EvC Forum: The Absurdities of the Geologic Time Scale

I may have said all I have to say on the subject starting about HERE in the thread dedicated to inventing reasons for destroying Christian belief in the Bible, but it was such fun I'd like to continue it if possible.

Percy doesn't seem to understand that I'm not saying Geology SAYS the things I'm ridiculing, what I'm saying is that these are the implications of the Geologic Time Scale if you follow it to its logical conclusions.

It is all tied to those slabs of rocks, you see, the ones so prominently and picturesquely displayed in the walls of the Grand Canyon in particular, but which can also be seen outlined as colored blocks on the map of the state of Tennessee posted a few times earlier in that discussion, and indeed wherever the strata exist, pretty much everywhere on the North American continent for starters.
[post map here]
The map of Tennessee clearly indicates a stepwise progression from the "oldest" Precambrian rocks on the east to the "most recent" Quaternary rocks on the west of that state, nicely spanning the whole Geologic Column and/or Time Scale. Since tectonic activity shmushed* the state, predominantly from east to west, it seems to have collapsed the whole shebang so that it doesn't rise in altitude from east to west as steeply as one would expect. It appears that each layer in the original horizontal stack was partially denuded on its east end for some distance, each forming a terrace. Except as I say they don't do much climbing, they just show that the strata were originally there or something like that.

Anyway that brought up the fact that the surface of this earth wherever the strata occur, such as the surface of the State of Tennessee, is now composed of the massive remains of the strata, some upended into mountains, some carved into massive canyons and massive cliffs, whole massive chunks of layers having eroded away, as shown on the map of Tennessee for instance, and so on and so forth, which further puts the usual claim to erosion within the strata, those teensy little breaks you have to get a microscope to appreciate in the walls of the Grand Canyon for instance. absurdly out of scale.

If the surface of the earth varies topographically from massive highs to massive lows that further raises questions about all those former "time periods" of supposed hundreds of millions of years during which one would naturally guess some such topography also existed, at least for those layers that contain land fossils, questions such as how that could be when all those time periods have been collapsed down into slabs of rocks, flat flat rocks most usually composed of a single sediment or special combination of sediments. So that is explained by valleys being filled in and mountains eroded down, all somehow occurring with that single sediment, and then, since there are dozens of these time periods and slabs of rocks that enclose their remains, whatever raised the mountains that eroded down and filled in the valleys had to occur over and over again in the history of the earth, each getting its own peculiar sedimentary type and collection of dead things.

Except we don't hear about that. Instead we hear about the more likely scenario of the rising and falling of sea level. Which is absurd in its own right, since even the one-time rising of the Flood is too much for them to countenance, yet many such risings and fallings is no problem for them. We can get a deep water deposition for one layer and a shallow water deposition for the next one up and so on without any apparent concern about the mechanics of the situation though if it's the Flood they've got lots of concerns about the mechanics. Also, we've learned about Walther's Law on this forum, so what are we to imagine here to explain a continent-covering sandstone followed by a continent-covering limestone. We need a discussion of the mechanics of these things.

And how you get the topographically varied landscape with massive forms such as exist on the surface today, building on top of each of those continent-spanning rocks to create the next rock-slab time period/ landscape can't be explained by the rising ocean scenario anyway.

So let's get the geniuses of EvC spelling out this WHOLE Geologic Time Scale thing for us.

Added: So Dr. A has put up a post on the other thread that purports to explain how the strata formed (the mechanics thereof mentioned above), with the usual ridiculous completely imaginary scenario of eroding mountains filling up a river valley. Imaginary I say because I don't think there is even one area of a rock layer anywhere that formed that way. This is a typical presentation nevertheless, simply based on the fact that layers are observed to form this way in today's world, but as a representation of how the strata of the Geological Column formed it's fraudulent. Even the strata that don't span an entire continent do span a number of states in the US. The Redwall Limestone seen in the Grand Canyon, for instance, is part of a limestone formation called

The Madison Group:

The Madison and its equivalent strata extend from the Black Hills of western South Dakota to western Montana and eastern Idaho, and from the Canadian border to western Colorado and the Grand Canyon of Arizona.

However, it can also be represented as far more extensive than that, as presented in this old textbook of Geology HBD posted HERE.

Mississippian (Carboniferous):

Ordovician, Silurian and Devonian rocks are also represented in that textbook as extending over large areas of North America. (HBD was presenting this information under the impression that it would be hard to explain these patterns by the Flood, which I find incomprehensible since why would any random pattern of sedimentary deposition be hard to explain by unpredictable patterns of ocean transgression?)

The Redwall Limestone is also mentioned by British creationist Paul Garner in his video lecture on the geology of the Grand Canyon as being found in the UK as well.

The point here is that any explanation on the scale of erosion filling up a river valley is pathetically inadequate to account for the huge extent of the strata.

Unfortunately the maps show only the strata that contain marine fossils, I'm unable to find maps showing the extent of the upper strata that contain fossils of land animals and I still hope to find some. However, there is no distinction between these different levels as far as the presentation of the rocks go as they are all extensive flat slabs of disparate sediments.

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Back to my original point: The strata are of course the physical basis for the Geologic Time Scale, as represented for instance in the Grand Canyon:

On this diagram the Redwall Limestone is identified with the Mississippian time period:

So, back to the absurdities: a slab of rock, this limestone, which on some accounts extends across most of North America, represents a time period on the surface of the earth, which one would assume looked at least somewhat topographically like the surface of the earth today with mountains and valleys and rivers and canyons and cliffs and so on. But it extends now only as a very thick flat slab of limestone across most of North America. The characteristics of the period and the creatures that lived during it are determined by geologists from the fossil contents of the limestone. We must imagine a complete earth landscape packed into that rock.

This would only be the case for the strata that contain fossils of land animals. It would make things easier if all the lower or "earlier" strata were assumed to be from a period when the whole earth was under water, but instead we get interpretations of different depths of water and when we get to the Coconino sand it is assumed to have formed "in air."

I think I'm going to have to rewrite some of this.

Here's a representation from the creationist website Alpha and Omega Ministries of the extent across North America of the Tapeats Sandstone which is the lowest layer seen in the Grand Canyon above the basement or Precambrian rocks:

Next image shows the extent of the smaller limestone formation, the Kaibab Plateau:

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*The term schmushed (alt. smushed) may be too technical here. It is roughly equivalent to squished or scrunched.

Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Edited by Faith, : uwq

Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

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