Evidence that the Great Unconformity did not Form Before the Strata above it

That lack of that 'next step' is the HALLMARK of the YEC crowd. They say "it's all hypothetical and mine is a good as yours ..." except that science DOES take the next step and make predictions. If these predictions don't hold true, they have another go at it until they do hold true. Industry spends BILLIONS betting on the results of this process and here we are typing on computers. Then you failed miserably, because your calculation had NOTHING to do with what it would take to make the oceans boil. Since you haven't done those calculations, how can your answer be "No"? So now you are contradicting your immediately previous post. WTF?In your initial 'calculation' you only included speed. Then above you claim it was a calc about oceans boiling, then when called on that you go back to saying it was only about speed and not boiling.Following where you are going with this is difficult to say the least.JB

Here are those calculations regarding earthquake motion and heat generated by rapid plate movement Message 9Message 25Plates moving at 10 feet per day IS supersonic ~30,000 times faster than current rate.HBD

The answer is YES!And I should mention that this problem of rapid plate movement was pointed out to you already and you said something to the effect of "I will think and pray about it." But then you just wait a couple years and trot this nonsense out again as if it hasn't already been debunked. Plates moving at 30,000 times their current measured speed is all but impossible... pretending it is still a valid argument is simply dishonest.HBD

Here are brief excerpts from messages posted by various people over the last day or so that should serve as examples of what moderation would like to see less of: I haven't been strictly enforcing the guidelines because it seems like the violations have been slight and occasional with the vast majority of discussion focusing on the topic, or at least on topics related to the topic. I've admired the way participants have been giving careful attention to many of the issues raised.When frustrations grow people on both sides of the discussion should realize that they may be underestimating the magnitude of the task before them. Talking scientists into ignoring the evidence and its implications is just as difficult as talking creationists into ignoring their religious beliefs.The stakes are far higher for creationists. Their religious beliefs cannot be wrong because eternal salvation is at stake. A scientist giving up a theory suffers little, but a believer giving up a religious belief suffers a great deal, and this is why each disproved creationist idea doesn't win the debate but only provokes introduction of a new creationist idea.Discussion has drifted a bit far off the original topic and should begin focusing a little more on how the Great Unconformity formed.

Good reminders, Percy. I think even more frustrating is that each disproved creationist idea is not checked off a list so the issues can be systematically worked through. Debunked creationist ideas are simply put on a shelf to be brought out again when they think everyone has forgotten they have been debunked and so they have to be disproven all over again. To be sure, this is not a problem unique to any particular creationist, but seems to be the modus operandi.HBD

Perhaps as a foundation for future discussions and to help Faith understand where we come from, I extracted this quote from a somewhat whimsical webpage that provides some basic insight into a couple of geological principles applicable to this thread. Sometimes I don' think I/we have explained things very well, but this seems to capture the ideas fairly well. So, using these principles, practically anyone can formulate a series of events needed to develop the schematic geological section shown here: Even if we don't count the deposition of each stratum as a separate event, there are still 4 major events depicted.

This article gets into a very technical discussion of the Great Unconformity and surrounding events in the earth's history.Written In Stone...seen through my lens: The Great Unconformity at Baker's Bridge: Part III - Regional Geological and Global Bio-Evolutionary SignificanceSome of the diagrams are pertinent and instructive to what we have discussed on these pages. This one: ... pertains to the late Proterozoic history, focusing on some of the Grand Canyon elements. What I'm interested in here is the period called the 'Cryogenian'. It contains two periods of glaciation that resulted in what we have come to know as the 'snowball earth'. Some of the biological, climatic and geomorphic changes are discussed.My point is that perhaps some of the 'straight and flat' surfaces that Faith has referred to may be a result of those periods of glaciation.Let me clarify that I do not think these particularly refer to the Great Unconformity in the specific locations we've been looking at in the GC; but more broadly to some of the images where we do see (relatively) flat unconformities elsewhere as shown in some of Faith's non-GC photographs.One of the hallmarks of glacial erosion is the limited depth of weathering
in the underlying rocks. Another is the erosion of those rocks to 'basement' type lithologies. Another is the production of such surfaces at this one (no, not the highway...) on the Baltic Shield: I'm proposing that there are (at least) three basic ways of getting 'staight and flate' erosional surfaces (not depositional surfaces such as some we have discussed here).-- Erosion by continental ice sheets, suggested here,-- Wave-cut benches which have been shown in several images (although rejected by Faith),-- Subaerial erosion to a flaty-lying, resistant stratum (not yet discussed here, but possibly shown by the Kaibab Limestone erosional level at the Grand Canyon).Further discussion?(As you can see, with the prices of both gold and oil in the doldrums, I have way too much time on my hands...)

I see edge has anticipated my return with a couple of posts. However, I made good use? of my "vacation time" by responding to the last topic on the thread so I want to put that up first.
================================To HBD:Here's an attempt to deal with your posts on how earthquakes and heat make my YEC tectonic scenario impossible. It's off topic but I don't have any more to say about it than this so I'm not starting a new thread. Message 857The "current rate" is meaningless since all you are doing is taking the uniformitarian assumption as standard, assuming that the rate has been constant for millions of years. If in fact it's been slowing down to this rate over 4300 years you'd never know it but in that context your assertion that 30,000 times the current rate would be beyond possible is nothing but your own subjective incredulity.Then you go on to accuse me:EvC Forum: Evidence that the Great Unconformity did not Form Before the Strata above it Message 858What I said I'd pray about was specific: PaulK's post about the magnitude of earthquakes, since I'd suggested that maybe a faster tectonic movement wouldn't produce a great frequency of earthquakes but fewer very big quakes in a short period of time. I wasn't saying I'd pray about the whole argument:EvC Forum: Heat release from tectonic frictionHe posted information about how damaging a quake bigger than 6 could be: The discussion was focusing on the San Andreas fault. None of this paragraph would apply to that fault or even the whole region up to a thousand miles away until less than a century and a half ago. In fact there would have been few places in the world that could be described in these terms until the last thousand years or so, and most of them weren't in high earthquake-prone areas. Europe wasn't for instance and neither was the Middle East, because the main earthquake hazards would be at the subduction zones in the Far East of Asia as well as the Far West of the Americas.As for how "Plates moving at 30,000 times their current measured speed is all but impossible.." I can only repeat what I said above. You are assuming the current rate has persisted for millions of years and you are making it a standard without any warrant.Just for the record, you CAN'T debunk something I KNOW to be true, and I KNOW the earth is not millions of years old, I know there were no humanoids before Adam and Eve, I KNOW there was no death before the Fall, and I KNOW tectonic movement had to occur since the Flood, and that being the case the oceans never boiled and it's just a matter of understanding the math rightly. If you start with worldly assumptions you can only get worldly conclusions, but a Christian should start with Biblical assumptions.Also on this old thread you soon get to a discussion with TrueCreation that I could not follow because I can't do that math AND I OBJECTED AT THE TIME, so it's very wrong of you to accuse me of agreeing that you'd proved the oceans boiled and that I'm dishonestly denying it. I'll see if I can deal with the TrueCreation segment when I get to it but I may not be any better able to follow it now than I could then. (Later: Nope, gave up.)So herefs your Message 9 of the old thread that you referenced in Message 857: THE QUAKE PROBLEMEvC Forum: Heat release from tectonic friction Right. About the rate of the movement of tbe whole continent. Faults were created by that movement you know, but you have no knowledge of WHEN any of them occurred or what their history of activity was earlier than a couple hundred years ago. You are assuming conditions in the past were the same as they are today. You are assuming that the San Andreas fault even existed for most of the 4500 years since the Flood. And you are also not taking into account all the other effects of tectonic movement which would have absorbed a lot of that energy, such as in the building of the Rockies and other mountains, the creation of angular unconformities such as the G.U. and so on and so forth. All this would have been happening in western North America as a result of the tectonic movement, especially in the early years when it WAS so much faster. It should all have slowed down as the continental movement slowed down.But of course you are assuming the movement has been constant for millions of years. You have no idea if faster movement is possible or what faster movement would do. You assume a movement thirty thousand times faster than today's MUST have produced unliveable conditions just because you assume the current rate is some kind of standard, rather than the end result of a process of slowing down. You are not arguing with a uniformitarian like yourself; I don't share your assumptions.The average of 10 feet per day would have occurred about 200BC when we should be able to assume there was little to no population in western North America. (Was California even formed by then?, since I read somewhere that most of it is the product of land added on to the continent at some point-- just tried to find that info again but got lost in all the other geological facts about the state.) Even Europe was tribal at that time, some of them pretty wild tribes, but then Europe wouldn't have suffered the brunt of the tectonic movement that late anyway, just as the east coast of the US wouldnft have either. In the "old world" that would all have been occurring to the east as Asia ran into its own subduction zones, which still plague their Pacific rim with severe earthquakes and volcanism.So the tectonic movement would have slowed down to about 5 feet per day by about 900 AD. And it should be down to inches per day by the 1800s when the first Europeans were just beginning to get out to the west in any appreciable numbers. Perhaps the native American tribes had been living for a long time with frequent earthquakes by then. Or perhaps the faster movement meant bigger earthquakes farther apart toward the beginning of the continental drift --. during a period when there were no cities to collapse and burn down. And while major earthquakes may be felt at some distance they really only affect a local area and usually wouldnft be detected at all a thousand miles away. (I know I'm repeating myself. Wrote parts of this out of order. ) Only if circumstances were always as you are supposing them to have been. Possible the fault didn't yet exist or wasn't the weakest spot in western N. America, while, again, the tectonic movement was also raising the Rockies etc etc etc and probably produced less frequent but much bigger earthquakes during the early part of the movement. And again there was no civilized infrastructure to suffer from them until the last hundred and fifty years anyway. Again all this assumes that things in the past were the same as they are today. There probably was a lot of both in the first few hundred years after the Flood when Noah's clan had not yet moved far enough out of the Middle East to experience much if any of it. They were about 3000 miles from the Atlantic coast where the continents were separating at the mid-Atlantic ridge, and about the same distance from India which was probably in transit to Asia in the first few hundred years anyway, and 5000 miles or so from the Siberian traps as well as a few thousand miles from the eastern Asian subduction zone. What's silly is your assumption you can think like a uniformitarian Old Earther and say anything meaningful about the YEC Flood scenario. Says the uniformitarian old-earthist evolutionist. You need to think like a YEC Floodist if you want me to take you seriously.And I saw somewhere later in that thread that you wondered why YECs "need" the whole tectonic scenario and this is one of the most annoying misrepresentations of YEC. We get our stuff from SCIENCE, which tells us that the continents have been moving apart on the Atlantic side and closer together on the Pacific side, from the breakup of an original Supercontinent. The evidence for this is good so we make use of it within our YE time frame.Next for your post on how the speedy tectonic movement should have boiled the oceans but didn't.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

THE HEAT PROBLEMHere you proved your own assumptions wrong.EvC Forum: Heat release from tectonic friction Message 10 Just a side quation about this: Why the birth of Christ? Why not the year 2015 since tectonic movement would have been occurring all that time. In any case, yes, such calculations are needed since it is so often claimed that the speed of continental separation on the Flood time scale would have boiled the oceans. I do wish you would translate the math into English so I can get some idea of the actual degree of heat you’re talkjing about. Is that much heat more or less equivalent to a house fire or a forest fire or a nuclear bomb or what? I read that it takes 30,000 joules for a bulldozer to push such and such a resistance such and such a distance. That kind of comparison would be helpful here. Not much, is it? I’d factor in the post-Flood ice age too.I do think my homely little calculation that compares the enormous volume of water in the oceans with a very large pot sitting on a burner at full flame shows that there is no way all the underwater magma plus volcanoes ever released, plus earthquakes, is ever going to affect the temperature of the oceans more than a few degrees at most. The Atlantic ridge is like putting a candle under that pot, and even adding the movements of all the plates with their magma and earthquakes and mountain building and volcanoes couldn’t add more than a few dozen candles under that enormous pot. Judging by the visual disparity in size of the enormous volume of the oceans compared with all the areas that generate heat that you can see on world maps. The ocean has over 321 million cubic miles of water and most of it VERY cold. Those thousands of miles of faults are thin lines at the bottom of this huge volume of water. And again, the ice age does need to be taken into account, which I understand to have been created by increased evaporation which would have been the result of any little rise in the temperature of the earth’s water. Good point, even less heat affecting the temperature of the oceans. Gee, sounds sort of dire but I notice you haven’t ventured any calculations based on this estimate. You seem to be content to point and go Wow. But the calculations you just did are far from supporting your dire predictions so what makes you think there’s any support for this claim? Even after noting that the heat generated by such quakes would be trapped underground and so on? Who are you fooling?Even if this number of quakes was the reality this is really only a drop in the bucket as it were of the heat it would take to raise the temperature of the oceans, which, again, make up a volume of water of 321,003, 271 cubic miles. Perhaps it would help if you could come up with a reasonable calculation for how much heat it would take to raise the temperature of ONE cubic mile of water, say in the depth of the ocean where it’s pretty cold. You asked a question you really should try to answer instead of just throwing up your hands and declaring the result WOULD be crazy IF you answered it. Again, who are you fooling? The ONLY calculations you did in this post proved your predictions WRONG.Nothing in this post supports your conclusion and yet you declare it as fact that the tectonic speed I’ve calculated would definitely boil the oceans and based on this wild assertion accuse me of all kinds of evil for disagreeing. Prove it before you open your mouth on this subject . For now I’m assuming your own calculations have disproved your predictions.================================
Your next post is pure subjective opinion without any supporting evidence: EvC Forum: Heat release from tectonic friction Message 22All you are saying is that Old Earth assumptions are right and YE is wrong.Then in the next post Message 23, we get the bogus reasoning that way too many Christians have been using to justify putting science above God’s word: What you are calling reality cannot contradict the Bible or it is not reality, and both Old Earthism and evolution contradict the Bible. God wouldn’t give us conflicting messages. You really mean science, a human enterprise, when you say reality but whereas reality must agree with God’s word, science on these issues concerning the past doesn’t, and is therefore wrong.You do go on to say this: But you don’t seem to realize that this supports MY view, not yours. It would take a lot more than the increase in tectonic speed with its related volcanism and earthquakes to affect the temperature of that immense hydrosphere to any appreciable degree if at all.Yet at this point you nevertheless reiterate your mere opinion that the YEC model is untenable. First you give evidence that it wouldn’t boil the oceans, then despite that evidence you go on to assert that the model is nevertheless untenable. You’ve done this a number of times already. You don’t seem to be aware that you are contradicting yourself, proving one thing but then denying it on completely subjective grounds.==========================
A SHORT EXCURSION BACK TO THE QUAKE PROBLEM: Not based on the Bible. Those great civilizations were in existence by 1000 BC but not 2000 BC which is about the time the Tower of Babel would have been built. Abraham came along a hundred years later (about 1900 BC) , into a worid that was mostly still tribal. Egypt would have been the greatest civilization at that time. Of course there would have been earthquakes. However, that should not have been an area of great earthquakes compared with areas farther east where the east coast of Asia was subducting the Pacific plates. But there wouldn’t have been much infrastructure yet to be threatened by earthquakes even there. The Great Wall of China wasn’t even begun until around 700 BC, and not finished for another five hundred years or so. I’m remembering this from Wikipedia so my dates are very approximate. Chinese civilization existed but wasn’t very organized. Their first Emperor didn’t come along until about 300 BC. Because science says such a supercontinent existed, Wegener’s continental drift is obviously true, and if you think like a YEC you have to account for all that within the time since the Flood.

BACK AGAIN TO THE HEAT PROBLEM In your next post, Message 24, you do some calculations again, calculating heat increase due to lava flow based on my YEC tectonics. I can’t follow the math despite looking at websites that discuss these things. Calculating it with my grade-school arithmetic I get 20,000 miles X 5280 feet = 105,600,000 feet X 10 feet wide = 1,056,000,000 square feet X 10 feet deep = 10,560,000,000 cubic feet of lava per day forced into the ocean. Looks like it’s probably equivalent to your 1.06 x 10^10 cu. Ft. So far so good.Before going on, where I may not be able to understand much anyway, I’d just stop to make the point that the calculations above get us to the SIZE of the heat source, which is about ten and a half billion cubic feet. According to an online calculator ‘’ that’s .07174028 or seven tenths of a cubic mile. (The same site says there are 147,197,952,000 cubic feet in one cubic mile.) The volume of water in the oceans is 321,003, 271 cubic miles. Therefore the ratio of the size of the heat source to the volume of water is less than one to 321 million. Of course the amount of heat put out by the source is what you are going to calculate next, but I have to comment that it looks to me like trying to heat Lake Superior with a candle. I quoted all that to have it handy but I can’t follow the math so I really have no idea how right or wrong it may be. I wonder if you put this into plain English without the math symbols if that might reveal what’s right or wrong about it.I’m still back on heating Lake Superior with a candle. I don’t think the tectonic movement I presented would raise the ocean’s temperature at all despite all the statements of certainty that it would have to be so. The calculations are all over the place, no reason to believe any of them.Next comes TrueCreation in Message 25 who comes up with the outlandish result of his calculations that the heat generated in my scenario would boil 140 times the current oceans.This may fit with your intuition, of course, since your intuition is really just Old Earthism anyway and the worse it looks for YEC the happier you are.And after that the thread just goes off in all kinds of directions.Online you can find calculations in the opposite direction such as this one from another message board:
https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=200709081612... This fits with MY intuition a lot better than yours.Since neither you nor TC wrote your numbers in plain English I have to ask if either of you got close to this 1.3 billion one-megaton bombs per one degree Celsius rise in the oceans’ temperature supposedly caused by my speedy tectonics scenario.That thread was a disaster. If you want to convince me of your view you failed miserably. There are too many different ways to calculate it and if you won’t put it into English forget it. I’m going with my own observation that the sources of heat are not enough to heat the oceans, period.Again, I did not concede anything on this subject.======================================
AN APPENDIX OF SORTS ON QUANTITIES NEEDED FOR THINKING ABOUT ALL THIS STUFFhttps://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=201103150711... Google page Google says (There are variations in these numbers from source to source.)And it’s COLD waterEdited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Admin, : Fix link.

Actually, Faith, I was hoping to reignite a reasonable discussion with or without you.Simple denial and argument by unsupported assertion aren't going to cut it any more.And if you don't understand a point, ask questions, don't hurl insults.

But, as has been pointed out to you, this is not just an assumption. If you take the current rate and apply it to dated objects in geology it all works out just right. You ignored that so you can pretend that it is "just" and assumption.So you have to explain why the dating and the speed are both wrong is just the right way that it all works.

And we need some explanation of why, when scientists started looking, everything suddenly came to a screeching halt and resumed the nice sedate speed that we see today.

Gosh what a coincidence, eh?{Isn't this what you said to me back in Message 827 where it made no sense?}Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

The current rate is not an assumption, it is observable data. The San Andreas Fault is currently moving at a rate of about 1.5 inches per year. The Indian Plate is currently moving at 2.0 inches per year. Those are observations. In your scenario the plates are moving at 10 feet per day which would be [10 feet * 12 inches * 365 days/year] = 43,800 inches per year.43,800 divided by [the current rate of 2.0 inches per year] = 21,900 times the current rate. (If you use the rate for the San Andreas it is 29,200 times the rate at which that fault is moving). The Indian Plate was thought to have once traveled across what is now the Indian Ocean at a rate of 7.9 inches per year. At that rate it would only be 5,500 times the rate.I then simply extrapolated the current rate of earthquakes for the San Andreas to reflect the increased plate movement. I did make an assumption that earthquake frequency would increase linearly with the rate of plate motion. I suppose that's true. Plates moving against each other causes stress and that stress is relieved by slippage. That slippage is felt as earthquakes. Can we not assume that gravity, friction, and other physical forces operated the same in the past? I am only assuming that the San Andreas Fault can serve as a model for how continental plates interact. Essentially this is where TrueCreation pointed out I had made a mistake in this calculation. Oceanic Crust is composed of 3 main layers. The top layer is unconsolidated sediment about 1,300 feet thick - thinning towards the Mid Atlantic ridge. The next layer is about 6,500 feet thick and consists of rapidly cooled basalt. Below that is another 16,000 feet of slow cooled magma. So in total, there is about 23,000 feet of magma that would need to fill the rift and then be cooled by the ocean water. Let's consider that the heat from only 1/3 of that thickness would have gone directly into the ocean.20,000 miles X 5,280 feet X 10 feet wide X 8,000 feet deep = 8.45 x 10¹² cubic feet of magma per day.Now we need to convert it to cubic centimeters = 2.39 10¹⁷ cubic centimeters then we will convert to the mass of lava using 2.5 g / cm³ (the approximate density of basalt) which gives us 5.98 x 10¹⁷ kg of magma. This section is the calculation related to how much heat is released by 1 kg of magma to cool from 900 C to 100 C. So 1 kg of magma releases 1.36 x 10⁶ J of energy when cooling from 900 C to 100 C.** 1 Joule (J) is the amount of heat required to raise the temperature of 1 g of water by 0.24 KSo total heat transferred into the ocean per day is [total mass of magma] x [total heat per kg] = 5.98 x 10¹⁷ kg x 1.36 x 10⁶ J / kg = 8.13 x 10²³ Joules per day. (8.13 x 10²³ Joules per day) / (5.6 x 10²⁴ J / deg C) = .145 deg per day.In just one year that would put enough heat into the ocean to raise the temperature of the entire ocean 53 deg COr to look at it a different way... Using you own source, 8.13 x 10²³ Joules is enough heat to boil 3.17 x 10¹⁷ kg of water.1 cubic mile of water would weigh 4.16 x 10¹² kg. So every day 76,200 cubic miles of water would boil of. In 1 year alone, 27,800,000 cubic miles of water would boil off. [kg / day of water boiled by 8.13 x 10²³ Joules] / [kg of water in a cubic mile] = 76,200. [76,200 cu. mi. / day] x [365 days] = 27,800,000 cu miles per year. Yes, it cold. It has had enough time to radiate all that heat back into space. No, of course you didn't. This 3+ page dissertation of denial is evidence of that. But that doesn't change the fact that it was debunked. Yes, that's the problem alright. You "know" that the plates were travelling at 10 feet per day in 200B.C.HBD