It's no good. I just can't stay out of this any longer.
I have been reading this thread through and attempting to follow all of the arguments.
This last post just confuses me.
I understood that you were arguing
for a global flood, so why is it that when I read your quotes that they seem to argue against it.
Before I go any further, I just want to say that I am not a geologist and have no real knowledge of any of these events or research papers. I am just going on what I have read in this thread.
Here are my questions/comments.
Randy writes:
the oxygen isotope ratios of the foraminifera shells show a marked temporary decrease in the salinity of the waters of the Gulf of Mexico. It clearly shows that there was a major period of flooding from 12,000 to 10,000 years ago... There was no question that there was a flood and there is no question that it was a universal flood 1.
I don't know anything about the time period but I do know a little about micro fossils like foraminifera so assuming that the evidence was correctly recorded and analyzed, I have no reason to doubt these findings. However, when I read this passage, I was immediately struck by the fact that this time scale agrees pretty well with the end of the last ice age when the retreat of the glaciers across North America could be expected to dump vast quantities of fresh water into the Gulf of Mexico. Lower salinity? Sure there would be. It is completely predictable.
You then go on to say
"Emiliani's findings are corroborated by geologists Kennett and Shackleton, who concluded that there was a 'massive inpouring of glacial melt water into the Gulf of Mexico via the Mississippi River system. At the time of maximum inpouring of this water, surface salinities were...reduced by about ten percent."1
Hang on a minute! Didn't I just say that?
How does this point to a global flood?
This is the retreat of the glaciers at the end of the ice age.
I don't get the connection.
Later you write
"Science... has found evidence for a massive deluge that may ... have inspired Noah's tale. About 7,500 years ago, a flood poured ten cubic miles of water a day--130 times more than flows over Niagara Falls - from the Mediterranean Sea into the Black Sea, abruptly turning the formerly freshwater lake into a brackish inland sea."2
Did it? OK I'll take your word for it because as I said before, I have no direct knowledge of this either way.
The one thing that strikes me as strange here though is that during a global flood, wouldn't the black see have filled up with fresh water from the rain on the huge land masses surrounding it instead of a sudden inrush of salt water from the mediterainean, which should have been able to drain into the Atlantic a lot more easily.
"In 1993, William Ryan and Walter Pitman of Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory dug up cores of sediment from the bottom of the Black sea. The cores showed that the sea's outer margins had once been dry land, indicating it had been two-thirds its present size. Furthermore, over the entire sea bottom was a thin, uniform layer of sediment that could only have been deposited during a flood. The researchers also found that within that layer saltwater mollusks appear, all from the Mediterranean and all dating
from around 7600 years ago." 2
OK then. Let's say that these findings are true (and again I have no reason or evidence to dispute them)
So the Mediterainanian did apparently flood into the black sea which had apparently been at a much lower level previously. Even the timing is convenient (but incidentally doesn't agree with the Gulf of Mexico findings).
Why did it do so?
How could a global flood possibly have made it happen unless it rained only in the Med'?
Isn't it more likely that the Med' is still the same level today that it has always been (or is there evidence to say that it too has risen?) which is at present almost the same as the Black Sea?
For the flood scenario to be true then wouldn't the land all around the Black Sea have had to suddenly drop in level to precipitate the inpouring? Is there evidence of this? Just filling up the Med' couldn't have done it as the two were presumably level before and still are after.
I would propose that a more likely scenario is that the Black Sea could have been at a lower level intitially and physically separated by some means from the Med' Glacier perhaps? Did they come that far south? I think they did but I'm not sure. Anyway, let's just follow this hypothesis a little further. Lets say that 7500 years ago, a glacier or some other kind of land bridge, that previously separated the two Seas, receded/eroded enough to let the Med' flow into the Black Sea. Wouldn't that explain these findings a lot more easily than a "Global" flood which given the lay of the land in Eastern Europe would have been far more likely to flow water in the oposite direction?
Again, you appear to be arguing
against the flood
I can't really comment on the last few quotes as I don't
1) see the relevence. What the heck do Ammonites have to do with the flood?
2) understand what is actually being suggested there. Are you saying that the fact that these Ammonites are found in a specific (chronological?) order all over the place that this is evidenc
for a flood.
I just don't get it. Which side are you on?
PY
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