REAL Flood Geology

One of the best ways of determining what sorts of deposits a global flood would have left is to determine what sorts of deposits actual floods leave. I went on a field trip 4 years ago to eastern Washington state to view deposits left by the Lake Missoula floods (Missoula floods - Wikipedia) which were catastrophic by anyone's definition. The waters that were released by these floods were strong enough to carve basalt into pretty canyon-like features: . These floods ravaged eastern Washington periodically during the ice age. The story behind the floods is actually a bit surprising, since the scientist who researched these rocks, J. Harlen Bretz, actually encountered a lot of difficulty with the scientific establishment due to anti-catastrophic bias. Eventually the evidence proved his case, and he's been cited erroneously by creationists ever since.Key indicators of the flood include giant ripples: , which were formed by massive quantities of water sweeping over fine-grained sediments, and erratic boulders: which were deposited by the extremely strong water and which were moved on the order of km from their source region.Presumably, if there was a global flood, there would be these sorts of features every where. Since we don't really see those sorts of objects much outside of a few locations worldwide, it's pretty easy to draw the conclusion that a global flood didn't occur.

Nice! It's been 4 years since I last visited, and we don't get much rain here, so I wasn't sure on the flow of water.It's very tough to get a straight answer as to what the waters of the flood must have looked like, or their origins or the flow patterns. I've heard it claimed that there weren't any oceans prior to the flood, and that the flood filled in from the "fountains of the deep," erupting to fill the oceans. Also, with the sea level drop/rise claimed, that would probably be equivalent to a catastrophic flood on the order of the Missoula floods. Some of those things must have flowed out over land, leaving these feature somewhere, right?

We did look at some pillow lava deposits on this trip as well, since Washington is also home to the Columbia River Basalts. .
The pillow lavas are the bottom layer. Another layer of pillow basalts is immediately above the columnar basalts, which are in turn covered by another layer of basalt.Interestingly enough, these pillow lavas were buried under more typical columnar basaltic flows and separated by a few million years in age. And on top of those basalts are some more pillow basalts, followed by another layer of regular basalt. It's all pretty hard to rectify with flood geology.