Such an event could be nothing short of a phenomenon and would need some kind of geo-cataclysm to tie it together.
Even if many basins share deposits of a common origin, say a marine transgression, it does not follow such a transgression was itself a cataclysm of any kind. Geo-synchronous deposits don’t mandate a catastrophe by themselves (though the nature of them can, say the K-Pg iridium layer).
Once again you forget all about plate tectonics and that greatly disparate locations may have once been contiguous millions of years ago.
The organisms were doomed because they were mortal. Their species came onto the stage, lived for a period of hundreds of thousands, or some millions of years, and went extinct, to be replaced by new species.
The phenomenon you describe is known as ‘time’.
There can’t be sedimentation occurring and including discarded shells from snails and clams in both South America and Russia within relatively close chronological proximity, why?
Presumably you’re talking about index fossils here. Note that the “same time frame” could be a length of a million years or more. There’s nothing cataclysmic required, just that various parts of the world were depositional environments at the same time. The Mississippi Delta and the Nile Delta are both depositional environments right now, all without a global flood.
We are talking about 26 locations, not two.
26 basins. They all have the same geologic signature. They have to be connected catastrophically for this to make sense.
If you are still appealing to Pangaea, you have actually increased the problem many-fold. In your scenario many of the ocean-hugging basins involved would now be land-locked and require an overflowing of flood waters every so millions of years to achieve the geologic signature we find today. The catastrophes still must occur in concert and they still must occur at the most extreme geologic points on the planet.
And what you leave out is that the “extinctions” would have had to all occur simultaneously around the globe. Your model does not explain the simultaneity nor the extent of the problem.
Sure, on a local scale. But we are talking about those two locations on the grand scale of the entire geologic column. Those two locations on the grand scale exactly match the other 24 grand geologic scales literally at the four corners of the globe. Your answer has not touched the global nature of the problem.
Two local environments like deltas do not even come close to explaining the global significance of what I am describing. How are you going to tie local weather and geology from two mere locations on the planet with literally every other extreme location on the planet? Further, how are you going to make them all look exactly alike over millions of years? The problem is far larger than you deem it to be.
…
All of you are still calling on local events to explain a global phenomenon. Going with your idea would leave random gaps in all 26 geologic columns, contradicting Morton’s analysis that all columns were “entire” and “piled up in proper order”.
Basins. This does not help your position because it is not surprising that sediment collects in basins. But it still requires catastrophe, which would translate into the rising of sea levels around the globe to bury organisms. Strangely, it would have to happen everywhere at once every several millions of years!
This highlights how you continue to opt for simplistic answers to a complex problem. I note that none of you are geologists and perhaps that is the disconnect. I can only wonder how this problem might be approached by specialists.
No. They all have the same chronologic signature and same fossil assemblage signature. The geology can be quite different. I see you still can’t bring yourself to read or learn anything about actual geology.
By what measure do they “exactly match”? Please show the actual data with references.
You’re not describing anything. You’re just blindly asserting there is an “exact match”(of what?) “on the grand geological scales”. Which isn’t a statement that makes any sense.
What is it that is found in 26 locations on the Earth, exactly? References please.
Actually, no we weren’t. The response you quoted was to this comment from you:
You will note that is two locations, not 26. Thus my response was structured grammatically for two locations, because that’s what I was replying to. However, the logic of the rest of my comment, that you ignored, works perfectly well for any number of locations. This is why it is advisable that you read things in their entirety rather than just until you’ve found something you think you can respond to.
This is still wrong for exactly the reasons I (and others) have explained and you have ignored. They are basins, that means low elevation and so the first impacted by increased sea level. Not only does this sea level rise not need to be rapid, there is no evidence that any of the correlated layers at the various sites are the product of any form of catastrophe whatsoever. The only way they need to be connected is by similar geological processes, explainable by them all being reasonably coastal basins.
First, you obviously have your order of events reversed. What you mean to say is that many of the ocean-hugging basins WOULD PREVIOUSLY have been land-locked. This is likely true, and likely explains why only 26 of the thousands of basins on earth have consistent geology. This is no problem for us, but a massive problem for you, as you now must explain why other coastal basins of similar description don’t have this signal. Good luck with that.
This was likely left out as there is no evidence to support it, with a few notable exceptions associated with extinction events.
This is evidently refuted by every source you have so far provided. Until such time as you can provide an actual compositional comparison for each of the 26 locations, this should be assumed to be false.
On this thread, two of the participants are geologists, and you seem to be attempting to reject Glenn Morton’s conclusions for a third.
They just schooled you, above.
This is my last post on this thread, and it can be closed anytime as far as I’m concerned. The OP is ridiculous to begin with, and you do not seem to be interested in gaining any real insight into geology.
They don’t all have the same geological signature. They all just have rocks from every Phanerozoic period. There’s no reason for them to all be connected in any way, much less catastrophically.
Even that isn’t necessary. Index fossils are those with a limited stratigraphic range, but the range doesn’t have to begin or end simultaneously worldwide.
There is no need to do any such thing. And you quite misunderstand what those 26 locations have in common. What they have in common, to repeat myself because you just don’t listen, is rocks from every Phanerozoic period. The rocks from those periods are not all of the same type, do not all have the same fossils (or any fossils at all, necessarily), and are not even all of the same age within periods that are each many millions of years long.
No catastrophe is needed to explain the Mississippi and Nile deltas or sedimentary accumulation in any basin. Deposition is episodic, and there are many local events that you might call catastrophes. But nothing worldwide. Nothing has to happen everywhere at once every several mission years. That’s your fantasy notion of what Morton’s locations show.
Aren’t you the one opting for a simplistic answer, i.e. a worldwide flood? That just doesn’t work.
You aren’ t either, but Morton was, and I know a lot more about geology than you do. Actually, I believe there are a couple of geologists here.
There is no problem, only your fevered imagination.
I’ve found lithostratigraphy for the Williston and Bonaparte basins.
Left of / is Williston, right of / is Bonaparte:
Pliocene-sandstone/limestone
Miocene-limestone>sandstone>marlstone>sandstone/limestone
Oligocene-sandstone>claystone/shale&sandstone
Eocene-Basically everything except limestone/limestone
Paleocene-32 layers of complex description/just limestone
U.Cretaceous-Complex, but mostly sandstone then shale/same
L.Cretaceous-shale>sandstone>shale>sandstone>shale&sandstone/marlstone>shale
U.Jurassic- shale w/ interbedded sandstone/shale>sandstone*
L.Jurassic-Alternating shale and limestone/sandstone
Triassic-Siltstone/Alternating sandstone/siltstone*
Permian-Siltstone>limestone>siltstone>sandstone/limestone>sandstone>limestone
So that’s one layer with approximately the same description, and two (*) with ‘vaguely’ similar descriptions. But even those aren’t really that similar if you look closely, and I’ve left out some of the differences for the sake of space.
Williston:
https://thebakkenformation.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Strat-column-NDGS-2009.pdf
Bonaparte:
TL;DR: They aren’t the same. They’re not even close, you’re just wrong. Actually read things before you talk about them.
I am a geoscientist (Msc Geology and later I branched out into Geophysics) with 35 years of practical experience in the Oil Industry behind me. I have worked with geological and geophysical data all my life, including a cumulative total of several years in the field, working the actual rocks.
I flatter myself that I have some idea of what I’m talking about.
‘Simultaneously’ is geological time doesn’t mean it all happened in a time span of a few years, or a few hundreds of years.
Much of biostratigraphy is based on microfossil zonation. Planktonic foraminifera float in the ocean waters and can have very widespread occurrence - moving around the oceans by currents. You can read a bit more about this, and other types of microfossils,
An excerpt:
“Biostratigraphy plays a critical role in the building of geologic models for hydrocarbon exploration and in the drilling operations that test those models. The fundamental principal in stratigraphy is that the sedimentary rocks in the Earth’s surface accumulated in layers, with the oldest on the bottom and the youngest on the top. The history of life on Earth has been one of creatures appearing, evolving, and becoming extinct. Putting these two concepts together, we observe that different layers of sedimentary rocks contain different fossils.”
It is worth reading this in full - hopefully you gain some insight in what it is we find, what it means, and how we can use it to our advantage.
“Now” in my statement was historical during Pangaea and I think everybody understood that but you.
Then I am a little interested in your comments. The others here might be just making noise. I have also asked Kevin Nelstead from GeoChristian to repond.
Of course I am aware of this deep-time belief. But I have missed your point in your last post here. Let me ask for clarification about the overall premise. First, do you believe Glenn Morton has found what he said he found?
The problem r_speir has is that he doesn’t understand the difference between lithostratigraphy, biostratigraphy and chronostratigraphy. If anything, I would recommend that he starts his geological education there.
This side-steps the problem. I am asking you - just you - for a more considered application of the problem at hand. Do you believe Glenn Morton did find - or rather, identify - 26 global locations of almost intact geologic columns or not? Do you believe them to be “entire” and “piled up in proper order”?
No, I do not need to understand those details fully to advance a geologic problem toward your paradigm. But what I do expect is an honest evaluation of the problem and what you think an honest solution would be. Thanks.
The post you responded to was not my reply to your request for clarification. The approval process messes with the conversation on this board.
One thing: my understanding is that @BrushyCanyon is also a geologist with similar experience to mine. From his writings it is clear to me that @John_Harshman has a decent grounding in geology as well. I would listen to them if I were you.
Glenn Morton - let me quite his words from the TO article:
“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.”
What he is saying here is that there are places where every period of the geological time scale is represented by actual rocks. What he is emphatically NOT saying is that at these locations there has been unbroken sedimentation since the Precambrian. In fact, he makes that clear:
"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. "
What this means is that a number of places on Earth have been sedimentary basins throughout the Phanerozoic pretty much all of the time. I haven’t checked all of the list but in general I expect these locations to be on stable cratonic interiors - that is, areas away from orogenic belts (past and present mountain ranges) with a largely quiet and undisturbed geological history.
Now I am going to give you a bit of background that will be helpful in understanding what has been going on.
In cratonic areas the Earth’s crust isn’t affected much by the horizontal stresses caused by plate tectonics. Instead, such areas tend to slowly move vertically, down as well as up, in response to deeper processes in the mantle. This is called epeirogenic movement. Such movements may allow the creation of accumulation space for thick piles of sediments (note that the loading caused by the weight of the sediment pile is insufficient by itself to create this accomodation space).
Apart from these vertical crustal movements, which will be different from region to region, there have also been continuous variations in global sea level. The amplitudes of these are in the order of hundreds of meters (note that this is an order of magnitude smaller than what would be required to cover all of the mountains of the Earth with water). Causes for these variations are climatic change (the hotter, the less water is captured as ice) and also the particular state of plate tectonics (for instance active spreading means a lot of extensive underseas volcanic ridges that displace water onto the continental shelves).
The sedimentary record then is the cumulative product of both of these factors. If the net effect is that the area is mostly under water, we can have very continous sedimentation and little erosion. However, there will be times when global sea level fall coincides with local vertical uplift so that the area becomes emerged, and part of the previously deposited column will be eroded away, leaving a gap. To complicate matters, at such times there can still be deposition as well - terrestrial sediments formed in rivers, lakes and deserts. It all depends on the specific local configuration at the time.
Are you with me so far?
Blockquote 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.
What are the specific features found in every location then? As @CrisprCAS9 pointed out, the actual composition of these rock layers is very different. They represent the same points in time, but the depositional conditions weren’t the same at all. How does this support your claim at all?
That’s not how any language, much less the English language, works.
I understood what you meant, it just isn’t what you said. You should learn to say what you mean, and not make up your own custom grammar randomly throughout your posts.
He doesn’t understand the difference between future and past tense, so it is unlikely he could master even an introductory geology text. Perhaps his education should start with rudimentary grammar?
