Flood Geology Cannot Explain Sedimentary Formations. Here's Why

On the Tapeats: Mica, feldspar, and angular quartz grains are less common in ocean settings than on land. The claim that these indicate deposition in an ocean setting are simply untrue. Both mica and feldspar are relatively vulnerable to chemical weathering, breaking down into clay minerals as they are exposed to air and water. Mica is also quite flimsy, breaking easily. Sediment rich in those is typically found relatively close to the eroding rocks. There is basically no feldspar or mica in the sand along the Atlantic beaches of the U.S. south of New England, as the mountains are too far away for those mineral groups to survive transport. Likewise, those minerals that are more resistant to breakage and chemical change, such as quartz, rutile, or zircon, get the corners knocked off as they bang into each other during the long process of washing out to sea and then back and forth on the beach with each tide. In more tropical areas away from major rivers, bits of skeletons from sea life dominate the sand. On the Pacific coast, with mountains generally close to the ocean, there are more angular grains and more minerals that are vulnerable to physical or chemical breakdown. Dolomite is found primarily in coastal areas or salt lakes, where you get unusual salinity levels, or else by slow change from limestone exposed to magnesium-rich porewater. It is not an indication of deeper water.

The Tapeats does, however, have some glauconite, which does form under the ocean. The conventional geological interpretation of the Tapeats is that it is a marginal marine deposit, formed as sea level was rising across the region and waves were eroding feldspars and micas from newly-flooded rock.

The Coconino and Navajo Sandstones, in contrast, show numerous features typical of sand dunes deposited on land, such as footprints. YEC sources have tried to explain those away, but there is no time for forming footprints as the sediment piled up on a young-earth schedule, even if the footprints were compatible with underwater deposition. Similarly, the other claims that those deposits actually are from under the Flood do not hold up well; on inspection, the YEC claims are merely dismissal of what is inconvenient for their view, not a serious effort to consider and test among all possibilities.

Although much of the data in the PBDB does come from valid published sources (some data come from reporting what is in collections that have not otherwise been published), much of the data entry is by students assigned to enter data from a publication as a class project. The students, and often the supervising professor who is supposed to be verifying the information, generally do not have adequate familiarity with all of the species to know if they are misspelling something or confusing two similar names or otherwise contributing an error. Correctly entering something published in 1850 without any updating can also produce inaccuracies in the database. PBDB, like many biodiversity databases, has not clearly defined itself as an archive of data as originally reported versus an up to date source providing current knowledge. Nor is there a great system for making corrections - you have to try to find who is listed as responsible for a given data set, track them down, and contact them. I need to find time to follow up on a case where I did that only to get the reply that the person didn’t know why he was listed and that I needed to contact another person. Fossilworks is merely a portal for accessing PBDB data, and does not give independent evidence that the PBDB data are good.

Casually dismissing a source that you don’t like is a serious problem in YEC practice; you need to be careful to hold their claims to an equal standard. However, as you may have figured out by this point, and as Timothy noted, both of us have quite extensive experience in dealing with PBDB and the errors that are in it. There are countless potential pitfalls that impact such data. For example, a publication in 2005 included a list of all known fossil scaphopods. Sounds reasonably up to date, unless you read carefully and find that much of the list was copied from a publication in the late 1800’s; many of the ages in the late 1800’s publication are now known to be incorrect, if you happen to be knowledgeable about the stratigraphy of the southeastern U.S. An early Paleozoic fossil, not even a true clam but a rostroconch, back in the 1800’s was lumped into Cardium, a genus of cockles, and accidentally given the same name as a modern cockle species. Now some databases that aggregate information from the PBDB and elsewhere claim that the modern species is found in the Ordovician when they aren’t even the same class of mollusks. Like the problems of generative AI, PBDB and many other biodiversity databases have focused on “Look at all the cool results we can get by analyzing this huge data set in many ways” without providing support to the basic tasks of generating and verifying the data.

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