Geological megasequences: data pointing to 500+ million years of evolution? Or to the year-long biblical Flood?

The operative word being also. This is an exercise in futility, because you can also keep coming up with relative minutiae that may appear to validate an argument, and still be interpreting the trees in the forest mistakenly. It also would not be gracious of me to tell you what I also think. :grin:

Speaking of futility, did you ever follow the link I posted here why God’s plan was a two creation model from the start? The first was never ‘perfect’ as YECs insist, but merely ‘very good’ and always subjected to futility and death, from before death occurred.

No, as those deposits are still extremely rare. Dozens of graveyards, as compared to thousands of dinosaur-containing fossil sites, is not likely to be produced by a deposition system that should only preserve things in a mixed, shattered state. Which brings us back to shell hash deposits: how are tiny, fragile shells preserved by a megatsunami?

How are oysters (let alone trees) more mobile than dinosaurs? There are far more fossil marine bivalves in layers of that age than mammals.

If the mud is soft and deep enough, then it can readily bury them.

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https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/sed.12724 gives a current overview of tsunami sedimentation. Carefully going through the references in that will give a good idea of what should or shouldn’t be present in tsunami deposits.

Mid-ocean rifting is generally pretty calm. You seem to be envisioning a solid plate suddenly breaking in two, but even that would not be good at generating tsunamis. Earthquakes that move significant amounts of the underwater crust up or down are good at making tsunamis. Plus, the seafloor deposits indicate a slow, gradual production of new seafloor at the ridges since around the beginning of the Zuni sequence (most older seafloor has been subducted away and can’t be checked).

Subduction is much more likely to generate tsunamis. However, tectonic-caused earthquakes cannot get much bigger than the largest experienced in historic times. You could produce more big earthquakes if the process of plate motion were given more energy, but rock can only take so much energy before it will break. Roughly a moment magnitude of 10 is the biggest possible. Of course, you also need to explain where that extra energy is coming from and how come all the extra heat doesn’t vaporize the earth, given the second law of thermodynamics and the amount of plate motion that occurs in a short time under a young-earth scenario.

It is possible to have a larger earthquake and tsunami if the cause is not internal. An incoming asteroid can produce a bigger earthquake, up to about magnitude 15, which would destroy the planet. Even a bunch of magnitude 10 quakes would likely be causing problems for the ark.

Again, if these waves are being generated in the Pacific, they should wash from the Pacific. But the sedimentary record shows a gradual rise of sea level all around the edges of the continent. Carbonates are not the finest, and you are mixing up the Stokes law aspect with Walther’s law. The Walther’s law pattern is NOT compatible with a tsunami. It is the pattern produced by gradual change in sea level or other environmental parameters. Stokes’ law (with modifications in light of the shape variation) explains the bigger/heavier particles settling first and finer/less dense last. As the backwash from a tsunami wave carries mixed sediment back into the ocean, we should see this type of pattern. But the Tonto group has sand not just to the bottom, but to the uphill/inland side. The shale was deposited in deeper/more offshore water while sand was being deposited shallower. Limestone dominated yet further from the land while sand was being deposited near the beach. The trace fossils indicate plenty of time involved in the deposition, not a single tsunami. The forewash of a tsunami would produce a jumble including big stuff near the coast, then as the flooding water slows down there would be mostly sand, with the silt-size furthest up. Carbonate would not be separate; carbonate comes in various sizes and would be mixed in with similarly sized non-carbonate in a tsunami, so the presence of a carbonate unit as part of a sequence stratigraphic unit does not fit with a tsunami explanation. The occasional relatively complete fragile fossil in fine-grained sediments is typically associated with evidence of low oxygen levels, though occasional rapid burial in a landslide or the like does happen, and mud underwater can be very soupy and allow things to sink in quickly. Low oxygen requires little mixing of the water, which doesn’t fit with loads of tsunamis.

A tsunami would not result in large ocean sediment deposits all along the west coast. It would result in deposits of very mixed ocean and terrestrial deposits. The deposits indicate a calm rise in sea level, not a tsunami. You need to think through the implications of your hypothesis, check the evidence, and then change what doesn’t work in the hypothesis, rather than claiming that the hypothesis is supported by evidence that actually contradicts it.

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I’ve read through this whole thread and the quote above stands out to me as the most important critique of Don’s position of anything that’s been said (and there have been many excellent replies!) The fundamental problem I see with “flood geology” is that time and again its proponents are forced to admit that the laws of physics do not allow for the “mechanisms” they offer as explanations for a host of observable evidence. So they are forced instead of invoke miracles to fill in the gaps. But how in the world is such a view a better scientific explanation for the observable evidence?

Dr. Baumgardner, the inventor of the supposedly scientific “runaway subduction” model which the OP has relied upon, has actually admitted some of its numerous flaws. One major one is that such rapid movement of tectonic plates would generate an enormous amount of heat, as Baumgardner, Snelling et al. admit. But when questioned about where all that heat went, Dr. Baumgardner had to admit he had no physical mechanism to explain this, so God must have done it miraculously (see him here: https://youtu.be/P4c-gURnQZ4?t=7258.) In that same answer Baumgardner goes on to reference the RATE project, in which he participated. He states that “we found evidence, radioisotope evidence that there was a large amount of nuclear decay that occurred during the Flood. And, again, to alter nuclear decay rates requires the hand of God.” So again, another miracle is invoked to explain what the RATE project said was observable evidence for “more than 500 million years worth (at today’s rates) of nuclear and radioisotope decay during deposition of the Phanerozoic strata sequence of the Grand Canyon-Colorado Plateau region” (“Fission Tracks in Zircons: Evidence for Abundant Nuclear Decay”). Young Earth creationists themselves have noted that the heat generated by this much nuclear decay would vaporize the Earth’s crust. What’s more the radiation generated would have been lethal to all life on the planet, including all on the ark and would leave it a radioactive wasteland (see e.g. “Creationism and Accelerated Decay”). So besides a miracle to speed up radioactive decay and another to get rid of the heat, God would have to do yet a another miracle to get rid of the radiation and its immediate effects.

But note too that, as the late Glenn Morton (RIP) pointed out, Baumgartner has admitted that even to get to the initial state upon which he based his “runaway subduction” model would require 20 million years: “One difficulty in making a connection between these calculations and the Flood is their time scale. Some 2 x 10^7 years is needed before the instability occurs in the second calculation. Most of this time is involved with the accumulation of a large blob of cold, dense material at the barrier created by the phase transition at 600 km depth” (John R. Baumgardner, “Runaway Subduction as the Driving Mechanism for the Genesis Flood”, Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Creationism, (Pittsburgh: Creation Science Fellowship, Inc., 1994), p. 74; see this and other critiques of Baumgartner’s model in G. Morton, “Runaway Subduction is a Sham”)

My fundamental question to the OP, then, is why bother pretending to be all sciency and claiming that this is actually better science than the mainstream view if fundamental flaws in “creation science” require multiple miracles to overcome gigantic violations of the laws of physics? It would seem more honest to me simply to admit that mainstream scientists (whose ranks include many Christians) have the better scientific case but that you’re going to hold another view in spite of that, for other reasons.

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In one sitting?! :slightly_smiling_face:
 

Well said. YECism implicitly says (and many say it explicitly) that scientists are dishonest and that Christian ones compromise their integrity. That is ignorantly pharisaical.

Speeding up nuclear decay rates requires decreasing the strength of the Strong Nuclear Force, in order to decease the binding energy of nuclei. Decreasing it by the strength required for this would make not only large nuclei, but every composite particle (like protons and neutrons) disintigrate. Ignoring that,

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“How are oysters (let alone trees) more mobile than dinosaurs? There are far more fossil marine bivalves in layers of that age than mammals.”

Yes, there are far more marine bivalves in the Zuni megasequence; actually, there are more marine than terrestrial fossils in EVERY megasequence. But isn’t this exactly what we would expect, if this was ocean (marine) flooding?

In fact, in the lower levels of flooding–the first three megasequences (Sauk, Tippecanoe, and Kaskakia)–nearly all the fossils are marine. Again, just what we would expect as the ocean waters were rising more and more over all the continents in a global flood.

Not in tsunami flooding.

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Yes. Gradual flooding, with no tsunamis, or sorting by escape ability.

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As I’ve said, I’m not hung up on tsunamis. I’m just saying it was ocean water having powerful enough hydraulics to transport, deposit, and spread vast amounts of ocean floor sediment (much of it shallow marine)–along with its occupants–across the continents.

In other words, the fossil record is largely a record of ecosystems being transported from the ocean floor, then deposited onto the continents.

The popular idea that such hydraulics was nothing more than slowly rising ocean water (.01 inch per week), caused by melting glaciers, over millions of years, simply does not account for the volume of ocean sediment transported and deposited upon all the continents–nor does it account for the fossilization we find occurring in that sediment upon the continents. Animals just keeling over and falling into a lake or flooding river, or fish dying, then sinking (“bloat and float”) will not result in fossils. In fact, one authority even claimed that two fossilized fighting dinosaurs in a desert were killed and fossilized by a giant sand dune collapsing upon them! Ridiculous.

This argument does not gain credibility by repetition.

It does not account for it because it did not happen. How many times does it have to be explained that there was no transport of ocean sediment, and that the sediment formed in place in the inland seas? That is it. Slowly as in hundreds of thousands or millions of years. Slower than Lake Mead drying out. Therefore there is no need for hydraulic force at all - no tsunami, nothing from the Pacific being washed on the continent.

If you wish to persist in believing that fossil shells could be carried inland at 500 miles per hour in a cavitating, turbulent chaos of sand and rock, and then gently laid them down intact in sharply defined strata, and one wave scraped the continent to bedrock, another wave only killed all the big dinosaurs and small dinosaurs and in between dinosaurs, and another wiped out only mammals, fine, people will believe what they believe. It’s not that I do not get what you are saying, it’s that your whole line of argument is top to bottom implausible.

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About interpreting the trees in the forest wrong, the forest is bigger than just a flood. It’s distant starlight and girdled rocks and extinct radioactive nuclides and ice cores and…

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God engineered a lot of clocks into his creation for us to discover and to learn how to use, and they mutually validate and calibrate each other. He didn’t mess with the mechanisms after they were made, either (see Jeremiah 33:25 cited just above). And why aren’t you denying them all except when it’s convenient to your flawed arguments.

As I have said repeatedly, if the deposits were transported, then everything would be smashed in pieces. Finding Atlanta, Haminoea, Limacina, or Creseis is completely incompatible with this.

The sediment was transported grain by grain off the higher parts of the continents, into the high ocean waters, and deposited around the organisms, which then died.

That will usually result in small pieces, which is what we almost always find (even if those aren’t the ones one sees pictures of), if this is a vertebrate; or a shell, in the case of mollusks, arthropods, or echinoderms. Nearly every vertebrate fossil ever found consists of single bones or teeth.

Given the number of people that have been killed by landslides, and the fact that that deposit is from a desert ecosystem, it seems pretty reasonable to me.

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If the sediment was already on the continent, how did it become progressively higher and higher–over two miles thick–on the continent?

And, where did all those ocean creatures–which are found throughout the megasequences–come from?

And, how did they suddenly become buried, and fossilized (even in fine detail), in all that muddy sediment?

And if all that muddy sediment–all 53+ million cubic kilometers of it–was already on the North American continent, then how did all those dinosaurs (including herds of them, in Montana and Alberta, Canada) suddenly find themselves buried alive under tons of this sediment?

Of course, it was not the continent when they lived there. It was the sea. God can move mountains.

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The same way that there are miles thick sediments under our current oceans.

The ocean.

The same way they are getting buried now.

You have never shown that they were suddenly buried under tons of sediment.

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Is there any point in continuing this conversation, Dr. Moderator? :slightly_smiling_face: @donpartain is doing about as well as a flat earther in listening to facts about reality, being obsessed with ‘flood geology’, ignoring all the other physics in the cosmos, near or distant, not to mention ignoring biology and experts who work in the field.

And he does not recognize his theological issue with God’s two-creation plan, the first one being ‘very good’ and not perfect, and ignores scripture as well, notably the Jeremiah citation.

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Do you watch the news? Dozens of people lost their lives in a mudslide within this past month. Not a year goes by but that somewhere in the world some such tragedy occurs. Also, ocean shelf mudslides are frequent. If it happens in the present, why could it not happen in the past?

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But the “mudslides” that became sedimentary layers are in an entirely different league. For one, they did not need a mountain or hill to slide down, to suddenly overwhelm and cover billions of life forms. Secondly, they have buried the greatest percentage of every continent–and are thousands of feet thick on every one of them.

Also, today’s mudslides do not contain ocean life–but every one of the megasequence “mudslides” does, in the form of their fossils.

So, I would say that the mudslides today are quite different from the “mudslides” that left tens of millions of cubic kilometers of ocean sediment upon not just North America, but upon all the continents–all at the same time, even.