__Comparing Flood models (CONTINUED from above:
http://funday.createaforum.com/1-10/1-145/msg304/#msg304 )
[SHEET STRATA]
_The big picture includes: the sheet nature of strata sometimes spread over a huge lateral extent.
_When you compare the type of erosion, transportation and deposition of sediments today with what we see in the sedimentary rocks, there is a huge difference. _Sedimentary rocks of all ages are predominantly sheets, unlike today when sediments are commonly unlithified and two-dimensional.
_This includes the huge vertical and spatial extent of the rocks labelled as Precambrian, Paleozoic and Mesozoic.
[EVEN CENOZOIC]
_Even the Cenozoic forms large sheets out in the plains of eastern Montana, the Dakotas, and adjacent areas.
_The Cenozoic valley and basin fills in the Rocky Mountains are generally sheet-like over hundreds of square kilometres.
_In other words, the deposition was unlike today’s and fits in with the energy and depositional pattern expected in a Flood
--that is more violent at the beginning and wanes with time,
--as ‘The mountains rose; the valleys sank down’ (Psalm 104:8a) to drain the floodwaters.
[FOSSILS]
_The sedimentary rocks also contain billions of fossils.
_Considering that fossilization is a very exceptional process in the modern world, all these fossils should point to the Flood.
_The stratification and fossils, plus much more information, are why we believe the geological evidence strongly indicates a late Cenozoic Flood/post-Flood boundary.
[DINOSAUR TRACKS & EGGS]
_Such a boundary would automatically place the dinosaur tracks and eggs within the Flood,
--and the fact that the tracks and eggs were made by living animals further constrains the time as the early Flood.
_Those who advocate post-Flood catastrophism need to come up with viable mechanisms to account for
--the sheet nature and sediments with billions of fossils and the other details of the rock record.
__How does the geological column relate?
_Lawrence next brings up how the geological column relates to the Flood.
_I would agree that there is a pattern, as Lawrence states, but the exact pattern has not been determined yet.
_Evolutionists are always finding fossil surprises, such as ‘living fossils’,
--or earlier than previously identified occurences of fossils in their geological timescale,8 which require manipulation of the data.
[FOSSIL PATTERN EXPLANATIONS]
_Whatever the exact fossil pattern, there are at least two viable hypotheses to explain the order within the Flood:
--ecological zonation and Woodmorappe’s TAB concept.
_There are likely other mechanisms that no-one has yet considered.
_Those who relegate the Flood/post-Flood boundary to the middle or late Paleozoic
--seem to take the geological column as an absolute sequence of the Flood and post-Flood period.
_I believe we need a thorough evaluation of the geological column.
_There are many aspects to the geological column that must be substantiated, and there seems to be
--much flawed logic and procedures in the way uniformitarian scientists developed the column and continue to uphold it as a global sequence.5
_Radiometric dates are simply fit to the column, so they are of no help.
_In my geological travels, mostly in the northwest of the USA, I see evidence for a general order of the fossils in places, and exceptions in other places.
_For instance, the mountains of Montana are commonly Precambrian or Paleozoic;
--while the valley and basin fills, which came later, are commonly late Mesozoic and Cenozoic.
_This represents a general order to the fossils that is similar to the uniformitarian order.
_On the plains, the localities of dinosaurs and mammals are widely scattered,
--and so it is difficult to know whether the difference in fossils is really vertical or horizontal or both.
[DINOSAURS & MAMMALS TOGETHER]
_In one location in northeast Montana there are Paleocene dinosaurs mixed with ungulates.9
_Of course, this and other locations of Paleocene dinosaurs are hotly disputed by evolutionists,
--indicating the circular reasoning that is part of the fossil order making up the geological column.
_As stated by Woodmorappe and Oard,2 those who advocate a Flood/post-Flood boundary in the mid to late Paleozoic,
--must explain the supposed order in the geological column after the Flood.
_Lawrence apparently believes Robinson10 has solved the problem by advocating differential spreading or colonization,
--in other words the reptiles and birds multiplied faster than the mammals.
[EXPLAIN FOSSIL ORDER IN DETAIL]
_But, the order must be explained in detail, including the order of microorganisms and plants,
--since those who advocate a Paleozoic Flood/post-Flood boundary also believe in an absolute geological column.
_Besides, would reptiles spread faster than rats and rabbits?
_And why would dinosaurs want to migrate that fast when they have lots of mammal meals available?
[EXPLAIN MARINE FOSSILS]
_And this does not even touch marine fossils.
_For instance, how are Cretaceous ammonites supposed to avoid admixture with Tertiary marine fauna during some vague post-Flood migration?
_Surely, the post-Flood scenario should result in a generally random order of the fossils,
--since postulated post-Flood catastrophism should bury all organisms in a local or regional area.
_Lawrence states that the succession of mammals following dinosaurs is more of a problem for Woodmorappe and myself.
_I fail to see this, since there are mechanisms during the Flood that can cause fossil order,
--but no workable mechanism, as far as I know, in the model of post-Flood catastrophism.
[POSTPONE]
_The survival of mammals, as well as dinosaurs, during the initial onslaught of the Flood will be addressed later.
[ANIMAL BURIAL PATTERN]
_Lawrence goes on to state in that same paragraph that the mammals would have to be buried in the last moments of the Flood.
_This is assuming a linear sequence of the geological column compressed into the Flood.
_Woodmorappe and I question such linearity;
--we expect that the early Flood would generate more sediment and bury the land animals.
_The Bible says that all air-breathing animals that lived on land perished by Day 150.
_So all the mammals would have been dead and would generally be deposited in early Flood sediments.
[MOUNTAIN RANGES EMERGED FIRST?]
_This makes the rock record compressed, especially in areas of the continent that likely emerged first,
--such as near the continental divide in western North America.
_(One must be careful in that the above scenario does not work with micro-organisms,
--and that some of these mammals could have been floating for awhile and been deposited in the Recessional Stage of the Flood.)
_This is why I can make a case that the ‘Cenozoic’ can be early Flood, late Flood and post-Flood, depending upon the location.11
[MAMMALS BURIED BY FLOOD]
_‘Cenozoic’ sediments with mammals’ tracks and the giant beavers in corkscrew-shaped burrows in Nebraska can be explained by
--early Flood sediments that were deeply buried and subsequently exposed by late Flood erosion, as I have discussed before.12
_(I do not know enough about platypus distribution in Australia to comment.)
__Numerous difficulties with ‘post-Flood catastrophism’
_Those who believe that the Flood/post-Flood boundary is in the middle or late Paleozoic, or the K/T for that matter,
--have copious, severe problems explaining geological and paleontological features without the Flood.
_They resort to what is called post-Flood catastrophism, about which I have heard or read very little.
_I would at least like to read some speculations on the nature of these mechanisms.
[POST-FLOOD CATASTROPHISTS, EXPLAIN THESE]
_Advocates of such Flood/post-Flood boundaries need to come up with viable post-Flood catastrophic mechanisms
--for huge erosion, transportation, and sheet deposition, sometimes over tens of thousands of square kilometres.
_They need to come up with viable tectonic models plus explanations for [in]numerable other difficulties.
_Some of these difficulties, among very many, are:
_1) Where is the record of dinosaurs, mammals and other organisms from the supposed record of the Flood in the early Paleozoic and Precambrian?
_2) How is the Mesozoic and Cenozoic order of the geological column to be explained as a worldwide post-Flood sequence?
_3) How are huge early Cenozoic coal seams
--that are up to 100 km long, 40 km wide, and 61 m thick, of nearly pure coal in the Powder River Basin of southeast Montana and northeast Wyoming
--to be explained by post-Flood processes?13
_4) How are Cenozoic planation surfaces developed?
_5) How are pediments formed?
_6) How are water and wind gaps developed?
_7) How can man and beast survive the volcanic winter from all the post-Paleozoic volcanism?
_8) How would man and beast survive the devastation of large meteorite impacts?
_9) Where does the energy for erosion and transport come from after the Flood?
_10) What mechanism erodes the Rocky Mountains of western Montana and northern/central Idaho
--and lays down well-rounded quartzites from the Pacific coast to western North Dakota, sometimes at current speeds over 30 m/sec?14
_Some of these quartzites weigh up to 200 kg and are found on mountain tops,
--such as the northern Teton Mountains of northwest Wyoming,
--the Gravelly Range of southwest Montana,
--and the Wallowa Mountains of northeast Oregon.15
[A more recent Oard article says sediments were carried from east to west in N. America]
_All this occurred in the Cenozoic of geological time.
[_The extensive sheet-like deposits in the Grand Canyon, and around the world, support the standard Flood model ‘big picture’
--that these deposits are a result of the world-wide Flood of Noah.]
[& EXPLAIN THIS]
_Dinosaur tracks and eggs
--that are found near where I live
--are on top of thousands of metres of sedimentary rocks from the Flood, as all participants in the dispute recognize.
_But, there has also been at least 300 m, and possibly more than 1,000 m, of erosion of these areas to expose the dinosaur eggs, tracks and bonebeds.
_What post-Flood mechanism would lay down many hundreds of metres of Mesozoic and Cenozoic sediments over tens of thousands of square kilometres,
--erode the strata as a sheet, and end with more channellized erosion with no trace of the eroded material downstream?
_The Flood is the mechanism that is able to accomplish all this work.
_Based on the geology of the Rocky Mountains and the adjacent High Plains, and from Scripture,
--the logical place to place dinosaur tracks and eggs is early in the Flood, during the first 150 days
--when all air-breathing animals that had lived on land died (except those in the Ark of course).
_The erosion of the area down to the level of observed tracks and eggs fits in neatly with the Recessional Stage of the Flood,
--thus constraining the tracks and eggs to be from the Inundatory Stage.16
_Any postulated post-Flood mechanism that can accomplish all this geological activity would have to be on par with the Flood itself.
_I do not find the Flood explanation of the Mesozoic and Cenozoic limiting but rather straightforward,
--while I find that the post-Flood explanation of these strata and fossils adds many times more problems than it purports to solve.
_Lawrence disputes Holt’s contention that the post-Flood period would be too hazardous for man.17
_Not to mention other parts of the world, the Middle East underwent much tectonics and sedimentation during the Mesozoic and Cenozoic.17,18
_I would say there is a severe problem of survivability.
__The logic of emerged Flood sediments early in the Flood
_It is true, as Lawrence states, that areas of emerged land are not excluded in the biblical testimony,
_but to state that ‘… it is certainly not evident or expected’ is to not think of the many processes
--that can cause emerged Flood sediments early in the Flood.
_Furthermore, Lawrence and others do not seem to have thought much about the unusual features of tracks and eggs
--that make a natural environment suspicious,
--such as predominantly straight trackways,
--tracks only on bedding planes,
--and few tracks of babies or young juveniles,
--unlike today.19,20
[5 CAUSES OF FLOOD SEDIMENTS]
_I will discuss some of the mechanisms that would cause emerged Flood sediments.
_After a few thousand metres or so of sediment is rapidly deposited in a ‘geosyncline’,
--sea level would shallow greatly because the crustal trough is being filled up.
_Then there are at least five viable mechanisms that would result in fluctuating sea level that can result in emerged sediments.
_One mechanism is twice-daily tides.
_These tides can be substantial on a globally or nearly globally flooded Earth due to a lack of continental barriers and/or resonance.21,22
_The height of these tides should be quite variable spatially due to the effects of the remaining uninundated land and sea-bottom topography.
_A second mechanism is multiple tectonics, both near and far, that will cause all kinds of tsunamis and waves.
_Just this mechanism alone would cause massive sea-level oscillations.
_A third mechanism is general uplift of the area of exposed Flood sediments due to conditions in the lower crust or mantle,
--such as a heating event or change of mineral phase in the mantle.
_Fourth, meteorite bombardment in the ocean should result in huge tsunamis, which would spread out and decrease in energy with distance.
_Fifth, the dynamics of Flood currents results in sheet flows snaking over shallow land masses at high speed,
--just like the jet stream in the atmosphere.23
_These modelled currents can accelerate from rest up to about 80 m/sec, in about 40 days with the pattern of ridges and troughs moving very slowly.
_The most relevant feature, for this discussion, is that in the middle of the trough sea level can fall as much as 1,000 m, resulting in a large area
of exposed land that can remain for tens of days.
_These are not ad hoc mechanisms but reasonable deductions within a global Flood.
__Flood and post-Flood deposition
_Robert Lawrence’s estimate of the amount of sediment laid down in the first 150 days is about 100 m/day.
_He is an order of magnitude too high.
_During the Flood some areas would have received high rates of sedimentation, but, on average, the depositional rates will be about 10m/day
--based on an average continental thickness of 1,500 m.
_Although I would agree that most of the sediment was laid down during the first 150 days, especially at the beginning,
--more sediment would have been added from copious volcanic emissions during the Recessional Stage.
_So, this would put the estimate for the first 150 days somewhere around 8 m/day.
_I would also add that the sediments laid down early in the Flood ‘geosynclines’ did not necessarily erode from the edge,
--but could have come from quite a long distance.
_We just don’t know.
_The Recessional Stage would generally erode the top of the sediment column from the highest areas and redeposit the material mostly along the continental margins.
_Regardless of the average deposition rate, Lawrence concludes that
--the geological activity very early in the Flood would have been too much for the air-breathing land dwellers.
_The question seems to come up as to where the dinosaurs and mammals were located while the Paleozoic sediments were being deposited on the continents.
_All these deductions presuppose that we know the pre-Flood geography, topography and bathymetry.
_We do not know any of these geomorphological features.
_Moreover, the addition of an average of about 1,500 m of sediments on the continents and continental margins, plus great tectonics,
--has catastrophically disrupted and changed the pre-Flood world.
_So, questions like ‘Where were the dinosaurs and mammals early in the catastrophe?’ assume that
--we know not only the pre-Flood geomorphology, but also the precise events of the Flood.
_They also assume that the globe was totally flooded soon after the start.
_For all we know, much of the current ocean basins could have been pre-Flood land while the current continents were pre-Flood oceans.
_If Mount Everest can rise more than 9,000 m out of the floodwaters, portions of the pre-Flood continents
--could have sunk thousands of metres and now be covered with sea water, in spite of the current observations
--of a felsic upper continental crust, a mafic ocean crust, and general isostatic balance.
_So, the dinosaurs and mammals could have been still on these pre-Flood continents while the ‘geosynclines’ were filling up.
_A further rise in the relative level of the sea could have chased them off into the water
--in which strong Flood currents swept them up on the shores of newly exposed Flood sediments.
_Some drowned, forming bonebeds along the shore, while some lived to make tracks and lay eggs before the exposed Flood sediments were finally covered by water.
_This is just one viable scenario.
_On the other hand, the amount of sediment laid down in the post-Flood period, if the Mesozoic and Cenozoic were post-Flood,
--is far greater than that observed in depositional areas today.
_Lawrence’s average of 25 m/yr for 200 years is much too high, but nonetheless, it would still be large.
_Because of all this post-Flood activity, including deposition, Robinson is forced to postulate a post-Flood period of around 15,000 years,7
--which is really a Scriptural and archaeological stretch.