I'll try to keep this within the few sub-topics that spun off our initial discussion.
Okay, so you aren't visulizing a tranquil flood. Good. And I do understand your point, but I think a world-wide flood model COULD account for "upsidedown" hydrualic sorting.
Except for the fact that no one has figured out how a flood could do this. Speaking from common sense, which is all I have because I am not a fully trained geologist, there is no concieveable mechanical way that smaller particles would settle out before larger particles in turbulent water. It just dosen't happen that way. We could always just invoke 'something' that COULD have caused this to happen but that would not be science.
Why then are there overthrust and re-work theories for fossils not found in their expected evolutionary order?
When a geologist finds a fossil out of order they do not just simply hand wave it as a result of tectonic activity. When you see a fossil out of order you should be suspicious of some kind of activity and look for other evidence of folding/faulting/tilting/etc. Either that or that particular species may have survived longer than we previously knew. Either way, you need more evidence before you can tell the meaning of an 'out of order' fossil. If there is a thrust fault that caused an out of order fossil there should also be a series of rock formations that are out of order. If you can drill and find this there is a genuine thrust fault. It is not as though thrust faults don't exist and scientists are just using them as excuses to make sure the fossil record isn't contradicted.
Where were all these things found? Earth, right?
Right but there is a volume vs surface area problem here. The compressed amount of geologic features created by biomass almost does cover the earth right now. Imagine if all that biomass was not compressed.
(I don't see how limestone and marble figure into this.)
Limestone is made from compressed critters. Marble is made from compressed limestone through metamorphasis after it is buried and heated at extreme depth by our standards.
From
Problems with a Global Flood, 2nd edition
How were limestone deposits formed? Much limestone is made of the skeletons of zillions of microscopic sea animals. Some deposits are thousands of meters thick. Were all those animals alive when the Flood started? If not, how do you explain the well-ordered sequence of fossils in the deposits? Roughly 1.5 x 10^15 grams of calcium carbonate are deposited on the ocean floor each year. [Poldervaart, 1955] A deposition rate ten times as high for 5000 years before the Flood would still only account for less than 0.02% of limestone deposits.
...
"Scientific creationists interpret the fossils found in the earth's rocks as the remains of animals that perished in the Noachian Deluge. Ironically, they often cite the sheer number of fossils in 'fossil graveyards' as evidence for the Flood. In particular, creationists seem enamored by the Karroo Formation in Africa, which is estimated to contain the remains of 800 billion vertebrate animals (see Whitcomb and Morris, p. 160; Gish, p. 61). As pseudoscientists, creationists dare not test this major hypothesis that all of the fossilized animals died in the Flood.
"Robert E. Sloan, a paleontologist at the University of Minnesota, has studied the Karroo Formation. He asserts that the animals fossilized there range from the size of a small lizard to the size of a cow, with the average animal perhaps the size of a fox. A minute's work with a calculator shows that, if the 800 billion animals in the Karoo formation could be resurrected, there would be twenty-one of them for every acre of land on earth. Suppose we assume (conservatively, I think) that the Karroo Formation contains 1 percent of the vertebrate [land] fossils on earth. Then when the Flood began, there must have been at least 2100 living animals per acre, ranging from tiny shrews to immense dinosaurs. To a noncreationist mind, that seems a bit crowded."
...
A thousand kilometers' length of arctic coastal plain, according to experts in Leningrad, contains about 500,000 tons of tusks. Even assuming that the entire population was preserved, you seem to be saying that Russia had wall-to-wall mammoths before this "event."
Even if there was room physically for all the large animals which now exist only as fossils, how could they have all coexisted in a stable ecology before the Flood? Montana alone would have had to support a diversity of herbivores orders of magnitude larger than anything now
observed.
Where did all the organic material in the fossil record come from? There are 1.16 x 10^13 metric tons of coal reserves, and at least 100 times that much unrecoverable organic matter in sediments. A typical forest, even if it covered the entire earth, would supply only 1.9 x 10^13 metric tons. [Ricklefs, 1993, p. 149]
My favorite part of the Karoo Formation bit is that creationists were using it as evidence for the flood before they realised just what it would have meant for all those animals to have been alive at one time.
In each of these cases, even if you were able to get enough land to account for all the animals you don't have enough ocean to account for all the limestone or enough room for the super tall and dense forrests to produce all that coal. It is a totally loosing position to take just from a quantatative analysis.
About oil being organic, read the 'Black Gold' thread in the geology forum. Bill Birkeland gives a great presentation about oil fields and their biological origin. He pretty much shut everyone up on that thread. It was pretty awesome.
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