Someone who admits he knows nothing about geology, asking where the colum came from?

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Originally posted by Coragyps:
Yeah, there's that much salt, like Randy just posted- probably not in Morton's location. We had to come up with very peculiar cement mixes to be able to cement oil wells up there - regular ol' cement doesn't stick to pure salt very well. I don't remember/never knew the exact geography of where the most salt was, but our company serviced those wells out of Williston.

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There's salt like that in South Arkansas and beneath the US Gulf of Mexico coast, too.

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My calculations don't agree with Morton as to the volume of water evaporated but they do clearly show the magnitude of the problem for YEC. Maybe I'll email Glenn to see why we differ in the final value. I get about 5 x10^20 grams of water to produce a salt layer 45 meters thick over 188,000 square miles containing 8.45 trillion cubic meters of salt, assuming the water was 3.4% salt to start with. This is considerably less than 856 million cubic kilometers which would actually be more than half the water in the world's oceans. Evaporating even the 5x10^20 grams of water I calculate will require about 10^24 J of heat. Most of this heat will be returned to the atmosphere as latent heat of vaporization. 10^24 J is about twice the amount of heat required to heat the entire atmosphere by 100 C and this is only a small portion of the evaporation required to produce all the salt layers in the area let alone all the salt in all the supposed flood layers worldwide. There are huge salt deposits under Michigan as well Site Not Configured | 404 Not Foundand many other places around the world in addition to the ones you have mentioned.Randy

Maybe the discrepancy is partly that sodium chloride itself is only 2.67% by weight in (standard) seawater. I get 2.74 x 10^13 kg of salt per cubic km of water from this. Still tough to get to evaporate in a rainstorm.

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Originally posted by Coragyps:
Maybe the discrepancy is partly that sodium chloride itself is only 2.67% by weight in (standard) seawater. I get 2.74 x 10^13 kg of salt per cubic km of water from this. Still tough to get to evaporate in a rainstorm.

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Well that gives me about 700,000 cubic kilometers of water which is still a long way from 845 million and the calcualtion yields a little more heat of course. Even after it stops raining I think it's pretty tough to get these vast evaporates formed between flood surges. In fact it's impossible without major miracles along with many many other impossibilities in "flood geology"
Randy

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Originally posted by Tranquility Base:
I do not claim to be able to personally explain every formation.

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But isn't that the issue? Mainstream explanations account for virtually all formations. Why should we put credence in a theory that explains just a few beds?

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What I am saying is that there is evidence for rapidity in much of the column.

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Well, I suppose if you wish to redefine 'much' just as TC has redefined 'apparent' and 'in-place' I would have to agree with you. However, you are committing a logical fallacy in extending some parts of the column to all parts of the column.

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You have problems with sands being transported over 200-300 miles. You obviously have never, even for a second, pondered the possibility that this was a huge calamity. Of course a marine innundation surging across a continent would transport sand for hundreds of miles!

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Yeah, the wrong direction in this case. Why do these eolian units have grain size distributions that defy water deposition? How did insect tracks become preserved in such sandstones? Why do we see some beds that are clearly stream deposits interlayered with the dunes? Basically, to accept your scenario, we have to abandon huge amounts of critical data and suspend our basic principles of geology.

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We just have no problem with lots of layers forming quickly - I have seen these form in seconds on video I have in my hands documenting the experiments of a French hydro-geologist.

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Yes. How many experiments did Brethault do with silts, clays and calc sediments. Not to mention the layering in evaporites. I have no problem with rapid deposition of some sandston laminae, either. In fact, this was explained to me in Geology 101 a looooong time ago. However, no creationist has ventured a guess as to how long a time span occurs between laminated sets, laminated beds and laminated formations. And then there's the reality that many laminated sands might have been destroyed to form even younger beds. You really need to account for this.

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Any cycle of the planet can be fitted to any cycle one sees in varves! Just calibrate to the cycle you want - one simply leaves the time per varve as a free parameter and you can get anything to work as long as it's in the ballpark. As scientists we all do this all the time. It doesn't prove that that cycle was the cycle you thought it was.

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In this case, not. That is no how we calibrate varves. It is done by radiometric dating, comparison with tree rings, etc., etc. It is also clear the true varves are an annual event.

Yes Karl i am interested to check out this book. Sorry i just about didn't see this post.I lost some questions back there too . So under the earth is like a giant lava lamp, the earth is constantly in motion somehow. Being pushed up from the bottom and worn off at the top. What is the core supposed to be made of? Is it said to be solid or a liquid? Help the more I learn the more questions I have. Forgive my ignorance i'm trying to stick to questions. thanx------------------
saved by grace[This message has been edited by funkmasterfreaky, 11-28-2002]

The whole core is iron (or iron-nickel alloy, maybe with a little iron sulfide), solid at the center and liquid around. The mantle is above the core, and is silicate-based rock - but hot enough that it flows very slowly, like "molasses in January." The crust, that we live on, is a skin of rock about as comparatively thick as the peel of an apple.
The liquid iron generates the Earth's magnetic field, and the fluidity of the mantle drives the "lava lamp" of plate tectonics.

Funkmaster:
You can find some basic information about plate tectonics in the Lava Lamp earth at
Just a moment...The page links to several short lectures on the subject.The USGS also has a page plate tectonics (also linked from Blanchard’s page)http://pubs.usgs.gov/publications/text/dynamic.htmlRandy

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The whole core is iron (or iron-nickel alloy, maybe with a little iron sulfide), solid at the center and liquid around. The mantle is above the core, and is silicate-based rock - but hot enough that it flows very slowly, like "molasses in January." The crust, that we live on, is a skin of rock about as comparatively thick as the peel of an apple.
The liquid iron generates the Earth's magnetic field, and the fluidity of the mantle drives the "lava lamp" of plate tectonics.

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I do have a text book i figured this out all by myself pretty simple. Just curious what we think the core is made of. And if it is solid how is it staying solid in such heat? This is probably really basic but then it's hard to understand to much else if you don't get all the basics. So the lithosphere is where we have our cracked shell (the plates) and they are all moving ontop of superheated rock that has become maluable like heated plastic. This heated rock is acting like a lava lamp (sort of) This is stuff i learned in highschool science pretty much. This neat stuff. Oh by the way i'm not implying that geology is a simple science, just that what i thouroughly understand so far is a simple concept. I think this is crazy stuff.------------------
saved by grace

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Originally posted by funkmasterfreaky:
And if it is solid how is it staying solid in such heat?

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It is also under immense pressure.------------------
No webpage found at provided URL: www.hells-handmaiden.com

Just curious what we think the core is made of.We *think* the core is primarily made of an alloy of nickel and iron. The reason we think that is because in a molten, early earth the heaviest elements would have sunk the deepest into the center, and the most common heavy elements in this part of the Solar System are iron and nickel. Also iron meteorites consist of nickel-iron and they are believed to be fragments of the cores of large asteroids. So, although we have never sampled Earth's core and probably never will, we *suspect* that iron meteorites are similar in chemical composition.
Plus we think that the Earth "grew" by being hit with a lot of meteorites in its early history, and the nickel-iron would have sunk
right in.We *know* whatever is down there is dense. Since we know the strength of Earth's gravitational pull we know the mass of the Earth and we know the volume of the Earth we can find out what the the average density of Earth is. And we can easily observe the density of rocks on the Earth's surface. Surprise! (And I'm pulling this off a website, not calculating myself) the density of rocks near the surface ranges between 2,000 - 3,000 kilograms per cubic meter of rock. The average density of Earth is 5500 kilograms per cubic meter of material. The composition of Earth must therefore change with depth, and the core must be much heavier than what we have near the surface.And if it is solid how is it staying solid in such heat?Boiling point & melting point temperatures of substances increases with pressure. The inner core is under a lot of pressure so it doesn't melt even though it must be very hot. In fact some theoretical predictions have material from the liquid outer condensing onto the solid inner core as the Earth's interior slowly cools, so it's actually more likely to grow than to melt.By the way, we have strong evidence that the outer core is liquid and the inner core is solid from studies of earthquake waves. We also know about how far down the boundaries are between the different layers of the Earth from these seismic studies.http://www.uoregon.edu/~dogsci/dorsey/geo101/lect11.htmlSo the lithosphere is where we have our cracked shell (the plates) and they are all moving ontop of superheated rock that has become maluable like heated plastic.Pretty much.

Thanx for your help Gene90 i appreciate it. This makes sense to me so i take it both sides are in agreement that at some point in the earths history (however it came to be) the earth was very maluable and the heavier metal elements sunk to the core, which would point to metorites hitting the earth alot at this point (as i understand most space rock has more metals in it). Then the very inner core due to pressure maintains it's solid form but the outer core is a liquid, kind of acting as a lubricant. Oh thanx for the mass of the earth info that makes sense too. So we can reasonably guess that our core is very dense. How accepted is the idea that there was once a "super continent" pangea i think it's refered to as? To me even the tectonic plate theory lends to this idea. Oh yeah why is catastrophism not very widely accepted, it doesn't seem that unreasonable to me?Forgive me if this is rudementary stuff I am trying not to overlook anything here. I apreciate any clarification and correction. I'm actually ending up with interests in chemistry due to this studying geology, which is crazy i used to hated chemistry as i am not a fan of math, so chem and physics get a little tough going for me. My mind is more suited to analyzing social history.------------------
saved by grace

This makes sense to me so i take it both sides are in agreement that at some point in the earths history (however it came to be) the earth was very maluable and the heavier metal elements sunk to the coreWell there are a lot of different Creationist interpretations. One I read today, and did a critique of under "A creationist take on quickly forming giant gaseous planets" on this board said that the Earth could never have been molten. That view makes some sense from a Creationist perspective because it would take it so long to cool, we would need an old Earth (older than 6000 years) to really make that possible.Then the very inner core due to pressure maintains it's solid form but the outer core is a liquid, kind of acting as a lubricant.Kind of, I suppose, but we don't know much at all about the physics of what's going on down there, what kinds of movements and currents are and that sort of thing so I don't know if I'd call it a lubricant. Maybe a sort of "insulator"(?)How accepted is the idea that there was once a "super continent" pangea i think it's refered to as?Most of the concept of continental motions, and Pangea, are accepted almost unanimously through the geologic community.It's very new though. It was noticed even in the 1920s that the continents seemed to fit and shared the same rock and fossil types from the time of Pangea, but nobody could come up with a reasonable explanation of how continents made of rock could break and drift apart. At that time the best they could do was suggest that the continents were actually being dragged over the sea floor in response to tides...which was shown to be impossible so the idea was put on hold. In the 1960s paleomagnetism data and studies of the sea floor led to the theory of plate tectonics, which actually seems to work, and the idea caught on. And now we can even measure the motion of continents (North America moves about as fast as fingernails grow).Oh yeah why is catastrophism not very widely accepted, it doesn't seem that unreasonable to me?Catastrophism was once dominant in geology because people did not know the age of the Earth (except from study of the Bible) and they assumed that it was made a few thousand years ago. And if it was made that short a time ago only great upheavals of the Earth could form mountains. As science progressed that view began to change. Kelvin pushed the minimum age to 40 million years based upon thermodynamics. On an Earth that old you no longer need catastrophies to shape the land, slow and gradual processes suffice. And we can observe slow and gradual processes, but have not seen catastrophies. That was the original appeal, that you can *see* the changes in a uniformitarian view. Processes we see happening today most likely happened in the past, unless there is good reason to assume otherwise (which is rare). And when we model these processes happening over long time frames, we can use them to explain most of the geology we see today.
Hence the phrase, "The present is the key to the past", you look at what is happening today to try to understand processes that occured in the distant past.With modern technology we can measure the annual growth of the Himalayan Mountains but we've never seen a mountain range be thrust up overnight. Plus, today we have things like varves, which are annual deposits in lakes made by the spring melt from nearby glaciers. They are like tree rings, and give us a record that goes back hundreds of thousands of years. We can study fossil pollen and volcanic ash preserved in those layers and find that, with the exception of ice ages, the Earth has been pretty much like it is today for as far back as those records go.Of course uniformitarianism of the 1890s is not uniformitarianism of today because geologists have discovered in the last fifty years or so that catastrophies do occur. Very large volcanic deposits have been found in a few regions of the Earth and over a hundred impact craters are currently known to exist on the Earth. So the modern view is that most of Earth's geologic features are formed very very slowly, with an occasional catastrophe in between.But now, to try and flip it over, with lots of recent catastrophies we would have to throw out most of the data geology has collected. We would have to throw out radiometric ages, we would have to throw out paleomagnetic data, and we would have to throw out varves. Plus we would have to explain why all those catastrophies suddenly stopped and how the effects of them on the life on Earth just vanished. For example, if there are 120 craters on Earth, and the Earth is six thousand years old, we should be getting a large new crater at least once every 50 years, but we haven't seen any. Or all the craters were formed at about the same time, but life somehow survived. But some of those craters are huge...one would seemingly kill most living things and change the Earth's climate for centuries afterward. So this is a problem with catastrophism - life on Earth is fragile.So catastrophism is not popular because it would basically require geologists to assume all the data they have collected is wrong. It would also raise all sorts of other problems.

Thanx again you don't know how much i appreciate the insight..------------------
saved by grace

Okay so, we make alot of guesses in this science (educated ones, guesses nonetheless). Now we know that catastrophic events such as earthquakes, volcanoes, storms, flooding ect. occur, and that they have an impact on the earth. Volcanic ash spewed into the atmosphere can alter our global temperature and weather paterns for years. So we know that yes, while the earth is changing at a certain rate visible to us now, that there are plenty of forces capable of causing alterations to this process.So the face of the earth as we see it today has to have been formed by a mixture of these two views (uniformitarianism/catastrophism). We can't ignore either, we see that the earth is constantly moving and changing at a certain rate, but we also observe that many natural forces can and have, very drastically changed our planet as well.Now i see this getting very difficult from here. Now if we were a closed system with no exceptions dating and figuring out how everything came to be would be much easier. Unfortunately this is not the case and there are a countless number of variables (meteorites, volcanic activity, earthquakes, flooding, storms ect.). We do not have detailed geological records going back very far so we can't really know what all happened to our planet (especially if we are to believe this planet is millions of years old).Thinking as scientists we cannot assume catastrophies unless we have observed and examined evidence of a catastrophy happening. Though this is a good thing, for if we assume too much or incorrectly our final conclusion ends up far from accurate. On the flip side of this coin however in millions of years we know there must have been a great deal of catastrophies, if we ignore this fact and turn to only what we can figure out so far, we can gurantee that our conclusions will be off. We are ignoring the fact that the earth as we know it has been carved by a great many things, and has seen some drastic changes.If we have drastic changes in temperature and weather, atmospheric changes ect, then it would seem to me a great folly to expect that the face of this earth has been carved at a uniform rate. I have a feeling this is generally agreed with.Now I do not know hardly anything of dating methods, though i have been reading up on these things slowly. Lacking the knowledge right now i cannot rightly dispute these dating methods. However the assumption that the "ruler" we are using is constant seems shaky to me. I know that this is a tested assumption, unfortunately to guarantee our results we would have to observe and this decay process over millions of years and under hundreds of different environments. Unfortunately for me this gets into chemistry beyond my current understanding.Please forgive me if i have misrepresented a point of view or come to any blatantly false conclusions. I am not adverse to correction. If you can at all help clarify/support/refute my doubts as to the radiometric dating I would appreciate it. thanx ------------------
saved by grace

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If you can at all help clarify/support/refute my doubts as to the radiometric dating I would appreciate it. thanx

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One little chunk of evidence in favor of the constancy of radioactive decay rates that is observed rather than relying on some quantum-mechanical proof has to do with supernovae. Most of the light from a supernova comes from the energy given off by the decay of nickel-56 to cobalt-56 and on to stable iron-56. These half-lives are short - days to weeks, if I remember right, and both give off lots of precisely characterized radiation. The thing that shows the constant rate of decay is that the half-lives calculated from a nearby, naked-eye supernova are identical to the half-lives calculated from one a billion light-years away, that exploded a billion years ago: the light from the explosion is only now getting here. If the decay rate was different in the past, we would see a difference in the fading-out of distant and nearby supernovae.