I think it’s hard to avoid such fascinations when someone believes so strongly in certain explanations about the Earth’s past, similar to this quote by Adam Sedgwick, who retired as president of the Geological Society in this recantation shared the other day by @T_aquaticus :
We saw the clearest traces of diluvial action, and we had, in our sacred histories, the record of a general deluge. On this double testimony it was, that we gave a unity to a vast succession of phenomena, not one of which we perfectly comprehended, and under the name diluvium, classed them all together.
Our errors were, however, natural, and of the same kind which lead many excellent observers of a former century to refer all the secondary formations of geology to the Noachian deluge. Having been myself a believer, and, to the best of my power, a propagator of what I now regard as a philosophic heresy, and having more than once been quoted for opinions I do not now maintain, I think it right, as one of my last acts before I quit this Chair, thus publicly to read my recantation.
It’s a really natural sort of thing to do, with such a strong belief in a global flood to get really excited about things you think fit well with that (now discarded in the geological community) hypothesis. I’m speaking from my personal experience having believed and devoured YEC articles, books, etc. and feeling what I imagine is similar to what Adam is experiencing here.
You could try to put this under the banner of confirmation bias, or Morton’s demon, but I feel like those are inadequate to describe the sense of awe that one experiences to believe you’ve figured something out like this. It’s kind of like the joy of discovery combined with a deeply religious experience that is transcendent in nature. I found it deeply unsettling at least at first to unlink my deep religious experience, the enriching of my faith when I would come across things like those described in the OP, and my joy in figuring out something about the natural world - from such beliefs I now consider to be false. Funny enough I would have never believed myself, but freedom from YEC beliefs has deepened my sense of awe about God’s creation and him as the creator. Yet at the time, I would have considered anything but YEC to be heresy.