More “impossible to tell once you get that early” evidence.
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This is what it’s ALL about. Having to make reality a lie because God.
"You are confusing the lateral sequence of facies, which is Walther’s Law, with the rate of deposition, which obeys Stokes’ Law (to be precise, Stokes’ law is for the simple case of spherical shapes, but the considerations apply to other things). "
No, Stokes’ law does involve spherical shapes, as you acknowledged–and it concerns itself with viscosity, not sedimentation. On the other hand, Walther’s Law describes sediment layering, where there is a “fining up” of sediment layers in a transgressive phase, and a “coarsing up” in a regressive phase.
And geologists have applied Walther’s Law not only to the megasequences, but even to the parasequences within them. In fact, in an earlier comment, I gave the Tonto Group in the Grand Canyon (just as geologists have) as a classic example of Walther’s Law at work–where the Tapeats Sandstone is overlain by Bright Angel Shale, which is overlain by Muav Limestone.
The land deposits preserved from the upper Jurassic through Cretaceous include much of the Rocky Mountain region and the edges of the Appalachian region. Evaporites from parts of that time are best-studied along the Gulf Coast region, due to its relevance for petroleum. There are other evaporites of various ages around North America and other regions of the world.
Also, there are plenty of pointers to slow deposition during the Zuni sequence. Widespread volcaic ash layers (now bentonites) in the Cretaceous Interior Seaway require settling over time through calm water. If the water were highly agitated and full of stirred-up sediment, the ash would simply be blended in, not forming distinct layers. The “teepee buttes” are carbonate mounds formed by biological and chemical alteration of hydrocarbons slowly seeping out of the seafloor. Sedimentation had to be slow enough to allow the local concentration of hydrocarbons, and for animals to be attracted by it. The types of oysters, inoceramid clams, calcareous nannofossils, foraminifera, ammonoids, dinosaurs, pterosaurs, and all sorts of other organisms change as you go up layer by layer.
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But Dr. Clarey used deep-time models to find oil. His rejection of deep time is due to his theological commitment to young-earth teachings. Your argument illustrates a common misconception that the credentials of someone who supports your view ought to impress everyone, while people with similar credentials who critique your view can be dismissed. A scientist must admit that the scientific data clearly and strongly support a vast age for the earth in order to be a truthful scientist. Of course, many scientists deal with topics unrelated to the age of the earth and may not be particularly informed. And it is possible to honestly look for alternative explanations. But the fact that hundreds of young-earthers have worked for oil companies, and not one has been able to use young-earth models to find a drop of oil, is not an argument for a young earth. If a young-earth model were true, there would not be a significant difference between the amount of heat, pressure, and time experienced by the organic material in different layers. Yet in reality, oil and gas are found in particular layers that match the expectation for being slowly cooked from dead stuff into simper hydrocarbons. Flood geology claims that catastrophic flooding occurred which should have jumbled everything together, yet oil and gas exploration finds distinct layers that have different types of microfossils, different chemical properties, different magnetism, etc., etc., and this sequence is consistent globally. Oil and gas gets trapped in buried structures such as reefs, which could not exist during a flood geology flood. Diapirs are another good structure for trapping petroleum. They are giant bulges of salt that push their way up through surrounding layers, bending the layers into shapes that can trap the oil. The salt deposition could not occur during a global flood unless salinity was so high as to kill almost all aquatic life, and there must be time for the layers above to form and then for the salt to squash and flow upward. Many other possible petroleum traps exist, all formed by long-term old-earth processes.
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You need to step back from myopic details where your interpretation is easily refuted and look at the big picture (that includes the God and the cosmos – he was not short of time).
“A Review of Tectonic Models and Analytical Data from Almora-Dadeldhura Klippe, Northwest India and Far Western Nepal”
If you have trouble downloading the paper, private message me your personal inbox and I can send you the PDF as an attachment.
TBH, I did not fully understand much of this paper because I am not a geologist. I took a lot of math in high school, college, and grad school, but I would need to do some intensive background in geology to really work out the equations and data.
Some of the basic equations of tectonics are covered in a few pages of an OpenLibre geology text:
A more extensive review of plate tectonic modeling can be found here:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/323176942_Plate_tectonic_modelling_Review_and_perspectives
I have come to the conclusion that it would take me years of effort to really grasp how plate tectonics models work, and why. You have lots of fun ahead of you if you choose to explore the topic in depth.
Or you could just be like me, and acknowledge that tens of thousands of geophysicists in academia and industry have very good reasons to believe what they believe, and they do a good job of checking on each other to make sure the works that get published are valid.
Blessings,
Chris
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Stokes’ law (with further modifications in light of the shapes of the particles) tells how fast a particle will settle through a fluid. Smaller particles have a high ratio of surface area to mass, so friction slows them down a lot. This determines how quickly a layer could be deposited - how big are the pieces in it? Walther’s law describes the pattern - what types of facies are usually found in a sequence. But Walther’s law requires slow, gradual change. Tsunamis mix everything up and don’t produce a pattern like Walther’s. Actual major floods, such as the refilling of the Mediterranean after the Messinian, do not follow Walther’s law. Instead, there is an abrupt change from one facies to a quite different one. Such a change can also occur if there is a long gap of nondeposition between one layer and the next. Examining the contact layer is a good clue. For example, in an ocean setting, there will often be evidence that the contact between layers was sitting exposed on the ocean floor for a long time. Animals make holes down into the lower layer, there may be chemical changes at the surface, if the lower layer is hard there may be attached organisms like corals or oysters growing on it, there’s often an accumulation of worn bone and teeth. Such surfaces would have no time to form during a flood geology flood, as Kurt Wise pointed out. But they are found throughout the geologic record.
Michael Tuomey’s 1848 Geology of South Carolina has a short section discussing how geology supports a biblical picture. He briefly dismisses young-earth concerns as a thing of the past, noting that about five minutes of studying the rocks should be enough to show that they are quite old. He doesn’t accept the evolutionary ideas favored by a minority in his day, but particularly focuses on the fact that the geological and biblical records both pointed back to a beginning, not to the eternal cycles popular in “Enlightenment” imagination.
His estimate of five minutes, though, presupposes the understanding that had developed over 200 years. Steno, in the 1660’s, was the first to publish on understanding the pattern of rock layers. In particular, he pointed out that layers underneath would be older than those above, and layers with matching features found in different places could be identified as being the same layer (among other patterns). Building on this, by the late 1600’s, it was clear that there were a lot of geological layers, and people began to suspect that they might require a while to form. By the early 1700’s, it was clear that a single flood was not a possible explanation - the layers did not show hydraulic sorting, and looked like ordinary accumulations of sediment such as could be seen slowly piling up today. As people looked at various parts of Europe, and eventually other regions in the world, they began to see that some of the same layers could be recognized quite widely, as well as finding that the total number of layers was quite large. They also began to notice that the fossils also showed patterns, with different types in different layers. The accumulated evidence by the 1770’s firmly established a vast, though quite uncertain, age of the earth. (Much of this work was done by Christians, in part because most of the educated were clergy.) The progress in a geological understanding of the age of the earth should not be confused with religious or philosophical speculations, though both atheistic and young-earth sources often do so. About 1800, Cuvier firmly established that extinction had occurred and the use of fossils to identify layers was on solid scientific ground. All of the geological layers seemed to be pre-human, in contrast to deistic speculation about eternal cycles of the earth and humanity. Likewise, the observed pattern was for simper life to dominate the older layers, while more complex organisms gradually added to the sequence. No fixed patterns in sea level, temperature, etc. were apparent; instead, one had to go out and observe the rocks to determine what the conditions were at their formation.
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Definitely, as long as it fits in to a match box of 2448 BCE when Peleg was born and named for its greatest manifestation. Because Jesus.
Actually, a number of articles point out that there is a “fining up” landward of sediment deposition, with tsunamis…just as Walther’s Law says of transgressing waters. And the tsunamis of the Flood, moving massive amounts of sediment across continents, were in a league of their own.
Thanks for the materials, Chris.
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What? I’m neither trying to impress nor dismiss anyone. I’m simply saying that you don’t have to have a uniformitarian world view in order to do geology.
You are clearly overstating your case. Such does not help your credibility.
There are two types of fining upward patterns associated with tsunamis, but neither matches the standard pattern of Walther’s law, nor would the tsunamis of flood geology imagination produce such patterns. Generating tsunamis able to flood the whole earth would also generate enough heat to melt the earth, so the word “imagination” is justified.
As a tsunami, or any other wave, washes up onto land, the water slows down. Right near where the wave hits, there can be a a jumble of all sorts of things, but soon the wave will be moving too little to carry the biggest and heaviest stuff. So the farther up the beach/land you go, you tend to see smaller pieces plus less dense pieces (such as bits of wood, seaweed, or plastic). Similarly, when the water draining back from a wave washes into the ocean, the bigger/denser pieces washed with the wave settle out faster while the finer material takes longer to settle. But the pattern from Walther’s law is to have sandy at the beach and finer somewhat deeper, the reverse of the pattern from a large wave washing onto land. Likewise, the deposition after things have settled is a distinct pattern of smaller-scale vertical fining upward throughout the area that got stuff washed to it, without the side to side change associated with Walther’s Law. Again, Walther’s law is that the pattern of facies that you see if you go horizontally along an environmental gradient at any one point in time is also the pattern of facies change that you see if you go up or down through a section, because the different environments have all shifted together. Global flooding by tsunamis would not produce a gradual shift from lowland swampy areas to beach dunes to beach to shallow water to somewhat deeper water to somewhat deeper still and then back again. Likewise, the constant tsunamis should wash away the deposits from each previous wave - there would be no chance for the fine material to settle out until after the flood, just as the line of deposits from each wave on a beach keeps being shifted by the next one. (Also keep in mind how well the ark could stand the waves that you’re suggesting.)
Based on the claims of young-earthers and former young-earthers who have worked for oil companies, I am confident that the estimate of at least hundreds of young-earthers being in the business is not an overestimate. But none of them have ever given any example of how a young earth model helps them find oil. If you think that is an overstatement, try finding any examples of a young-earth model actually working to find natural resources. When confronted with that point, John Reed, who has worked in the oil industry, invoked the presence of many young-earthers in the industry but did not give any example of how they used young-earth models to find anything. He also claimed that someone had found some resource to be present in older and younger layers but not in between. Besides being too vague to assess, no evidence was given that this pattern would be supported by a young-earth model.
Try predicting, based on young-earth models, where to find oil. There’s not enough information there - the models aren’t designed to give a good description of how the earth works, but only to try to persuade people that the earth is young.
It is true that some oil has been found just by stumbling across it. But no oil has ever been found based on applying a distinctively young-earth model. Oil companies aren’t out to support the scientific consensus - they are major funders of climate denial. They are going to use whatever methods work. They don’t use young-earth models.
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And you know this how, Don? Have you worked as a geologist in the oil industry?
Also, did you read the links provided to you about Glenn Morton, an oil industry geologist who was a prominent figure for a while in the YEC movement?
Blessings,
Chris
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"Flood geology claims that catastrophic flooding occurred which should have jumbled everything together, yet oil and gas exploration finds distinct layers that have different types of microfossils, different chemical properties, different magnetism, etc., etc., and this sequence is consistent globally."
The Sloss sequences constitute “flood geology”…with “distinct layers that have different types of microfossils,” etc. However, it’s up to us to interpret the data. Does it point to one big Flood over a year–or does it point to six floods, over 500 million years. In either case, they are “distinct layers”–in fact discrete “packages” of sedimentary layers. And, the same basic packages are found on every continent.
Actually, megasequence studies reveal that the Zuni (Cretaceous) saw the highest ocean levels and the largest sediment deposits on all continents. In fact, the transgressive water flow was so catastrophic and overpowering that it wiped out whole herds of dinosaurs (like the Maiasaura, in western Montana)–burying them alive. It also catastrophically buried thousands of dinosaurs in Alberta, Canada, where arguably the largest dinosaur “graveyard” on earth is found. But it wasn’t just in North America. China, too, has such mass dinosaur graveyards, dating to the Zuni megasequence. Some have proposed flooding rivers (wiping out a whole herd of these giants??), tropical storms, or hurricanes. However, this would not account for the amounts of ocean water and sediment that would not only suddenly kill, but also bury and fossilize, these gargantuan creatures. But mega-tsunamis, with a sea level 800’-1000’ above present-day levels, would be capable of catastrophically drowning and completely burying them in ocean sediment.
Bacteria have biodegraded ocean oil spills in a matter of days. Bacteria that biodegrade oil are also found in oil reservoirs. So, you insist that such oil has remained in its reservoirs for “hundreds of millions of years,” somehow escaping being biodegraded by bacteria over all this time?
Are you talking about any anaerobic bacteria?
Detailed fossilization in clay sediments tells us that clay settles much quicker than you seem to be thinking. Many highly detailed, soft-bodied life forms are found, for example, in the Burgess Shale (and, of course, shale is formed from clay sediments). If the clay sediments didn’t quickly compact and cement together, such detail would not be possible, especially with soft-bodied organisms–like fish and jellyfish, which would decompose in just a matter of hours.