So what about SILT and dating????

The depth of the layers of any large river delta indicates ages much greater than 4500 years. As the layers accumulate and the weight increases, they tend to depress into the earth. The bottom layers under the greatest heat and pressure gradually turn to rock.The Mississippi River delta is 7 miles thick in some places. At a deposition rate as high as even a centimeter a year, which would be very high, that's still 160,000 years. Deposition rates are actually much less than that, so the bottom layers of the delta are probably around a million years old.Why isn't it older? The courses of rivers wander over time. The position of Mississippi's outlet into the Gulf of Mexico has not remained fixed.--Percy

Hi, techristian!I agree with PaulK that your WMUZ announcer was just repeating old YEC claims, not any recent findings. You can find these claims at many Creationist websites - these claims have been around for a long time, and most of them have been addressed here more than once.I also agree with Jar - the topic of this thread is silt and dating. JonF referred you to Dalrymple's book which gives a table of age estimates using sediment accumulation, all much, much older than 4500 years. If you're interested I can scan those pages in and post them for you.Also, I provided you the example of the Mississippi River delta being 7 miles deep in places when the deposition rate is less than a centimeter per year, yielding an age far, far greater than 4500 years.Both the Dalrymple and Mississippi information are directly based upon scientific findings, and it flatly contradicts your radio announcer. Could you respond to this, please? Click on your name in the login line that appears on most pages, or anywhere your name happens to appear, such as next to messages you've authored. This will provide you a list of your most recent message in the last 30 threads you've participated in.--Percy

You've raised more questions than you've answered.

1. What is a "shear event"? I have a guess, but I'd rather have a concrete understanding of what you're proposing.
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2. If my guess about what you mean by "shear events" is correct, there is no physical evidence of shear events. You're proposing a mechanism for which you have no evidence.
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3. The Gulf of Mexico is not the hole, because the 7 miles of layers of river sediment are near the outlet of the Mississippi River, and are not distributed all about the Gulf of Mexico. The sediment depression is far, far deeper than the Gulf itself.
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4. There is no physical evidence of dramatic uplift of the continents 5,000 or so years ago. You're again proposing a mechanism for which you have no evidence.
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5. Dating of river mouth sediments gives ages in the hundreds of thousands of years, not mere thousands.
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6. The canyons on off-shore continental shelves were eroded there by the river when ocean levels were lower and the continental shelves were above sea level.

Your proposal has the same quality as the magical hole and amazing sediment proposals: no evidence. When theories are derived from books of revelation rather than evidence, it's called religion, not science.--Percy

But your lack of knowledge in this area is easily remedied: read a good geology book. I believe this is the same advice consistently given to you all along.The complaint constantly leveled at you was that you kept up a continual stream of proposals that not only had no supporting evidence, but contradicted known facts and even violated the laws of physics. You then compounded this by not addressing the evidence presented to you across hundreds of messages, by not presenting any relevant evidence of your own, and all the while maintaining that that ideas in violation of known scientific laws could somehow be acceptable as good science.So stop bemoaning your ignorance by saying things like "don't know enough" and do something about it. That way you won't keep advancing "roll-your-eyes" kinds of ideas.--Percy

"Scientific observation" implies something someone actually saw and recorded. Maybe "scientific evidence" would be a more appropriate term?Anyway, what makes you think there's scientific evidence that ancient oceans were shallow? Things that actually happened and were real leave evidence behind, so I don't know why you say it would be impossible to know about things that you think the Bible claims happened in the past. But it would be impossible to find evidence for things that never actually happened. More unsupported assertions, no evidence, and you're exhibiting the same pattern in other threads. In a recent post in another thread (Message 56) you said, "The science of all of this, of course, is beyond my knowledge." When this is the case it is good to follow this advice from Wittgenstein: Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.Way back in 2004 I wrote this to you (Message 40): What I said then is just as true today. The same factors that caused you to decide to cease participation here some months ago are still fully in play, and I don't understand why you're back.--Percy