Geology- working up from basic principles.

There is something here that may be being overlooked in other responses: your use of "rocks" vs "rock" -- where "rocks" would be loose and no longer associated with the sedimentary layer they came from.There are places where the law of superposition would not strictly apply to loose rocks -- rocks that are in a river bed for instance would come from erosion of layers of rock the river passes through, and they could be transported downstream onto a layer that is possibly younger than the one the rock came from. In fact any place where the surface has been eroded away those eroded elements would be in a similar situation (beds could be arid and wind eroded). This would require tilted layers and subsequent erosion across them, tectonic activity, or other disruption of the sedimentary layers, and this should be evident from the terrain involved.Rock layers (whether consolidated or metamorphosed into rock or conglomerate or just compacted sediment layers) however would not be subject to this problem, and any eroded face would show the progression of layers. Geologists would be aware of the possibility of "contamination" of layers by errant rocks and would control for it by digging into the pristine layer of sediment.The same issue applies to fossils found on the surface of the ground rather than in a layer of sediment, and this happens a lot due to the nature of the search process. In these cases we can only know that the found element is younger than the layer it is found on, but not know how much younger: that takes investigation to find the layer that the element in question came from.So the issue is that you need the original sedimentary layers for accurate relative dating. This can also be (has been) an issue for radiometric dating of rocks.Enjoy.

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From Message 39From the article:

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Superposition ignores the general case of sedimentation in moving water and most bodies of water have moving water. In moving water, sediment layers form horizontally. The process of sedimentation in moving water has been demonstrated in laboratory experiment. In these examples, thin layers of sediment built horizontally at a noticeable rate with these layers forming one on top of the other as the edge moved forward. There were other layers beneath them but the two on top were easier to watch. In fact it can be shown that Superposition goes against both experiments and observations in sedimentology.

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Geneal case in moving water? I'm betting the "lab experiment" doesn't look anything like the graphic, but seeing as there is no reference to any paper on this "experiment" (or any reference to who performed it or where or when ... ) it is hard to discuss the actual data.Enjoy.

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Is this the site I got kicked off of for providing facts demonstrating that Hovind had to be wrong?Lol.

Hi stewartreeve, type [qs]quotes are easy[/qs] and it becomes: For other formatting tips see Posting TipsYes, and the preferred general point-of-view, imho(ysa)o is open-minded skepticism, where we can look at the evidence of flume created sediment profiles, and we see that the generally are high energy events in small sections under certain circumstances, and thus it is highly unlikely that they can explain all inconvenient evidence of sedimentary layers.Certainly it is incapable of explaining alternate layers of silty clay (which takes a long time to deposit) and diatom shells (which fall fast) as seen in Lake Suigetsu in Japan (see Age Correlations and An Old Earth, Version 2 No 1, Message 5).This thread is about explaining the basics of geology, and is not a thread to debate the results.Enjoy.Edited by RAZD, : spling

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Hi again stewartreeve, still having some difficulties with correlating the data?First you try to use a dynamic system to discredit sedimentary deposition, and then you attempt a totally different ad hoc explanation for the non-dynamic sedimentation in a lake (I assume this means you acknowledge that the Berthaultian slurry flury speculation does not apply to Lake Suigetsu, hence we see a different mechanism proposed): Curiously, natural mechanisms that cause floculation exist, as municipal engineers have copied them rather than created them, and I'm well aware of what is involved, but they are not universal. You are making an unfounded assumption to apply them to Lake Suigetsu, where the actual rate of deposition of the silty clay was measured.Particle agglomeration does not necessarily increase the rate of settlement dramatically, as they don't necessarily increase the density of the particles, just clump them together. Often other methods to accelerate the process are used, such as centrifugal flow separators or sand filters.Interestingly, even assuming a natural flocculation mechanism, this does not solve your problem of the alternating layers of clay and diatom shells. The diatoms fall continuously during the summer months, but they die off in the winter, when the clay layers are formed by the absence of diatoms.Just a moment...

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To reconstruct the calendar time scale, we counted varves, based on gray-scale image analyses of digital pictures, in a 10.43- to 30.45-m-deep section, producing a 29,100-year-long floating chronology. Because we estimated the varve chronology of older than ~20,000 yr B.P. (19-m depth of SG core) by counting in a single core section, the error of the varve counting increases with depth, and the accumulated error at 40,000 cal yr B.P. would be less than ~2000 years, assuming no break in the sediment (12).

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There are some 29,100 distinct layers produced by this process of alternating diatom and clay. The fascinating part is that there are also organic elements deposited in the bottom and embedded in the layers: leaves, twigs, insects. These bits and pieces contain carbon isotopes, including carbon-14, obtained from the atmosphere when they were living.Carbon-14 decays, so the ratio of C-14 to C-13 changes with age of a specimen after it dies. There is a very strong correlation between the age determined by counting and the age determined by C-14 dating:Just a moment... (3)

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Fig. 1. (A) Radiocarbon calibration up to 45,000 yr B.P. reconstructed from annually laminated sediments of Lake Suigetsu, Japan. The small circles with 1s error represent the 14C ages against varve ages. For the oldest eight points (>38,000 years, filled circles), we assumed a constant sedimentation during the Glacial period. The green symbols correspond to the tree-ring calibration (2, 15), and the large red symbols represent calibration by combined 14C and U-Th dating of corals from Papua New Guinea (squares) (8), Mururoa (circles), and Barbados (triangles) (7). The line indicates that radiocarbon age equals calibrated age.

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We are only concerned here with the open blue circles (Lake Suigetsu data) here (there is more about this on the Age Correlations and An Old Earth, Version 2 No 1 thread, so excuse me if I seem a little brief in this explanation here). But the correlation between C-14 and varve layer count is also correlated in a third way: A 40,000-Year Varve Chronology from Lake Suigetsu, Japan: Extension of the 14C Calibration Curve

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Results

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Figure 1 shows the varve and ¹⁴C chronologies as a function of depth of the SG core. Until now, the varve numbers have been counted in the 10.42-30.45 m deep section. The Lake Suigetsu floating varve chronology consists of 29,100 varves. As shown in Figure 1 the sedimentation or annual varve thickness is relatively uniform (typically 1.2 mm yr-1 during the Holocene and 0.62 mm yr-1 during the Glacial). The age below 30.45 m depth is obtained by assuming a constant sedimentation in the Glacial (0.62 mm yr-1). The ¹⁴C ages at 10.42, 30.45 and 35 m depth are ca. 7800, 35,000 and 42,000 BP, respectively.

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Here we see a correlation between the varve layers and the C-14 amounts in the organic specimens, and we see a correlation between the layers and the rate of depositionNote where the correlation between C-14 and depth with C-14 and varve count shows a bend at about 11,000 years ago ("BP" means "before present" with "present" defined as 1950 CE): both curves show a matching change in slope of the curves with depth. These show fairly steady rates of deposition of the clay and diatoms, as shown by relatively uniform thickness of the layers, and the change in slope indicates an overall change in the rate of deposition indicating an overall climatic change.I'm sure that, as an engineer, you are familiar with exponential curves, and also know that these are the decay curves for a number of natural systems, including radioactive decay.And, of course, you realize that one curve in this graph is from a linear system of varve counting and the other is a mathematical model based on actual measurements that are along an exponential distribution.This means that any method that speeds up the deposition of the lake varves cannot explain the correlation with the C-14 data as any natural flocculation system would not affect the rate of decay of C-14. Likewise any mechanism that could affect the rate of decay (another common creationist excuse) would not affect the sedimentation rate, and two independent systems are highly unlikely to change their rates at the same instant.So we've thrown out Berthault's curious results for consideration in Lake Suigetsu, and we've shown that there is a curious correlation between both varve layer age and exponential curve calculated C-14 age and the rate of sedimentation, a three way correlation that shows that some natural flocculation mechanism cannot cause an increased rate of deposit and explain the actual evidence. Interestingly, being open-minded does not mean continuing to believe falsified concepts, that's where the skeptic part takes over.Enjoy.

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Hi again stewartreeve, still slugging away eh? I suggest sooner rather than later, as you seem to be going down a rather pointless rabbit-hole.In Message 113 it was pointed out that this thread is about how geological principles are applied to understand evidence: You are still arguing about the latter and ignoring the former.The principle in question is the law of superposition (Message 1):

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The first thing I would like to deal with is the law of superposition. This states that sedimentary layers form in a time progressive sequence with the oldest layers at the bottom and the youngest on the top. To view this simply, picture stacking books one on top of the other- the book you put down first will by at the bottom of the pile, and the book you put down last will be at the top. Can we agree this principle is sound?

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You appear to be arguing that this may not be sound in all cases due to your premise that some apparently horizontal depositions may be formed by Berthault's dynamic flow deposition, with quick settling materials (granular sands, for example), even though this is only demonstrated in very small scale experiments and can only apply in certain special circumstances.In Message 113 I noted:

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Certainly it is incapable of explaining alternate layers of silty clay (which takes a long time to deposit) and diatom shells (which fall fast) as seen in Lake Suigetsu in Japan (see Age Correlations and An Old Earth, Version 2 No 1, Message 5).

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It appears that you agreed that Bertault's flume flow would not apply to Lake Suigetsu (note S•U•I•G•E•T•S•U): You did not dispute that the dynamic system, aka Bertault, was incapable of explaining this deposit, but instead changed to a different mechanism. You are now proposing fast settling of clay deposits by some hypothetical flocculation mechanism.This means that the law of superposition de facto applies to the Lake Suigetsu deposits, and all we are arguing about is the rate of deposition - the results and not the principle of geology, in this case the law of superposition.Further, Message 120 describes in detail how superposition accurately explains (all) the evidence and that no other known mechanism explains (all) the evidence.In other words your original premise has been shown to not apply in one case (of many that are similar in nature to the Lake Suigetsu deposits), and we can agree that the principle of superposition is indeed sound in this case.Curiously that is the point of the topic, and further discussion is rather off topic. This turns out to be a red herring logical fallacy, for several reasons - not least of which is that what can occur under certain controlled circumstances cannot be assume to apply to any natural system without first showing that it is possible - and it ignores the actual physical evidence from Lake Suigetsu.Interestingly, Message 120 also shows that the rates of sedimentation could not have been increased in any significant amount by hypothetically adding imagined flocculation chemicals, because the diatoms exhibit an annual variation independent of chemical additives that results in the alternating layers. It also shows independent evidence that correlates with and corroborates the annual deposition process, thus demonstrating that there was no increased rate of sedimentation.Thus your second premise is also shown to be of no value.Not only does this additional data confirm the annual deposits, but it also confirms the principle of superposition:Every layer that was dated was indeed organized by youngest on top and oldest on the bottom.The "law of superposition" is thereby confirmed as a sound principle for use in geology. Then you should recognize that the "law of superposition" is confirmed as a logical principle and any further posting on this issue is moot and off-topic.If you want to pursue Bertault's conjecture further, I suggest a new topic with an example of where it could be observed in a known deposit.Enjoy.

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Hi Iblis, Yeah, what geology I learned is way old and inadequate, so it's always cool to read info from the experts. One of the reason's I enjoyed the Exploring the Grand Canyon, from the bottom up. so much, and miss Jar's mediation on it. Or the Green River varves. One of the things I remember from the GCBottomsUp thread was that periodically the area was under water and out of the water as sea levels and land rose and fell, thus causing alternating marine and land typical deposits.It seems to me that there are a couple of things going on here, as when we add Petrophysics (Message 138): So if I understand correctly ....As the sea level rises (or land subsides) specific areas can transition from land to swamp to shore to shallow marine to deep marine - these geological "habitats" move horizontally with the shoreline.Same in reverse when sea level falls (or land rises), and once again the geological "habitats" move horizontally but in the other direction.In each case the geological "habitats" can leave sediment deposits characteristic of their "habitat."So you get a "swamp" layer that is from different timelines as the shoreline moves in and out, and it cuts diagonally through the timelines of the deposits at different elevations in different areas, but we still see sediment deposited on top of what was there.And I'll stop there in case I'm way off base.Enjoy

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Thanks Petrophysics1 and edge So if we focus on a single point and go down through the layers, then - barring some mechanism that mixes up the deposition process (like earth quake faults) - the layers lower are older than upper layers.If we take a core at any one location, the horizontal sample size is so small that it will be similar to a line going down from recent to old to ancient.If we take another core a mile away, we get the same relative relationship of the layers from young top to old bottom. We may also see similar layers to the first core, but at different elevations, and possibly (probably?) from different timelines.Timelines in cores could consist of volcanic ash deposits, as there are distinct "signatures" in the ash for particular eruptions and they do "fall from the sky" at the same time over wide areas. One of the things I noticed in this article on the Green River Varves:Indiana University Bloomington (click here if fails to load)

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The laminations in Green River oil shale consist of pairs of laminae, one being richer in organic matter than the other. ... The richest grades of oil shale are characterized by the thinnest laminae because the organic matter compresses more than the mineral fraction of the rock during burial.

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Bradley also notes that larger-scale variations displayed by these laminated rocks suggest correlations with astronomical cycles including the 11-year sunspot cycle and the 21thousand-year eccentric orbital cycle of the earth which lends further evidence that the paired laminae are indeed varves, or annual units of sedimentation. Units of laminated oil shale are laterally very persistent. Individual laminae within certain units of oil shale have be correlated in drill cores over distances of 100 kilometers.

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So in this one case we have (a) a strong horizontal pattern, and (b) a cyclic pattern matching the solar cycle. The latter being of interest in terms of correlations of age dating systems (see Age Correlations and An Old Earth, Version 2 No 1). The long term seasonal variations could be another correlation to add to that thread (although I may need to use other "rhythmites" with strong seasonal evidence, such as pollen.I would think these 11-year cycle correlations could make it easier to track the oil rich layers.But this is getting off the topic - the law of superposition. I think it has been fairly well demonstrated that no matter the horizontal pattern, that the vertical pattern still demonstrates the validity of the law of superposition.

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Sediments that were carried all the way to the front of the delta cascaded down into deeper waters, forming the sloping foreset beds on the delta front. The foresets are inclined in the general direction of sediment transport and delta growth, and are typically composed of sand or mixed sand and gravel (Figures 7 and 8). Figure 8. Close-up of foreset beds in marine delta south of Erskine Academy, South China, Maine.

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And I would (previously) have assumed that the layers were tilted after formation instead of formed at these angles with the sediment running (pouring?) downslope as the delta formed. So those layers could be older to the left and younger to the right, even though the right end is lower than the left end?So the law of superposition holds for any vertical core through those deposits, but the timeline\age will be different for the same depositional environments ("geologic habitats") for a core 5 or 10 feet to the right.Maine low bush blueberries, yum. Lived in Castine ME for a (too short) while. Cool stuff. Heh. Using subjective evidence and guessing ... making up stuff you know. Enjoy.

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