Summations Only

No, Faith. No, it isn't.

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I don't see any reason for me to continue this thread. I've made about the best case I can make to this point.

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The biggest problem with this thread has been your failure to make a case.We have seen your opinions about the evidence - which are usually wrong (but very little dealing with specific cases even when the discussion seems to demand it).We have seen you make strange assertions which are never supported by any reasoned argument. And if you could provide reasonable arguments to support those assertions it is certainly false to say that there is no point to continuing or that you have made the best case that you can.And, having said that, I will conclude that we have not seen anything from you that I could call a case, not in this thread.

Here's the diagram again: The boundaries between adjacent stratigraphic layers that are not unconformity boundaries appear to be very flat and straight in the diagram, but I'm guessing that Jar was actually asking about the uncomformable boundaries between the stratigraphic groups. For example, the bottom of the next to last stratigraphic section includes the Wapsipinicon and Hsing ss formations (apologies for misspellings, the text is fuzzy), and they appear to be above a sloping and irregular unconformity. Is there a typo here, because this appears to say that they are and are not continental sediments.

Here's the diagram again: So, for example, the Wapsipinicon, Hsing ss and Cedar Valley formations at the bottom of one stratigraphic section actually lie directly on top of the bottommost stratigraphic section at an unconformity boundary. I don't understand the part about there being a basin to the east, since the slope of the unconformities is downward to the west.

Exactly. No problem. The tops of the blobs are erosional and the bottoms show the beginning of deposition of a new sequence.I guess I can see that this is kind of a complex diagram for a forum such as this. There is no such thing as a physical slope in this diagram because the vertical dimension is time. Any horizontal line represents a point in time, not a contact per se, even thought the rocks are in normal stratigraphic contact. The lower contact shows when sedimentation began at any particular point. So for the Kaskaskia sequence, sediment was deposited earlier in the west than in the east. But for the most part it all began at one time in the other sequences.The point here is that there is more erosion on the west side.My purpose in presenting this diagram was to show how the continental rock formations do not express continuous sedimentation because of lengthy periods of lost record due to the emergence of a landscape and its erosion.The four sets of 'blobs' are periods of marine transgression across the continent with periods of subaerial erosion in between. If you remember my recording tape analogy, the tape is running from bottom to top of the diagram and the gaps are missing information. They have been erased and/or not recorded in the geological record.These periods (Tippecanoe, etc.) are continental-scale transgressions recognized in North America. There are actually six of them but two are not preserved in the area shown. Just think of the sea moving in and then moving out, leaving behind a record of sedimentation each time over millions of years.As I mentioned, I guess this is way too technical. My intent was to show the presence of erosion in the geological record and the inundation of pre-existing landscape in a way that showed the strata and how they formed. My apologies for the confusion Edited by edge, : No reason given.

I don't think it is too technical at all and with a little prodding I think we can finger it out.Thanks.Now another question that came up has to do with compressing and flattening surfaces and why fossils were found where they are found. Now the last item seems pretty simple; fossils are found where they died or where they were moved after they died.The former questions though do need a little more explanation. First, as you have shown the layers really are not always flat and level despite how they might look from a distance but there are many that really are kinda flat.Layers of evaporites are often relatively flat since they form at the surface of water from solar evaporation. Precipitates also form fairly flat layers since they to are formed from a uniform solution. Annual layers of fine particles also form fairly flat layers in lakes and oceans since they're moderated by gravity and the fluidity of water. We also would expect to get fairly flat layers from windblown deposits and see particle size sorted flat layers as rivers and streams deposit the dirt, debris and silt they carry at the river delta.It seems to be that there is one other factor that should produce relatively flat layers and that is when the layer is deeply buried. When something is buried deeply pressure is applied equally from all sides. If I remember correctly pressure increases at a figure of over 7000 pounds per square inch for every mile of depth so at only two miles we would see over 14000 pounds per square inch pressure.As material is buried even deeper the pressures keep going up. Such extreme compaction would also tend to flatten surfaces.However even under the extreme pressures a surface can never be more than what was there originally and while layers can be flattened what we see is that the widths change based on erosional effects BEFORE being buried.Does that make sense?

So then why do you absolutely refuse to talk to any geologists about it?I remember your personal emails to me about your ideas.I remember advising you to talk to geologists about your ideas.
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I remember you flying into hysterical screaming at that very simple and obvious idea.So then why have you still not talked to any geologists about your ideas?Edited by Admin, : Fix typo.

Faith, you have made absolutely no case whatsoever.Please refer back to my message, Message 765:

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The Physicist and the Metaphysicist
In the 1920s, there was a dinner at which the physicist Robert W. Wood was asked to respond to a toast. This was a time when people stood up, made a toast, and then selected someone to respond. Nobody knew what toast they'd be asked to reply to, so it was a challenge for the quick-witted. In this case the toast was: "To physics and metaphysics." Now by metaphysics was meant something like philosophy -- truths that you could get to just by thinking about them. Wood took a second, glanced about him, and answered along these lines: The physicist has an idea, he said. The more he thinks it through, the more sense it makes to him. He goes to the scientific literature, and the more he reads, the more promising the idea seems. Thus prepared, he devises an experiment to test the idea. The experiment is painstaking. Many possibilities are eliminated or taken into account; the accuracy of the measurement is refined. At the end of all this work, the experiment is completed and ... the idea is shown to be worthless. The physicist then discards the idea, frees his mind (as I was saying a moment ago) from the clutter of error, and moves on to something else.

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The difference between physics and metaphysics, Wood concluded, is that the metaphysicist has no laboratory.

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(reportedly from an essay by Carl Sagan)

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Now actually read it this time!!!!!!You had an idea. You thought it had something going for it. So you presented it, put it to the test.It failed that test.So now what?What parts failed that test? What parts maybe didn't?You total idiot! That's how the scientific method works! You have an idea that might explain something. So you present it. The first iteration gets most of the things wrong, so you regroup and attempt to reexplain.Reread that quote. You got some parts wrong, so don't repeat them! How simpler could it be?

Please continue as you have. Let's get the information out there, and people like me can ask questions as necessary.

Faith isn't doing science, but apologetics.There's a whole different method involved in that, and it bears no resemblance to the scientific method.

Stepping back just a ways to look at the big picture. Here is a map showing the general overall make-up of the current earths surface by the geological material. It does not show detail but rather the basics. It's from World geologic provinces and the important part is the table below the image that has links to a short description of each type of structure. Reading the descriptions in relation to the image may help us understand the general trends that are going on in different areas simultaneously. We can see where general activity is happening, where nothing much is happening, where the general direction is up or down.A second consideration are the plates that underlie the surface seen above and the general direction of motion of those plates. lates_tect2_en.svg#/media/Filelates_tect2_en.svg"]-->(Link to image). By USGS - http://pubs.usgs.gov/publications/text/slabs.html, Public Domain, File:Plates tect2 en.svg - Wikimedia Commons

Edited by Admin, : Reduce image width. The image was originally a link that to the original image, I've provided that as a separate link.

Elaborating on this in a post might be helpful. Although Faith will deny it as soon as attention is called to it, she doesn't accept that the particles that make up sediments are eroded from higher regions and carried by wind, water and gravity to lower regions (see Message 789: "Why so consistently flat and straight as if there were some rule that erosion would have to totally obliterate a mountain range before anything could be deposited in its place.").So I think it might be helpful to describe how the light blue regions are orogens, high regions undergoing erosion that produces sediments that are eventually deposited in lower regions like the darker blue basin regions and orange shield regions.

Working on it.

From my point of view this thread was over some time ago, and what is going on now is simply irrelevant. Nobody is addressing the problem the thread is about. Stack of flat rocks, each representing a former depositional environment or landscape where the rock is now, can't have happened although the processes involved are very hard to spell out, Try imagining the depositional and erosional processes that would have to occur for each transformation from landscape to rock keeping in mind a particular stack of rocks as they exist today. If you're really doing this, you will run into insurmountable problems. To keep the creatures alive You start multiplying landscapes that aren't part of the final stack of strata; or you move them out of the area where their fossils happen to have been found; you get sediments piling up that have nothing to do with the final stack of strata, being there only because they are needed to bury one sediment so it will lithify. But some of these extraneous sediments would themselves lithify in the time allotted to lithify those that are in the stack of strata. You try using the sediments that do occur in the strata but the former landscape hasn't been covered or eroded enough for another to form on top of it; You keep destroying the habitats of the creatures that supposedly lived there, as evidenced by their fossils being found there. I don't know what you all think you are doing but you aren't focused on the problem posed by this thread.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

And that's just z few of the problems barely sketched out. You also have to get those straight flat contact lines that may occur between most or even all of the rocks n your chosen stack of rocks. That means some kind of depositional or erosional perfection that Nature can't produce by the piecemeal processes you have to work with. And of course you have to be sure the fossils that are found in your chosen stack of rocks could actually have been buried there in whatever scenario you are constructing.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.