REAL Flood Geology

One of the best ways of determining what sorts of deposits a global flood would have left is to determine what sorts of deposits actual floods leave. I went on a field trip 4 years ago to eastern Washington state to view deposits left by the Lake Missoula floods (Missoula floods - Wikipedia) which were catastrophic by anyone's definition. The waters that were released by these floods were strong enough to carve basalt into pretty canyon-like features: . These floods ravaged eastern Washington periodically during the ice age. The story behind the floods is actually a bit surprising, since the scientist who researched these rocks, J. Harlen Bretz, actually encountered a lot of difficulty with the scientific establishment due to anti-catastrophic bias. Eventually the evidence proved his case, and he's been cited erroneously by creationists ever since.Key indicators of the flood include giant ripples: , which were formed by massive quantities of water sweeping over fine-grained sediments, and erratic boulders: which were deposited by the extremely strong water and which were moved on the order of km from their source region.Presumably, if there was a global flood, there would be these sorts of features every where. Since we don't really see those sorts of objects much outside of a few locations worldwide, it's pretty easy to draw the conclusion that a global flood didn't occur.

Nice pictures! I work and live on lake Pend Oreille which is just downstream of the ice dam that created Lake Missoula. There are giant ripple marks in numerous places in the area.However this flood was a catastrophic failure of a ice dam creating a large flow of water, ice and debris. The combined flow rate was 10 times the combined flow of all the rivers of the world.Would a global flood resulting from sustained rain and "breaking up of the fountains of the great deep" be different - more like filling up a bathtub?

The OP doesn't ask anyone to assume the water was 'magic' in the YEC sense--that it does anything you want, like a genie. I wanted us to think about the element as any geologist thinks about it. Water behaves in certain ways. What would it really do? What would we see? (Many thanks to Matt P for some impressive demonstrations.)It just happens that this parameter rules out any zany planet-wide tectonics. As I understand it, the heat generated by that sort of colossal crustal upheaval would burn away, not augment, the world's water inventory.You pose an interesting question in asking where the water would come from. I've never seen YECs even attempt to explain this since they punted on their vapor canopy theory.Where, realistically, can you get enough water in that short a time to bury the world's highest mountains? And where would the water go? Geologically its hard to imagine a realistic water source for the job. Not one that does the trick in that brief a time. Realistic sources of water on that scale all require volcanism so rampant to release it that no flooding could be sustained.Likely there isn't a credible geological source. For this exercise it seems we're forced to take the flood's arrival as a given.Can anyone think of a geologically sound way to get that much water covering everything in a matter of days?___Edited by Archer Opterix, : Clarity.Edited by Archer Opterix, : Typo repair.Edited by Archer Opterix, : Typo.

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ArcherAll species are transitional.

Fascinating!Speaking of things we should see more of: someone on another thread (Quetzal?) mentioned pillow lava. It refers to the characteristic way lava flows behave when they occur under water.Had a global flood occurred earth would display a lot more pillow lava than it does. Wouldn't that be the typical form in which to find almost any igneous rock?___Edited by Archer Opterix, : Typo repair.

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ArcherAll species are transitional.

Wow. That's Washington state? I thought it was all forest up there...Great pics.Geologists = Hippies Edited by RickJB, : No reason given.

Well, they do like dirt

And the official theme music is L'apprenti sorcier by Paul Dukas (better known to most people as the theme from Fantasia for a cloaked Micky Mouse ....) ol' brer rabbit don say nuffin.The big problem here is that you have this claim that all these fossils are thrown around by the flood, and now we have this big wad of tar rolling a bunch up to be swallowed together, and not one dinosaur got stuck in it, even though it grabbed up everything from insects to elephants.We can look at oil spills for how this would be affected by "flood" water as well: the oil floats, congeals into tar and washes up in globs on the shore. Water tends to disperse oil and tar.http://www.sbwcn.org/spill.shtml
and
http://www.geog.ucsb.edu/...lspill/69oilspill_articles2.html

quote:

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Animals that depended on the sea were hard hit. Incoming tides brought the corpses of dead seals and dolphins. Oil had clogged the blowholes of the dolphins, causing massive lung hemorrhages. Animals that ingested the oil were poisoned. In the months that followed, gray whales migrating to their calving and breeding grounds in Baja California avoided the channel ”their main route south.

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http://www.mms.gov/tarprojectcategories/behavior.htm
http://www.mms.gov/tarprojects/347.htm

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The usual situation is that emulsions are either obviously stable, mesostable, or unstable. Entrained water, water suspended in oil by viscous forces alone, is also evident.

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We would expect to see water left from the flood intruded into the tar deposit, but they are not there.Interestingly there are also no marine animals in the La Brea tar pits either.The predictions of modern oil spills and tar in oceans does not match what we see in La Brea.Enjoy.

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RebelAAmericanOZen[Deist
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A better measure of relative validity is that there is evidence that contradicts the YEC interpretation of these items, but not evidence that contradicts the deep time geology interpretations.

Compare the above to
Grand Canyon | Answers in Genesis

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RebelAAmericanOZen[Deist
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But the question originally was not specifically about water, just the flood. There is no adequate short term supply of such magnitude, most creationists admit this. What I have seen is creationists arguing that the water requirment was low as the mountains formed after due to runaway subduction. I'm looking at the effects of runaway subduction on a modern world, which in itself is a big problem most creationist post Baumgardner's model and then run away.So are we dealing with the idea that the mountains were formed before or after? That is quite important.

KJV
http://www.genesis.net.au/%7Ebible/kjv/genesis/

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7:20 Fifteen cubits upward did the waters prevail; and the mountains were covered.

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A cubit is ~18" so we are talking a depth of water of ~270" = ~22.5 ftNIV
Genesis 7 NIV - The LORD then said to Noah, Go into - Bible Gateway

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7:20 The waters rose and covered the mountains to a depth of more than twenty feet.

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Changing the order of the words changes the meanings eh?Of course one possiblitiy is that the water was not constrained by gravity (being magic water), so that the depth could have been a uniform 22.5 ft. With this model the water flows out of the deep -- the ocean beds -- to cover the land and when it is done it receeds back into the ocean beds.This of course raises new problems with the extensive difference in the behavior of shallow water to deep water, and the problem with how rocks and dirt would behave in the same gravity anomolous condition.But it creates less problems for other issues of geology. This would also be in keeping with the Moses parting of the red sea, and similar paths could have been used to create paths for all the ark animals to get to their respective habitats.Magic Water: the real solution eh?Enjoy

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ps type [qs]quote boxes are easy[/qs] and it becomes:Edited by RAZD, : changed title, added last paragraph.

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RebelAAmericanOZen[Deist
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Which mountains? The hill I got outback or Everest? Either way, I agree, this is magic water, and not the fun kind.

Nice! It's been 4 years since I last visited, and we don't get much rain here, so I wasn't sure on the flow of water.It's very tough to get a straight answer as to what the waters of the flood must have looked like, or their origins or the flow patterns. I've heard it claimed that there weren't any oceans prior to the flood, and that the flood filled in from the "fountains of the deep," erupting to fill the oceans. Also, with the sea level drop/rise claimed, that would probably be equivalent to a catastrophic flood on the order of the Missoula floods. Some of those things must have flowed out over land, leaving these feature somewhere, right?

We did look at some pillow lava deposits on this trip as well, since Washington is also home to the Columbia River Basalts. .
The pillow lavas are the bottom layer. Another layer of pillow basalts is immediately above the columnar basalts, which are in turn covered by another layer of basalt.Interestingly enough, these pillow lavas were buried under more typical columnar basaltic flows and separated by a few million years in age. And on top of those basalts are some more pillow basalts, followed by another layer of regular basalt. It's all pretty hard to rectify with flood geology.

What is the prevailing YEC theory on basalt flows, are they mostly pre, during or post flood?I always like to ask YEC'ers, what deposition in the picture below from Yellowstone, represents the flood deposit?Notice the colonnades in the basalt flow and lack of pillows or palagonite matrix. The flows were in air not underwater. Edited by iceage, : No reason given.