global flood; it’s about the age of the oceans, if anything. Of course it assumes there are no sinks for ocean substances.

Again, not about the flood. And it assumes that uplift doesn’t happen.

Come again?

To the extent that’s a real thing, it’s evidence for rapid local deposition in some spots, not for a global flood.

Still not relevant to a flood, and there are processes that can create a small amount of C14 in carbon deposits.

There apparently are no unpermineralized dinosaur bones, and the “soft tissue” is hardly pristine tissue. Calling it “tissue” is problematic.

Now of course none of this matters, since we can’t know anything about the past based on observation. Historical science isn’t science at all, and creation science is no exception. Right?

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Yes, that’s why YECs don’t want to explain the Haymond Formation. (@PDPrice, are you going to give it a try before this thread closes? Give it a shot. Show the doubters that you aren’t dodging the question.)

Glenn Morton and now @BrushyCanyon have provided eye-witness testimony on how oil exploration is carried out. So, @PDPrice, why doesn’t their eye-witness testimony count? Are you dismissing their reliability? (Are you operating under a double-standard?)

I won’t presume to nominate a #1 weakest young earth argument—but that one surely has to be somewhere near the top of the list. That’s such an old PRATT that I don’t quite have the will to start a new thread on that topic. But if we have any silent readers who are curious, they can private message to me their interest.

The “rest of the geology” does not exist in the past??? I have no idea what that means—but I’m curious as to the explanation.

Perhaps @PDPrice will name some examples of the “massive continuous geologic formations spanning the global” that he’s talking about. (Are their reliable witnesses to them?)

I’m willing to delay the closing of this thread if that will encourage the exploration of this sub-topic. I’ve never heard these claims before (that those phenomena would not be expected on an old earth.)

And why would oceans on an old earth be toxic from salt and nickel? (PDPrice, are you unaware of natural processes which remove salt from the oceans? I thought that old ocean-salt-argument from The Genesis Flood was gradually dying within YEC lore. Even some of my most die-hard YEC colleagues of long ago no longer use that one.)

What leads you to think that continents would be eroded away? I thought you accepted geologic forces like uplift and lava flows?

So in this case you are willing to accept the reliability of witnesses. What is behind this inconsistency?

So in this case are we to assume eyewitness testimony is unreliable?

Just as your mind is completely closed to the eyewitness testimony of Glenn Morton and the entire geology academy (with the exception of Tim Clarey.)

I have never been successful in getting replies for these types of email inquiries at AIG, ICR, and CMI. If I got a reply, it was usually a general “form letter” telling me to search their website. Perhaps others will be more successful.

The question I asked Tim Clarey directly concerning oil exploration and flood geology was a call-in program some years ago. He dodged it. Perhaps you would be more successful than any of us.

I recall an AIG radio program where the White Cliffs of Dover were described as formed in a single year because there were far more nutrients in the water back then and rapid biological growth was phenomenally fast. (Obviously, they never did the math on the kilojoules of energy generated in terms of heat. The tiny organisms were bursting into flames because their metabolism was so high.)

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In the closing hours of this soiree, I would like to acknowledge and appreciate the understanding of the geosciences exhibited by the other life scientists, ministers and other non-specified scholars who have taken the time to learn what the Earth can teach us.

Everyone can learn, not everyone will.

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Those chalk deposits are a drop in the bucket. My favorite is the crinoids:

For those who are curious, this is a crinoid:

The broken bits of crinoids are 2,000 feet thick in places. There’s enough crinoids in one deposit to cover the entire globe to 1/4 inch thick. There is absolutely no way a flood can create that.

The article linked above also describes other massive fossil deposits that can’t be explained by a single global flood.

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Henry Morris used to get very irritated when someone asked him to quantify his claims and show his calculations. I vaguely recall an audience question which challenged him concerning the thickness of crinoid layers. He said something like: The same pre-flood conditions which made it possible for humans to live beyond 900 years allowed such ocean organisms to grow at rapid rates unimaginable today. That’s why uniformitarianism is so misleading. We can’t judge the past based upon today’s conditions.

@PDPrice, do you agree with that explanation? Can the biota calculations survive scrutiny or do you consider all of this beyond scrutiny because it was in the past?

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It’s a shame threads like this get closed because they always produce so many interesting and unusual geology facts and examples. Who cares if the YECs here refuse to learn? That’s their loss.

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While we have a moment or two:

Flat Contacts?


Folds in the Tappets Fm. Cambrian, Grand Canyon

Devonian Temple Butte channels between the Redwall (Mississippian) and the Muave Limestone (Cambrian)

Angular unconformity between Redwall and Muave

Travertine (Pleistocene ?) over Muave and Bright Angel

Pleistocene lava flows over Redwall
Great Unconformity Tappeats on preCambrian gneiss

Kaibab Monocline, Tappeats against Chuar Group (preCambrian)

A few of my pics from my latest (2018) Canyon trip.

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It is the truth, so a consensus emerges.

Two industry veterans on this thread are telling you the way it is, and instead of listening and learning, you assert that they are close minded and then go expertise shopping for opinion more in keeping with your confirmation bias requirements - get some links to a few creationist articles, and you are good to go, content in the knowledge that the people who actually find oil do not know what they are talking about.

Here is more - oil prospecting is not just about inert rock. Oil is found in sedimentary rock, which is full of the remains of living things. Oil companies retain the services of biologists who are expert in microfossils, and as these creatures have evolved over geological time these can be used to calibrate the age of the strata as the borehole progresses. The temperature - pressure history these fossils were subject to can be determined, which also provides valuable information relevant to finding oil and the grade fraction expected.

Flood geology simply cannot account for the progression of fossil species, the coloration changes which correlate with the state history, or the sheer volume of micro-life represented. As with everything else, the evidence agrees just fine with what would be expected from an old earth, including continents that are not all eroded away and underwater canyons.

Nicely put. YEC persists in the illusion that science and geology in particular is motivated by some sort of crusade to provide a naturalist alternative to their scriptural literalism, and is driven by spiritual forces. In reality, almost nobody in geology is the least concerned with proving antiquity for the millionth time, rather the quest is to fill ever more detail of what happened over that expanse, to add to the catalog of human understanding and provide for energy resources demanded.

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Even in the 1830’s there was enough evidence against Noah’s flood that even the ardent supporters were admitting their error.

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Thus endeth the lesson.

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