Long build up of Sediments

The idea that the geo column was built up in slow increments is based on the interpretation that each layer represents millions of years, or a specific time period, in which the life forms that managed to die and get fossilized therein did so one at a time over the designated millions of years for the particular time period. I don't see that it matters if there are some differences in the time allotted to various layers' construction period since what I'm saying does seem to accord with the overall picture of the Geologic Time Table.{abe: I just realized as I wrote the next post that you could only be talking about differing rates within the layer/time period, but overall it wouldn't make any difference if it accumulated at five inches per year for a while and half an inch per year for another while, the point being that when the whole depth of that particular sediment is completed it has been called by a certain number of millions of years, and that has to be the time it took for it to build}.This message has been edited by Faith, 03-10-2006 06:15 PM

Let me try to say this more clearly.If a given layer of rock, a particular sediment that became rock, is called a certain name by geologists that designates a particular time period in the past, and a certain number of millions of years is assigned to that layer of rock, now known as that time period, then the assumption makes sense that it took those millions of years so designated for that layer to form. If during those millions of years its formation was faster or slower in one portion of it than another I have no idea how you would tell that, as the whole thing is a monolith to the naked eye.In other words, the slow accumulation of sediment is deduced from the total number of millions of years the geologists have assigned to that layer.This message has been edited by Faith, 03-10-2006 06:06 PM

This may be an academic point in this context, but I don't have the idea that "the landscapes we see now are the same as they have always been." Or maybe I just imagine bigger tectonic shifts than you are thinking of. My reasoning is very simple: It just seems to me that the conjuring that has to go into explaining how marine fossils got into the strata of the deserts and the mountains is a lot more complicated (less "parsimonious," or less "elegant") on the geo timescale assumption than the Flood assumption.

I think maybe what you said was LESS extreme than my beliefs but maybe I'm not understanding you.I take the geological column to be found to some depth under the deserts as well as anywhere else, and the fossil contents to be within the strata as usual, so the flood scenario explains all that quite nicely to my mind. I understand that there are an amazing number of marine fossils to be found out in the wildest parts of the Nevada desert -- I've never been there but been told. Clearly the area had to once have been under water.But the geo timetable explanation requires us to believe that every desert and every mountain where marine fossils are found must have its own localized explanation involving some past immersion in water. This is no doubt because there are some indications of a nonmarine environment here and there too, but to my mind the whole shebang is better explained by the Flood.

I see. Well, then kindly explain the millions of years assigned to the various periods of time in the geo timetable. [I see, farther down you reduce it all to a few years of accumulation with none whatever for the millions left over. That's convenient]. If say, the Permian or the Triassic or the Devonian -- or you name it, I have a bunch of charts of all this stuff but I think we only need the general principle to make this point -- take a period like that and identify it at a particular location, say the Grand Canyon, or again, you pick it, and note the depth of that particular layer called by that name, and then note the number of millions of years assigned to that period on a standard Geo Timetable chart, and divide the feet or inches or centimeters or whatever applies into those millions of years and that ought to give you a figure for the average rate of accumulation of the sediment in that layer. No problem if some of it accumulated faster or slower, it all will have to average out to something that adds up to that particular number of millions of years. If in fact that layer was supposedly deeply eroded, then add the depth of sediment you think is missing and recalculate: the rate of sedimentation will be a little faster than the first figure to fill up the assigned number of millions of years, right? But still it's going to be a VERY slow rate of sedimentation. YOu don't have a million feet of any layer anywhere, even assuming massive erosion, which would be a foot a year for a million years, yet most of the layers/time periods are designated to have lasted MANY millions of years, and to accumulate what, fifty to a hundred feet max? OK, then factor that in to get this average rate that is necessary to fill up that particular depth in that particular number of millions of years. Oh, and can you explain how a particular period -- of your choice -- is known to have lasted so many millions of years in the first place? Is this due to radiometric readings exclusively or what? If there was no accumulation for 99.99% of that period, how would know know much about it at all? And of course how would you know whether there was or wasn't a period of nonaccumulation? Surely you come up with this because the slow accumulation that otherwise has to be the case IS absurd. I don't understand the question but also I'm not prepared to discuss coral reefs. If the principle I'm talking about applies, please apply it.Also, I am not right now trying to explain anything by the Flood but to raise questions about the standard explanation. I have no idea what you are saying here. Seems to me you'd better explain it all by some such conatrivance, however ad hoc, as the implications the other way make a shambles of the whole timetable idea. But if you only have ten years of deposition for ten feet of accumulation in a period that lasted umpteen million years, that's a foot a year, and still a rather slow rate of accumulation for something that buried and fossilized all those living things. But yes, it is a more viable explanation. Though proving that it happened this way would of course be impossible. It's just another completely wild speculation, in this case designed to plug holes in the other completely wild speculations. Of course not. The whole geo timetable is so absurd anything that seems to reduce the absurdity would be a welcome port in the storm as it were. Some yet-to-be understood phenomenon explains it I'm sure. But again I'm simply questioning the interpretations, the ones I listed in my Message 22 on the other thread (sorry, forgot which thread I'm on), and this takes us elsewhere.This message has been edited by Faith, 03-10-2006 10:00 PMThis message has been edited by Faith, 03-10-2006 10:03 PM

Very very slow deposition there still, inches per year for a period of millions of years,* but I will be continuing to think about this and answer further later.What occurred to me to ask right now is How do geologists explain where all the sediment comes from that has supposedly piled up to such a depth?{abe: * hard to figure how so many living things managed to get themselves buried at this rate, to the extent of being covered and compressed enough to become fossilized rather than merely decomposing.{abe: Oh, sorry, forgot. Of course if those kilometers piled up in just a few years and nothing else happened for the rest of the millions then you'd have a high enough rate of deposition to make a case. That's the very convenient explanation.So radiometric dating says these periods are so many millions of years old, and in order to get the rate of deposition down {abe: correction, up} to something reasonable {abe: that can account for fossilization maybe} we have to think that there was no deposition at all for an enormous part of those millions of years, only in this very short time span, and this pattern must have repeated itself in every time period because the same situation pertains. And I have to say that this whole scenario sounds even more untenable than the one I started out with -- ad hoc after ad hoc.But I'm just ruminating. More tomorrow.This message has been edited by Faith, 03-11-2006 12:37 AM

What is an "emergent and therefore eroding" land mass? Is this something that is pure speculation or something observed?And "tell where" WHAT are? and why does WHERE they are matter?And why would this be a problem for a worldwide flood which would dissolve an incredible volume of land mass?This message has been edited by Faith, 03-11-2006 12:28 AM

I've explained this Lfen, in the last few posts I think. The rate of deposition is based on the depth of the layer x the number of millions of years it supposedly took to accumulate. So if the Mississippian "period" took 50 million years to form, as one of my charts of the Grand Canyon says it did, which is nothing but "redwall" limestone, and according to Wikipedia from 450 to 525 feet thick in the canyon, rounding it to 500 feet means it accumulated about a foot in 100,000 years. That's a pretty slow rate of deposition.But other factors such as the possibility of the loss of huge quantities through erosion may speed up the rate of deposition, though it still remains extremely slow, and the possibility of edge's idea that the deposition itself maybe only lasted for a few years out of the 50 million.I took into account the possibility that a great deal of the layer had eroded away, which would increase the rate somewhat.Edge says the original depth could possibly have been in kilometers. That would call for an increased rate of deposition certainly, but given the millions of years allotted to most of the layers it's still a very slow rate.Again, the more I think about this, the more difficult it becomes to imagine where such an incredible depth of sediments could have come from under the gradual accumulation theory. Kilometers of depth?The rate of deposition affects the plausibility of fossilization, for one thing, which requires more than just burial to prevent decomposition, which is a pretty rapid process under most conditions. What all it requires I'm not sure, compression at least I think, oxygen depletion perhaps? Somebody will have to fill me in on this. But about the fastest rate of deposition I can come up with, even given kilometers of depth accumulated in the usual millions of years alloted to a given layer, is still only about a maximum of a foot a year and I don't see how even that rate would favor fossilization.But then, again, edge says that he thinks the sediments were probably laid down in a matter of mere years, and that for the greater part of the millions of years allotted to a particular layer or time frame (greater part being as much or more than 99.99% of those millions of years) no deposition was occurring at all. This of course would speed up the rate of deposition of a given layer enormously. Say it took only ten years out of those millions to build up a layer that is now fifty feet in depth; say also that 450 feet that once existed has been eroded away. That's 500 feet accumulated in ten years, or 50 feet in one year or about a foot a week. I don't know if that is a fast enough rate to permit fossilization or not. I also don't know if that's a lot or a little sedimentation without a clear idea of what is bringing it about. It's also odd to think that all those layers we see that are supposed to represent millions of years of an ancient time period (Jurassic, Mississippian, whatever) could have been laid down in just a few years as a regular pattern for all the layers.But this is all a rather different angle on the subject than I started out with. The original point focused on the difficulty of explaining the change from one sediment + particular fossil contents to another over millions of years and the apparent neatness of the layers considering how long they supposedly took to form. That is, we have a "period" of 50 million years during which nothing but this particular limestone accumulated over a huge area of the Southwest US, and then "suddenly" (judging by the relatively straight line between it abd the layers above and below) a completely different kind of sediment starts depositing for another few million years.This message has been edited by Faith, 03-11-2006 08:53 AM

"Emergent" suggests something arising out of something else. Or do you only mean that it is above sea level? OK, now somehow these eroded sediments had to get into very thick layers, and layers of only one kind of sediment at a time, and had to become the corpus of the land mass itself, so why wouldn't it all simply have eroded into the sea and been lost, or eroded into valleys and filled them up. That is, how did you get these neat layers out of erosion? Or are you supposing they eroded into the sea and formed this huge area of thickness of some kind of sediment? Just one kind. (And what then made it change to another kind?) And eventually you have this extremely thick stack of individual sediments all formed under water and then the ocean level lowers and we have the Southwest USA from Arizona through Utah or what? You mean sediments that were formed by abrasion? Could have been a lot of abrasion in a great flood. But already-formed sediments of that type would also have been moved around in the flood. I'm not really seeing a problem here.

The entire geologic column was formed by the flood. THAT's the beginning and end of the flood. I don't know where people get the idea they have to get out their microscopes and peer into one particular half inch of one layer to find it. The evidence of the flood is EVERYWHERE. I see it wherever I go.This message has been edited by Faith, 03-11-2006 09:10 AM

I acknowledge that there are problems for the flood model, but my focus here is on the problems with the slow sedimentation over 4 billion years model. Oh right, and you can tell from that just how many feet of sediment that accumulated over just how many millions of years is now missing? Not much is really rapid and it only can be considered rapid after assuming the erosion of huge quantities of sediment and maybe reducing the time of deposition to a very very tiny time period out of the millions of years the layer is labeled with, and even then the deposition doesn't seem fast enough to permit fossilization as I've been trying to figure it out here. And it's only natural you would want to needle me with an off topic bit about the flood when the subject is YOUR theory of hundreds of millions of years of slow deposition of sediments that keep themselves neatly separate from each other and have no known reasonable source. Again, I am not focusing on the flood, but raising questions about YOUR theory, a theory which is totally absurd if one thinks about it at all (and hey Purpledawn, if he can call me sophomoric I can call him absurd). Well, how many out of those kilometers of depth of deposition of precisely differing sediments over hundreds of millions of years can be described as having been rapid, AND, rapid enough to permit fossilization???This message has been edited by Faith, 03-11-2006 09:30 AM

Igneous rocks are volcanic, right? Volcanic activity is considered to have been initiated with the Flood.I too am responding to the other poster, by responding to you. But I can go respond to her directly. The idea that the flood has to be searched for is silly when the whole geo column, this stack of different sediments full of fossils, is obviously the evidence for the flood.Stratification is what I see everywhere.

What does this have to do with how I calculated the rate of deposition? I chose limestone at random. Could have chosen anything else in the Grand Canyon wall. Oy. Actually, no I don't think they are being formed except under unusual conditions here and there, nothing like what would add up to the quantities we see all over the earth even in a billion years. Yes, another problem for the flood scenario while you evade the problem for your scenario. Tell me how you expect fossilization to occur at the rates of sedimentation you postulate. Even assuming this I don't get rates of sedimentation fast enough to permit fossilziation. What on earth does this have to do with what I just said? I'm saying that a conspicuous apparently sudden change from one completely uniform/homogeneous sediment to another over tens of millions of years beggars explanation. How it stayed so uniform for those years and then how it was suddenly absolutely totally replaced by Something Completely Different.

The release of the "fountains of the deep" suggests the opening of the ocean floor which released volcanoes. They continue today because the ocean floor remains open.Stream beds and beach sands don't anywhere near suggest the kind of layering that we see in the geo column. To the extent that they could be taken as a model they would tend to support the flood idea, the movement of different kinds of sediments in different waves or currents of water, on a similar principle to the stream bed but on a much greater scale.
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abe: Must be gone for a while.This message has been edited by Faith, 03-11-2006 09:47 AM

No I am NOT confusing those things. I am dealing with what the length of the period itself is supposed to be, not the age of the rock. The whole range of possibilities has been adequately covered for the rate of sedimentation within that period as well. Please do not confuse this thread at this point. It's confused enough with eight or ten posters already.This message has been edited by Faith, 03-11-2006 03:55 PM