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Author Topic:   Uniformitarianism and Geology
Minnemooseus
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Posts: 3941
From: Duluth, Minnesota, U.S. (West end of Lake Superior)
Joined: 11-11-2001
Member Rating: 10.0


Message 4 of 56 (592013)
11-18-2010 12:04 AM
Reply to: Message 3 by Coyote
11-17-2010 11:22 PM


POTMed it
POTM message.
Main quibble: The use of the term "soils". Better term: Unconsolidated clastic material.
Message 1 writes:
1) If uniformitarianism and naturalism are anti-biblical assumptions as ways to explain things in the past, how can he use the fact that a canyon formed 30 years ago as an argument for his position?
Mt. Saint Helens is a (so called) catastrophic event, and catastrophic events are part of the uniformitarianism concept. Relatively unusual things do happen - Indeed, in deep geologic time they are not even really unusual. But equating the Mt. Saint Helens related processes to the Grand Canyon related processes is without validity.
Moose

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Minnemooseus
Member
Posts: 3941
From: Duluth, Minnesota, U.S. (West end of Lake Superior)
Joined: 11-11-2001
Member Rating: 10.0


(2)
Message 33 of 56 (592897)
11-22-2010 6:19 PM
Reply to: Message 29 by alschwin
11-22-2010 3:46 PM


Polystrate trees? - A flood happened? - So what
All of you failed to agnowledge inverted polystrate tree fossils and hypothesize how they are formed. Rapped deposition or not no uprooted tree would ever survive long enough to be buried by strata: it would decay long before this.
Short response version:
Even if mainstream science totally granted the above as correct, it would still have no real significance in the big picture of geologic history.
Long version:
Mainstream geologic thought does not deny that rapid deposition can happen. Rather than refuting uniformitarianism, it is part of uniformitarianism. Processes that happen in the present have also happened in the past.
Now I don’t know the details of the deposits, but I suspect they are indeed from some variety of flood or series of floods, probably relatively small scale. The time frame of the deposition? — It could be a day, a year, a decade or more. Depending on the type of tree and the oxygen present, a tree could take a long time to decompose. So, even granting a flood, it doesn’t strongly support the more or less year long flood as described in the Bible.
You seem to be invoking your own extreme variety of uniformitarianism. That is, since rapid deposition is possible, then all deposition is rapid. There is strong evidence to the contrary, both in the present and the past.
Now, if you had very widely found such deposits, at various elevations, that could be correlated as having happened at about the same time (possibly within a year), then you would be getting somewhere in documenting a really big flood. Alas, such does not exist in the real world.
Even if such did exist within the geologic deposits as we know them, it would still not account for the vast amount of time consuming deposition and other geologic processes found elsewhere in the geologic record (all those various rocks, eroded rocks, folded rocks, faulted rocks, metamorphosed rocks, etc.). What you would have is a big flood in the context of an old Earth. Young Earth creationism is a dead concept right from the word young.
Moose
Edited by Minnemooseus, : Added a bit more.

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Minnemooseus
Member
Posts: 3941
From: Duluth, Minnesota, U.S. (West end of Lake Superior)
Joined: 11-11-2001
Member Rating: 10.0


Message 55 of 56 (593252)
11-25-2010 2:54 PM
Reply to: Message 33 by Minnemooseus
11-22-2010 6:19 PM


The real Joggins geological story
The Pennsylvanian Joggins Formation of Nova Scotia: sedimentological log and stratigraphic framework of the historic fossil cliffs
quote:
The formation is divided into 14 cycles, most of which commence with major transgressions represented by the open-water facies assemblage, some faunal elements of which show a restricted-marine affinity. Higher in the cycles, the re-advance of coastal and alluvial systems yielded poorly and well drained facies assemblages, respectively. The main levels of standing trees, dominated by lycopsids, were entombed where distributary channels brought sand into coastal wetlands.
The above quoted is part of the article abstract. It appears that the entire article is available there, but it is broken into a lot of small pages with a lot of other clutter.
My interpretation of the above quoted is that essentially the trees were buried in a river delta environment. From the geologic time scale perspective, probably a pretty high sedimentation rate event. But hardly a catastrophic event.
Moose

Professor, geology, Whatsamatta U
Evolution - Changes in the environment, caused by the interactions of the components of the environment.
"Do not meddle in the affairs of cats, for they are subtle and will piss on your computer." - Bruce Graham
"The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness." - John Kenneth Galbraith
"Yesterday on Fox News, commentator Glenn Beck said that he believes President Obama is a racist. To be fair, every time you watch Glenn Beck, it does get a little easier to hate white people." - Conan O'Brien
"I know a little about a lot of things, and a lot about a few things, but I'm highly ignorant about everything." - Moose

This message is a reply to:
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