Ok, you are all way off track and so I will answer you all in one post. The geologic column is only recognized by the layering and it contents, and Morton clearly says that column has been recognized in 26 scattered locations on the planet. So please stop bringing weird different kinds of layering into the argument.
We are discussing the presence of a recognizable geologic column with recognizable layers and contents scattered all over the globe. Please stay on topic and answer how you will explain that phenomenon.
The simple answer is that it isnât the same column. What there is, is that at those locations there has been sedimentation in all recognised geological periods since the Precambrian - but not necessarily the same sedimentation, nor necessarily uninterrupted sedimentation throughout each the period from start to finish.
" They are saying that there is no place on earth where all twelve of the periods are found. Given that the precambrian is always found if one drills deep enough we merely need to find places with the 11 phanerozoic periods. What we will see below is that such situations do occur. In point of fact Morris and Parker define the geologic column in a silly fashion. There is no place on earth that has sediments from every single day since the origin of the earth. No geologist would require this level of detail from the geological column. But if there are sediments left at a given site once every hundred thousand years or so, then at the scale of the geological column, the entire column would exist.There would still be erosional surfaces contained in that column and that would mean that some days left no sediment at a given location to mark their existence."
The fact that there are only 26 recognised locations where we find layers from every period tells you that pretty much everywhere else there were interruptions in sedimentation. Now, sometimes we have gaps because erosion has removed rock formations before the next ones were laid down, but in many cases we know that areas were exposed at certain times and did not receive any sediment then. Moreover, in many cases the sediments that are there were not deposited in the sea but on land - in rivers, in lakes and deserts, demonstrating that such areas were not flooded.
You ask how we can tie these individual locations together: that is done by the geological discipline of stratigraphy. The best correlations use fossil assemblages (frequently microfossils, sometimes macrofossils) to assign date ranges to particular points in the column so that we can tie things down and compare different rocks at different locations that were laid down roughly at the same time. In some cases we are fortunate enough to be able to use absolute dating. These biostratigraphical schemes have been developed over 200 years by extremely detailed field work, working from individual localities outwards as well as upwards and downwards. A bit like a jigsaw puzzle in progress, where you can have a number of smaller patchess of pieces fitting together but not yet connected to give you the whole. Over time, with more work, such little islands will get connected until the entire picture in time and space emerges.
Of course this will never be complete - after all, what was deposited in on place was eroded in another (when we talk about clastic sediments) so a great deal is missing and can never be recovered. Even so, the reconstructed picture that has emerged over the past two centuries, greatly helped by plate tectonic theory, is remarkably consistent and detailed.
That answer really is too simple because it simply does not work. Sorry. If the column is recognized by certain, specific features in every location, then it very much is the same column and it must be explained.
You are misunderstanding that paragraph. He is calling out YECs there and saying they are wrong. Read it again more carefully. He is claiming to find all the geologic column with 11 of the periods. That is my point. Those periods - whether 6 or 8 or 10 or 11 - will require global floods.
The crucial thing that you havenât got your head around (and that isnât surprising for a YEC) is the difference between chronostratigraphy and lithostratigraphy.
The column that Glenn Morton talks about is the chronostratigraphic column: an abstract concept that respresents all of the time periods since the Precambrian. These periods are recognised in the lithostratigraphic column ( the pile of actual rocks) by, mainly, the fossil content and sometimes by other dating methods. So what he means is that the fossil content of the particular columns he talked about shows that there was deposition at certain times in every geological period. This does not mean that the pile of rocks looks the same at each of those locations, nor does it mean that there was uninterrupted sedimentation at those locations, nor does it mean that there were global floods - because in between these lcations there were always large areas of exposed land.
You donât seem to understand the geologic column. The same layers in different locations are of similar age and contain similar fossil biota. They arenât chemically or physically identical. The similar aged strata werenât all deposited by the same geologic process.
Why would you think geologists hold that at any given point of time in the earthâs history, similar layers are being laid down? Right now, geologic forces are laying down sediment in the oceans, igneous rock from volcanos, metamorphic rock though tectonic movements, sedimentary rock through the accumulation of erosion, and so forth. So in a billion years, rock from our era, around the world, would exhibit the range of diversity we find in ancient rock. That is the very uniformitarianism that YEC accuses conventional geology of.
Given that mainstream geologists reject global floods, Noahâs or otherwise, what do you think they mean when they refer to a geological column?
Your sentences contradict one another. No one is arguing for âidenticalâ anyway. Your last sentence is just false. Anyone knows that when recognizable structures are identified, it will exactly require the same geo-cataclysmic process to lay down the layers.
That is patently false from Mortonâs article. The very reason he wrote the article was in response to YECs and to put aside the very idea of âabstractâ. These are real locations with the genuine geologic column residing in each.
To repeat myself, correlation isnât done on the basis of recognizable structures - it is done on the basis of time equivalence, based on (mainly) the fossil assemblage content. Do try to understand this - it is crucial.
I can only recommend that you slow down and re-read the answers you have been given here.
As I said, your main problem is that you confuse chronostratigraphy and lithostratigraphy, plus that you think that the genuine geological column must be a pile of sediments somewhere that were laid down uninterruptedly, hour by hour, day by day, year by year, from the Cambrian to the Recent.
As long as you keep thinking this, you will not understand the actual situation.
Obviously you would only need to have sea level above the level of those 26 locations which, as you note in your initial comment, are all basins. That means âlower than the surrounding terrainâ.
ErâŚno. The Siberian Traps basalt fields from the late Permian - early Triassic werenât laid down by the same process which produced sedimentary rocks of the same age. Do take a basic geology course somewhere, even a short online one.
You appear not even to have read the paragraph. Of course heâs calling out YECs, and in the process he tells you what he means by âcomplete geologic columnâ, which is that it contains rocks from every Phanerozoic period. But why should that require even one global flood?
@faded_Glory is correct: chronostratigraphy and lithostratigrapy are very different concepts. On the Colorado Plateau the lithology of the basal Jurassic is typically continental sand deposits, usually in huge dune fields (Entrada, Carmel, Navajo, etc).
In the Gulf of Mexico the lower Jurassic is recognized by the Luann Salt, a thick bed of halite and other evaporites.
Completely different lithologies and different processes, same time frame.
Fer sher. Again, even in continuous facies, theyâre often time-transgressive, so that sandstone X in location A may correspond temporally not to sandstone X present in location B but to shale Y in location B.
This is a given, and to be expected due to differentials in aggregate, minerals, chemical composition, etc at differing locations. However, the fact that one can identify levels of the phanerozoic at all in, say, Russia and tie it to South America, says that greatly disparate locations doomed the same organisms in the same layers during the same time frame. Such an event could be nothing short of a phenomenon and would need some kind of geo-cataclysm to tie it together. Common sense tells us that.
You can identify a level of the column in two places and connect them geologically when the prevailing geological processes were the same in both places at the same time. If a location in Russia and South America were both coastal marine environments of similar latitude, then you would expect similar sedimentation and, if there was migration between them, similar biota. This is not evidence of a global flood, it is evidence that both locations were subject to similar conditions at the same time. None of this suggests any kind of catastrophism, much less a global catastrophe.
