Beyond Biblical Literalism?

[Paraleptopecten (Timothy Campbell)]

@adamjedgar

@T_aquaticus

You have never shown that any of these sedimentary layers were formed at the same time nor were they formed recently. That’s because you don’t have the facts on your side.

Omg…you clearly dont study outside of the third hand drip fed ideas that form your world view…there are buckloads of research about exactly that point…including on this very forum.

Like this research? [for a start]

@Paraleptopecten

Completely unsorted deposits are also a problem–everything from shells larger than my hand down to fine clay that takes weeks to settle out of still water (let alone alternating between sandier and muddier layers over and over in a single deposit) is impossible to get out of a single flood event.

@Paraleptopecten

I have personally observed coastal marine deposits several meters thick, with at least one unconformity, with index fossils in each layer, and different lithology in each. How is that possible to deposit in a year? Or even a few thousand? And I have a few tens of thousands of fossil mollusks sitting within 5 meters of me that would get smashed if there were a violent flood depositing them.

@Paraleptopecten

As to implications of the deposits, the main points are that
1: the material is extremely unsorted, containing shells over 150 mm long, shells under 5 mm long, and clay that takes multiple days to settle out of the water I washed things in. This indicates very low water speeds [mostly, there is one river-deposited bed at the top that has more coarse material].

2: Many of the shells are fragile: we have found multiple complete specimens of Gari, Solecurtus, and one Mactrotoma, all of which are large clams that would break if I squeezed them a bit too hard, or dropped them.

3: In the stratigraphy, note the extinction rates always increasing with depth (discrediting different habitats from the same time being deposited on top of each other), the presence of dinosaurs near the bottom (discrediting escape ability or depth as a viable deposition scheme) and oysters throughout, the chaotic variation in sediment type (discrediting a consistent change in grain size), the chaotic up and down in depth and multi-decade lifespans of organisms in each layer (discrediting any rapid deposition).

@Paraleptopecten

The exact same argument applied to things like pteropods, Atlanta, Spisula, Cooperella, Gari, eulimids, or practically any other mollusks that won’t only break if I step on them or throw them (I’ve tried with some already broken ones).

Shells like those are strong enough to survive significant pressure when they are filled with sediment, and/or because they are so small that the forces exerted on them are tiny. However, if the deposition was violent, how does a clam shell that is about as strong as an eggshell, but 170 mm x 100 mm, survive? Or something 1 mm across, that would shatter if I tried to pick it up with anything more forceful than surface tension from a wet paintbrush survive, and get deposited next to a 150 mm Mercenaria shell that weighs a few hundred grams?

There is one Yorktown Formation Deposit I know of that got smothered in mud by a storm. Most deposits do not look like that one.

Another problem: the standard layer sequence near the coast in the Carolinas is the following (generalized somewhat, and with a more complete section than most places have):

Topsoil

Coarse sand, some beach or river-deposited fossils, all recent species. (late Pleistocene)

Layer going from coarse sand to finer sand and shell hash back to coarse sand, mostly recent species. (mid-Pleistocene

Several more layers going from coarse sand to finer sand and shell hash back to coarse sand, with some patches of mud mixed in, decreasing proportions of recent species as you go down. (late Pliocene and early Pleistocene)

Sandy leached limestones, sandy unleached limestones, or more sandy shell layers, decreasing proportions of recent species as you go down, hitting zero by the mid-lower part of this. (early Miocene to mid-Pliocene)

Mostly biogenic leached limestones. (Paleocene to Oligocene)

Clay and clayy limestones. (Cretaceous)

Igneous and Metamorphic Bedrock. (Paleozoic or Precambrian)

@Paraleptopecten

Faunal succession, and the deposits it is seen in are particularly spectacular in contradicting flood geology models. (I study Neogene, Quaternary, and Recent mollusks, so I have seen a decent amount of such things). I still have yet to see any halfway-plausible explanation of coastal marine deposits from a YEC view.

How does one get 10 different patchy layers, each with index fossils, some of the unconsolidated ones with mud that takes days to settle out of still water (I should know, we’ve sieved over a ton of the material), the consolidated ones experiencing groundwater percolating through them for a while (fastest way to make limestone) before the next layer comes in, a record of dozens of individual transgression/regression pulses with associated organisms ranging from freshwater to mid-shelf (50-80 m depth of ocean), and a column of sedimentary deposits 3 kilometers thick out of one flood?

And how can one possibly deal with global planktonic foraminifera correlations in that scenario?