Salt in Oceans

So, even according to Young Earth Creationist estimates, the Earth is at least 98 million years old.Nice going guys.Of course, it's older than that, because the poor little YECs ignored many well-known mechanisms of salt removal.This is why they have to go back to 1715, let's say that again, 1715, to find a scientist sufficiently ignorant of geology to support them.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

It doesn't say what he wants to hear.This makes it very different from papers published in 1715, which are totally reliable.

The obvious answer to this is that albitization of sodium is not Glenn Morton's theory, and has been published in peer-reviewed journals by the people who actually found out about it. Indeed, in Morton's article he explicitly states that his facts and figures are taken from K. L. Von Damm, "Controls on the Chemistry and Temporal Variability of Seafloor Hydrothermal Fluids," in Humphris et al editors, Seafloor Hydrothermal Systems: Physical, Chemical, Biological and Geological Interactions, Geophysical Monograph 91, (Washington: American Geophysical Union, 1995), pp222-247.Obviously Morton cannot have a paper published which merely reports other people's findings, nor, if he could, would he get a Nobel Prize for doing so, since there is no Nobel Prize in Pointing Out Well-Established Facts In Geology To Creationists.When creationists stoop to arguments as risible as these, it seems to me that it is not Glenn Morton who is "blowing smoke". 80C is indeed a low temperature compared to the 350C+ temperatures at which the albite forms.Recall that Morton is discussing processes which happen within the Earth's crust: now temperature increases at about 2.5C per 100 meters. This leaves a large volume of crust where albite, if it dissolves at all, will do so extremely slowly. Recall further that the ultimate fate of all oceanic crust is subduction.This, then, would appear on the face of it to be a sodium sink.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

Not according to Morton. In his open letter to Austin and Humphreys, he points out: This, again, Morton mentions in his open letter to Austin and Humphreys:

Just one page? Not a wiki or something?Ah well, at least that's some progress. Do you have a link to it, please?

This doesn't work.The depth of the salt deposits shows that they can't have been produced simply by a one-off event of evaporation of salt water from an enclosed basin. There's too much salt to have been dissolved in the water in the first place. A salt layer 2 km thick, as found under the Mediterranean, surely can't have been deposited as a result of a one-off evaporation of the Mediterranean, which today has an average depth of 1500 meters. Even allowing that it would, at the time of the hypothetical evaporation, have had its bottom at the depth where the bottom of the evaporite layer is now (~ 4km below sea level) that's still way too much salt to be dissolved in it at any one time. You can't have a sea which is 50% salt.

Try Biju-Duval and Montadert, Structural history of the Mediterranean basins.

you could go one better than that by admitting that your claim has been refuted.

Uh ... they're there.Even if you came up with some argument that I found totally unanswerable "proving" that the saline giants couldn't have formed, I'd still know that you were wrong because they exist. As a matter of fact, they are easy to explain. No, the laws of chemistry didn't change but the situation did. Independent evidence shows that whenever a halite giant formed, it did so in a basin almost completely isolated from the sea. I'm fairly sure that we did this in this thread already. Then I suggest that you fire your intuition and hire a new one. Isolation from the main body of the ocean would not be produced by a event which allegedly connected all the oceans into one big unbroken expanse of ocean. Curiously enough, there's no forum rule against taunting creationists about the vacuity of their beliefs.

'Cos a basin of that type doesn't presently exist. Yeah, it's fairly rare. You need a very specific set of circumstances for it to happen. Either the basin has to be connected to the main body of the ocean by a very narrow channel, or it has to be divided from it by a permeable sill, or it has to be divided from it by a sill which is only overtopped at high tide, or ... well, there are a number of models, but obviously what they all have in common is a basin which only just connects to the main body of the ocean.There's no particular reason why there should be such a basin today, and as a matter of fact there isn't. There are all sorts of things wrong with this.First of all, if that was the explanation, then the saline giants would all be on the top, wouldn't they?Second, there's the quantitative aspect. As I pointed out in the other thread, the entire evaporation of a whole kilometer of water would result in only 14 meters of evaporites. To deposit four kilometers of salt you need a continuous process.Then again, the entire evaporation of seawater would result in all the evaporites being deposited. Not just the salt and the gypsum, but the whole kaboodle.Finally, show me your "basins unable to join the ocean". The example I gave in the other thread was the Louann Salt. It's under the Gulf of Mexico, slevesque. Now in real geology there was a time when the Gulf of Mexico was only just barely connected to the rest of the ocean. But how does "flood geology" account for it? You may do as you please, but, really, if you're only willing to discuss "flood geology" with someone who won't make fun of "flood geology", then you may have unwittingly stumbled into the wrong forum, accidentally made over 1,000 posts here, and inadvertently become an admin.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

Playa lakes are one thing and saline giants are another.Saline giants are huge. The Louann Salt extends over 800,000 square kilometers and is 4 kilometers deep. We're not talking about the same process here.That sort of thing is not happening right now. The formation of playas is not the same thing on a smaller scale, it's a completely different thing.

By ... uh ... not being the same.A playa forms because rain on the hills washes minerals down into a relatively arid environment which water does not flow out of but rather evaporates out of. (The technical term is "internal drainage".)A saline giant forms because a bit of the sea is so isolated from the main body of the ocean that more water is lost by evaporation then flows in.One requires a desert, the other requires an ocean.

True, but they're still not the same thing. A saline giant isn't just a playa writ large. One forms in the sea and the other forms in the desert.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

But it's only "the same process" in that evaporation is involved. Apart from that, no. Deserts. Oceans. Two very different things. You can't just point to the formation of playas and say: "Look, that explains the formation of saline giants", 'cos it really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really doesn't.

Which prize?I don't just want to make slevesque less wrong about geology, I'd be equally happy if I could make you less wrong about it too. And it's more likely, what with it not being part of your religion to be wrong.