Glenn Morton's Evidence Examined

I said what Faith reported above, and I believe my comments to this effect in another thread are what prompted her to start the current one.My information on this comes from personal conversations with Glenn Morton (who was head of oil exploration for a major oil company) and two of his colleagues, including Steve Robertson. Perhaps some of my information is incorrect; I appreciate corrections from anyone who has firsthand (or even secondhand) knowledge of how commercial oil exploration is actually done. (I.e. not from "armchair geologists" or even academics who have no knowledge of what is actually done in commercial practice.)Based on my conversations with Glenn and his colleagues, I see a number of misconceptions being repeated in this thread.
1) it has been assumed in this thread that oil is found by geologists. From what I understand, this is false. "Finding oil" means drilling a well that produces oil. This is done by the oil exploration teams of major oil companies, using a variety of techniques. The head of he exploration team is generally an experienced oil businessman, who is perhaps a geophysicist like Glenn. Geophysics is a branch of physics, not geology. (Glenn is NOT a geologist and is proud that he never took a geology class in his life.) Geophysicists are trained more in acoustics than in geology, and are skilled at analyzing seismic and other survey data. As I understand it, Glenn always had at least one geologist and a number of geophysicists on his team. But their information was often inconsistent and was always incomplete. It was left to Glenn to make a case to his management whether or not to drill in any specific location.
2) it has been claimed by some in this thread that it is necessary to know the geologic history of a site in order to find oil. This is not true. If one is near a known large oil field, all that is needed is good interpretation of seismic surveys to identify faults, salt domes, and other features that might have trapped a significant amount of oil. (and most oil exploration today is done near already-known oil fields.)

I was simply repeating what you had said Faith and even quoted what you said.Did you not say "Well, I see no reason whatever to suppose that the dating of the rocks does anything more than locate them physically, and although it is asserted that the dates are used in the location of oil, so far nothing has been said to show that there is any more to it than physical location. "?Edited by jar, : fix initial quotebox

I also said it's not needed to locate the rocks, why should it be? If you can reach the rock to date it you can reach it by relative dating and you can assess the morphological situation as well without knowing anything about the absolute date of the rocks.

Actually, not quite true.If we include flood geology as 'YE', the stratigraphic order does not exist.The early geologists understood this when William Smith started to correlate rock ourcroppings across Great Britain along with their fossil content. They realized, even as churchmen, that this meant the death of Flood 'geology'. Sure. I could go out and drill random wells all over the world to uncertain depths and eventually find oil.However, at several millions of dollars per well, I wouldn't be able to do it for very long. That fact alone makes YE oil exploration impossible. See above.And that's why nobody is doing it.I once had an old woman prospector who said God told her where her uranium deposit was. It was quite a comedy that I should relate some day. She said that the Russians murdered her assayer to keep it quiet.

How did the oil companies know to even try an area that is now a known field?They wouldn't have drilled every 10 miles across Africa to find that there is oil in Nigeria but not in Namibia.

Heh, heh, ...Great! The classic conflict between geophysicists and geologists.Well, I'd say that geology is more important than this anecdote states. When Glennn is doing geophysics, he is basically looking at geological structure (basically a trap). What the properties of the rock are within that structure is up in the air except from geological interpretation. A lot of that is based on experience within a region. A lot of perfect traps are void of oil for some geological reason. But few geologists will drill without geophysical data.So, I'll give this one to Glennn, but with a grain of salt.And I find it hard to believe that he never took a course in geology. Must have been before my time ... heh, heh ... But I might ask how do we know where and how deep to drill a salt dome play? The point is that Glennn probably knew something about these oil fields before even running the seismic.But back to my last post.These days, no one drills an oil well without as much information as possible. The wells are simply too expensive. Especially when one blows up. The deepest oil well drilled was 39k feet and that was in 4k feet of water (it was the Deepwater Horizons rig, in fact). Nobody wants to drill into the unknown.If I were drilling in the GOM, I'd have a palynologist on hand at all times and that requires evolution to work. If the rocks were in the order (or actually, disorder suggested by flood geology) then nothing would work. We would be drilling blind.So, the take away is that, yeah, you could drill random wells all over the world and find oil, or you could drill where God tells you. But you won't be in business very long.

Most of the original discoveries had oil seeps. As Jar mentioned, in Saudi, they were actually drilling for water. Not sure when the Nigerian fields were discovered, but we certainly know something about the geology of the area. That would be impossible if we used a flood model.In that case things would be just where they happen to be. The old maps of fossil localities reflected this. They were just blobs drawn around ammonite localities, for instance. Now, we know that they are controlled by the lithologies an ages of the rocks. And once we know that, of course, it becomes a lot easier.

Gullible souls, weren't they?The order of the fossils can be learned by anyone. It is apparently consistent wherever you look. This is clear to anybody, whether OE or YE. You do not need the OE/evolutionist INTERPRETATION of the fossil order to recognize the fossil order.However, I think this topic has moved on since kbertsche's Message 376 which suggests that the OE versus YE argument isn't really relevant, since Geology isn't essential to finding oil at all.

So you accept relative dating, is that correct?

This is a ridiculous straw man which has been repeated over and over on this thread. Nobody is arguing for drilling randomly. Obviously as much knowledge of the lay of the rocks as possible is needed and even then there are no guarantees. (I have a little bit of knowledge of the difficulties because I'm part owner of the mineral rights to a piece of land that is surrounded by oil and natural gas fields and yet the oil companies won't take a chance on it. I guess the rock readings aren't good enough or they are finding enough next door or whatever).Nobody is saying anything about using random methods to find oil. All I've been saying is that so far nobody has given any reason to suppose that Old Earth dating methods contribute anything at all to the project.

Well, here's another assertion that the absolute dates matter, that it's "a lot easier" if you know the ages. But again, it remains a complete mystery why that should be so. The location of the ammonites should tell you what you want to know. The main thing seems to be to know how the rocks are arranged and at what depth so that you have a shot at a good guess whether they may form traps for oil that you can tap. What on earth does the age of the rocks have to do with that, beyond knowing their relative ages in relation to each other?Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Naive, perhaps. They underestimated the human mind to believe weird stuff like YEC. But the point is that there should be no order if we used the flood model. Well, it depends on your definition of 'essential'.Most economic enterprises today would say that it's essential.

But in flood geology, the could be anywhere in the geological column. But that IS old earth geology. YE geology, especially in your scenario, is based solely on the fludde. But as we know that does not explain the fossil order. You have admitted this yourself.

Why are you saying such things? We know where they are the same as you do, we know they aren't "anywhere in the geological column" same as you do. Why are you pretending otherwise? You are suffering from a serious logic malfunction at the very least, or you are just playing word games.EXPLAINING the fossil order is what is not necessary; KNOWING the fossil order is something else and YECs who've studied geology know it as well as you do.Your idea of YE geology is completely your own invention, just a straw man. We expect to understand WHY the order exists eventually; meanwhile it's either a lie on your part or just imposing your own weird invention on us, to say that we deny THAT it exists and make use of it just as you do.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Because, as you have stated, there is no YEC explanation for the order of the fossil record. Well, I HAVE been trying to interpret the Faith posts for a long time now. My point is that there should be no fossil record according to YEC.And no. I don't think they know it as well as I do. At least not in the context of all geology.