REAL Flood Geology

Actually both specific gravity and grain size are important. In settling from liquids at low Reynolds number, with minerals of similar density grain size will dominate as the settling velocity is directly proportional to the density difference and to the square of the diameter for a spherical particle according to Stokes's law. From water deposition one would expect the coarse grained rocks to be deposited first followed by finer and finer grain sizes. However, according to Grand Canyon Geology by Beus and Morales, the deposits forming the Bright Angel Shales coarsen as they ascend. From page 105 "Upward coarsening sequences are up to 25 feet (8 m) thick and typically can be traced for several 10's of kilometers.Randy

I just thought that if someone was going to claim that the GC sediments were all sorted into all those layers by hydrodynamics effect in water they should maybe know a little something about the factors the govern sedimentation. The Reynolds number is one of the most important factors in hydrodynamics. It is a dimensionless number that allows prediction of the nature of flow. For a spherical particle Re is calculated by multiplying the diameter by the density of the fluid and the velocity and dividing by the viscosity of the fluid. If Re < 0.2 Stokes law can be used to predict settling velocityv = 2(p-p0)r^2g/9n
where p-p0 is the density difference, r is the diameter of the particle, g the gravitational constant and n is the viscosity of the liquid.For practical examples with some data from other posts, with sand of about 1/16 mm diameter and a specific gravity of 2.5 g/cc the settling velocity calculate from Stokes's law is 0.003 m/sec and the Re= 0.199 so Stokes's law is valid and the calculation is fairly accurate. For bigger particles with higher Re significant corrections to Stokes's law are required as the particles will settle more slowly than predicted by Stokes's law.On the other hand for a 1 micron clay particle Re is very small and the settling velocity is only about 0.0000008 m/sec. Still water for a long time is needed to get such fine particles to deposit in thick uniform layers. This hardly fits with a whirling swirling global flood.Of course there are many other problems with flood deposition of all those complex layers in the GC such as the extensive patterns of animal burrows found in some layers, the presence of evaporites in other layers and the famous animal tracks in the Coconino Sandstone that we have discussed exhaustively on past threads.Randy

The really amusing thing to me is that YECs use these mountains that they say didn't exist before the flood to sort fossils while thousands of feet of sediment are being deposited. They claim that some the fossils of some organisms ended up higher than others because they escaped up the mountains faster or lived in "biomes" at higher elevation. This doesn't really work even with mountains but I really wonder how anyone could think it would work at all without mountains.
Randy