Genesis is history and can't be forced to fit with evolutionary theory

[St.Roymond]

@cewoldt

Same as polystrate fossils.

There are at least three known ways in which polystrate fossil trees occur. One is happening right now on the bottom of Spirit Lake at Mount Saint Helens in Washington state: thousands of trees sank to the bottom weighted by rock and hard soil trapped in their root balls, so they remain upright on landing. These trees will not rot because the water they are in is too deep and cold, and can easily last tens of thousands of years in that condition. They are slowly being buried in layers of sediment as they stand upright on the bottom. Since the water is mineral-dense, they are also slowly being petrified.

That’s the means I’m familiar with because some of my geology professors when I was at university studied them and continue to do so.

@cewoldt

How could a tree last thousands or millions of years waiting to become fossilized?

They don’t “wait to become fossilized”, they are being fossilized as they slowly – usually in a few thousand years – get buried because of the conditions they are in.

More interesting to me are the trees that get surrounded by lava and only get scorched, then at a later time when they are dead and dry a later lava flow sets them on fire and reduces them to ash while the lava that touches them hardens on contact, resulting in a tree-shaped hollow reaching through several lava flows.

[T_aquaticus]

@cewoldt

The better explanation of the evidence is that the layers were laid down rapidly.

Why would that require a world wide flood or a recent flood?

Were there telephone poles in Noah’s time?

Polystrate telephone pole created by Mt. Pinatubo eruption and subsequent lahars.

[St.Roymond]

@T_aquaticus

Were there telephone poles in Noah’s time?

I wish I had a picture to go with this–

Hiking the tertiary dune crest one day out where I do conservation work I tripped over something solid in the dune grass. Bending to discover what I’d tripped on, I found the tip of a 4x4 sticking up maybe two inches. Thinking it a piece of driftwood someone had stuck there, I endeavored to dig it up. My efforts went awry when I discovered that there was a piece of plywood attached to the 4x4 – so I proceeded to excavate that.
Uncovered, that plywood was a sign that said “TRAIL”. I stared, because I knew that the sign had been put there about two decades before, that at the time it had been on the foredune, and that the sign had been twelve feet above the ground on a 4x4 pole.

[The same thing is happening to the signposts I and friends (in a not-for-profit) put up on behalf of the county parks department; we put them on the then-current foredune, signs twelve feet up, and on my most recent survey all those signposts are on the secondary or tertiary dunes and the distance from dune surface to sign has gone from twelve feet down to between eight and twelve feet. This means that at some point this summer we will have to dig them out, replace them with a post to serve as trail marker, and put them on the current foredune. The beauty of this is that this accelerated westward dune growth is due in large part to a dune-building experiment we carried out some eight years ago: we pushed the dune line over ten yards westward, and due to the behavior of wind and sand this has propagated southward – so we made work for ouselves.]

[T_aquaticus]

@St.Roymond

Hiking the tertiary dune crest one day out where I do conservation work I tripped over something solid in the dune grass. Bending to discover what I’d tripped on, I found the tip of a 4x4 sticking up maybe two inches. Thinking it a piece of driftwood someone had stuck there, I endeavored to dig it up. My efforts went awry when I discovered that there was a piece of plywood attached to the 4x4 – so I proceeded to excavate that.

I had a family trip down the Oregon coast when I was a kid, and one of my best memories is riding the giant sand buggies around the dunes in Florence. I think they were converted school buses. I also like the fact that those dunes inspired Frank Herbert to write a few books. Stopped by Mt. St. Helens on that same trip which was pretty impressive.

In my part of the country we have a few big stationary dunes. In fact, they are the “tallest single-structured sand dune in North America” at 470 feet, according to the website. The dunes are a product of having equal easterly and westerly winds through the year.

[St.Roymond]

@T_aquaticus

@cewoldt

The better explanation of the evidence is that the layers were laid down rapidly.

Why would that require a world wide flood or a recent flood?

Or even a flood – a lake bottom after a volcanic eruption is sufficient if trees are swept into the lake and have stones and/or packed soil in their rootball.

For that matter, just an eruption can be sufficient – we saw trees that had been snapped off maybe three to four meters up, standing upright in layers that ran downhill on a roughly forty-degree slope. They’d been growing on a sloped hillside when the Mazama (Crater Lake) eruption sent lahars, volcanic cinder, ash, and pyroclastic flows – not necessarily in that order, and not just one of each – onto that slope. Apparently they were partially buried when a heavy pyroclastic flow snapped the tops off. There was also a faint soil line where their tops were, followed by a layer of apparently wind-blown ash, then mixed wind-blown material, and finally a new soil line.

It was a fun formation; a quarry pit nearby was deep enough we could find layers from other volcanic eruptions.

Something interesting is that the Mazama eruption occurred about 6800 (by carbon dating) to 7,700 years (by dendochronology) ago and the native tribes in the area all passed down the account of how the mountain threw a column of ash and pumice high into the sky (via several different calculations it has been estimated to have reached thirty miles tall), the top of the mountain glowed (not from lava; the pumice falling back from the column was only a few degrees below being molten and was thus incandescent) and then the peak fell. It turns out that the peak literally fell straight down; the extreme violence of the ash/pumice eruption had left a hollow below the mountain roughly a cubic kilometer in volume; the pressure of the eruption kept the mountain standing but when that pressure faded the center of the mountain collapsed down into that void.
At any rate, the point is that there is no way to dispute the dating of the eruption, and the native tribes’ accounts prove that people lived there, yet there is no evidence of any flood plus the eruption would have been a millennium before the claimed date of Creation.

[T_aquaticus]

@St.Roymond

Something interesting is that the Mazama eruption occurred about 6800 (by carbon dating) to 7,700 years (by dendochronology) ago and the native tribes in the area all passed down the account of how the mountain threw a column of ash and pumice high into the sky (via several different calculations it has been estimated to have reached thirty miles tall), the top of the mountain glowed (not from lava; the pumice falling back from the column was only a few degrees below being molten and was thus incandescent) and then the peak fell.

Farther north is the Channeled Scablands which are actually good models for what YEC flood geologists should be pointing to. However, the features in the scablands don’t line up with other features that they want to cite as being the result of Noah’s flood. Catastrophic floods don’t stay in a single channel and just dig deeper, as is seen in the Grand Canyon. Instead, they overflow their banks and also produced many parallel braided canyons.

[St.Roymond]

@T_aquaticus

In my part of the country we have a few big stationary dunes. In fact, they are the “tallest single-structured sand dune in North America” at 470 feet, according to the website. The dunes are a product of having equal easterly and westerly winds through the year.

I haven’t been to that; the biggest dunes I’ve seen were at Winnemucca Sand Dunes in Nevada, which change with the season. That’s in the middle of what was once a substantial inland sea; as the sea shrank the wind blew the beach sand inward, until the sea finally dwinded and vanished beneath a sea of dunes that’s like forty miles long.
I’ve also been to Sand Mountain in Nevada; I remember this exact view:

The shape shifts but not much. We hiked to the top; there were people who hiked the continuous dune crest from end to end!

In both those Nevada location there were concerns that human activities would spread out the sand and ruin the dunes, but they remain because the wind today continues to do what it did so long ago – it blows loose sand into the middle.

[St.Roymond]

@T_aquaticus

Channeled Scablands

I’ve got cousins in the tri-cities in Washington; when I was in university I visited them most summers and every visit we went to a different body of water in the Scablands – there are lakes/ponds in low spots and at least one river – plus explore more that none of us had seen before. What really got me weren’t the giant ripples–

though they’re impressive, or these–

wind-hollowed ripples, some of which actually get farmed!

but was this:

All those high spots with cliffs are exposed portions of massive lava flows. The flood current was so strong it lifted boulders bigger than a barn right up out of the formation and proceeded to shred the formation! If not for the Missoula floods, the area shown would be a continuous plateau with thin and poor desert soil; as it is it’s only arid, not desert.

[I’ve long wanted to climb one of the round ones (like the one center-right), but my window of opportunity is probably gone – rock climbing isn’t recommended after having hip replacements.]

@T_aquaticus

Catastrophic floods don’t stay in a single channel and just dig deeper, as is seen in the Grand Canyon.

True. There are canyons in the scablands, but they all post-date it. There are spots where plainly the water behaved just like in tidepools at the beach, only on a giant scale; one depression would fill up and overflow into a neighbor, causing that neighboring depression to overflow, linking several depressions with small erosion gullies. When that process continued until the water was free to keep flowing to the sea, a canyon resulted. [I can’t find an image of one I’m thinking of, where a stream widens then narrows as it passes through depressions (wide) and the eroded connecting channel (narrow).]

Here’s another shot showing the power those floods had:

On the left is what was a lava formation that the currents carved into what look like ripples!
Remember the barn-sized boulders? Picture a whole stream of those bouncing along in a massive flood, shattering the surface of the lava flow and thus contributing to the erosion.

Which reminds me: at least two of those floods carried ice all the way down west where at the bend of the Columbia channel giant bergs were swirled into the Willamette Valley, dropping erratics the size of a dump truck.

Pretty awesome “artwork” done long before 5,000 BCE!