Flood Geology Cannot Explain Sedimentary Formations. Here's Why

[Paraleptopecten (Timothy Campbell)]

Hello, and welcome. I’m a Christian undergraduate student at present, specializing in studying fossil mollusks. My theology is generally at the conservative end of the regulars here.

@Wesley_Coleman

in his data taken from The Paleobiology Database, a public database of paleontological data that includes the ability to filter fossil occurrences by time, space, and taxonomy. He organized this data with a metric called NLSSS (Number of Local, Stage-boundary Straddling Species). This measure tracks species found within tight geographic ranges (2 degrees longitude and latitude) that appear in rock layers from different geological stages.

How much filtering did he do of bad data in the PBDB? Using raw PBDB data for an analysis like this is not going to produce reliable results, no matter what the author’s ideas about what this ought to imply.

@Wesley_Coleman

What this does is call into question the very foundation of sequence stratigraphy

There is still succession of species, whether vertebrates, mollusks, or planktonic foraminifera. This has been known for over 250 years now. Lyell’s definitions of Cenozoic epochs were based on changes in extinction rates of mollusks in European deposits.

@Wesley_Coleman

Each mega-sequence begins with high-energy conglomerates—coarse, large-grained sediments requiring significant water force to deposit.

“Significant” as in beach face or riverine, not tsunamis of boiling mud.

@Wesley_Coleman

Fossils require deep sediment to be formulated

There are fossils that have never been buried under more than a few tens of meters of material sitting all around me right now. Many fossils have had that happen, but it is not a requirement.

@Wesley_Coleman

I would like to see where this bioturbation is?

At every single fossiliferous Cenozoic shallow marine deposit, for a few thousand.

@Wesley_Coleman

There is no plausible reason for such articulated impressions and action to be preserved over gradual processes.

Yes there is–falling into anoxic water, landslides, river floods, changes in sediment type soon after deposition, etc. Also, such fossils are rare, indicating that conditions which would preserve them are also rare.

@Wesley_Coleman

What we’re looking at is turbidity flows moving mile-high deposits and quickly screenshotting ecology.

That would smash every fossil in the deposits.

@Wesley_Coleman

Modern experiments have repeatedly shown fossilization within days/weeks.

Under conditions that are extremely rare.

@Wesley_Coleman

The flood consisted of a series of processes that involved a year of submersion and recession, but that only accounts for about a half to 3/4ths of the total catastrophe. There was the freezing of rapid rains in the northern and southern poles causing great glaciers and ice sheets to spread over much of the continents. There were great lakes such as what secularists now recognize as Lake Missoula that broke fourth and eroded massive terrestrial regions.

That’s better, but still doesn’t work:

@Paraleptopecten

Let’s take an example of the strata at one mine in Horry County, South Carolina: the bottom of the pit hits a clayy limestone that has occasional dinosaur bones in other places and some bioturbation of its surface, above this there is a thick, hard limestone with lots of endolithic bivalve burrows in its upper surface that then got eroded down, then a non-leached shell marl with multiple transgressive-regressive pulses within it. This indicates the following sequence of events:

1 The clayy limestone is deposited.

2 It is colonized by various animals at its surface (takes a few years at an unrealistic minimum).

[a bunch of other layers get deposited and eroded away, based on other sites]

3 The animals whose skeletons compose the limestone live and die (a few centuries at an unrealistic minimum, given the known lifespans of some of the animals in it).

4 The sediment later to become limestone is exposed to fresh groundwater for a few decades at an unrealistic minimum (fastest way for limestone to form).

5 The limestone goes back under the ocean, is excavated from topsoil by water motion, and is then colonized by (among other things) lithophagiform mussels. These mussels live for a decade or more to get to their final sizes.

6 Sea level goes back down and the surface of the limestone is eroded down such that some burrows are only a few mm deep.

[a couple more layers come and go based on other sites]

7 Sea level rises again, and a new marine fauna colonizes the top of the limestone.

8 Sea level then drops and rises about three more times (over at least a few centuries, again based solely on measured lifespans).

9 Sea level drops a final time, a river erodes through the site, and leaves a sand layer at the top outside of its channel (at least a few decades more).

10 The river moves elsewhere.

11 People arrive in the area, as the sea level and river courses have not changed significantly since human habitation.

This means that the layers here took more than 500 years to be deposited, with sea level going up and down by intervals of over 30 meters during that time (which adds at least 2000 years more to allow for deposition of clay-sized grains in the layers). If that was during the flood, then the flood took centuries. If it was after, then we would have records of sea level changes of that size range in archeological deposits. The only other option is a pointless, deceptive miracle.

@Wesley_Coleman

I would like to see this globally consistent succession of fossils.

Read any paper on global planktonic foraminiferal dating for a start.

@Wesley_Coleman

4. A single year cannot even come close to accounting for the quantity of biogenic limestone, dolomite, and chalk present on the earth.

A global flood can

It would require animals with lifespans of years to live, grow to adulthood, and die within hours to produce the volumes observed.

@Wesley_Coleman

There’s an exceedingly span in which the smallest changes to the chalks would be made on the order of 0.008 and 0.08 inches per year for about a million years. This is not the environmental tapestry in which we would expect these kinds of fossils.

What is this about, exactly?

@Wesley_Coleman

Should expect no other geological processes to interrupt these sediment deposits for such aforementioned lengths of time?

They often do–deposits that extensive are rare.

@Wesley_Coleman

Why is there order and consistency to them that defies ecological systems?

There isn’t, unless something strange has been discovered recently.

@Wesley_Coleman

Radiometric dating methods, particularly those using long half-lives (e.g., potassium-argon, uranium-lead), often assume a constant decay rate and initial conditions. Many creationists have challenged this assumption and have gotten no serious rebuttals.

Yes, because if the decay rates were not constant, then either every atom fell apart, or Earth turned into a ball of plasma.

@Wesley_Coleman

These occur in a consistent manner, with radioisotopes that date older consistently dating older and conversely the younger dating younger (with a divergence of hundreds of millions of years in many cases).

Of course they do! That’s called “contamination” and “noise”. A value of “100,000 years” from C14 is background noise. Under this same logic, I could assert that the earth is less than a millennium old using ages based on Tritium.

@Wesley_Coleman

Furthermore, accelerated nuclear decay (as suggested by the RATE project) could explain the inflated radiometric ages.

No, it would either make all atoms larger than hydrogen fall apart or turn the earth into a ball of plasma.

@Wesley_Coleman

I see no reason why the earth can be old AND we can have a recent humanity and flood.

God wanted to do it that way because his ways are higher than ours?

@Wesley_Coleman

However, C-14 has been found in fossils, coal, and diamonds supposedly millions of years old.

As contamination and/or background noise.