Pangea and Creation

JOE MEERT

I am still quite interested in the creationist version of Pangea and their
methods for determining the shape and composition of Pangea. I am calling
this Pangea-Noachia since there appear to be few research hypotheses
accepted by creationists that were used to generate Pangea. If there was
one single supercontinent sometime in the recent past, then how fast did the
current ocean floor form? Do creationists recognize pre-Pangea
supercontinents?

 

HELEN

Hi Joe. I don’t think there is any question but that the Bible, and
therefore creation models, all refer to an original supercontintent.

And while I cannot speak for other models, I can give you a brief
run-down of Barry’s. Someone else was asking about this recently and I
did the fastest summary I could:

In Genesis 1:2 we read that the earth, contrary to the standard
scenario, had a cool beginning -- water is going to boil off if not. A
cool beginning and a very high speed of light means that all the
radioactive elements (few or none of which would have been on the
surface or even in the crust) would have been decaying at very high
rates. The short half-life ones would have burned off rather quickly,
so that we would not see the mother elements today in nature (except for
C14). This massive decay would rapidly heat the earth's interior,
driving, first of all, water out of the rocks.

In Genesis 2 we see that the entire surface of the ground was watered by
upwelling streams and mists.

The build up of heat in the interior of the earth would then have ended
up in either the earth exploding (as the asteroidal planet did) or in a
massive explosion of scalding waters that had reached a critical
pressure (this also explains the Flood on Mars which reached critical
pressure, as well as the outpouring of maria on the moon).

In Genesis 7:11 we read that before the rains came, ALL the fountains of
the deep exploded simultaneously. Extra-biblical legends tell us these
waters were scalding hot. The Bible tells us that rain came
immediately. This all fits. The scalding waters would have evaporated
in the main very quickly and recycled immediately as a warm deluge of
water on the earth.

Continued heating below the surface would have ended up melting the
rocks themselves, producing later volcanism and the aesthenosphere -- a
layer of water and magma mixed below the crust and upper mantle. At its
peak heat, the aesthenosphere would have produced a slipperey, heated
surface so that any significant meteorite or asteroid hit which cracked
the crust to any degree could easily have started the continental
gliding or separating we find mentioned in Genesis 10:25 -- in the days
of Peleg the earth was divided. Earth, not populations, is the word --
eres -- a geographical entity.

The separation at the Atlantic Rift and other places produced the
Pacific Ring of Fire on the other side of the earth as the land and
crust 'wrinkled' from the movement.

To give you a little more, but still pretty general, this is from his
wall chart. My parts for this post are in square brackets. I know
Barry has revised some of this, but right now he is in Australia very
sick with flu and bordering on pneumonia. This is his nighttime and
there is no way I am going to wake him up to ask questions about this.
Just please keep in mind that although the model has not changed
basically, I do think he has revised some of the dating and such as
more information has come in both from astronomy and geology:

[Yes, there was an initial Pangea.] Radioactive heating metamorphosed
basal sediments of the crust during the Archean. These became the stble
cratons or shield areas. Mobile belts bordering the cratons split and
downwarped during Catastrophe 1 [the Flood of Noah]. Sediiments on top
of the cratons were swept into troughs which later stabilized.

Post Flood activity largely confined to the supercontinental margin for
the next 235 years, while intrusives date atomically from 600 to 230
million years. Vast amounts of ice and snow precipitated on Gondwana as
moisture laden air swept over the pole. [The Flood had left the
supercontinent somewhat shifted as the two joined landmasses of Laurasia
to the north and Gondwanaland to the south.] Main fault-controlled
trough across Laurasia shows where many tsunamis swept vast amount of
vegetation to form the main coal measures [at the time of Catastrophe 2,
the Babel incident, during which] continued radioactive heating of
mantle caused rampant vulcanism, huge earth movements, tsunamis and
Siberian flood basalts. Mid-ocean ridge and tectonic plates
re-activated. Even coincides with Babel Disperson in Gen. 10-11.

[The] era [after Babel] ended with an asteroid impact(s). The axis tilt
enlarged [original axis tilt possibly due to the explosive outgassing of
sub-crustal waters during Noah’s Flood, which would have had the force
of a large impact as there was the supercontinent in one place and any
outgassing below the surface of the deeper seas would not have had the
propelling effect of the outgassing at the incipient crustal plates.].
Continental drift and mountain building processes enhanced by impact and
high mantle temperatures. This sequence corresponds to the Peleg
Disaster in Genesis 10:25. The Deccan flood basalts outpoured in
India. Mid-ocean ridge re-activated in the early Mesozoic. Region
updomed near the Blake Plateau. A radial swarm of basic dykes were
emplaced along stress trajectories. Similar, smaller igneous centers
exist. By mid to late Mesozoic rupturing began. It wa precisely at
this key location on the Ucatan coast that the main asteroidal impact
occurred forming a crater 180 km wide. Another impact blasted crater 32
km wide at Manson, Iowa. Mantle now highly mobile. Continents
separate.

1. Separating continents generate many tsunamis
2. Rising mountains give chronic quake activity.
3. High mantle pressures assist persistent vulcanism
4. High axis tilt helps iceage.

The Cenozoic Era was divided by an ice-age.

About 2345 BC, the Dodwell/Mandelkehr event occurred: the earth’s axis
was somewhat corrected by an asteroid impact. The government astronomer
of South Australia G.F. Dodwell, compiled 66 observations indicating
axis tilt changed. Dr. M. Mandelhehr collated worldwide climatic,
archaeological, and geological proof for this 2345 BC event. It
triggered continuing geological activity during Abram’s time. The Sodom
firestorm left a 100 km trail of damage along the Jordan rift.

 

JOE MEERT

JM: Yes, but there are many supercontinents, Columbia
(http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_1892000/1892869.stm),
Rodinia (http://www.clas.ufl.edu/users/jmeert/rodinia.jpg),
Gondwana-Panottia and Pangea. So, once again creationists are a bit behind
the times when they discuss a 'single' supercontinent.

JM:However, Barry's ideas are mere speculation he has no evidence to back
them up AND they are not yet published in the scientific literature (are
they?). So, basically Barry starts out with an unsubstantiated 'what if'
and continues with a series of untestable assertions from there! Isn't this
exactly what you accuse evolutionists of doing?

JM: Entirely speculation and relies on an interpretation of the bible. As
you move further and further away from a literal bible, why not just let the
whole thing be allegory?

JM: But Barry's speed of light hypothesis was meant to do away with the heat
problem of radioactive decay. So which is it? Did it cause, or not cause a
heat problem?

JM: Please show me where it says 'simulataneously'. Are you inserting a bit
of extra text here? Actually, none of it fits the evidence. It 'fits' your
story because you abandon a literal bible and accept speculative assertions
that are untestable. Heck, a global firestorm can be made to fit stories
like these!

JM: What about the other supercontinents? How did Po-haloes survive this
'heating'? This is simply more speculation with no evidence to back it up!

[/quote]The separation at the Atlantic Rift and other places produced the
Pacific Ring of Fire on the other side of the earth as the land and
crust 'wrinkled' from the movement. [/quote]

JM: You'll have to explain this more as it makes no sense to me. How fast
did the Atlantic open?

JM: Not true, intrusive bodies date from all time periods.

JM: NO evidence for tsunamis.

There is no geological evidence consistent with this notion! Barry picks
and chooses what geological information he wants to incorporate. He's
better off sticking to physics! I thank you for your attempt to explain
this, but none of what you offered can be backed up with consistent geologic
evidence. You've rejected (sans rationale) all the previous
supercontinents. You've reinterpreted the bible by sticking in words and
inferences that are not there and invented a physics that is untested and
(as yet) unsupported to fit it all together. Creationists are always
lamenting the 'rampant speculation' involved in evolution and yet they offer
speculation that is orders of magnitude greater to fit selected evidence
into a modified biblical story. Wow!

 

HELEN

Joe, here is a little more in response to your post, some of which I
found hard to believe was written by you.

1. Barry deals with not just Pangea, but Laurasia and Gondwanaland as
well, contrary to your first response. As for other names of large land
masses during the division processes, that really is neither here nor
there. The fact is that these large land masses are not disputed.

2. Contrary to your assertion, Barry’s model is based on data and is
definitely more substantiated than any evolutionary model I have yet
seen!

3. You stated that when I mentioned Genesis 2 as stating the surface of
the ground was watered by upwelling streams and mists, you accused me of
straying from ‘literal Bible’. Genesis 2:6 refers to streams, or mists
(depending on which translation you prefer) which “came up from the
earth and watered the whole surface of the ground.” Water doesn’t come
up unless it is under pressure. Pressure and heat are closely related,
as I think you know, which is probably the reason ‘mists’ is one
translation and ‘streams’ another for the Hebrew word used. However I
was not straying one iota from straight Bible when I mentioned this.

4. The buildup of heat in the earth’s interior was due to the decay of
the short half-life elements combined with the longer ones we are also
seeing today. The heat problem was not from any change in expressed
heat from the individual elements during decay, but from the addition of
the short half-life elements in combination with the long half-life
elements.

5. You challenged me to show you where all the springs of deep burst
simultaneously. Here is Genesis 7:11, as I referenced: In the six
hundredth year of Hoah’s life, on the seventeenth day of the second
month – on that day all the springs of the great deep burst forth, and
the floodgates of the heavens were opened. Now, granted that
they may have burst open at different hours that day, but given the
enormity of the catastrophe and the fact that they all went in one day,
I don’t thing the word “simultaneous” is stretching matters. However,
if you want to argue hours, then I am willing to say “all in one day”
and leave out the word simultaneous.

6. I have a hard time thinking a global firestorm would cause an
explosion of waters from beneath the crust all over the earth on one day
and then cause rain for forty days…. But if you say so….

7. The Atlantic Rift started as a cracking at the time of the Flood.
This would have been one of the major lines along which the great
fountains erupted. The actual movement in its majority, however, at the
time of Peleg would probably have only taken about 200 years give or
take some.

8. The intrusives mentioned were those related to the Flood, not all
intrusives. I understood Barry’s notes because I have heard him talk.
I suppose I should have checked for places of possible confusion. My
apologies.

9. Biblical evidence for tsunamis can be found in Job, who most
probably was the Jobab of Gen. 10:29, Peleg’s nephew. The fact that
coal seams are just that and not great layers spreading out all over
also is evidence of massive amounts of vegetation being swept into
troughs by something. Tsunamis are very much in evidence both in the
Bible and in geology.

10. Barry's not picking and choosing. He is trying to deal with all
the data and not just selected bits. He is also working across fields
instead of staying confined to a small area of focus. If, for instance,
the physics or astronomy does not fit the geology, then the model needs
revision. However it does fit, and evidence coming in daily from
physics, astronomy, and geology all verify that.

 

JOE MEERT

JM: Umm, laurasia and Gondwana (Gondwana=land of the Gonds so adding land to
it is a common mistake--even made by geologists) are the northern and
southern parts of Pangea. Barry does not discuss the earlier
supercontinents I mentioned.

JM: I understand your desire to protect him, but all you've given are
unsupported and unpublished assertions that are not testable.

JM: But of course you (and Barry) have asserted that with c-decay, the heat
problem is removed. Now, it's come back at a convenient time. Of course,
the whole think is just-so speculation with no hard evidence.

JM: Well, then it was not simultaneous! I'm glad you changed your story.

JM: I said it's as plausible as your concoction, but neither can be
supported scientifically.

JM: Then how do you explain the depth profile of the Atlantic?

JM: No problem.

JM: Speculation. Where's the evidence? Show me a tsunami producing a coal
seam today.

JM: Barry attributed (in another thread) the Permo-Carboniferous glaciations
to the Siberian traps. That shows he is not careful about his picking and
choosing since the glaciations PRE-DATE the eruption of the traps. I don't
mind that people want to speculate about geology, but it would be best to
get the facts straight first. Barry's model does not fit any geology I know
of and it does not fit the physics or astronomy that I know either.

 

HELEN

First of all, thank you for the correction on Gondwana. Second, what
evidence do you have for the earlier supercontinents, please (before
Pangea)?

You said all I had given you are "unsupported and unpublished assertions
that are not testable." Nothing historical is testable, Joe. You
cannot test the evolutionary model either, so that means absolutely
nothing. However, Barry's model is definitely supported by data and the
Biblical record, both. And, by published, you are referring to secular
peer-reviewed journals. They simply are not the be-all and end-all. In
your own field, for example, Wegener was not only unpublished but mocked
by all the geologists and many others of his time. Nevertheless, he was
right. It is certainly not an endless list of people like that, but it
is, nevertheless, a significant one.

Nor are you correct in stating that Barry is "coming back at a
convenient time" with the heat buildup of the early radiodecay. That
was always part and parcel of the model. The short half-life elements
are an important part of the model, and of the story of the earth as
well! The hard evidence you say is lacking is there in a number of
places. Timings on the redshift plateaus match almost exactly with the
seeming plateaus in radiometric dates. The redshift curve, long
accepted by standard astronomy, matches the lightspeed curve exactly,
and the 'anomalous' readings on some of the recent redshift values are
not anomalous at all in Barry's model, but fit exactly where they are
supposed to.

What there is a lack of hard evidence for is the evolutionary assertion
of long ages, given the data that is available.

And if, in the course of thousands of years, the fountains of the deep
all erupting in one day is not to be considered simultaneous by you,
that's up to you. I consider it a simultaneous phenomena and did not
"change my story."

What is it about the "depth profile" of the Atlantic you are thinking
is so difficult to explain?

You wanted a tsunami producing a coal seam today as evidence that it
could have happened in the past. You know that is a silly challenge for
two reasons:

1. We have a mini-example at Mt. St. Helens where the tidal wave from
Spirit Lake washed up the mountainside and swept all the vegetation into
the lake itself. There is every evidence of beginning coalification at
the bottom of the lake now.

2. Tsunamis of the size which produced the great coal seams of America
and Europe could only happen with a catastrophe the size of the ones at
Babel or Peleg. When such a catastrophe occurs, you will have your
tsunamis washing vast amounts of material into downwarped areas.

If you can please show me where Barry attributed the
Permo-Carboniferous glaciations to the Siberian traps, I will be happy
to ask him about it.

[ May 08, 2002, 08:05 PM: Message edited by: Administrator ]

 

JOE MEERT

JM: The same sort of evidence that we used to reconstruct Pangea.
Deformational belts, faunal provinciality, paleomagnetism,
geochronology, igneous provinces etc.

JM: Where do you get that notion? That certainly puts a damper on
intelligent design doesn't it? However, let's not get away from the
main point of discussion. The simple fact is that geology is indeed
testable. A model can be constructed and if the model does not fit the
evidence, then the model is probably wrong. Indeed, this is precisely
what you are arguing below. If it is not testable, then this reduces
all arguments to the same level.

JM: I disagree completely, but this is a side issue.

.

JM: So, you've 'tested' an untestable idea against an unsupported
religious document? Let's back off the whole notion that something is
untestable, since it negates your whole premise. Any model must be
tested against the evidence. You negate your own premise from one
sentence to the next!

JM: I never said they were. What they do, quite successfully, is
challenge the author to examine their data in detail (trust me, I just
received a 9 page review of my 13 page paper which was rightly and
soundly challenged by the reviewers). Peer-review is the best way to
make sure that arguments are soundly argued and defended. If Barry
wants to have his model make more than rounds through creationist
circles, then he must publish it. In fact, if he formulates his
geological model and relates it to Gondwana, he can submit it directly
to me for review (http://gondwanaresearch.com).

JM: This is revisionist history? Wegener's paper "Die Enstehung der
Kontinente und Ozeane" was published at least 3 times both before and
after his death. The fact is that Wegener's idea was noticed by
geologists who felt the need to criticize the idea because so much of
the evidence he presented was compelling. Wegener's main problem was
that he was unable to supply a mechanism for generating the drift and
this resulted in most of the resistance to his idea. The additional
evidence he supplied (paleoclimatic and paleogeographic and fossil
evidences were strong. Harold Jeffrey's was the most prominent in his
objection to Wegener's lack of a driving force. Jeffrey's was consumed
with the lack of a driving mechanism, so much so, in fact, that he paid
little attention to the geologic arguments given by Wegener. Three
great geologists, Arthur Holmes (Edinburgh-who actually suggested
convection as a driving mechanism), Sam Carey (Australia) and Alex du
Toit (South Africa) supported Wegener's ideas. The subject was hotly
debated in scientific circles and Wegener's book is indeed considered a
scientific publication. So, while you are correct in pointing out that
Wegener's ideas were resisted, they were also featured prominently in
the scientific literature at the time. This is a critical distinction.

JM: The point is that the argument is made that the energies associated
with the decay (rather than the length of time for the decay) is what is
important in the Setterfield scenario as I understand it. He argument
is that if c was faster, the energies associated with decay would be
substantively less and therefore would alleviate the heat problem.
Apparently, the argument now is that the heat supplied by short-live
radioisotopes is somehow greater.

JM: Nonsense. What exactly are 'seeming plateaus' in radiometric dates?
This sounds like mumbo-jumbo to me.

JM: Where is this published?

JM: So you say. The problem is that there is plenty of evidence for an
old earth and has been for some time. I fully understand that you
reject that evidence based on your religious conviction, but that is not
the same as publishing the reasons why and having those ideas out there
for the scrutiny of other scientists. You may object and protest about
how science is done, but it produces results! You have a couple of
choices. (1) You can complain that it is unfair and your ideas are
being stifled or (2) You can follow the procedures and refine your
arguments. This is what Wegener tried to do and it is why he was heard
and remembered amongst geologists. He did not sit by and take his case
to the general public, but he argued his science as good scientists
will.

JM: My point is about taking the bible literally. If you want to take
it literally, then you cannot say simultaneous because the bible does
not claim it was simulataneous.

JM: If it formed in just a few years, why does it have the depth profile
it has?

JM: There was not a tsunami or even a 'tidal wave'. A tsunami is
generated via seismicity and a tidal wave via the tides. A few burned
twigs at the bottom of a Lake is not scaleable into global coal reserves
except by wishful thinking. Develop your ideas and present them to the
scientific community!

JM: Bald assertion. Where is the evidence that they were produced by
tsunamis? I ask you to support your statement and instead I get a story
about a volcanic eruption. We are not simply talking about US and
Europe, there are coal deposits found throughout the world and according
to modern geology, their locations/age correspond very nicely to the
types of environments thought to be responsible for their formation.

JM: See Ice Ages thread.

 

EARL DETRA

Helen: "You wanted a tsunami producing a coal seam today as evidence that it
could have happened in the past. You know that is a silly challenge for
two reasons:

"1. We have a mini-example at Mt. St. Helens where the tidal wave from
Spirit Lake washed up the mountainside and swept all the vegetation into
the lake itself. There is every evidence of beginning coalification at
the bottom of the lake now."

Mt. Saint Helens produced a tsunami? Perhaps you could document this. I have heard of no such thing. What is the evidence of coalification? Is it truly "every" evidence? Do you really equate this to the extensive coal deposits of the Mesa Verde Group for instance? Shall we calculate how many MSH tsunamis it would take to create one mineable coal seam of the same extent as presently exploited in the Mesa Verde? Sorry, but the only silly thing I see here is a comparison between a volcanic lake deposit and a continent-wide regression-transgression sequence. I think your "mini-example" is, at best, a bit too "mini" to be taken seriously.

"2. Tsunamis of the size which produced the great coal seams of America
and Europe could only happen with a catastrophe the size of the ones at
Babel or Peleg. When such a catastrophe occurs, you will have your
tsunamis washing vast amounts of material into downwarped areas."

Whoa! You have started off with the assumption that tsunamis actually caused the coal beds. It might be good to provide just a little bit of evidence first, or are we never again going to hear the circular reasoning argument from creationists? The largest organic vegetation kill by tsunamis that I know of occurred at Krakatau in 1883, but even this one is minute compared to the amount of vegetation contained in even one major economic coal seam. It would also be associated with marine sediments, a whole lot of proximal volcanic deposits, human artifacts and marine fossils, all of which are not present in the large economic coal fields. Perhaps you could give us a mechanism for producing such tsunamis. You might also suggest exactly when these tsunamis occurred. The great Carboniferous deposits should have occurred at about mid flood when there was no land surface available for abundant terrigenous plant life and no source of sediments to bury it. I also wonder why we see root systems beneath the trees in these transported vegetation kills. Your picture of coal deposits seems quite confused. Where did you get this tsunami theory for coal deposits?

 

HELEN

Well, Joe, you weren’t terribly enlightening about your evidence for supercontinents before Pangea, so we’ll let that one pass by unless you can be more specific.

As far as testing historical material, when you can go back into history and repeat what happened on an experimental basis, let me know. Until then, everything is interpretation based on possible models – very often several of which could be correct. And ID has nothing to do with that. It has to do with the current state of affairs of various phenomena.

And I won’t argue with you about Wegener. Ariel Roth was ‘there’ and ‘then’ and his memories of what happened in meetings and in the published literature are probably a lot more accurate than the revisionist material that geology is handing down now, I would assume from general embarrassment.

As far as the heat internal to the planets was concerned, the buildup was due to the COMBINATION of the short and long half-lived elements decaying at the same time. I thought I had made that clear.

As far as radiometric dates are concerned, are you saying you have not noticed the clumping? These clumps, or plateaus, match those of the redshift almost exactly…

The redshift curve is standard in astronomy. I assume it is in texts.

Why don’t you think the Atlantic Ocean would look different if it had opened up within a generation or two instead of over a few billion or whatever years?

To both of you:

I brought up Mt. St. Helens and Spirit Lake because when the volcano exploded, it sent a rather massive wave from Spirit Lake up the opposite hillside which then scoured the hill of trees and debris and washed it back into the lake. The log mat that formed was interesting, but even more interesting were a few other things:

First of all the bark and debris settled to the bottom. Gradually many of the logs also did, and a number of them began to settle in upright positions, as the root balls were heavier/denser than the upper sections. As the lake settled bit by bit and the water started clearing, folks who went down under the water for science exploration found some remarkable things. The upright logs buried in the layers that settled around them provided excellent evidence for the “petrified forests” we see elsewhere. The logs which were buried in a vertical or nearly vertical position in Spirit Lake were at different levels, and would, in a thousand or so years give the distinct appearance of a succession of forests. Secondly, the composition of the debris at the bottom of the lake became quite thick and started to show the sort of composition that we see in coal seems now. If Spirit Lake were subjected to another volcanic eruption with somehow forced it to drain, and if this eruption deposited layers on top of the muddy bottom, subjecting it to heat and pressure, you would have coal. And in a rather short time, I think, too.

Some of the material regarding the explorations and findings at the bottom of the lake are on film in a video Dr. Steve Austin made when he obtained a diving permit for the lake and went down under (several times).

It’s not just a matter of a ‘few twigs’, Joe and Earl. It is a matter of an entire hillside being swept clean by one wave just from a lake, and the resulting mass of debris at the bottom of the lake now.

That illustration is a good one for the theory that, during the splitting of the continents, the massive tsunamis that would have been generated could easily have swept all manner of vegetation in massive amounts into troughs and rifts where it later was buried and became the coal seems of today. I thought you would both have been familiar enough with the Mt. St. Helens surrounds to know about the phenomenon of what happened at Spirit Lake. It is a tremendous clue for us regarding the formation of coal seems, among other things.

 

EARL DETRA

Helen: I brought up Mt. St. Helens and Spirit Lake because when the volcano exploded, it sent a rather massive wave from Spirit Lake up the opposite hillside which then scoured the hill of trees and debris and washed it back into the lake. The log mat that formed was interesting, but even more interesting were a few other things:

Helen, I have no problem with logs being washed into the lake. I have only a problem with it being called a tsunami. I also would like to see that actual reference to this phenomenon, since all I have heard about is the ash flow carrying trees into the lake. However, you raise an interesting point. If the trees quickly sink in a flood, then why do we not see tree trunks at the base of the geological record?

First of all the bark and debris settled to the bottom. Gradually many of the logs also did, and a number of them began to settle in upright positions, as the root balls were heavier/denser than the upper sections. As the lake settled bit by bit and the water started clearing, folks who went down under the water for science exploration found some remarkable things. The upright logs buried in the layers that settled around them provided excellent evidence for the “petrified forests” we see elsewhere. The logs which were buried in a vertical or nearly vertical position in Spirit Lake were at different levels, and would, in a thousand or so years give the distinct appearance of a succession of forests.

I am not sure why they would do this. Is there a succession of forests at the bottom of Spirit Lake? Do you really think that geologists would not recognize the presence of a lake in the geological record of a proximal volcanic terrane?

Secondly, the composition of the debris at the bottom of the lake became quite thick and started to show the sort of composition that we see in coal seems now. If Spirit Lake were subjected to another volcanic eruption with somehow forced it to drain, and if this eruption deposited layers on top of the muddy bottom, subjecting it to heat and pressure, you would have coal. And in a rather short time, I think, too.

But what composition is that? I can assure you that we find many coalified fragments in sediments that do not host coal seams. The kind of environment you are talking about would not, in my opinion, give us the clean thick coals that we see in the economic fields mined today.

Some of the material regarding the explorations and findings at the bottom of the lake are on film in a video Dr. Steve Austin made when he obtained a diving permit for the lake and went down under (several times).

Do you have this handy. As a diver, myself it would be of interest to me.

It’s not just a matter of a ‘few twigs’, Joe and Earl. It is a matter of an entire hillside being swept clean by one wave just from a lake, and the resulting mass of debris at the bottom of the lake now.

I understand. Do you understand that if coal formed this way that we should have a lot of other artifacts and 'higher ground' species mixed in with the coal deposits? It is an interesting scenario, but coal seams simply did not form this way.

That illustration is a good one for the theory that, during the splitting of the continents, the massive tsunamis that would have been generated could easily have swept all manner of vegetation in massive amounts into troughs and rifts where it later was buried and became the coal seems of today.

Once again, you put the cart before the horse. You assume that there was a cataclysmic splitting and then deduce that there were tsunamis. You then deduce that these tsunamis would produce coal beds. There is no evidence that they could result in more than a relatively thin layer of highly contaminated organic debris.

I thought you would both have been familiar enough with the Mt. St. Helens surrounds to know about the phenomenon of what happened at Spirit Lake. It is a tremendous clue for us regarding the formation of coal seems, among other things.

Helen, I have actually mapped out a proximal volcanic lake in the geological record. My familiarity with this subject probably has few equals outside the academic community. This environment has virtually no comparison to extensive coal fields which I have also personally core drilled. There is no evidence that tsunamis had anything to do with substantial coal deposition. If you analyzed all that you would need to have rapidly splitting continents, and resultant tsunamis, there would be no remaining environment for coal deposition.

I have some other questions, however. If one were to have tsunamis during the flood, what land masses would the tsunamis wash clear of trees? Also, if this flood really covered all of the land, how would the tsunamis build up their wave-height to be able to reach high ground that did not exist? How would this happen numerous times during a flood of one years duration? How did the all of that vegetation repopulate the diminishing land masses that had been cleared by previous tsunamis? You have presented us with an interesting geological phenomenon, but to explain coal deposition with it is nonsensical.

 

JOE MEERT

JM: Sure, I was. I said that the same sort of evidence that was used
to
reconstruct Pangea was used to reconstruct the other continents. If
you
mean, "I don't know what evidence was used to reconstruct Pangea, so
how
would I know what evidence was used to reconstruct the others"---then
I can
expand a bit.

JM: Again, you do not need to go back into history and recreate the
exact
event in order to know what happened. That's an absurd statement and
if we
hold to your logic, that reduces the entire bible (along with all
your
arguments below) to mindless conjecture since all explanations become
equally valid...we
can
gain a lot of knowledge about past events without reliving each one.
For
example,
how could we possibly figure out what happened in a car accident
where the
victims were killed? No one is going to recreate the event (even for
an
experiment). The evidence is assembled using a wide variety of
information
and then we can discover, with reasonable certainty, what happened to
cause
the accident. What you really want to say is that geologic events
must be
reconstructed based on what we can observe from the evidence. Your
'multiple working hypothesis' (MWH) notion is correct, but some of
these
hypotheses have been rejected because they do not fit the
observations. One
of these 'working hypotheses' was the Noachian flood some 200 years
ago. It
was dispelled and has no evidence to support it. Thus, it does not,
and
should not, form one of the MWH for earth science. You can choose to
ignore
the evidence already assembled against it for the past 200 years and
I can't
do much about it. However, you'll find it rough going trying to
marshall
anything more than a religiously based argument for the flood. The
rock
record provides absolutely NO EVIDENCE for a Noachian flood 4000
years ago
as noted by a wealth of geologic data and you've not provided
anything
compelling to resurrect a long-dead notion. Having looked at a few
rocks in
my life, I can tell you first hand that a global flood is simply not
written
in the rock record. What you need to do, if you want to support your
notion
of the Noachian flood is produce a body of evidence that can ONLY be
explained by a flood.

JM: The point is that the history of Wegener's idea is
corroborated by a number of sources. Not everyone was anti-Wegener
and his
idea was scientifically controversial and was noticed by the
geologists of his day. Compare that with ye-creationism. It is
noticed by
scientists today, not because of its evidence (of lack thereof), but
because
of the socio-political agenda masquerading behind flood
geology. As
noted many times, if there was no bible, there would be no discussion
of a
global flood. In fact, had the bible said the world was destroyed by
fire,
I suspect that creationists would try to describe the rock record as
compatible with a fire.

JM: You made it clear, but you didn't make your argument make sense.
Basically, Setterfield is arguing that c-decay solves the problem of
intense
heat. Now you say that there was a lot of heat released due to
radioactive
decay. If you want to know what modern
geology
considers as heat sources for the heat of the earth then it is a
combination
of short-lived radioisotopes (Such as [sup]26[/sup]Al, long-lived
isotopes,
accretional energy and also the gravitational potential energy
conversion
during the iron crisis. I guess I am willing to hear your argument
on this,
but given that the Setterfield hypothesis was developed (at least in
part)
to explain away the 'heat' problem, it seems odd to know also use it
to
explain the heat!

JM: I don't even know what you mean by 'clumping'! Clumps and
plateaus are
not necessarily synonymous. A plateau is a flat region whereas a
'clump' is
an irregular grouping of something.

JM: I did not say it wasn't! I am trying to figure out what your
vague
description of 'clumps' and 'plateaus' are. Since you are referring
to
geochronology, I can tell you that a 'clump' is not a term that is
used in
geochronology. A 'plateau' is used in Ar-Ar dating to describe a
series of
gas releases that give the same age over a series of temperature
steps.

JM: Well, it is not a few billion. It is quite precisely dated.
Simple
physics shows why the two profiles would be different. Surely you
know
about conductive cooling of oceanic crust and the depth profile
produced by
conductive versus convective cooling?

JM: It's not a tsunami. TO assert that it is, shows a lack of rigor
in your
background research. I will withold further judgement providing you
can
supply ample evidence for your tsunami notion.

JM: Not quite. The petrified forests we see elsewhere show a variety
of
conditions for their formation. Do you mean the forests of
Yellowstone? If
so, the evidence for their in-situ formation is very different than
that
observed in Spirit Lake. You need to do a bit more research on the
evidence
for in-situ formation of those forests. I can point you in the
direction of
the evidence if you want.

JM: How do you know that? Can you go back in history and repeat the
events? I am, of course, playing with your previous conclusion
regarding
historical events.

JM: Supply evidence. This is a bald assertion on your part. In
essence,
you are making a giant leap here sans strong evidence for incipient
coalization.

JM: This is merely your opinion. Can you supply evidence that this
is what
would happen? What sort of heat and pressure do you think is needed
to form
anthracite coal? Tell us how many eruptions would be neccessary and
then
show us the evidence for these eruptions in coal fields elsewhere in
the
world.

JM:Show me the evidence that it is now coalified in a similar manner
to the
coalified material we see in Pennsylvania and other regions. Show me
evidence of volcanism in the regions of other coalified regions to
support
your conjecture that Mt St. Helen 'esque' eruptions caused this coal
to
form.

JM: Compared to the massive coal fields elsewhere, it is indeed, just
a few
twigs.

JM: It does NO such thing. One situation, which you have not backed
up with
published evidence is based on events related to a volcanic eruption.
The
other is based on tsunamis for which you have provided no evidence.
Your
argument borders on the absurd. You need to show (a) rapid drift of
the
continents happened (b) that tsunamis happened to deposit the
vegetation
mats in troughs and rifts and (c) that is the best possible
explanation for
the formation of coal. If you want your tsunami to form a MWH, then
you've
got to argue more cogently and provide rock solid evidence.

JM: Maybe it 'seems' ok to you, but the fact is that it provides no
such
evidence. You appear to be arguing points that are outside of your
area of
expertise. Maybe if you could show (using some published results)
that this
is indeed how coal forms, I would be less critical. So far, you've
taken a
particular eruption, found some twigs at the bottom of a lake that
are burnt
and concluded that all coal formed in a different manner. Do you see
how
absurd that is?

 

HELEN

Dear Earl and Joe,

I can’t believe you are missing the point about Spirit Lake. Of
course
that was not a tsunami! I never said it was. I referred to
it
as a ‘tidal wave’ which is not even correct, so if you are going to
correct me, please correct what I really said.

The BIG wave caused by the volcanic explosion wiped out a hillside of
trees. Now this was a LITTLE wave compared with a tsunami. I know
that! But if that wave from the lake could do that much damage, what
kind of damage could the sort of waves caused by MASSIVE earth
movements
cause? That was kind of my point!

Nor, Earl, did I say that trees ‘quickly sink’ in a flood. I never
said that at all. What are you reading? You even quoted where I
wrote
“Gradually many of the logs also did [sink to the bottom]” There
were
giant log mats on the lake, remember? I don’t know if any are still
there, but SOME of the trees sank vertically later because their root
balls were denser than the upward portions.

And I don’t think the Flood fossilized anything. But you will find a
very carbon rich layer just above the preCambrian, which probably DID
come from the biota destroyed by Noah’s Flood.

If you are interested in the possibility of an alternate process of
coalification, which the Spirit Lake phenomenon may be demonstrating,
I
suggest you go to the man who made that the subject of his PhD thesis
BEFORE Mt. St. Helens blew, giving credence to what he had suggested:
Dr. Steve Austin. I also strongly suggest buying the video of the
work
he did underwater at Spirit Lake after the eruption. He has footage
of
what I am referring to. Do what any critic does – go to the source.
I
am not the source. I am simply reporting material. You can get the
video from ICR. It is, in fact, one of the things which was
instrumental in swinging me from old age to young age where creation
is
concerned. It is an impressive video.

By the way, I don’t assume there was a cataclysmic splitting of the
continents, the Bible says there was, and I figure that eyewitness
testimony is probably not a bad thing to go on.

And lastly, you asked what land would tsunamis wash clear of debris
during a flood. That is not when the continents split, according to
the
Bible. The splitting of the continents came several hundred years
later, at the time of Peleg. There was plenty of material to be
washed
into downwarped troughs then.

IN response to Joe:

No, I don’t know what evidence was used to reconstruct Pangea. I
only
know that it is accepted by geologists and agreed to by the Bible.

And no you cannot directly test historical happenings. You can
construct models based on the knowledge we have now and try to come
close, but that’s the best we can do. That’s all we can do with a
murder a day ago or a thousand years ago: reconstruct on a
best-guess
basis unless we have a confession or at least a smoking gun.

To put the Bible into the category of that kind of thing is not
reality. The Bible was written by eyewitnesses. That makes it a
matter
of believing them or not.

ITM, there most certainly is evidence of a worldwide Flood. It is at
the Precambrian/Cambrian boundary. I’ve mentioned that before to
you
and you now say I have never presented anything to verify the Flood
in
the geologic record. However, because you and others on an a priori
basis refuse to acknowledge the existence of the Flood, any evidence
you
find at all will be subject to another explanation, so your demand
that
the evidence needs to be something that can only be explained by a
Flood
is something impossible where a die-hard evolutionist is concerned.

OK now, on Wegener, I have pulled out my copy of Ariel Roth’s
Origins (1998, review and Herald Publishing Association).
Keep
in mind that Roth was born in 1927 and is still delightfully alive.
But
that means that he would have been in college at the end of World War
II. The timing is important here. I am going to use ‘selected’
quotes
so I don’t have to do three pages, but I am not taking anything out
of
context, just hitting the highlights of what he remembers and what he
learned:

I remember listening to my professor of physical geology comment
on
the ‘jigsaw puzzle’ match of the east and west coasts of the Atlantic
Ocean. He mentioned that early in this century a man by the name of
Wegener proposed that long ago North and South America had been next
to
Europe and Africa, and that at that time no Atlantic Ocean exited in
between. The continents had since moved apart. While the idea was
interesting, my professor commented that no one paid much attention
to
it anymore. Little did he realize that within six years the
geological
community would have made a complete reversal from virtual rejection
to
almost total acceptance of Wegener’s idea.

…At the time that Alfred Wegener (1880-1930) suggested that the
continents had moved, the prevailing, but not exclusive, idea was
that
in the past the earth had shrunk as it cooled, and mountain ranges
results from lateral compression of our planet’s surface layers…

At the time of his death, Wegener’s idea of moving continents had few
supporters and a large retinue of opponents, especially in North
America. His opponents often reacted with indignation and disdain
toward his views. In 1926 an international symposium convened in New
York to discuss the topic. Wegener attended it and faced general
hostility to the idea. “The ‘big guns’ among American geologists
fired
full salvos in opposition,” some accusing Wegener of ignoring the
facts
and of practicing autointoxication. The scorn bestowed on the idea
of
moving continents during the following years was severe enough that
to
show support for the idea could damage one’s scientific reputation.
(pp 33-36)

You further said, Joe, that without the Bible, “there would be no
discussion of a global flood.” In order to say that you would also
have
to ignore the dozens and dozens of Flood memories among all the other
ancient cultures.

And when you refer to the socio-political agenda you consider the
Flood
geologists to have, I think you have the wrong group. They are not
the
ones in a state of metaphysical panic about what might be taught to
the
children in schools! They are not the ones in control of the media
and
producing something as laughably bizarre as the PBS “Evolution”,
which
is evidently going to be aired again. You want a socio-political
agenda? Go check the people who are afraid to have evolution be
anything but a sacred cow to be worshiped and never questioned,
despite
any evidence to the contrary!

Nor do you have Barry’s model right. But I’ve given up trying to
explain anything to you. The material is partially there on the
website, partially on Lambert’s and partially in the form of his
recent
paper and the book we are in the middle of re-writing: Creation and
Catastrophe.

And despite your hang-up with my use of words, there is a distinct
grouping or clumping or plateauing of radiometric data . I know you
know about it. I can’t imagine you have worked in the field and NOT
seen it or been aware of it. I’ll ask Barry for a reference for you
if
I remember the next time we talk.

 

EARL DETRA

Helen: Nor, Earl, did I say that trees ‘quickly sink’ in a flood. I never said that at all. What are you reading? You even quoted where I wrote “Gradually many of the logs also did [sink to the bottom]” There were giant log mats on the lake, remember? I don’t know if any are still there, but SOME of the trees sank vertically later because their root balls were denser than the upward portions.

Well, geologically speaking, a few years is quite rapid. But this is immaterial to the discussion. Why do you think that we would see a series of forests in the present position of Spirit Lake a thousand years from now. As far as we know there is only one forest, and the trees in it are probably no longer standing vertically.


And I don’t think the Flood fossilized anything. But you will find a very carbon rich layer just above the preCambrian, which probably DID come from the biota destroyed by Noah’s Flood.

Hmm, exactly where is this? I see the basal Cambrian on occasion and I have never seen a carbon-rich layer, much less a coal seam, much less with fossil trees in it.

If you are interested in the possibility of an alternate process of coalification, which the Spirit Lake phenomenon may be demonstrating, I suggest you go to the man who made that the subject of his PhD thesis BEFORE Mt. St. Helens blew, giving credence to what he had suggested: Dr. Steve Austin. I also strongly suggest buying the video of the work he did underwater at Spirit Lake after the eruption. He has footage of what I am referring to. Do what any critic does – go to the source. I
am not the source. I am simply reporting material. You can get the video from ICR. It is, in fact, one of the things which was instrumental in swinging me from old age to young age where creation is concerned. It is an impressive video.

Sorry, but I will not support the work of Steve Austin by buying a video. If this work is that important to his argument, it should be given freely. With regard to going to the source, I came to this board for a discussion not a scientific study. As far as, I know he is welcome here. Was his video as instrumental in your conversion as the whole MSH experience was in his conversion to creationism?

By the way, I don’t assume there was a cataclysmic splitting of the continents, the Bible says there was, and I figure that eyewitness testimony is probably not a bad thing to go on.

To me, that means you assume that there was a cataclysmic splitting. You assume there was an eyewitness. Then you assume that the eyewitness was correct. Then you assume that the event was recorded accurately.

And lastly, you asked what land would tsunamis wash clear of debris during a flood. That is not when the continents split, according to the Bible. The splitting of the continents came several hundred years later, at the time of Peleg. There was plenty of material to be washed into downwarped troughs then.

But these deposits occurred right in the middle of the flood! Below you said something about the flood occurring at the Pc-C contact. Are you saying that the tsunamis occurred before the flood, but the coal beds occur in the late Paleozoic and late Mesozoic? I guess I don't understand your timing.

Why did you not address the rest of my questions?

[ May 24, 2002, 12:42 AM: Message edited by: Administrator ]

 

HELEN

Earl,

You wrote: geologically speaking, a few years is quite rapid. But this is immaterial to the discussion. Why do you think that we would see a series of forests in the present position of Spirit Lake a thousand years from now. As far as we know there is only one forest, and the trees in it are probably no longer standing vertically.

I think when we are talking in terms of a catastrophe, such as a volcanic explosion, that the term ‘rapid’ is not a matter of years but minutes, or possibly days and weeks. So the context is important to the discussion. I do not now if ANY logs sank within the first week or so. For the most part there were rather impressive floating log ‘mats,’ instead. What Dr. Austin noted was that some were floating almost upright instead of on their sides, and when he took a dive, he found that it was because instead of being snapped off at the ground, as many of the trees were, these trees had been torn up by their roots and the root balls were still enough intact so that their weight was sinking while the rest of the tree was floating.

Generally, when we see a petrified forest of the type at Yellowstone, where trees are buried at different levels and appear to be more or less in upright positions, we assume that each general level was a forest of a different time. Mt. St. Helens and Spirit Lake showed that this may not be the case – that there could be times, at least, where the different levels are caused by different times of sinking after a catastrophe such as a volcanic explosion when so much mud and detritus must also be settling at the same time. This could easily put the uprooted trees at different levels in the settling layers and, later, give the appearance that a succession of forests had grown there.

You then asked about the carbon-rich layer which might be the result of Noah’s Flood. In the strata it is immediately above the Sturtian diamictite layer in the Adelaide Geosyncline. The strata is known as the Tapley Hill sequence and is 2,500 meters thick. Its equivalence can be found in many places around the world. I don’t think anyone has checked “EVERYWHERE”, but where it has been checked, it is there, except in India, all of which is an intrusive craton or shield. (Now, I called my husband in Australia for this information for you as he is there right now, so any questions you have of a technical nature here I must also refer to him and get back to you with.)

The coal seams were not formed at this time, nor were trees fossilized during the flood. Both of these are the result of later catastrophes.

And I had to laugh at your refusal to purchase a video regarding this. I subscribe to a number of evolution-oriented journals and magazines and try to keep up somewhat there. I know I am supporting material I often heartily disagree with, but I figure it is worth it to stay as current as possible. The cost to me is hundreds of dollars a year, and you will not take a look at material that would cost you about $20 which might cause you to think a little outside of your box. That is a very interesting defensive position to take.

The next part of our discussion went like this:

Me: By the way, I don’t assume there was a cataclysmic splitting of the continents, the Bible says there was, and I figure that eyewitness testimony is probably not a bad thing to go on.

You: To me, that means you assume that there was a cataclysmic splitting. You assume there was an eyewitness. Then you assume that the eyewitness was correct. Then you assume that the event was recorded accurately.

You are right about all of that. And you assume that explorers, thousands of years later, are putting the evidence together in the right way and that with our limited knowledge and minds these people have reached the right conclusions. I prefer eyewitness testimony myself.

And, finally, I think you have the creation model I am referring to rather mixed up. The Flood of Noah was the first of three major worldwide catastrophes and was by far the most devastating. However the processes which heated the interior of the earth, driving water out of the rocks and eventually explosively out of the crust, resulting in Noah’s Flood, did not suddenly stop after a year. The geologic activity continued, especially around the margins of the incipient continents. Several hundred years later we have the massive volcanic activity associate with the Babel disaster which was also possibly accompanied by one or more meteorite impacts and several hundred years after that, when the aesthenosphere was extremely hot and therefore ‘slippery’, a possible series of meteorite impacts triggered the catastrophic splitting of the continents. In Australia, the Aborigines have legends associating language confusion with massive migrations and with coal formation at the same time. This agrees with the Babel incident and possibly the Peleg time of continental separation being the time of the rapid deposition of enough organic material in troughs and downwarped areas to form later coal seams.

I did not address the rest of your questions because they seemed predicated on the standard creation model that ‘one flood did everything’, which I strongly disagree with.

 

JOE MEERT

Here's what you said:

JM: Tsunami is clearly implied since laypeople often assume that a tidal
wave is a tsunami. Anyway, it's beside the point.

JM: That depends since you've provided no evidence that such
catastrophic motions have taken place!.

JM: You find carbon rich layers in the Precambrian as well. How did
those get there?

JM: As has been noted elsewhere, the processes going on at the bottom of
Spirit Lake are quite different from the Carboniferous deposits. The
'analogue', as has also been pointed out to you, does not fit with
'floating vegetation mats'. I don't know how many ways we can say this,
but until you (or Austin) can provide evidence for (a) rapid continental
motion (b) tsunamis (c) a global flood or (d) volcanic layers associated
with the Carboniferous and other coals, the analogy is quite useless.

JM: Actually, the Bible does not state this at all. The Bible has now
been interpreted to say this. If you want 'creation science' to be
science, then you'll have to provide more evidence than your particular
interpretation of the Bible. According to you:

JM: Why is none of this activity noticed by the folk living at the time?

JM: You've no evidence for that either. It's all conjecture based on an interpretation of the Bible.

JM: The bible does not mention a supercontinent. It has been interpreted to mean a supercontinent. However, as I mentioned
above, if you want creation science to be considered a science, then
you'll have to rely on some physical evidence. So, again I ask you what scientific evidence was used by creationists to verify that Pangea was, in fact, the supercontinent implied by their interpretation of scripture?

JM: And just how well do we do?

JM: Did Noah write the flood story?

JM: You presented evidence of trees in a volcanic eruption. The Precambrian-Cambrian boundary marks the onset of the flood? Good, now
let's talk about that for a moment. In Namibia, we see a transgression of the sea during the Vendian followed by continental deposits in the
Cambrian, so according to the sedimentary layers the flood lasted just from the Vendian to the Cambrian. I assume that is what you mean.
What's strange is that in eastern North America, we have just the opposite in that the Vendian is mostly continental deposits and no marine until the Late Cambrian. In India, we see the formation of evaporates in the late Precambrian and early Cambrian suggesting the sea
dried up. Your suggestion does not match the physical data. The Silurian in the Midwest is famous for its 'reef plays'. How did all
those reefs thrive in the midst of a global tempest?

JM: Please note that he is saying exactly what I did that most rejected Wegener's idea. The three I mentioned (du Toit, Carey and Holmes)
were very good geologists who accepted the idea (and they have written about it as well. Notice too that Wegener's ideas were taken
seriously in that they were debated within the scientific community. Noachian
flood geology is not. Is the scientific community actively engaged in debates about a Noachian global flood in the scientific literature? Are there doubts regarding the age of the earth in the pages of Science and
Nature? Are these debates featured at major scientific meetings (I'm
not talking about the socio-political aspects but the scientific ones)?

JM: No, I would not. There are also many other myths contained in those
legends and some culture with no flood stories. However, you are still
missing the point. Without the bible, would creationists insist on a
global flood based on the writing of pagan societies? The answer is no,
all creation science is focused on 'proving' the bible correct. The implicit assumption is that the bible is correct thus making a perfect
example of a circular argument.

JM: Would you like me to point you in the direction of recent political
action in the schools of Kansas, Ohio, Indiana and many other states?
Here's what one of the recent Impact articles at ICR concludes with:

JM: Sounds socio-political to me!

JM: What journal is Barry's paper published in?

JM: The words are very important since they can be mutually exclusive in
this case. To my knowledge, when speaking of radiometric dating on the
whole, there are no 'plateaus' in the age data. As far as 'clumping'
goes, I still am not sure what you mean, but I'll assume that what you
are clumsily trying to say is that radiometric ages fall into a series
of distinct age bins. Interestingly, these age clusters (a much better
word) match orogenic events quite nicely in the geologic record as noted
by Condie, 1998 and Meert (in press). The problem with asserting that
these age clusters also match the redshift plateaus is that it makes an
unsupported (and circular) assumption that they are coeval because of a
c-decay which is unsupported in the scientific literature. In other
words, the assumption is made that they are correlative when there is no
independent method to verify it. At any rate, I could not find the exact data used by Setterfield to make this assertion. Can you provide
me with the graph of 'clusters' he used? I'll reserve further comment until then.

Now back to my questions:

What scientific evidence did creationists use to reconstruct Pangea? Or
do you just believe it because a creationist told you it was ok?

[ May 25, 2002, 10:29 AM: Message edited by: Administrator ]

 

EARL DETRA

I think when we are talking in terms of a catastrophe, such as a volcanic explosion, that the term ‘rapid’ is not a matter of years but minutes, or possibly days and weeks.

So then, they DID sink quickly? That's what I thought.

So the context is important to the discussion. I do not now if ANY logs sank within the first week or so. For the most part there were rather impressive floating log ‘mats,’ instead. What Dr. Austin noted was that some were floating almost upright instead of on their sides, and when he took a dive, he found that it was because instead of being snapped off at the ground, as many of the trees were, these trees had been torn up by their roots and the root balls were still enough intact so that their weight was sinking while the rest of the tree was floating.

Yes, back to the substantial part of the point. My question, which remains unanswered is, how long did those logs remain in the vertical position so that they could be buried in that position?

Generally, when we see a petrified forest of the type at Yellowstone, where trees are buried at different levels and appear to be more or less in upright positions, we assume that each general level was a forest of a different time. Mt. St. Helens and Spirit Lake showed that this may not be the case – that there could be times, at least, where the different levels are caused by different times of sinking after a catastrophe such as a volcanic explosion when so much mud and detritus must also be settling at the same time. This could easily put the uprooted trees at different levels in the settling layers and, later, give the appearance that a succession of forests had grown there.

But one event will not give the appearance of successive forests. Not only that, but there is a big difference between being buried in lake sediments and being buried in volcanic ash. Believe it or not, we can tell the difference.

You then asked about the carbon-rich layer which might be the result of Noah’s Flood. In the strata it is immediately above the Sturtian diamictite layer in the Adelaide Geosyncline. The strata is known as the Tapley Hill sequence and is 2,500 meters thick. Its equivalence can be found in many places around the world. I don’t think anyone has checked “EVERYWHERE”, but where it has been checked, it is there, except in India, all of which is an intrusive craton or shield.

No, it is not found everywhere. And why would it not be found at nonconformities over igneous shield rocks? Was that not a surface over which the flood surged? Could it be that these were starved basins of some kind? Can you show that they were washed into their location? Why do we see no artifacts there if this was the beginning of the flood? Nor, as far as I know, is it related to economic coal measures or to tsunamis. If this were generated by the flood how then did we get the Carboniferous and Cretaceous coal beds higher in the geological column?

The coal seams were not formed at this time, nor were trees fossilized during the flood. Both of these are the result of later catastrophes.

Why not? Were there no trees around? Weren't coal beds the subject of our original discussion? Are you saying there were more than one flood? Where were your eyewitnesses to these other catastrophes?


I subscribe to a number of evolution-oriented journals and magazines and try to keep up somewhat there. I know I am supporting material I often heartily disagree with, but I figure it is worth it to stay as current as possible.

Except that there is no "evolution-oriented" journal or magazine. They are only reporting science. In the case of most creationist publications there is basically a propaganda effort to sway people to their side. 'Evolutionist' journals don't really care. Now this is a general rule, so there may be some publications that I do not know of.

The cost to me is hundreds of dollars a year, and you will not take a look at material that would cost you about $20 which might cause you to think a little outside of your box. That is a very interesting defensive position to take.

Actually, it is not defensive. It is just not that big a deal to me and creationist literature is not a very high priority. If their convictions were so pure, it seems to me that they would be glad to pass this information out gratis.

...

You are right about all of that. And you assume that explorers, thousands of years later, are putting the evidence together in the right way and that with our limited knowledge and minds these people have reached the right conclusions. I prefer eyewitness testimony myself.

Hmm, yes. That is why defense attorneys just love eyewitnesses.

And, finally, I think you have the creation model I am referring to rather mixed up.

That is probably an understatement.

The Flood of Noah was the first of three major worldwide catastrophes and was by far the most devastating. However the processes which heated the interior of the earth, driving water out of the rocks and eventually explosively out of the crust, resulting in Noah’s Flood, did not suddenly stop after a year. The geologic activity continued, especially around the margins of the incipient continents. Several hundred years later we have the massive volcanic activity associate with the Babel disaster which was also possibly accompanied by one or more meteorite impacts and several hundred years after that, when the aesthenosphere was extremely hot and therefore ‘slippery’, a possible series of meteorite impacts triggered the catastrophic splitting of the continents. In Australia, the Aborigines have legends associating language confusion with massive migrations and with coal formation at the same time. This agrees with the Babel incident and possibly the Peleg time of continental separation being the time of the rapid deposition of enough organic material in troughs and downwarped areas to form later coal seams.

I'll take your word for it. I really fail to see how these things all fit together especially since most of the geological record, including the Carboniferous coal seams have always been attributed to the flood. How do these three disasters manifest themselves in the geological record? I also wonder why the asthenosphere suddenly got 'slippery' but we see no evidence of anything abnormal in the geological record. These are probably subjects for other discussions.

I did not address the rest of your questions because they seemed predicated on the standard creation model that ‘one flood did everything’, which I strongly disagree with.

Very possible. Do you have a condensed version of this model somewhere?

[ May 27, 2002, 10:15 AM: Message edited by: Administrator ]

 

HELEN

It is impossible to present a model, which is, in effect, what has been requested here, in a short space. I am hoping the administrators will allow this to take up two posts. I have condensed a section of the rewrite of Creation and Catastrophe below. Some of it I made notes of and some is quoted, but since I am one of the authors, I didn't mark the differences. I can understand the problems in seeing the thing as a whole, so, with Barry's permission, here is the basic model in terms of earth as well as I can condense it:

========

Gen. 1 – first evidence of strata formation – 1:9-10 suddenly rising land mass. Waters “one place” means land “other place” – one supercontinent.

Rising of supercontinent – one day – vast energy -- washing a great deal of material into the sea, possibly depositing thousands of meters of clays and bedded ores.
These earliest deposits may be less evident today after the subsequent processes acting on the earth, resulting in metamorphic activity (or processes which would cause distinct changes in the rocks and strata themselves). The deposition of the original material might be reflected today by what we see when we look at the ‘black smokers’ of the South-East Pacific Rise.

Gen. 2:6 – streams or mists from ground watered whole earth – clear evidence of underground pressure. Eden on rise of land – source of four headwaters, four rivers. Another indication of high underground pressure. Noah’s Flood when these ‘springs’ exploded from increasing pressure (Gen. 7:11) and did not stop releasing scalding water until Gen. 8:2.

Heat buildup interior earth due to high light speed/rapid rate of radioactive decay of both long and short half-life materials.

Evidence outside Bible? Yes.
There is a class of meteorites which is considered to reflect the original composition of earth material. These are the ‘chondrites.’ These meteorites indicate that the earth’s mantle may have been comprised of minerals containing as much as 19% water. One of these minerals, serpentine, contains 13% water. When heated by the decay of radioactive elements in the interior, serpentine released that water and became olivine, a major mantle component today. As the earth heated internally, the water and heat pressure built.

Critical time for earth. Started cool. Water (Gen.1:2 and 2 Peter 3:5) , then heated up interior. Reason – radioactivity; heat released dramatically.
About 900 orbital years before the Flood, some major activity occurred. … Plugs of molten material from underneath the surface rose. The heat from these basalts and granites changed, or metamorphosed, the original sediments, producing stable craton areas. These areas were later to be the ‘shields’ which were the foundations of the continents as we recognize them today. The melting of the interior rocks resulted in a resetting of the radiometric clock and metamorphosed the basal sediments of the crust. At that time there was also the initiation of a world-wide network of geologically mobile belts bordering the shield areas in that original super-continent. Today the margins of our continents closely follow their outline.

Did the people before the Flood recognize that there were changes happening? When we look at the names of the antediluvians told to us in the Bible, there may be a good clue that they did know something was going on. For instance, the time of the above metamorphic activity would have roughly coincided with the birth of Methuselah. Interestingly, his name means, “His death will bring it.” Methuselah died the year the Flood of Noah started.

Noah’s Flood ends Pre-Cambrian.
Along fracture lines almost a thousand years old at the time, the heated waters exploded upwards with the force of thousands of volcanoes. Jets of water and chewed-out debris would have shot thousands of feet into the air in an episode that outgassed about half the volume of our present oceans (volcanoes today, releasing less pressure, can send exploding material to heights of over 50,000 feet into the atmosphere). Much of this heated water would have evaporated immediately, forming massive storm clouds which started a rain never before seen on earth. The waters that didn’t form these clouds would have fallen back to earth with the pulverized rocky material which had exploded upwards with it, forming a different sort of thick, hot, muddy rain. The results would truly have devastated earth and all life on it.

Evidence for ‘hot rain’ – extra-biblical -- other people have brought down the memory in their ancient stories. Chronicled by Marcus VonWellnitz (Creation Research Society Quarterly – CRSQ – 1979, vol.16, pp 44-46 & 59), there are memories of people left behind being scalded by the hot waster. Memories are recorded that both the water that fell from above and the waters which exploded upwards burned the flesh off bodies and dissolved the land. Noah, his wife, or some member of the family on the Ark must have seen the beginnings of this horror. So many times we simply think of rains like we know them – even torrential, hurricane-force rains, beating down for forty days. It was nothing like that. This would have been something never before or after experienced by men. Under these conditions, almost no fossilization could possibly have occurred. What we have instead are carbon-rich layers which may be the result of life-forms destroyed by the Flood.

outgassing waters not in shield areas, but on edges. Shield areas stable. Areas between cratons become mobile belts, later plate boundaries. Flood washed great amounts of sediment into down-warped areas – Pre-Cambrian tillites (unsorted boulders and rocks in concrete-like matrix)
n -- one line of weakness: Mid-Atlantic Ridge.
n -- also earth tilt on axis (possibly due to force of exploding waters over land area whereas ocean area would absorb much of force of any explosive extrusions; possibly due to impact events as other solar system bodies were affected by same radioactive build-up of pressures)

Time Correlation
Current estimates of the age of the entire universe can run anywhere from 10 billion to 20 billion years old. The data from the redshift curve indicates a maximum age of about 14 to 15 billion years. Lightspeed data agree with the redshift data, indicating a maximum age of about the same time. These estimates would be in terms of atomic years, not orbital years.
…With this as a start, we can go to the ages listed in the Bible and coordinate them with geological events and the curve begins to show total coordination with the mathematical predictions made with regard to this model in years past.
… Adam and Eve were created on day 6. Because the speed of light was dropping quite dramatically at first, however, over five billion atomic years had already passed since creation on day 1, and so day six corresponds to about 9 billion atomic years ago.
So why do the earth rocks only date at about 4 billion atomic years (the oldest moon rocks actually date a little older, which is interesting)? If you recall in the preceding section, it was mentioned that there was some major geological activity that occurred about 900 years before the Flood due to the heating of the interior of the earth. This heating had the effect of ‘resetting’ the radiometric clocks, as it separated the mother and daughter elements, not allowing later scientists to measure the original ratios for dating purposes. Thus, we have an atomic date for this resetting event of about 4.35 billion years ago.

Geologically, there is a division in rock type even closer to the time of the Flood. We see a change in the Archeozoic strata where the metamorphosed material stops. The rising molten material, having metamorphosed (changed by heat) the surrounding sediments, finally cooled and stabilized. This appears at the atomic time of about 2.5 billion years ago and is referred to as the Archean/Proterzoic boundary. -

Noah’s Flood dates at about 720 million years ago. That was, however, only about 600 orbital years later.

Biblical Correlation
So, matching the light speed curve with radiometric data and the events of Genesis until the Flood, we have some interesting ‘coincidences.’ The time of the resetting of the radiometric clocks was just about the time Methuselah was born. As previously mentioned, his name means “His death will bring it.” Bring what? There is linguistic evidence here that some were already aware of not only God’s anger with the sin run rampant in the world, but with the geologic changes which seemed, perhaps, to presage something disastrous. Until our own time, names have almost always meant something which was important to the parents. Enoch was Methuselah’s father, and the Bible tells us “Enoch walked with God.” Enoch, close to God, would have been as aware as anyone could have been of God’s wrath with the disobedience and violence in the world of that time. What was evident to those living at the time in terms of geology is impossible to know, but the possible earthquakes and perhaps the appearance of ‘hot spots’ such as Yellowstone (which was not there then), would have certainly been noticed and remarked upon. It may have been that God revealed directly to Enoch something of what was going to happen. We don’t know. But whatever it was that Enoch was aware of, it was enough for him to give his son a name that was a warning.

The stabilization of the cratons and the resultant change in the geologic record corresponds roughly with Noah’s birth, which is another interesting ‘coincidence.’ It was now 600 years before the judgment of the Flood, and 1.85 billion atomic years have elapsed between the births of the two men. The Bible tells us Noah received directions from God 120 years before the Flood. This dates to about 870 million atomic years ago. This also marks the beginning of some of the downwarping of some of the mobile belts. This earth movement may have given Noah added impetus to obey God! As a side note, it might be mentioned that when all of this is considered, Noah probably was not building his Ark near the coast, but inland, away from the geologically active areas that would later explode so devastatingly. There is no other way the Ark and its population could have survived the scalding, exploding waters.

THE PALEOZOIC ERA AND THE SECOND CATASTROPHE

Geologic activity continues after Flood. Readjustment of crust; continued internal heating. Later catastrophes generall (not always) confined to super-continent margins and mobile belt areas.
This s beginning of Paleozoic Era.
Fossilization requires burial and mineral-rich waters. Upwelling waters mineral-rich; continuing activity in draining of flood waters as well as uplifts and downwarping of land areas result in giant burials of associated life. Much activity underwater – big waves wash up on land – local catastrophic effects.
First episodes of fossil building associated with immediate post-Flood activity quite dramatic – “Cambrian Explosion” – but processes continued throughout era.

Internal heating of earth moderating but still building.

The massive heating effects took their toll around the universe, with results we are aware of in our own solar system. It is very possible that a planet between Mars and Jupiter exploded around this time, leaving us with our asteroid belt of today. Both Mars and our moon, in particular, show signs of this initial heating and cracking process.

World after Flood: warm, humid, great marshy areas. Vast bodies of warm, shallow waters.
Insects and amphibians, which had been maintained for the flood year on enormous floating vegetation mats, would have proliferated quickly and the spore-bearing plants would have been favored as the waters would have transported the released spores great distances, spreading plant life rapidly. What do we see in the fossil record of the life of this Era? Spore bearing plants such as algae, mosses, and ferns, giant insects, and amphibians – along with multitudes of marine life. The larger life forms, which take much longer to reproduce, would not have been able to recover from the Flood nearly as quickly. The Bible also indicates that this would have been the result, for in Genesis 7:21-23 we read that in the Flood, everything died that was ‘upon the face of the ground (or earth)’, or that ‘was upon the dry land.’

How could the amphibians, fish, and insects have survived the scalding waters? The mid-sea waters were not scalding. The original waters remained, to be later mixed with the infusion of waters (and many salts) from the earth’s interior. But even during the height of the Flood, there would have remained large sections of the original seas, not near the cracking vents, which simply experienced a rise of waters and were not directly subject to the intense heat. Here, on these seas, massive vegetation mats would have floated from areas ripped up by the initial water surges and brought together by wave activity. And on these floating islands of rotting and newly seeded and growing plant life was a haven for insects and amphibians especially. Thus the world after the Flood would have been quickly populated by that which survived in the greatest numbers and had the shortest generation times. And that was the world Noah and his family began to populate.

-- basically still one super-continent, but it was showing signs of breaking up and the northern and southern sections of the land mass have been given different names. The northern section is referred as Laurasia, and the southern as Gondwana (part of which straddled South Pole)… Moisture-laden air from the warm surface waters circulated down to this colder polar region – colder because the earth’s axis was now tilted… moist air precipitated as vast quantities of snow and ice. Referred to as the Permian Ice Age, this process eventually had a drying effect on the earth’s atmosphere. The rapidly growing ice sheet enlarged to encompass significant portion of Gondwana,

Underneath crust, heating continues. – rocks liquefy – plasticity – building pressure again.
The downwarped areas which had continued receiving so much debris began to rise in response to the pressure of the molten rock beneath them. The final phase of the upthrusting of the Appalachian Range in the United States, part of one of the mobile belts, was a result of this activity. Although this type of activity was in response to the pressure building, it did not release it. When and if this pressure was released, the ‘plastic’ hot rock was ready to become molten and either flow or volcanically explode in the area of released pressure.

…massive plumes of hot, low-density, highly fluid material rose upwards toward the surface. Far to the north of Gondwanaland, in Laurasia, there is the area we know as Siberia today. Here we find what are known as the “Siberian Traps.” These are layers of outpoured basalt covering an extraordinarily large area of about 1.5 million square kilometers, with thicknesses of up to 1 kilometer… These flood basalts in Siberia have two possible causes, perhaps even working in conjunction with one another: upwelling and possibly impact (crater hidden by Traps) would crack earth at this point. Traps…appear to have been outpoured in one intense episode unrelated to Noah’s Flood, but rather as the result of ongoing processes.

The interior heating continued. The release of the superheated waters had been the initial effect. Then, as the rocks themselves became plastic and then molten, large areas of uplift occurred. These uplifts had an additional effect of promoting the fault lines started by the Flood. These fault areas, or fault blocks were rising in some sections and sinking in others.
n -- not enough to release the building internal pressure.
n -- pressure release at time of Bable – massive volcanic activity all over earth.
n -- possibly associated with impact event as well

many of the flood basalts in the world seem to coincide with the time of asteroid impact events. The Siberian Traps were one possible example. Aside from them, four impact structures have been identified as forming at the Permian-Triassic boundary – the same time as the second catastrophe. The larges of these is the Araguainha dome in Brazil, some 40 kilometers across. Then follows the complex structure at St. Martin in Manitoba, Canada, about 23 miles across. A 15 kilometer astrobleme at Dellen, Sweden and a 5 kilometer circular formation at Kursk in the old Soviet Union can also be added to this list.
Another event which happened during this catastrophe, and in response to it, was the dropping of a major fault block in the crust extending from an area we today associate with east of Greece to America, through what we know as the Appalachian area and down into the southern United States. It extended from roughly where England is in the north to about where Spain is in the south. Into this dropped area, the wave action caused by the volcanic activity and associated earthquakes washed enormous amounts of vegetation. This resulted in the major coal seams we see in these areas today. Similar things were happening in other places, although not as dramatically, and they also resulted in the other coal seams which are associated with volcanics.

This massive movement of earth in the Mediterranean area and its surrounds could certainly have been a reason for the panicked rush to escape the area which ended up resulting in the diffusion of peoples throughout the world and the resultant changing of languages as each group endeavored to not only find protection from ashen skies and jolting earthquakes, but to somehow start anew, after what has come to be known to us today as the Permian extinction. Here we see a sudden change in the geologic record of both fossil types and rock types in the strata.

…As areas of land experienced rapid sinking, or down-faulting, during the multitude of earthquakes that would have resulted from the geologic activity of this time, many of them would have been rapidly inundated with inflowing water, which brought with it sediments washed from the land over which it flowed. …. Thus some of the land life forms, especially those predominant in swamp life and marshy areas, were also being fossilized during the Paleozoic Era. Other fossilization can be effected by the minerals in volcanic ash deposits which are then introduced to remains that are buried there via rains or possibly tidal action if near coastlines. Because humans and the animals not comfortable in marshy environments, and wary of volcanoes, would not have been around these areas, we don’t see their fossils at this time.

Other cultures remember this catastrophe:
One that is very clear in associating the elements of this catastrophe comes from the Kukubidaji people of the Palmer river area of Northern Australia. They tell of the worldwide wanderings of Julmbanu, the Kangaroo-Man. Upon his return, he found that his people had gone off in different directions, talking different languages. Legend says the steps of Julmbanu can be traced from the remains of his campfires – white men call them coal.

Time Correlation
The Paleozoic, or ‘Early life’ Era lasted for 350 million atomic years, from 600 million years ago to 250 million years ago. On the orbital clock, this translates into about 300 actual years, from approximately 3536 B.C. to 3230 B.C. (or about 2256 A.C. – after creation – to 2562 A.C.). When the second catastrophe closed this era, the speed of light was about 1.1 million times its current value.

Biblical Correlation
Bible does not mention much. Goes straight from Flood to Babel catastrophe.
Extra-biblical sources in the form of ancient writings and legends tell us that it was Nimrod, Ham’s grandson through Cush, who coordinated the building of the tower – possibly some kind of temple or minaret – erected in defiance of God.

THE MESOZOIC ERA AND THE THIRD CATASTROPHE
World radically changed again. Volcanism yields dry and windy climate. Very destructive to marshy, humid life forms. Formation of Permian ice cap drained atmosphere of much moisture.
The result was semi-desert areas with broad river valleys where the ongoing life forms were concentrated and then became predominant. Spore-bearing plants, depending as they did on water, were wiped out in many areas and then concentrated in the few that were left that were environmentally friendly. However because the gymnosperms, such as palms and pines, propagate by wind-blown pollen, this was their time. The conditions were favoring them. This was also the time of the dinosaurs, both small and giant. The broad river valleys and deltas, luxuriant in their new growth, provided both the supportive water environments for the larger animals as well as the abundant vegetation necessary to sustain them.
Extensive migrations during this time – humans and animals. Continuing geologic activity; search for food both impetus for migrations. Genesis 10 – Table of Nations – shows linguistic and cultural/ethnic roots.

Time of sub-arial lava deposits – cannot be Flood related. New Red Sandstone of England (and similar through Europe); Dakota and Navajo sandstone, USA – all non-marine origin and need time to develop. …In Europe and Canada, eggs from dinosaurs such as protoceratops and styracosaurus have been found in layer upon layer of stacked nests, which are presumed to have been annually constructed. The layers of dinosaur prints in the Paluxy Mesozoic strata overlie thousands of feet of Paleozoic sediments. Their food supply and method of survival is not a problem if their demise was in a disaster that was separate from Noah’s Flood.

The Mesozoic strata also provide us with evidence of massive reef structures and their remains which are found above the Archeozoic and Paleozoic strata. …study done by La Trobe University zoologist Dr Alan Marshall in his work with corals [http://www.avcc.edu.au/news/univation/jun96/art6.htm] shows that perhaps the algae are not as beneficial as commonly thought but that they actually inhibit the reef-building processes. Thus if warm waters, conducive to corals, yet absent – at least for a time – of the symbiotic algae, were present during this age, reef-building could have happened much more quickly than normally assumed. An excellent article on the possible rapid growth of coral and coral reefs was done by Ariel Roth in Origins 6(2):88-95 (1979), available online here: http://www.grisda.org/origins/06088.htm

Also standing above the fossiliferous Paleozoic strata is a giant fossilized sponge reef which extends 2900 kilometers across Europe from Spain to Romania and as far north as Germany. It is strong evidence, given the time it would have needed to grow, that it belonged to a different Era than the Flood, and was fossilized by a different catastrophe.

Geologic activity continues, primarily around rim areas of supercontinent. Rising and sinking of some landforms – tidal waves -- massive tidal action resulted in the burial and fossilization of life forms inhabiting those coastal areas, including some dinosaurs, small mammals, and gymnosperms. We see evidence of dinosaurs evidently trapped in some of the massive, wind-blown sand dunes which were then inundated by the seawaters in some of these areas.
beginning of the Mesozoic, extensive volcanic activity, -- numerous ash layers in the associated strata. The lavas from these volcanoes do not show the effects of chilling by water (pillow lava). In the early Mesozoic, the Palisades of the Hudson River valley near New York were formed as a volcanic lava flow. Although the most extensive mountain-building would take place after the catastrophe which closed this Era, some ranges were in the process of being upthrust at this time. This was in large part due to the beginning separation of the northern sections of Laurasia, which would later become the North American continent. However this separation may not have been as evident as it would seem, as a great plug of mantle material – a mantle plume – was updoming the area between the separating sections. This formed what has become known as the Blake Plateau.
Era came to a sudden and explosive end with the Peleg disaster, only briefly referred to in Genesis 10:25 -- famous K/T or ‘cretaceous/tertiary’ boundary. There are several meteorite craters associated with this time, the largest known crater being the one in the Yucatan. Evidence for asteroid impacts can be seen in the iridium layer existing in the geological strata around the world at the close of the Mesozoic Era. Iridium in the concentrations found at this point is only normal in meteorites. These strata also contain coesite and stishovite – types of quartz which only form above 200,000 atmospheres pressure, such as would occur with an impact. Furthermore, many quartz grains found in these layers possess laminar deformations due to hypervelocity shock. Such ‘shocked’ quartz is only typical of nuclear or impact explosions. At Zumaya and elsewhere, tiny spherules of meteoritic composition with a high platinum concentration have been found. These spherules are thought to be melted fragments of the asteroid in question. Along with all of this is a carbon ash layer from wildfires which were the result of the impacts. There is an enormous amount of soot found with the iridium later in Denmark, Spain and New Zealand. This cumulative evidence points to impact events as the source of Catastrophe 3.

The major impact at Yucatan hit a critical point of weakness on the edge of the Blake Plateau. The crater is 180 kilometers wide. The strategic location of this impact, coupled with its size (comparable to the largest crater on the Moon), tore the crust apart. This initiated a major phase of continental separation on the now highly-mobile mantle. A ‘smaller’ impact formed a 32 kilometer-wide crater at this time in Manson, Iowa, USA.

Impacts continued. A 25 kilometer impact crater from that time is in Kamensk, in Southeast European Russia. An 8 kilometer crater can be found in Yakut, in Northeast Siberian Russia. In Algeria, at Tin Bider, there is a 6 kilometer crater, and at Quarkziz another that is 3.5 kilometers. A 5 kilometer crater of the same age is found at Rotmistrovka in the Ukaraine. Thus, in the same way the Schumaker-Levi comet hit Jupiter in a series of closely-times impacts, we can see the same happened to earth. The eastern areas were hit first by the smaller pieces followed by the main meteorite, which then slammed into the Yucatan. The piece that hit Iowa came in close behind. In India we also have the Deccan Traps, which is a layered basaltic lava deposit, similar to the Siberian Traps, but formed at this time, rather than earlier when the Siberian Traps were formed. Like the Siberian Traps, they may be hiding an impact crater. The Deccan Traps consist of over two million cubic kilometers of basaltic lava flows, in some areas reaching a thickness of over 2,400 meters. The Brito-Arctic basalt flows from this catastrophe were outpoured at this time and laid down over a very short time interval. Individual flows covered 10,000 square kilometers, in depths up to 15- meters. It is probable that the Moon also was the subject of bombardment at this time, which resulted in cratering there as well.

This time of catastrophe resulted in the most famous of all the extinctions – that of the dinosaurs and their world. The actual extinctions could have been a result from one of two causes, or a combination of both. It has been estimated that the formation of the Deccan Traps involved an outgassing of 33 trillion tons of CO2 (carbon dioxide), 6.6 trillion tons of SO2 (sulfur dioxide), and about 66 billion tons of fluorine and chlorine into the atmosphere. This would have had a devastating effect on the environment all by itself, killing much plant life and thus the dependent animal life as well.

The second possible cause was the effect of the series of impacts. Huge vapor plumes would have disrupted the atmosphere. Winds of hundreds of kilometers per hour would have swept around the globe. Massive fireball and lightning discharges would have produced the global wildfires which left the ash deposits evident in the strata at this point. Massive quantities of dust would have blanketed the atmosphere and darkening the skies, while the water vapor added to the atmosphere, especially if in conjunction with the sulfur dioxide extruded at the formation of the Deccan Traps, would have resulted in acid rains as well as greenhouse effects. Giant tsunamis would have disrupted the oceans and torn apart coastal areas. The disruption of the oceans, by both impact and resulting tsunamis, would have introduced cold, oxygen-poor waters from the depths to overwhelm the warm, oxygen-rich shallow seas along areas of the continental shelves, resulting in death to many life forms and devastating reefs and reef builders. Given the combination of both the impact series and the formation of the Deccan Traps happening essentially simultaneously, the massive extinction recorded in the geologic record becomes understandable.

This series of impacts on an earth crust which was now floating on a plastic-to-liquid and heated mantle was the catastrophe of Peleg which resulted in the final division of the original land mass, eventually producing the continents we see today. These impacts, all in the Northern Hemisphere, may have caused an increase in the axis tilt of the earth. There is some evidence for this as, in the same way the initial axis tilt at the time of the Flood resulted in the Permian Ice Age, another ice age was to follow this catastrophe.

Time Correlation
The Mesozoic Era, or Era of “middle Life’ laster about 185 million atomic years, from 250 million atomic years before the present time to about 65 million years before the present. This only translates into about 225 orbital years in the life of men, extending from about 3230 B.C. to 3005 B.C. (or 2560 A.C. to about 2785 A.C.). This Era ended with the catastrophe associated with Peleg, when light speed was 555,000 times its current value.

Biblical Correlation
impacts ending the Mesozoic Era about time of birth of Peleg. …separate from the Babel dispersion. Importantly, the word used for ‘earth’ in Genesis 10:25, where we are told that the earth was divided in the days of Peleg, is almost always used to describe a geographical unit rather than people or nations. On this basis, Peleg was two generations removed from the Babel dispersion. The time gap between Babel and Peleg is about 225 orbital years. This would allow ample time for human and animal migration to occur before the continuing ‘division’ of the supercontinent occurred, eventually making crossing from one section of land to another an impossibility, thus trapping the various groups in their new localities.

Further evidence comes from a study of the linguistic roots of the word Peleg, whose brother’s name was Joktan. The word ‘Peleg’ means ‘earthquake’, ‘division’, or ‘channel of water.’ It is the root word for Pelagos, which was the old Grecian name for the Mediterranean Sea. In geological nomenclature, pelagic deposits are those found in the ocean. The name of Peleg’s brother Joktan, means to ‘cut off’, ‘make small’, ‘ to kill’, ‘to destroy’, ‘diminish, or ‘tear off.’ Thus the picture presented is one where the tearing apart of the earth’s landmass in a great earthquake has occurred, with a channel of water coming to separate fragments. It would be illogical to merely name Peleg and Joktan after some tribal migration, or even a small cluster of earthquakes. Naming of children often carried significant meanings, and the naming of these two boys was the same.

It was this material in Genesis which first led Antonio Snider to propose the continental ‘drift’ idea in 1858 in his book ‘Creation and its Mysteries Unveiled.’ With the publication of Darwin’s book a year later, most people forget much of the other material that was being published at this time.

 

[Administrator: this continues Helen's material from post above ]

THE CENOZOIC ERA AND THE FOURTH CATASTROPHE

The world immediately following the multiple catastrophes of Peleg’s time was dark, sooty, and, needing sunlight it was not getting, becoming colder. Volcanic debris from the Deccan Trap formation, as well as the debris thrown up by the asteroid impacts, darkened the skies, blocking the sun and lowering temperatures. The initial impacts would have killed a great number of plants and animals in the vicinity. The resulting lack of sunlight, and therefore of enough vegetation for food would have starved out many more. Adding the devastating effects of the tsunamis and even the winds, and we can see why there was a terrible extinction event associated with this time.

The crust, now torn by the Yucatan impact, began to undergo an accelerated process of separation. The separation of the Western and Eastern Hemispheres was not a gentle, drifting process, but was primarily a massive, earth-quake producing series of jolts, producing more devastation geologically and resulting in continuing deaths of animals and people as well. This rapid series of movements, resulting in the collision of continental plates, had the effect of not only dramatic upthrust of some of our largest mountain ranges, but the production of a worldwide series of volcanoes. These appeared primarily along tectonic plate boundaries and over ‘hot spots.’

Light speed had dropped significantly by this time, and thus the radioactive decay rates were starting to stabilize at a lower level. This reduced the heat buildup in the earth’s interior and so the pressures were no longer building as before. However, mantle temperatures had now reached a peak, close to today’s value, and so remained plastic. The mobility of the uppermost section of this mantle was increased due to a high water content. This area, or ‘layer’ of the mantle is called the aesthenosphere, and it is upon that which the crustal plates float. The presence of water decreases friction, and thus the plates were sliding across it in various directions rather rapidly at the beginning of this Era. This was the time the Pacific Ring of Fire was born. As the plates moved, some colliding with others, the great ranges of mountains resulted: the Himalayas, the Andes, the Rockies, the Sierra-Nevada and Cascade Ranges – these are all a result of plate movement at this time. The Jordan Rift Valley was formed, stretching into the heart of Africa, along a fault line. The Swiss-Austrian Alps and Australian Alps are also a product of this time. The Atlantic Rift was literally ‘unzipping.’ Earth movement would have been dramatic and frightening. This would beget more violent wave action and, at the same time, the skies were still not clear due to ongoing volcanic activity.

Immediately after the impacts and initial volcanism, the earth experienced a greenhouse effect. Incoming heat from the sun was trapped by an atmosphere full of debris and ‘greenhouse gases’ – carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide – in combination with a great amount of water vapor. So once again there was, for awhile, a warm, humid world. This is reflected in the geologic record by a dramatic increased in the amount of fern spores found fossilized at this time. But the world did not stay this way for long. A high axis tilt, new mountain systems, and unstable wind patterns contributed to dramatic seasonal changes, and the world itself began cooling. Fossil shells indicate a cooling trend in the oceans as well.

The combination in the atmosphere of a high water content and a lot of dust produced a great deal of precipitation. However precipitation is more rapid when the air containing the vapor is cooled. Thus, the high axis tilt, providing temperature extremes associated with seasonal changes, allowed the advance of a second ice age. The northern areas of the Northern Hemisphere continents and the southern areas of the Southern Hemisphere continents, subject to the most extreme temperature changes, started accumulating great amounts of snow and ice. Glaciers began to form. The ice crept down Europe and North America.

Given these conditions, the animals most able to deal with these extremes were the mammals, with their stable body temperatures. Their size became important, too, as the ratio of surface area to body mass was what would help ensure survival in the increasing cold. The larger the animal, the more mass per body surface, and thus the more easily the animal could stay warm in cold temperatures. This was the age of the giant mammals: long-tusked American mastodons, big horned bisons, giant deer, saber-toothed tigers, and the incredible Megatherium, a towering giant ground sloth, about four times the size of the saber- toothed tigers, in the Northern Hemisphere; and giant marsupials like Diprotodon and the giant wombat in Australia.

The extreme temperature changes also favored the angiosperms, or flowering plants, with their hard-shelled seeds and deciduous habit, which allowed them to survive the cold winters. They, then, became dominant.

As the Era progressed, the water content of the atmosphere gradually dropped as it got locked into the glaciers and snows. The atmosphere itself began to clear of the debris from the previous catastrophe and the sun started to warm the earth again. The ice began to melt, and the glaciers to recede. Large lakes began to form, some of which finally breached, their cascading drainage resulting in such magnificent formations as the Columbia Gorge, and perhaps even Grand Canyon. This warming trend marked the end of the catastrophe of the last ice-age.

Time Correlation
The Cenozoic Era of recent life began 65 million atomic years ago, and was divided by the last Ice Age – the fourth catastrophe – about 2 million atomic years ago. This is about 200 years in orbital time, from 2787 A.C. to about 2990 A.C. About this time, the speed of light had slowed to almost its present value, and was starting to show the effects of an oscillation, or ‘reverberating’ effect, which would become evident later, when the speed of light would actually start rising again a bit and then resume a slight downward trend after that.

Biblical Correlation
The first significant drop in the life expectancies of humans occurred immediately following Noah’s Flood. We see the average life spans before the Flood easily reaching 800 years. Immediately after the Flood, until the time of Peleg, the ages center on about 400 years. This, however, after just three generations, sees another dramatic drop in expectancy at the time of Peleg. Whereas his father, and his father’s father as well as his great-grandfather had each lived more than 400 years, Peleg lived only 209 years. We see a steady but somewhat gradual drop in life expectancies after this until we read that Moses died at the ripe old age of 120 years. This remains the approximate peak life span today.

The dramatic drop in ages after both the Flood catastrophe and the catastrophe in the days of Peleg indicates that there was something happening which must have affected human genetics. That is not a subject for this handbook, but the fact should nevertheless be noted.

Biblically this period of the Cenozoic only covers two lifespans – that of Peleg and that of his son Reu. This, however, is also the time of Job, who, it appears, was probably the son of Joktan, Peleg’s brother. We read his name as being ‘Jobab’ in Genesis 10:29. What Job experienced and what he recalls is discussed in the chapter after the “Recent Period”.

THE RECENT PERIOD AND THE FIFTH CATASTROPHE

This general warming would have resulted in conditions no longer favoring the giant mammals, with their long generation times. It was now the smaller mammals, with somewhat shorter generation times, which became predominant. The larger mammals may have also been hunted to the point of extinction, or close to it, by the men during the ice-age, as food would have been harder to come by than during the warmer weather.

During this period, the sculpturing of the earth’s surface to its present form was essentially completed. The retreat of the glacial ice resulted in the development of suchgreat river basins as the Misssouri and Ohio rivers in the USA, and the Murray River basin in Australia. The North American Great Lakes were also the result of this glacial retreat. Animals and plants were able to migrate towards the poles. Forest ecosystems spread.

The main segment of the Recent Period ended about the time of an evident change in the earth’s axis tilt. Whether this was due to an impact event or the redistribution of mass within the earth is not entirely clear. However it happened, there is evidence of an axis tilt correction that occurred at this time, bringing the degree of tilt back from about 28 degrees to its current 23.5 degrees. This potentially catastrophic event would have helped moderate earth temperatures. Evidence for the climatological, archaeological and geological changes brought about by this event have been documented by Dr. M.M. Mandelkehr, while evidence for the change in axis tilt itself has been examined by the late Government Astronomer for South Australia, George Dodwell.

Time Correlation
The Recent Period, following the Ice Age, brings us right up to the present and includes today. However, just before the birth of Abraham, in 3488 A.C. (2304 B.C.), the fifth catastrophe occurred. There was a final axis tilt change in 3447 A.C. (2345 B.C.). This occurred about 450 orbital years after the Ice Age.

About 2600 B.C., light speed reached a temporary minimum and actually started climbing a bit, due to the before-mentioned oscillation. While there had always been evidence of an oscillation, the dramatic drop of light speed in the times before masked the oscillation. Now, however, with drop in the speed of light becoming so slight as to almost flatten the curve, the oscillation became a major factor. The minimum speed of light, reached about 2600 B.C. was even lower than the speed of light today. As the downward direction of the oscillation reversed, light speed actually began rising for the first time in earth history. This slight climb may have reached a peak about 1000 A.D., after which the direction reversed again producing the historic continuation of the drop, although the drop again remained gradual. There is some evidence that we may have reached a plateau around 1980 A.D., which would also be a part of the oscillation effect. Much more study remains to be done for the entire Recent Period.

Biblical Correlation
This last period correlates with the time of Abraham’s great-grandfather, Serug, as listed in Genesis 10:21. Thus the Recent Period takes in the entire Hebrew culture and history as well as most of the rest of written world history. Catastrophes had not stopped altogether, but the size had greatly diminished. Thus, events like the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah were localized to the Jordan Rift Valley. There is the real possibility that the Ten Plagues of Moses’ time might have been related to ongoing volcanic activity. The parting of the Red Sea and, forty years later of the Jordan River gives evidence that this area was still somewhat active geologically. We see further evidence of this in Numbers 16:31-34 when the earth is said to have opened suddenly and swallowed up the 250 men who had risen in opposition to Moses and Aaron. Not only were the men themselves swallowed by the earth in that incident, but also their families and belongings – indicating that this was no minor crack that appeared in the earth, but a gaping chasm which suddenly appeared and just as suddenly closed up again. The long day of Joshua was a result of the wobbling effect initiated by the last axis tilt change. It was more of this effect, but on a lesser scale as things settled down that resulted in the sun moving ‘back ten degrees’ in the time of Hezekiah.

It must be emphasized here that although these events can be explained in terms of natural causes, the timing and place were entirely miraculous, effecting the Lord’s judgment and provision. In the same way, earth movements of today, as well as other natural disasters which can be explained in terms of natural forces, are still under the complete control of God Himself. God does not ‘look down’ and say “Whoops!”

 

[Administrator: The following post was written before the writer had a chance to see Helen's post above and is not in reaction to it. The difference in the line structure here is because Helen and some others send in their material as Word documents and the following was sent in as email text. We do not have time to edit for lines and appreciate Word documents when they can be sent.]

M.D. KLUGE

Helen wrote:

And despite your hang-up with my use of words, there is a distinct
grouping or clumping or plateauing of radiometric data . I know you
know
about it. I can't imagine you have worked in the field and NOT seen
it or
been aware of it. I'll ask Barry for a reference for you if I
remember the
next time we talk.

Joe meert responded:

To my knowledge, when speaking of radiometric dating on the whole,
there
are no 'plateaus' in the age data. As far as 'clumping' goes, I still
am not
sure what you mean, but I'll assume that what you are clumsily trying
to say
is that radiometric ages fall into a series of distinct age bins.
Interestingly, these age clusters (a much better word) match orogenic
events
quite nicely in the geologic record as noted by Condie, 1998 and
Meert (in
press).

MDK: I'm confused. Why is it surprising that the distribution of
radiometric
dates obtained is not uniform over geological history? Would you not
expect
that geologists would be drawn to study geologically "interesting"
specimens, corresponding to geologically interesting episodes? That is
simply sampling bias

Evidently Setterfield has never published the alleged correspondence
between
clumps in radiometrically-determined ages and supposed clustering of
red
shift-determined astronomical distances; however, it seems quite
impossible.
To obtain such a correspondence one would need to know the value of
the
Hubble Constant with something near the precision with which one can
determine radiometric dates. At any rate, the precision needed for the
Hubble Constant would have to be at least comparable to the
bin-widths used
in sorting data. Since the best measurements of the Hubble Constant
give its
value to , very optimistically, at best five percent, this means that
for
the Cambrian, say, the best resolution he could achieve is greater
than 25
MY. Otherwise Setterfield cannot match red shift peaks with
corresponding
radiometric dating peaks.

What value of the Hubble constant does Setterfield use? And where
may I see
the correspondence in peaks?

Helen also wrote:

Nor do you have Barry's model right. But I've given up trying to
explain
anything to you. The material is partially there on the ebsite,
partially
on Lambert's and partially in the form of his recent paper and the
book we
are in the middle of re-writing: Creation and Catastrophe.

MDK: By "his recent paper" do you mean the one on the mechanism of
c-decay
he's been trying to get published in a scientific journal these past
years?
What journal accepted it, and when is it due for publication?

I must confess that I have had the same misunderstanding as Joe Meert
concerning radioactive heating in Setterfield's model. Since all
atomic and
nuclear dimensionless numbers are strictly constant in Setterfield's
model,
it followed that the rates of all chemical and nuclear processes
scaled
uniformly. Therefore, although radioactive dacay was much faster in
the
past, so were chemical (and strong, weak, and electromagnetic
physical)
processes correspondingly fast. Thus, although radioactive decay was
much
faster in the days of Adam than now, producing decays more rapidly
(but each
decay having the same energy as the corresponding decay now), the
heat would
have been generated more rapidly, but also conducted away and
absorbed and
re-emitted correspondingly more rapidly, so that Adam, Eve, Seth and
his
wife and their progeny would not have boiled. But now we hear that
this
admirable aspect of Setterfield's model does not apply within the
earth.

Finally, I do not understand the geometry Helen envisions for
coal-seam
formation by tsunamis. Are the trenches in which organic material was
deposited parallel to continental coasts? Are they in the land part
of the
continent or under water (within the continental shelf)? The analogy
with
Spirit Lake suggests that the seams are under water (the wave brought
organic material back into the lake bed which, obviously, had
previously
been under water.) Yet, I hesitate to decide whether this is supposed
to be
part of the analogy or not.

[ May 28, 2002, 09:58 AM: Message edited by: Administrator ]

 

EARL DETRA

MDK: I'm confused. Why is it surprising that the distribution of radiometric dates obtained is not uniform over geological history? Would you not expect that geologists would be drawn to study geologically "interesting" specimens, corresponding to geologically interesting episodes? That is simply sampling bias.

While I agree that sampling bias is a common and critical problem for any type of sampling in natural materials, I think that you might miss an important point. Dates will indeed accumulate in certain groups because of focused research, however, any dates outside the 'clumps' would, by definition, be 'interesting.' The point of this argument is not that the clustering is surprising, but that if radiometric dating were as undependable as some say, one would think that the results would be random and/or geologically unexplainable. They are not. I think you would also be surprised to find out what geologists think is 'interesting.'