I hope you realise that the 1500 who went down with the Titanic would have been spread over a very wide geographical area? Only a relatively small number of them could have landed close to the ship itself.
I hope you also realise that underwater landslides are a thing even today?
What you are doing here is presenting a very small (and incomplete) sample that only tells us about one particular place in the ocean. From that you are generalising it to everywhere in every ocean, sea, lake and river everywhere. You are also trying to debunk an unrealistic straw man uniformitarianism (one where slow sedimentation is the only thing that happens) that does not accurately reflect what we actually see happening today.
But “strongly making something suspect” is not sufficient when you are dealing with large numbers of events, whether because they happen very frequently or because they happen over a long period of time, or both. As I pointed out above, when you are looking at millions, billions or even trillions of events, very rare sets of circumstances become surprisingly common.
As Larry Osterman of Microsoft said, “One in a million is next Tuesday.”
So, radioactive decay rates have only been measured since–about 1906? A little over 100 years. They have not been observed to vary for 100 years. And so, from this, you "empirically" know that this rate has remained constant for 4.6 billion years?
But I appreciate the specific points and examples you took time to list here. And I will continue to give them some thought.
With starlight, we can observe constant decay rates going back billions of years. On top of that, decay rates are a direct result of the fundamental forces, so you would have to change physics itself in order to get different decay rates.
In more scientific terms, if the rates of radioactive decay were different in the past we would see evidence of it in the present. We do not just assume decay rates were the same in the past. We conclude that decay rates were the same in the past because that is what the evidence is consistent with.
But if you want to stay consistent, you would also have to abandon scavenging of whale bones. Afterall, that has only been observed for a few decades.
Excellent example of why you need to reconsider your line of reasoning. While we don’t actually know whether there are any skeletal remains left from the Titanic, none have yet been found. From this you draw the sweeping conclusion that no bones on the sea floor, anywhere, will survive for long. Which then makes it hard to explain why the skeletons of the entire 8 man crew of the H.L. Hunley, which sank during the American Civil War, have been found intact at their stations in the sunken vessel. Or why skeletal remains from four or five individuals have been recovered from the Antikythera wreck, even though that ship sank more than 2000 years ago.
In short, the evidence is that skeletons on the sea floor do not usually last long but at some appreciable frequency survive more than long enough to be completely covered with sediment.
It’s not just nuclear decay rates themselves that have been studied over the past hundred years or so, Don. It is the underlying mechanisms that determine why they take the values that they do. Nuclear decay rates are not arbitrary. They are determined by the fundamental laws of physics such as quantum mechanics, electromagnetism, conservation of mass-energy, and so on and so forth.
This means that if nuclear decay rates had ever varied in the past, a whole lot of other things would also have to have varied with them. The speed of light. Planck’s Constant. The masses of the electron, the proton, or the neutron. The strength of the electromagnetic force, the strong nuclear force or the weak nuclear force. And so on and so forth. Such changes would have very, very dramatic and far reaching effects. We would see clear and unmistakable evidence in the heavens above and the earth below if these changes had ever happened. But we don’t.
Actually, it is correct–at least of Dinosaur Provincial Park in Alberta. The Bearpaw Formation in this park does contain marine fossils–for example, ammonoids and sharks.
Also worth mentioning is the impact changing decay rates (in isolation) would have on the modern world. Nuclear power plants and nuclear weapons are kept dangerously close to runaway nuclear fission reactions. If decay rates suddenly increased all of our nuclear power plants and weapons would go off all at once. If decay rates slowed then all those weapons would be inert, which wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing, but we would lose those power stations. We would have to rebuild our entire stockpiles with a new isotope.
If radioactive decay rates did speed up to the rates needed by YEC then exploding nuclear weapons would be a mercy. That would probably be better than our own bodies cooking themselves as the 40K in our bones and tissue killed us off, not to mention the quickly growing heat wave that would melt the entire Earth in a matter of minutes to hours.
A few observations:
On the Pacific plate are many island/seamount chains oriented at different angles.
The ages of the Hawaiian/Emperor volcanoes increases from NW to SE. Has anyone besides McDougall measured these ages? Have these ages been double blind tested?
The change in angle between the two is interesting.
There are two other chains of seamounts just north of Hawaiian chain at angles different than Hawaiian/Emperor chains
In the Line and Marshall islands the same age progression is not observed.
Were the Line, Marshall and the two chains north of the Hawaiian chain formed in the same way as the Hawaiian/Emperor chains?
It was Andrew Snelling himself who came up with the figure of 22,400°C as the temperature that the earth would have reached if his accelerated nuclear decay had actually happened. It’s all there on page 183 of the final RATE report.
Yet he insists that it actually happened. Methinks he must be high on LSD.
So, you think it was just coincidence that at the same time (Jurassic-Cretaceous/ Zuni megasequence) dinosaurs were being massively buried in ocean sediments in Alberta, Canada, they were also being massively buried (present-day “dinosaur graveyards/boneyards”) in Montana/Wyoming/Utah…and in Africa…and in China…and in Argentina?
In fact, we know, from sequence stratigraphy, that during this same time period (Zuni megasequence), global sea levels reached their highest–from 800’ to 1000’ above today’s sea level. In other words, all continents were being flooded at highest levels at this time.
So, there was nothing “local” about the flooding or about the in-mass simultaneous burial of dinosaurs under tons of ocean sediments.
Apparently, Socrates and Queen Elizabeth died at the same time since they both died in the Holocene. I also can’t figure out how the US survived fighting the Civil War, WW I, WW II, Korean War, and the Vietnam War all at the same time in the Holocene.
Sequence Stratigraphy has taught us better about how the sedimentary rock layers were formed. Are you familiar with it?
It has shown us that these layers were not formed in situ. That is, sediments forming at the bottom of seas did not become the distinct layers of sedimentary rock that we have today. They had to be transported and deposited.
First, most of these sediments were transported from the ocean onto the continent–they did not form on the continent. Notice the following quote:
“Cratonic sequences are also known as “megasequences”, “stratigraphic sequences”, “Sloss sequences”, “supersequences” or simply “sequences”. They are geologic evidence of relative sea level rising and then falling (transgressing and regressing), thereby depositing varying layers ofsedimentonto the craton , now expressed as sedimentary rock. Places such as the Grand Canyon are a good visual example of this process, demonstrating the changes between layers deposited over time as the ancient environment changed.”
Notice that once on the craton, or continent, the ocean sediments are deposited across the continent by “transgressing” and “regressing” flows, from the ocean flooding. This is certainly movement…in fact, strong enough movement to hold sediments in suspension long enough to spread them across the continent.
Also, the ordering of the sedimentary rock layers testify to the fact that the sediments were not in situ, but were deposited. There is a distinct order to the sediment layers–an order that tells us whether they were deposited by a transgressing flow or by a regressing flow. Specifically, when it was a transgressive flow, the rock layers of a sequence showed a “thinning up” of sediments–sandstone overlain by shale, overlain by limestone. Accordingly, when the flow of deposition was regressive, there was a “coarsening up” of sediments–limestone overlain by shale, overlain by sandstone.
I realize that what you believe about these sediments has been the standard teaching, yet sequence stratigraphy is correcting this.
In fact, it should be instructive to us that in situ sediments at the bottom of oceans and seas today are not in the kind of layers, and ordering of layers, we find in the fossil record. And…these layers are in the form of “ooze”–nowhere close to diagenesis into sedimentary rock layers, as found in the fossil record.
In other words, there is a big difference between mere sediments at the bottom of a lake or sea, and, on the other hand, sedimentary rock layers–especially the rock layers (and their ordering) that we find in the fossil record.
So, you are mocking Jesus by mocking the Holy Spirit that He specifically said He would send upon Peter and the other Apostles, to “guide them into all truth”? John 16:12,13
You might think you are being cute by such ridicule, but you’re not being smart at all.
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
277
I’ll take that as a ‘Yes’.
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
278
Five million years. Ten million times longer than your religious belief.
Now…don’t forget that during this transgression, ocean sediments were being deposited…deposited over 75% of North America. And, in fact, about 3 million cubic kilometers of these sediments were deposited in the Sauk transgression.
So…you are claiming that 3 million cubic kilometers of sediments were held in suspension mostly as the Sauk transgression moved at a mere 6 cm (2.4 inches!) per year. Think about that…you actually believe such a sediment load could be held in suspension that long?
Not only that, but we know that the force of Sauk transgression was powerful enough to erode basement granite, forming the Great Unconformity–where erosion even contains large boulders. And, you believe that water moving at 2.4 inches per year would produce that kind of erosion of granite?