The Day the Mesozoic Died

Faith & Science Conversation
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@beaglelady

I finished the documentary, The Day the Mesozoic Died, and I found it be incredibly fascinating. Prior to watching this I never heard of the K-T Boundary, The Iridium Layer, or the Chixculub Crater. I’d like to discuss this topic more in depth…

  1. Is the Iridium Layer really found everywhere on earth?

  2. How concrete is the evidence for the Chixculub Crater? According to Wikipedia, it’s a 110 mile crater that is currently buried in the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico.

  3. How did plant species survive? My understanding is that much of it went extinct…

Here is the documentary … http://www.hhmi.org/biointeractive/day-mesozoic-died

And here is the CMI rebuttal … Did a meteor wipe out the dinosaurs? What about the iridium layer?

And here is my rebuttal to the CMI article:

Problems with the ‘great impact’ theory

The secular book The Great Dinosaur Extinction Controversy exposes the way that the meteor explanation for the dinosaur extinction has become a new dogma that has way outstripped the evidence (see review by Carl Wieland in Journal of Creation 12(2):154–158, 1998). Some of the reasons are:

The extinction was not that sudden (using evolutionary/long age interpretations of the geological record). But the spread in the geological record makes sense if much of the sedimentary deposits were formed in Noah’s Flood.

I’m not sure how it makes sense if “much of the sedimentary deposits were formed in the flood”. According to the documentary, The Day the Mesozoic Died, no dinosaurs have ever been discovered above the K-T Boundary.

Light-sensitive species survived.

Extinctions don’t correlate with crater dates.

Modern volcanic eruptions don’t cause global extinction patterns, even if they cause a temporary temperature drop.

Volcanic eruptions? I thought we were talking about a 6 mile-in-circumference meteor hitting the earth that created a 110 mile crater?

The iridium enrichment, supposedly a key proof of meteor impact, is not nearly as clearly defined as claimed.

How so?

Drill cores of the apparent ‘smoking gun’ Chicxulub Crater on the Yucatán peninsula in south-east Mexico do not support the idea that it is an impact crater.

It seems that some scientists didn’t speak out against the idea for fear of undermining the ‘nuclear winter’ idea, and being grouped with ‘nuclear warmongers’.

I’m confused by this last statement. According to the documentary, most geologists didn’t accept the Alvarest Hypothesis because it went against their gradualistic model.

“The overview article by meteorologist Mike Oard, ‘The extinction of the Dinosaurs’ (Journal of Creation 11(2):137–154, 1997) explains many features of dinosaur fossils that are consistent with a flood, and dinosaur tracks consistent with fleeing from encroaching flood waters.”

How does dinosaur tracks support the idea of “fleeing from encroaching flood waters”. Why is it that on some places on the earth you can find turtles and clams above the dinosaurs — did they outsmart / out-best the dinosaurs in their flight from the flood waters?

“Oard points out that iridium enrichment can be caused by massive volcanism, as many evolutionists agree. This would certainly have been a feature of the Flood year, associated with the breaking up of the ‘fountains of the great deep’”

Is it a sound exegetical practice to impose volcanic activity where none is mentioned in the Bible? “The fountains of the great deep” is a vague term and doesn’t necessarily mean volcanic activity.

“However, Oard agrees that the largest iridium anomalies were caused by meteorites striking during the Flood:”

Again — is it sound biblical exegesis to impose METEORS in the Bible where none is mentioned? What troubles me most about this idea is that the Bible is not shy about mentioning such activity that could be interpreted as volcanic activity or meteors from the sky. Fire and brimstone in both the Sodom and Gomorrah story AND Jonah and Ninevah. Stars falling from heaven in Revelations. Why would such a major detail as meteors no where found in any telling of Noah’s Flood anywhere in the Bible?

‘Iridium-rich clay falling from the atmosphere would accumulate only during temporary lulls in the Flood.’

According to Glen Morton, “36,500 feet of sediment (which is not exceptional) being deposited during the Flood year means that 100 feet ON AVERAGE would be deposited daily…” Where do we get the idea of “lulls in the Flood”…?

This explains the fact that so-called spikes are really composed of multiple spikes or are spread over a wider layer of sediment. John Woodmorappe has pointed out:

‘there are now over 30 iridium “horizons” in the Phanerozoic record. These can be explained by a slowdown in sedimentation rate as iridium rained from the sky (whether from a terrestrial, or an extraterrestrial source). They pose no problem for the Flood at all.’

I’m not sure what Woodmorappe means by “30 iridium horizons”. As far as “posing no problem for the Flood” it does pose a problem with importing unmentioned meteors into the Flood account.

“Oard also pointed out that the K/T boundary supposedly marking the end of the dinosaur age is most likely not synchronous around the world, and is not defined coherently. Very few dinosaur fossils are actually found near this boundary. Sometimes the argument becomes very circular. For example, the end of the dinosaur era is supposed to be clearly marked in the geological column by the K/T boundary, but in many localities the K/T boundary is defined by the highest dinosaur fossil. Or else the Alvarez theory is supported by the iridium spike in the K/T boundary, but in some localities the K/T boundary is defined by the iridium spike.”

According to the documentary the K-T Boundary was defined as a peculiar layer of clay that was distinct from other layers … so unless the documentary is mistaken I’m not sure where they get the idea of “circular argumentation”.

“The Bible provides the only coherent framework within which we can properly interpret history, including that of the dinosaurs. Other theories are doomed to failure, even the glamorous ‘deep impact’ theory, because all circumstantial evidence counts for nothing if it ignores the only eye-witness account we have of Creation and the Flood — the Bible.”

How are dinosaurs easier to understand when reading the Bible? Most every medieval portrait you find depicting Noah’s Ark or Eden does NOT include dinosaurs in their artwork — perhaps because they either didn’t know about dinosaurs, and/or, found no such mention of creatures found in Genesis 1-11. As to the other point — Moses is the author of Genesis, according to tradition. Everything that takes places in Genesis was not “personally seen by Moses”, and takes places anywhere from hundreds to thousands of years ago. They are not “eye-witness accounts” in the same sense the Gospel writers were, writing extremely close to the time of the events.

What do you guys think?

-Tim

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Yes, the K-T layer is found over the entire Earth. An the concentration of Iridium in this layer is over 1000 times more than anywhere on Earth.

The crater has been dated independently to 66 million years old. There are boulders as far away as Texas from the blast itself. Then there is the fused quartz balls and stress lines in them.

Many plant species went extinct but new plant species became more dominant - grasses and deciduous trees.

Please don’t label books “secular”. Does the writers of scientific paper need to put their religion underneath the title and their affiliation? Finally what the CMI rebuttal is just total whining that the scientific results don’t correspond the Bible. So what? The scientific results are the scientific results.

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Tim,
Take a look at this. It is the latest results on the one-two punch of asteroid first leading to volcanoes that killed most of the dinosaurs and other species over a 50,000 year period, 66 million years ago. Before the impact, the eruptions produced about 71,000 cubic kilometers of lava—an average rate of about 400 million cubic meters each year. But starting about 50,000 years after the asteroid impact, Deccan volcanoes and fissures began spewing lava at an average rate of about 900 million cubic meters per year

http://news.sciencemag.org/climate/2015/10/volcanoes-and-asteroid-strike-may-have-done-dinosaurs

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I was just copying and pasting from the article. It was the term they used, not me. There’s a lot of terminology and phrases these sorta of organizations use that I find annoying.

Secular Science — no, science is just science

Secular History — I’m not even sure what this means? As opposed to what? Would the Civil War be considered “Secular History”…? Or just Egytian and Chinese history that would seem to conflict with Flood dates.

“Those that don’t believe in the Bible have invented theories…” — there’s lots of people that believe in the Bible that don’t come to the same conclusions as YEC organizations. In my opinion they read it very woodenly, and re-adjust scientific explanations haphazardly to fit their conclusions.

They blame the media for saying things are “proven fact”, but then turn right around and use the data that other people discovered, and insert it into their flood model. It’s dishonest.

As to the other points, thanks for answering my questions. I shall look more into it.

P.S. The way I worded my rebuttal was a bit confusing. Only the words in Bold-Italic are mine. The rest is taken straight from the article.

-Tik

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I am glad you see that. It is annoying to me to see scientists who have spent a career building and researching to get labeled as secular scientist because people like Elizabeth Mitchell are paid by Ken Ham to read recent journal articles and bash the results as untrue or non-biblical. The folks at AIG do this everyday and are blatantly lying as well as dishonest.

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I believe if the folks that ran these organizations were more confident in their conclusions we would expect to see more people actively engaging in the field … But I don’t see that. I see people reading articles and giving their own take on it.

The first historically identified Flood Geologist was George McCready Price in the '20s and he was known for being a very active reader of geologist literature, but not actually participating in the practice. Are their any modern day flood geologists that have broke out of that and are actually working with the data in their hands?

As to your point about scientists being labelled secular scientists, it’s also discouraging to hear of people like Mary Schweitzer (who discovered soft tissue on dinosaur bones) to be called a “Christian Compromiser”.

-Tim

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Mary Schweitzer has spent her whole career doing this research with integrity to come up with scientifically sound results through hard work . To have her and her results bashed is unethical and demeaning of the person, the organization she is affiliated with, and the entire scientific field she is a part of. It is especially annoying when the person doing the bashing is not technically qualified to even comment on the results and are paid to make up counter arguments that are thinly vailed biblical interpretation disguised as honest scientific skepticism.

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