Growing the Geologic Column

Erosional unconformity noted.As for the dikes and sills, that just adds to the impression that the Cardenas could be a sill, just a particularly thick one.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

I've been slogging through the posts in this thread I hadn't answered yet and trying to respond at least where they raise questions or issues I want to address, or just where they interest me. But this is a LOT of work and I can't keep up with it. I've not responded to a lot of Percy's posts for instance, and HBD and JonF are both complaining I haven't dealt with posts of theirs. Earlier on and on earlier threads I just let a lot of long posts go, a lot of edge's for instance because he'd use technical terminology so that in many cases most of the post would simply be incomprehensible, as well as irritating for other reasons, and with so much coming at me I'm not going to stop and look up all those terms. I'm glad he seems to have stopped doing that. In any case, I can't do better than I'm doing, don't know what the solution to this is if there is any.

I don't see why not. There are already sills there, why not another? I'm not so much assuming it as looking for evidence for it. Because I did get convinced that all this occurred after the strata were laid down so I continue to look for how that could be evidenced. I'm sure it's frustrating to you since you've got it all worked out to your own satisfaction already, but I'm still looking for new angles on it. You've given some evidence but it doesn't strike me as conclusive: the erosional surfaces.

Quite frankly I don't think any of the stuff I'm thinking about has anything to do with what you all do in the field in your professional work so I don't know why you feel the need to defend yourselves against my ponderings.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Yes, eroded out of an incredibly thick and extensive metamorphized sandstone LAYER, that covered some enormous amount of geography. Yes, I know that. Suggests the Flood to me. Well in the Grand Canyon they are all jumbled up and need a lot of sorting out. I'll discuss them more when I've figured them out better. Meanwhile the tepui are clearly uncomplicated by comparison, though metamorphosed as one would expect of Precambrian rock. It's their hugeness, like the Coconino, the Redwall, the Dover Cliffs and other similar formations, their depth and breadth, that suggests they'll never be repeated on this planet, not their age, which of course is only about 4300 years on my reckoning anyway.

Far as I've seen, in the field the work you do doesn't even involve the enormous ages you've all said are necessary. I wanted petrophysics to put up that thread on finding oil because I really wanted to see if the age of the rock really figures in your practical work or not. It's been asserted by many that it does, but when he described what he does not long ago there was not one mention of the age of the rock, it was all about physical observations. Those are going to be valid whether the rocks were formed over bazillions of years or by the Flood.I've also recently been looking at hundreds of cross sections, many of which were made for use in the petroleum industry, and often the time periods are just barely sketched in. Time really doesn't seem to be the big deal it's made out to be when it comes to practical geological work.The really big deal is where the rocks lie, where they lie in relation to each other, their depth and so on, all the PHYSICAL stuff. Sure I can see that you need to know the order of the rocks and their RELATIVE age, but beyond that it doesn't seem to make any difference to your work at all.ABE: In other words your practical work IS Observational Science and the Old Earth theoretical stuff is just there as windowdressing.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

The main evidence I have is what led me to this pondering: the fact that in many or most places I've seen on cross section the volcanic effects clearly occurred after the strata were all in place, including the Grand Staircase. That other thread I've started is for the purpose of arguing all that, but I need to come up with a different OP.

interesting that even in this post of yours the age is really just windowdressing, what concerns you -- as it should -- is the relationships between the rocks themselves and their physical condition. The relative age is important, of course, something before or after something else etc., but "waaaaaaay older" could mean anything. Could mean a few thousand years really.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

So you all say but I think this is just a habit of thought and in actual practical fact has nothing to do with looking for oil or certain fossils. You have no idea what a rock would look like if it was millions of years old versus a few thousand years old anyway, how could you? It's all theory, and you're used to thinking that way so it's a habit but that's really all it is. I'm sure you do have the ability to tell different rocks from each other as you said a few posts back, Ordovician from this that or the other, but that's because there is such a thing as rock systems that have distinctive physical features that occurred before or after the others and got labeled that way, not because they really are the ages assigned to them. You could find the oil or fossils if you compressed the whole time scheme down to relative ages, order in time, without any regard to ideas about actual age. OK, this is the sort of thing I've heard is necessary. I'd like to see it demonstrated and argued out some time. I'd suspect that the theory about thermal history would work but only because it's really about relative age and relative heat, not because the actual temperature could be or needs to be known. But that's my theory for whenever I get to see the arguments presented.But just as a matter of fact I've been impressed with the sketchiness of the identification of the time periods on these petroleum cross sections, maybe something like "Ord" at the bottom of the stack and "Mio" at the very top with hardly anything noted in between. You've said nothing here that suggests you need to know more than the relative ages of the intrusive rocks, not actual age. Since actual ages are always assigned you are in the habit of taking them for real, but in practical reality you could do without them.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Weird, Pressie, no idea where you get such a weird idea.ABE: Here's what I mean: if for instance the cross section shows a stack of layers with a magma dike running from the Precambrian rocks at the very bottom to the Tertiary at the very top and spilling over the top, then we can conclude that the strata were all there first and then the volcanic event occurred. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

I would think it would be a lot harder to accumulate that much sand in one place on the Old Earth model than on the Flood model. In the Flood the water would do a lot of pulverizing as well as transporting and depositing. Where's all that sand going to come from over hundreds of millions of years? Can you identify a source on the South American continent and a method for its deposition and compression to such a huge depth and breadth? Same tectonic event did different things in the two different locations: raised the plateau in South America, also in the Grand Canyon but there it also had a volcano (or two or three?) working with it and the rocks got tilted and metamorphosed in various ways. What I said was that the HUGENESS isn't going to be repeated, of course there will always be sand and I suppose some sandstone created from it, just nothing on this huge scale.There is no observational evidence either for your hundreds of millions of years or my thousands.

I'm not sure what to do with your diagram. When I'm talking about volcanism after sedimentary deposits I'm looking for the deepest stack of sediments I can find because I'm trying to make a point about the hundreds of millions of years before tectonic or volcanic disturbance, and I've found hundreds of cross sections that include many that show this order pretty clearly. But your diagram, which required me to look things up, which is not fair on a thread like this, only goes back to the Pliocene and Pleistocene, too recent to show anything I have in mind, although if anything it could be a proof of what I'm talking about except earlier sediments aren't there to find out one way or another. It's being sediments among volcanic layers is also a different kind of example. But I'll put it into the mix to think about.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Sounds like something completely different to me. If a magna dike penetrates up through strata it has to have occurred after they were in place.

Well, you keep agreeing with me in that post and then ask if I think geologists are stupid after you've agreed with me, so what is your point? The physical condition of the rocks is the important thing, and he RELATIVE ages. You agree with this so what's the problem?Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

I'm really not ASSUMING any of this, I just think it makes sense and I want to try to prove it if I can. That would mean stepping on geologists' toes I'm afraid, sorry about that, but who knows, maybe I'll end up agreeing with you.I just figure the cut-off intrusives went that high and no higher at that point.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.