they should remind us of the global flood of Noah’s day. Footprints don’t routinely fossilize in today’s world—they’re washed away, especially footprints formed in “subaqueous, moderate-to-high energy conditions,” as researchers believe these footprints likely were. It takes unique conditions, such as rapid burial, to preserve something as delicate as a footprint
It is mind boggling how self contradictory his statement is. YEC holds the flood to be the most catastrophic, highest energy event in the history of the planet, with enormous seismic activity and continent crossing tsunamis. To transport and hold sediment in suspension requires energy which would destroy, not preserve, any delicate features. A couple of substitutions and Ham’s statement would read…
“Footprints don’t routinely fossilize in today’s world—they’re washed away, especially footprints formed in “Noah’s Flood” as Young Earth Creationists believe these footprints likely were.”
YEC do not just interpret the evidence differently, they are incoherent.
Indeed. Ken Ham can’t seem to explain why preservation of footprints requires the whole Earth to be flooded, nor why it had to happen in the last 10,000 years. There’s also the problem of dinosaur footprints being found in the middle of a geologic formation which would require large dinosaurs to be walking around on the quickly forming sediments with the flood waters above them. That’s in addition to the problems you outline.
I have shared this here before, but this was one of the things that finally made me start questioning YEC in earnest. I was already in a more “open” frame of mind, but I saw a video at Dinosaur State Park in Connecticut which showed a visual representation of how the footprints they showcase were formed. I was shocked to realize that footprints require a more tranquil environment to be formed. Which should be obvious, but I had heard “fossils require rapid burial” ad nauseum, because it was used as a “global flood” apologetic, and I had never stopped to think about how that must be different for things like footprints or worm tunnels. The same kind of “rapid burial” that would fossilize bones would destroy footprints – this is definitely not something Answers in Genesis wants to have an informed conversation about.
The clearest set of animal tracts I ever saw was on a hike in the Rockies. I was resting near a tranquil alpine tarn when I noticed a set of ungulate foot prints crossing for about 100 feet across the bed of the lake. The utter stillness of the water protected against any disturbance from wind or rain.
Here are a few prints from Dinosaur Valley State Park near Glen Rose. We camped there a year or so ago. I thought the raccoon and small male humanoid prints in the soft mud were interesting, as it shows how the Dino prints could have been made, then dried, then filled with sediment from perhaps rising water from a flood event. The Dino prints are only found in a rather thin layer of limestone, with the sandy sediment eroding away at a faster rate. Deeper layers of limestone do not have prints present, evidence of a fairly unusual sequence of events needed to form them
