At any rate of sedimentation over such supposed millions and millions of years, there shouldn't be any land mass left at all I would think; it should all have dissolved into the oceans.
This is a misconception. Over these "supposed" millions of years land masses are being built as well as being eroded. It isn't just one process - erosion. Continental crust is being formed by colliosion events with other continental crusts and oceanic crusts. The difference being that oceanic crust is heavier/denser than continental crust so it subducts under the continent. As the oceanic plate subducts, it melts (in the simplist terms) forming volcanism which is the source for more continental crust. ie. volcanoes are formed on the continent and are eroded away. Some of the sediment on the seafloor is also folded and metamorphosed by this kind of collision (like scrapping butter from a slice of bread) forming even more land, which is subsequently eroded over time.
So now you are going to go on to the layering of the sedimentation, and I just want to orient myself: didn't this originally come up as an answer to my "incredulity" about how the geo column could have formed? Depth of sediment you can show, but you have to show the different layers of different sediments, not to mention different fossil contents, which it appears you can answer in the following, but then there's also the question if you are expecting the sea floor to accumulate sediments periodically and then rise to form land mass, in order to account for the geo column effect? How feasible is the idea that much of the existing geo column was formed by rising ocean deposits like this?
I am going to answer the bolded section as it relates to the question you posed above and was answered somewhat above as well. Some Oceanic sediments are folded and metamorphosed as they are scrapped off by the continental crust as the oceanic crust subducts under the continent. These former oceanic sediments "build-up" as they are scrapped off to form something called a "melange" such as the
Francisco melange.
(edited to fix quote box.
This message has been edited by DBlevins, 03-19-2006 08:20 PM
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