The other thing which is rather queer. Is that they maintain that the Flood did the carving out of things like the Grand Canyon, on the way out, as the floods receded.
I’m not a Geologist, so please correct me if you can. Wouldn’t the “pushing” force of the water as it is entering something be way more than the “pulling” force as it leaves?
False. No assumptions are needed to observe stellar parallax. It’s an observable fact.
Heliocentrism predicts that we will see parallax for nearby stars because it is a necessary outcome of the Earth being at two points 180 million miles apart on days 6 months apart. Geocentrism does not make this prediction. There is absolutely no reason why we should see parallax of nearby stars in the Geocentric model.
We also have the observation of Jupiter and its moons.
Rabbits in the Cambrian.
A lack of any appreciable lead in zircons.
A lack of any appreciable argon in other igneous rocks.
A lack of correlation between different parent-daughter isotope systems.
A lack of correlation between 14C content and lake varve depth/number.
There are tons and tons and tons of observations that could convince me.
So what features would a geologic feature need to convince you it is an aeolian deposit?
It seems that you invent anomalies where they don’t exist, such as radically different physical laws in the past which would include accelerated nuclear decay. When you have to invoke completely different physical laws (for which there is no evidence) in order to support your model you are in fact ignoring the non-anomalies.
What part of reality am I refusing to see?
It’s easy to win an argument when you take the conclusions out from the context of the argument. I get the message loud and clear.
Have a good day.
Good question. The carving of canyons happens later when large lakes break and spill out over the landscape. Receding waters were and are a lot let turbulent. So you’re correct.
You kinda missed the point again. You’re seeing 100% of reality through your eyes. The point is that everyone has a difficulty looking through someone else’s worldview. Stepping into their shoes, putting on their lenses, etc. So to answer your last question first, you’re refusing to see reality through my eyes. I am guilty of this too (that’s why I said everyone).
Rabbits in the Cambrian.
A lack of any appreciable lead in zircons.
A lack of any appreciable argon in other igneous rocks.
A lack of correlation between different parent-daughter isotope systems.
A lack of correlation between 14C content and lake varve depth/number.There are tons and tons and tons of observations that could convince me.
That’s great to hear you name a few, then. I guess what I would say to you is that you still do not understand the model’s for the flood. For instance, I would never argue that rabbits should be in the Cambrian (nor would that even be possible under CPT theory). A couple of these are a little disingenuous since you claim to be aware of RATE research, but a few of these are workable places to start (specifically the last two).
As for what feature of the Tapeats would convince me of aeolian deposition. Here’s what we know. Tapeats has mica, angular K-felspar, 25% and lower cross-bedding, dolomite, angular sand grains, poor sorting, etc. These are good indicators of marine deposition.
And maybe the answer is, the Tapeats should be a marine deposit conventionally and this actually isn’t an area of clash.
Then other things that would convince me could be showing bent sediments with greater metamorphosing, creating a convincing model for underfoot rivers carving canyons, a sound explanation for pikes and dykes in shale and sandstones apart from being sand injectites, contemporaneous strata with wholly different eco-systems, etc.
What is disingenuous about them? Yes we are aware of the RATE project, but we are not satisfied that the RATE project came anywhere close to providing enough evidence to support its claims.
Accelerated nuclear decay is an extraordinary claim. It is extraordinary because it flies in the face of numerous experimental studies demonstrating that nuclear decay rates are strongly resistant to environmental factors, because it would require radical changes to some of the most fundamental laws of physics (such as the Standard Model of particle physics) if it were demonstrated, and because by the RATE team’s own admission it would have vaporised the Earth if it had actually happened. It’s a claim that would win a Nobel Prize hands down if it had any merit. But this being the case, it requires extraordinary evidence, and with good reason. If it didn’t, you’d be granting a free pass to astrology, homeopathy, water divining, feng shui, reading tea leaves, ancient aliens, and tobacco companies claiming that smoking was good for you.
The RATE project provided four or five studies, all of which had other explanations fully consistent with well established physical phenomena. Young earthists hand-wave these explanations away as “rescuing devices” but due to the extraordinary nature of their claim, they need to bear the burden of proof in terms of ruling them out. It is very bad science to dismiss credible explanations as “rescuing devices” when the alternative you are promoting is extraordinary new laws of fantasy physics thst would have vaporised the Earth if they had any basis in reality. Such a dismissal is tantamount to demanding that the basic rules and principles of quality control that apply to every area of science should not apply to you.
Critiquing the flaws in creationist work does not equate to calling them stupid or any sort of ad hominem argument.
Just a couple of questions here.
I would also want to know a bit about the science program itself. What is the philosophy behind it? What are the underlying assumptions? What are the goals?
For example, if you look at the conference proceedings that Wise’s data analysis appears in, from a Christian university in the US, you will see a quite different understanding of scientific inquiry, than is considered standard. I am sure hands on lab work was involved, though.
That one’s easy, if you are defining ecosystem in the standard way. For instance, there are lateral facies in the Yorktown Formation preserving a muddy-bottomed sound behind a shallow hard-ground shoal. Or, for another example, the Bowden Fm. preserves a deepwater tropical marine benthos, portions of the contemporaneous Tamiami Fm. preserve coral reefs, the Duplin preserves a shallow marine subtropical ecosystems, the uppermost parts of the Yorktown Formation preserve a shallow marine warm temperate ecosystem, there are contemporary cave deposits in the Western US (based on terrestrial vertebrates that washed out into the Tamiami), and parts of Africa preserve contemporary terrestrial and lacustrine habitats.
Why not?
I am very aware of the RATE research. They failed at demonstrating accelerated nuclear decay, and they admitted that the heat produced by accelerated nuclear decay would have destroyed the Earth. Last I checked, the Earth wasn’t destroyed a few thousand years ago.
That doesn’t answer the question. What features would a deposit need in order for you to accept it as an aeolian deposit?
In fact, what features would a geologic formation need in order to rule out a recent global flood? I’m still not seeing any answers to this question.
Also, a debunking of the RATE project:
Indeed. The goals of any science program need to be to teach skills and techniques that can be used in the lab, in the field, in industry, or wherever in order to learn how things work and how we can put what we have learned into practice in order to Get Things Done.
If, instead, a science program is trying to teach you to approach the subject as some sort of ammunition gathering exercise, then it isn’t teaching science at all. It’s teaching sales and marketing.
Given that most live and die in forest lands, grasslands, shorelines, or aqueous environments, as opposed to falling into streams of lava, how is this surprising?
This must be operant conditioning.
Every season of every year, there happens a flood that makes international headlines. Just this past week it was storm Boris in Eastern Europe and Italy. A couple of years ago Germany experienced flooding which caused landslides with a death toll of over a hundred. The same year Japan also had flooding with landslides. Recently British Columbia had cows floating in floods. California gets floods, Brazil gets floods, China gets floods. Floods happen lots. Massive ones and more local ones. My high school town had a century flood and it did not even make the national news.
No YEC ever claim that these are Noah’s flood, or are global.
And yet, every time an article appears which attaches a fossil to a flood, it is like “SEE! NOAH’S FLOOD”.
Life has been around for hundreds of millions of years, and Earth has seen likely billions of floods over that time. But you do not even need floods at all. Animals are mortal, and they also meet their end using run of the mill dry beds as game trails, or die at shoreline or stream crossings. There is plenty of water without Noah’s flood; always has been; always will be.
I want to come back to the OP, which I have wanted to do for days.
With astonishment I glance over or hear YEC explanations of why a worldwide flood would lead to the sedimentary formations we have now.
I’m not a scientist. The closest I come to science in my day to day life is protecting my family from food poisoning, as I do most of the meal planning, food maintenance and cooking.
But I can do a little arithmetic. Highest mountain currently c. 29K feet. 40 days of rain and flooding. Average of 725 FEET of water/day. Two feet of water leads to deadly floods. 30 FEET an hour!!! The roof of my house would be underwater in about 1/2 hour.
It would be interesting to look at the percentage of living things that live at various sea levels. The highest point in my flat part of the world is currently about 1000 feet. It would be covered in about a day and a half. It’s about 450 miles from me. No way could there be a bee-line for it that would make a significant difference in the number or position of corpses in Lake Superior. Even if land forms have changed significantly in whatever time frame you prefer, similar situations would exist.
People speculate about the water coming up from the ground. And what that would have been like. If nothing else, it would have been incredibly turbulent. And because turbulent, even deep waters would be more oxygenated.
I understand that decomposition in water occurs differently than in air. But this would be a unique water environment. And probably different in different places, dependent on geography and other factors. Does one see differences in the sediment that would be consistent with different geographies’ effect on the state of the water?
Discussions about fossil formation that I’ve glanced at seem to imagine corpses floating gently to the bottom and stacking neatly by level of evolutionary complexity.
This level of turbulence would surely have mixed corpses together and torn many apart, particularly in oxygenated water, where decomposition could take place more normally. I would expect to see a jumble of bones of many species, sorted not by species, but on average by size. Smallest bones to the bottom, larger bones on top – the way the sort in my stock pot as all the bits come apart after long exposure to heat and stirring.
Evaporation comes to mind as well. How much heat would be required to evaporate this volume of water within a year? What would have protected Noah and his family from this heat? Boiling the rotting corpses – what effect would that have? Rolling boil? More turbulence. Then an entirely new kind of rot after cooling. How long would the cooling take? And on and on and on.
I cannot imagine the ghastly surface of the earth during cooling and then for a good year as the bacteria finished their jobs. Airborne microbes. If Noah did, they would have surely. Wonder if any of those are types of bacteria that fossilize. Any flies left? One would hope so. They really would be needed.
I keep wondering, if YECs have put together a complete model that includes all the assumed physical and biological factors, and worked through it to the end. Examined what the end of the modeled event would be like. Rather than starting from what we have, and explaining backward to an pre-established explanation of what we see now.
I’m sure someone will explain it all to me.
Ha! And running for higher ground would be fun when the runoff from that area would be like swimming up Niagara Falls.
You raise lots of good questions - many of them ignored and unanswerable from within any YEC fold - though not for lack of trying in some cases.
YECs don’t try to claim that much height gain. They say rather that mountains back then had not reached their present height, and that flood geology itself later led to all the mountains pushed to their present heights as we see them now. Not a good answer - and not one that sustains any scrutiny from geologists - most (all?) YEC explanations quickly run one into an expanatory dead-end that requires monumental miracles to rescue the model, such as it is.
Regarding the fossil sorting, flood-geologists attempt to explain this away with the (grain-of-truth) fact that crude sorting does take place as stuff settles out of turbulent, and then calming waters - and that some things may self-sort by various abilities to survive a bit longer in it all. But none of that comes close to explaining the finely detailed sorting that we actually see - which is explained by the evolutionary history of emergence and disappearance of species over time. So the questions you raise are very good ones - and ones that remain unanswered - despite superficial attempts at finding a way to dismiss them - as you’ve seen Jon attempting. And some of those don’t even get so much as a superficial response - but just silence or denial.
It is refreshing to see scientifically knowledgeable people that can shine light on the details of these things in ways accessible to the rest of us.
The Black Sea flood, like that of Noah, is a real event that has had its impacts exaggerated in popular accounts. Although the Black Sea did become a salt lake when sea levels dropped during peak Pleistocene glaciation, there is no solid evidence that the re-filling happened rapidly enough to require anything more drastic than “hmm, looks like time to move uphill again”, and Ryan and Pitman have somewhat backed away from their earlier claims.
It’s possible that the Persian Gulf region experienced more dramatic flooding, but relevant geological data is hard to come by. Geological work in the region tends to focus on oil-containing layers, not on late Holocene, and political issues also make much of the Gulf challenging for field work. The Mediterranean experienced rather spectacular flooding, but that was at the end of the Miocene, and there’s no evidence of hominids exceeding chimps in brain size or cultural complexity at that date.
Carol Hill, in A Worldview Approach to Science and Scripture, discusses in some detail a possible meteorological scenario to generate a long-lasting regional flood across Mesopotamia. Many major floods have occurred in that region; the challenge is identifying which one best fits for Noah.
Analyzing how many species continue across a boundary has very little to do with sequence stratigraphy, but has minor relevance to putting stratigraphy in sequence- make sure you are using the correct term for what you mean. Sequence stratigraphy is recognizing sedimentary units and subunits based on the sediment deposition patterns associated with ups and downs of sea level. If sea level rises (globally) or areas of land sink, then the corresponding depositional environments move. Ocean beaches are typically sandy to rocky – all the wave and wind action washes away the small stuff. But as you get to deeper water, more of the waves are just at the surface and not stirring things up at the seafloor. Therefore, there’s more chance for mud to settle and less chance of sand or gravel washing that far from land. Yet further out, and the proportion of skeletons from sea life increases relative to mud and sand washing from the land. Low sea level tends to result in erosion; maximum sea level often means less sediment and distinctive features such as higher proportions of phosphate. Thus, large series of geologic units can be recognized as a series of “sequences” from beach sand as water rose, to deeper muds and limestones, and back again. More detailed features can be considered. There are multiple levels of small sequences within larger sequences. Working out regional versus global features can be a challenge. This sequence stratigraphic approach is quite widely used in the petroleum industry, as well as in academic stratigraphic work. None of that has any connection to what types of fossils are present. However, as suspected starting in the late 1600’s and firmly demonstrated academically by Cuvier about 1800, changes in the kinds of fossils over time can be used as another way to match up layers of the same versus different ages. Change in the fossils found in one sequence stratigraphy sequence versus the next can be used to determine which sequence another deposit corresponds to, but that is the only way that faunal changes tie into sequence stratigraphy. The number of species that survive across the species boundary is irrelevant; what matters is if there are any changes in the fossils that tell you something useful. Species that do survive longer can be useful as environmental markers – finding a lot of species that live right at the beach versus ones favoring deeper water can help place where you are in a sequence stratigraphy sequence.
Changes in stable isotopes, in the abundance of different minerals, magnetic polarity, climate indicators associated with Milankovtich cyles, and many other features besides changes in species can also be helpful for putting different geologic layers into correct order.
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.
The replies from @Paraleptopecten and @paleomalacologist in regards to the limits of reliablity of the PBDB, actually find support from YEC Terry Mortenson, in this article published by AiG
The History of the Development of the Geological Column
Alroy has also used the database to reassess the accuracy of species names. His findings suggest that irregularities in classification inflate the overall number of species in the fossil record by between 32 and 44 percent. Single species often end up with several names, he says, due to misidentification and poor communication between taxonomists in different countries.
Rapid has to be the most overused adjective in YEC. To make a cave in YEC timelines, start with rapid biogenesis of calcium carbonate by plankton, which disregards headaches with photosynthesis, kinetics, and ion concentration, and that sort of stuff. Once you have pumped out the required kilometers deep calciferous deposits, invoke rapid dewatering, and promptly follow with rapid lithification. To get to inland caves, the next step is rapid geological uplift. Once you have your limestone where you want it, all that is required is rapid erosion and dissolution, and lickity split, there is the cave.
In reality, each of these separate steps requires geological time. But this is just the >>start<<, as there are features in many caves which themselves require the subsequent passage of time after the cave has been formed. @Joel_Duff highlighted one such instance in a recent YouTube.
The site is a limestone quarry operation that operated for over a century. As removal of limestone continued mudstone was exposed, which was commercially worthless and set aside. It became evident that material had filled in a cave which had existed in the limestone, creating a cast mold of its caverns. The infill is chock full of exquisite fossils of early permian vertebrates.
All this adds to the timeline crunch. On top of all the “rapids” needed just to arrive at uplifted limestone, yet more is required to account for the erosion and dissolution to create the cave, then fill the cave with ingressed dirt and unfortunate critters, and then lithify the sediment, fossilize the remains, and throw some overburden onto the future quarry. But I suppose in for a penny, in for a pound.
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