simple wrote:
"how a flood could order the fossils? ..
Walt's book deals with that, citing lab
experiments, etc. He also mentions a
process, like in earthquakes, called
liquefaction. In a worldwide scenario,
he denser mammals would fall in a
certain order."
The liquefaction theory is readily refuted by layering and specific sedimentary structures of the strata, which Walt Brown claims were produced by liquefaction. It is simply impossible for liquefaction to produce climbing ripple lamination, trough cross-bedding, planar sets of foreset bedding, fossil animal burrows, and many other sedimentary structures and the complex interbedding of different layers of sediments observed within sedimentary rocks. It is nothing short of a miracle that liquefaction could produce all of these sedimentary structures and interbedding of the different layers containing these sedimentary structures such that they perfectly mimic, without any differences, the bedding and sedimentary structures that rivers, waves, turbidity currents, glaciers, contour currents, and many other depositional processes have been documented to produce in modern environments by innumerable studies. The fact of the matter is that these laboratory experiments have never succeeded in producing anything that replicated the complex types of sedimentary bedding and structures seen in the real world. Skeptical Young earth creationists need, in the laboratory, to try to create climbing ripples, epsilon cross-bedding, and a layer of sediments having all of the physical properties of a fossil soil using his liquefaction process. If they did, they would find that it is impossible to do and discover that Walt Brown's claims about what liquefaction can do is nothing more than religious fiction lacking any basis in reality.
In terms of actual "sorting", I would like an explanation how hydraulic sorting can explain the relative zonation of microfossils, i.e. foraminfera, palynomorphs, radiolarians, diatoms, conodonts, cocoliths, and so forth, that are too small to have been affected by hydraulic sorting during the flood. This is nicely discussed in "September: Fish Fossils: In a thread debating the historicity of the Genesis flood, Keith Littleton dismisses claims that the fossil record of fishes shows evidence of widespread catastrophic deposition, and points out facts about mammalian and foraminiferan fossil records that a global flood cannot explain." at:
The Talk.Origins Archive Post of the Month: September 2002
In that letter, Mr. Littleton, a member of a small "cabal" of Gulf Coast geologists having fun with debunking Young Earth creationists, wrote:
"What I would like Young Earth creationists to explain
is why microfossils which lived in the same ocean are
so nicely stratified according to age. First go read
"Microfossil Stratigraphy Presents Problems for the
Flood" by Glenn R. Morton at:
http://home.entouch.net/dmd/micro.htm "
I would make one change in the above paragraph by changing the phrase "nicely stratified according to age" to "nicely stratified according to relative depth".
Mr. Littleton continued:
"He gives a few of innumerable examples where
foraminifera and other microfossils are found in the
same stratigraphic sequence over large areas, even
world-wide. A person cannot explain this in terms of
either location or habitat zonation. Since they are
essentially the same size and weight, hydraulic sorting
cannot be used as an explanation. The only explanation
is that the foraminifera are found neatly zoned by
depth is because they lived at different times as the
strata accumulated.
The Young Earth creationist global flood model cannot
account for vertical distribution of microsfossils as
illustrated in the "MMS GOMR Resource Evaluation
Paleontological Laboratory, Biostratigraphic Chart."
with a link at "Scientific and Technical Papers of the
Gulf of Mexico OCS Region" at:
http://www.gomr.mms.gov/homepg/whatsnew/papers/papers.html "
NOTE: On that page the chart is listed as:
Witrock, Robert B., Anton R. Friedmann, James J.
Galluzzo, Leslie D. Nixon, Paul J. Post, and
Katherine M. Ross, MMS Biostratigraphic Chart
of the Gulf of Mexico Offshore Region, Jurassic
to Quaternary, revised May 2003.
Mr.Littleton continued:
"This chart can be downloaded from:
http://www.gomr.mms.gov/homepg/whatsnew/papers/biochart.pdfOCS BBS, OCS Offshore Gulf of Mexico Oil & Gas BOEM GOM Data
This chart shows the vertical sequence in which all
over the entire northern Gulf of Mexico how over a
100 different microfossils occur within a pile
sediments over 15,000 to 20,000 feet thick. In
oil well after oil well and in surface exposure
after surface exposure, the sequence of microfossils
shown in this chart can be found. For example,
Hyalina "B" is always found in the sediments above
the sediments containing Angulogerina "A." It, in
turn, overlies sediments containing Cristellaria
"S", Globorotalia miocenica and Globorotalia
menardii , and Bolivina imporcata. These
microfossils are found above sediments containing
Lenticulina 1, Cassidulina "L", and Saracenaria "H".
In addition, the geologic periods also occur in
the same order in oil well after oil well as
well as in surface exposures. Hydraulic sorting
cannot explain this vertical distribution of
microfossils as Glenn argues on his web page."
Again, Glen Morton's web page is:
http://home.entouch.net/dmd/micro.htm
Yours,
Bill Birkeland
[This message has been edited by Bill Birkeland, 02-04-2004]
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