Worldwide stratifications and worldwide amazing abundance of fossils
Ok I see you are up to the point where we are ready to talk about the
strata in better detail. When you refer to the Devonian or the Jurassic as "layers" you are getting a lot of feedback. This is because they aren't layers, they are arbitrary groupings of relative fossil positioning. Each of these "ages" or levels in the geological column is composed of millions of strata. They are the real layers we can investigate in the real world. The "eras" are something more like the periodic table, a convenient method of sumarizing all the facts that have come in about all the strata examined ever.
Each individual stratum represents a period of undisturbed natural solidification. Here a couple of examples of this kind of thing to help with the visualization, the two most common ways of stone forming naturally.
A volcano blows periodically, every 20-50 years let's say. Magma or lava or whatever you want to call it, rock that is so hot that it is a liquid, comes running down and settles in low-lying areas. It dries, it solidifies, it becomes solid ground, dust and tumbleweed blow across it, gophers come down from their trees and poop nuts on it, land hermit crabs scuttle about pretending to be rocks, and then finally one day, the volcano blows again. More hot liquid rock comes gushing down, settles and cools, solidifies. This second stratum of rock has its own characteristics and a layer of grit and bone and the occasional extremely flat hot gopher-crab crunch surprise between it and the previous layer.
Furthermore its shape conforms to on the bottom, and reduces on the top, whatever irregularities are found in the previous strata. Let's say there was a tyrannosaur out there minding his own business before the first eruption reduced him to hot giblets. That stratum of rock is going to have a big dino-steak-shaped irregularity at one point. The next eruption, the one that catches the gopher and the crab there
in fragrante delecto, it is going to conform to this original tyrannosaurus lump on the bottom, but if theres enough lava you might not even see it on the top.
There's another easy way for rock to solidify though, which is for it to be dissolved in water. Let's say we are in a different part of the world where they don't have a volcano but they do have a rainy season and a dry season. The water washes down, with the sediments suspended in it, pools up, becomes still, evaporates, leaving a layer of precipitate. The sun bakes down, the gophers poop, the little trilobites dance in the moonlight. Solid ground arrives.
This part is critical because if the precipitate remains a powder it can't stratify properly, the next bit of wash will stir it all up again. It won't be a separate stratum if it doesn't fully solidify, in other words. But assuming it doesn't rain until next year and there's plenty of sunlight and "ancient superglue" (red dirt, poo) then it ought to be fine. The next layer of sediment forms a new stratum, this new stratum has all the same kinds of animals in it as the last one, but the next one won't because the trilobites all exploded one day and there are none left around here. That's right, the next rainy season will form a new stratum with no trilobites in it. No new trilobites will appear in any stratum above this one, ever.
Now you may say, well, what if a meteor crashes in to the earth and disturbs all this stuff in such a way that a trilobite does end up on top even though they've been dead for say, twenty years. What if the earth opens up and shoots out buried trilobytes in a big gusher of steam and sludge, huh, then your dating scheme will be twenty years off won't it?
And the answer is no, anything like that will break the strata. They won't be a smooth lovely ant-farm cross-section of layer-cake with nuts anymore, they will be ugly shards of peanut brittle. As a result, those trilobites won't be put on the "geological column" we are drawing up. Only intact strata count. In cases where layers are not horizontal or do not configure to the shape of the layers below them no inference may be made as to relative time based on superposition.
others have shown me how discrete deposits show up in stream beds
I would like to hear more about this. I assume you are talking about running streams, streams that don't go dry. I'm having trouble imagining how "solidification" can happen in a liquid at all, much less moving water. I can just barely visualize very still water rich in minerals slowly producing one large layer of sediment. Then if all the minerals were gone and it remained perfectly still and then new minerals showed up somehow. But that would take a very VERY long time, much longer than the normal wet-dry process. And if anything at all disturbed it the stratum forming would have to start over, this would lead to less strata than individual deposit events, not more.
Now the geologists like this word "catastrophic", it seems to mean specifically breaking of the rocks and invalidating the arrangement. None of the fossils found inside the volcano would count for example, because its a big hole with a vertical grain rather than a series of nice layers. Volcanoes are catastrophic, strata aren't.
huge jumbled-up collections of so many that demonstrate a sudden mass death
That would be catastrophic, the rocks wouldn't count.
A gigantic flood moving sediments to and fro
That would be catastrophic, the rocks wouldn't count.
the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up
Peanut brittle, no strata, wouldn't count.
™ Version 4.2