And of course you would know because you've seen a worldwide Flood.
And of course you would know because you've seen a worldwide Flood.
Why should the Flood produce perfection? Sometimes you all say it could produce only a jumble, and then when I agree it wouldn't produce perfect geological columns everywhere now you complain that it's not perfect.
... Why not? What makes you want perfection?
Honey, you never say anything too specific. Curiously, I don't ask for perfection, what I ask for is consistency, and that includes consistency with the all the known evidence. ALL the evidence.
For instance you have yet to define specifically what you mean by the geological column / time scale, and your concept of "THE Flood" changes to suit your argument/s of the day.
You have no evidence to show that it does anything you say (and that's a lot of different things that water simply doesn't do). Evidence, not (repeated) assertion/s. Objective empirical evidence (except you don't seem to know what that is ...).
But you also missed the point I was making (so maybe I need to be clearer) - that the sedimentary deposits in each location stack one on top of the other, not in random patterns.
The Flood didn't do any dancing and what do you mean by "several times around?" I picture the ocean rising up over the shore line of this ONE CONTINENT (that's all there was at the time) depositing a layer or part of a layer with each wave until the whole land area was under a great depth of water (I have no idea how deep since the layers would have added a lot to the land's depth), and there would be different sediments deposited on different parts of the continent, in some places the layer wouldn't be complete for lack of sufficient sediment and in others it would be far thicker than the rest of the same layer elsewhere. ...
Which is different from your previous argument du jour of large waves washing around the world laying down different layers with each wave.
The question either way is how come the layers stack on top of the previous layers instead of in random places? In the geological (science), the explanation is that they are being deposited in the same basins year after year, decade after decade, century after century, millennia after millennia ... basins that are defined geologically by being low points, sea/ocean floors, lake floors, valleys, etc.
... ie - what's to keep these Dancing Magic Flood deposits from landing just anywhere?
Someone famous once said that if you say what is true you don't have to remember what you said.
AND
Still unanswered (by you) are the questions raised by the Green River Varve formation, continental land area adjacent to the Grand Canyon / Staircase continental land areas:
quote:The sedimentary layers were formed in a large area named for the Green River, a tributary of the Colorado River. The three separate basins lie around the Uinta Mountains of northeastern Utah:
Areas of oil shale of the Green River Formation, Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming (USGS)
an area in northwestern Colorado east of the Uintas
a larger area in the southwest corner of Wyoming just north of the Uintas known as Lake Gosiute
the largest area, in northeastern Utah and western Colorado south of the Uintas, known as Lake Uinta
Yet this formation is curiously absent from the Grand Canyon stratigraphy ... how do you explain this absence when chronologically it was laid down during the formation of the Grand Canyon stratigraphy?
How do you explain the very thin varve layers, "mean thickness of a varve here is 0.18 mm," of alternating light and dark layers of very fine sediment (and we have talked about how long it takes to deposit very fine material from suspension in water)? There are over 6 million pairs of alternating light and dark layers ...
How do you explain the different rock types that are part of the formation ... and particularly the layers of volcanic ash within/between the varve layers?
How do you explain the layers of evaporite minerals within the varve layers?
Note the correspondence of layer times with radiometric dates. How do you explain this?
Note that the areas of deposition shifted over the time period of deposition in a way that corresponds with astrochronological dates. How do you explain this?
This all left a "continuous record of six million years" of evolution in this area ... how did the fossils get sorted by radiometric age? How did the radiometric isotopes get sorted with depth in the formation?
The overall deposition was so gentle (" ... The limestone matrix is so fine-grained that fossils include rare soft parts of complete insects and fallen leaves in spectacular detail ...") that these fossils were not torn up. How does this mesh with your model for the formation of the "geological column/time scale" in this area?
Science, including actual geology, physics, astronomy, and yes biology, explain these facts in a manner that is consistent with known processes observed today, consistent with all the known evidence and consistent from one field of science to another.
And ... btw ... there is ongoing deposition in the 6 basins (ie low areas) within the Green River Formation (see map above).
Isn't it curious that evidence keeps turning up pesky little details that derail your ad hoc unsupported arguments.
The existing layers of the Grand Canyon were laid down prior to this, during the Paleozoic and Mesozoic eras, and the erosion of the plateau, and then the carving of the Grand Canyon occurred in the Cenozoic era.
This graphic shows information on paleogeography, sea levels, rocks, tectonism, magmatism, and life. +There is a geological column in the center with additional detail v other columns that have been posted.
What this shows is the order that everything occurred in the Grand Canyon area (including the staircase).
There is also a lot of back-up text there too, from the U of Arizona. The second page has a cross section of the Canyon.
What this means for the Green River Formation is that it (deposition of fine sediment varves of alternating color, over 6 million pairs) occurred while the Grand Canyon was being formed (eroded).
Now I can adjust the brightness of the screen on my computer, and you should be able to do the same.
... I also should add I suppose that I'm so allergic to the standard interpretation of these things ...
What it shows is the relative timing of events, and it shows a geological column for the Grand Canyon and the Staircase. This should coincide with whatever interpretation you make, because that order is literally written in stone.
It shows volcanic activity at the end of the Mezozoic era and in the Cenozoic era.
It shows much tectonic activity throughout the time covered by the geologic column (from 4.55+ billion years ago to the present)
And it shows the stages in the evolution of life with the nested hierarchy of the major groups of life. This speaks to the types of fossils found in the different layers. This leads to the question of magic sorting of fossils to match radiometric ages of the layers.
There is no scientific fact that challenges that biblical event. ...
Except history of areas that have not experienced any flood. Like the mountaintops of the Sierra Nevada White Mountains with continuous growth of Bristlecone Pines for over 8000 years.
For starters.
... The dating methods are not verifiable.
Except that the correlations between the dating methods show consistent agreement.
IE -- one dating method verifies the other, and is in turn verified by a third.
Basics Faith, basics. Facts beat mythology every time
Oh nonsense, RAZD, all that has been explained many times. I don't know if the bristlecone pines survived the Flood or grew up afterward and your dating is as usual wrong, but the mountains grew up AFTER the Flood, one of the results of the tectonic activity that began AFTER the Flood and probably caused the draining of the Flood water too. Volcanoes also were the result of the tectonic movement and therefore so were the volcanic mountains.
Explained many times but not substantiated by any facts. Fantasies are not facts.
Meanwhile the dating methods, particularly the ones in Age Correlations and An Old Earth, Version 2 No 1, show continuous, consistent dating of objects, both by annual counting methodologies (tree rings, ice layers, etc) and by radiometric methodologies. These have also been correlated with known historical dates and show consistent accuracy.
For instance Volcanic deposits can be dated both by radiometric decay data and by the ages of the layers bedded on top of, below, and between the ash and lava layers.
You simply cannot deposit ash layers between sediment layers by a flood myth and stay true to reality and the way things work.
The dating methods are the ONLY thing you have and yes they corroborate each other, although I do suspect that a really honest examination of them would turn up confirmation bias and other reasons to question them, ...
This is your typical avoidance approach to reality Faith: you try to ignore it and pretend it is somehow, someway, erroneous. It isn't. There is just too much cross correlation ... unless the whole universe is imaginary, or it was fabricated by a capricious god who mocks you.
... and in any case they are unverifiable in the sense that you can't go back in time to check them out, all you have is what you can see in the present. ...
And what we have in the present are different levels of radioactive isotopes in different layers of sediment. Isotopes that cannot be sorted by any known mechanical/physical system. Levels that are explained by consistent radioactive decay over many many years. We have this with different decay strings and different sets of the pertinent decay isotopes, each with their own half-life, and this means that the proportions of the decay isotopes for one decay string to the decay isotopes in the second decay string change with each year of decay.
The proportions found in the layers are consistent with each decay string dating for every layer investigated.
This is simply not possible to achieve with water sorting of sediments.
That is what we call verification in science. You can deny it, but that just makes you wrong.
... And everything else supports the Flood. Especially the strata and the bazillions of fossils. The strata are really totally inexplicable on the Time Periods scheme when you really put your mind into trying to figure out how huge slabs of rock thousands of square miles stretching across whole continents were what each Time Period left behind, a sheer flat slab of rock, RAZD. And huge flat rock where all the fossils are found that you think lived in that period which is now nothing but a rock. It's physical impossible.
Nope. We know there was a vast, shallow inland sea, and the deposits of sediments and fossils are consistent with that landscape. Thousands of square miles is minuscule compared to the bottom of the pacific and atlantic oceans, so when you really put your mind to it, the reality emerges. The geological/ecological changes over long periods of time explain the data perfectly.
Let me remind you of the Green River Shale Varves, found along the Green river, tributary to the Colorado river, upstream of the Grand Canyon.
quote:The Green River Formation is an Eocene geologic formation that records the sedimentation in a group of intermountain lakes in three basins along the present-day Green River in Colorado, Wyoming, and Utah. The sediments are deposited in very fine layers, a dark layer during the growing season and a light-hue inorganic layer in the dry season. Each pair of layers is called a varve and represents one year. The sediments of the Green River Formation present a continuous record of six million years. The mean thickness of a varve here is 0.18 mm, with a minimum thickness of 0.014 mm and maximum of 9.8 mm.[1]
The sedimentary layers were formed in a large area named for the Green River, a tributary of the Colorado River. The three separate basins lie around the Uinta Mountains of northeastern Utah:
an area in northwestern Colorado east of the Uintas
a larger area in the southwest corner of Wyoming just north of the Uintas known as Lake Gosiute
the largest area, in northeastern Utah and western Colorado south of the Uintas, known as Lake Uinta
Fossil Butte National Monument in Lincoln County, Wyoming is in a part of the formation known as Fossil Lake because of its abundance of exceptionally well preserved fish fossils.
Six million years of annual varves ... meaning six million dark layers and six million light layers. That's 12 million layers of fine materials deposited over time. One after the other.
And you can't explain how one such light/dark layer pair could form during a flood.
There are literally thousands of pollen grains in the shales. Frequently they are packed so thickly that they overlap each other making observation difficult. They are far too numerous to permit a complete count of the different species. In the present work only those identifications are recorded which I feel are reasonably certain and close as to the family. These constitute only a relatively small proportion (possibly less than one-third) of the identifiable pollen. The remainder will have to await a considerable extension of our knowledge of pollen morphology. No attempt was made to count the grains of the species which were identified, this is a subject reserved for later study, but in describing each species some note is generally made of my impression of its relative abundance.
That is but a small section I copied out of the paper. It's quite extensive. You can sign up to read the whole article on-line for free. If you are interested in facts and reality.
The pollen is also deposited in an annual pattern, confirming and verifiying the varve layering is an annual phenomenon.
The reality overwhelms your simplistic fantasy.
The evidence shows that the earth is old, very very old.
Your mythology cannot explain the evidence of old age except by magical intervention, which means that everything (including religious texts) is imaginary or fake.
Re: Basics Faith, basics. Facts beat mythology every time
Why on earth would pollen grains in a slab of shale be a problem for the Flood? If anything it's confirmation.
AbE: You go on to say that pollens accumulate on some pattern consistent with the varve layers, but that doesn't describe the situation of a huge bunch of them being found together in a shale slab. ...
Because the pollen grains only occur in the dark layers, as they are released in the spring of the year. The light layers are from the dry seasons and they have no organic material, including no pollen.
Each dark layer has accumulations of pollen, each light layer does not. Six million each.
... What that shows is that the pollen got collected together in the Flood and deposited with the fine silt and clay particles that became the shale.
So that pattern confirms the annual layering, not swirly bathtub rings or some other ridiculous fantasy.
AND you still have not explained how the different materials are sorted into 12 million layers alternating between dark and light layers: epic fail
... and deposited with the fine silt and clay particles that became the shale. ...
And you and I have discussed the glaring problem with this: those materials have different settling rates, so for them to settle out of ONE imaginary flood event, you and your imaginary flood need a fantastical mechanism that sorts faster settling material from slower settling material, so that the faster settling material doesn't all settle out first and you end up with only two layers, one dark layer, and one light layer. No such mechanism exists or can ever have existed without invoking magic.
While I on the other hand, only need normal deposition of sediments over time, with the normal observed behavior of such materials, with the alternating layers accumulating with the alternating seasons of the year, year after year. Simple, normal, and what we see occurring today. No magic, no mystery, no problems.
And that is just scraping the surface of what the Green River Varves tell us. The varves extend over 40,000 square miles in area with these wafer-thin varves.
So according to the evidence, and the known normal behavior of materials, there was no WW Fantasy Flood.
Re: Basics Faith, basics. Facts beat mythology every time
With all your complaining about my Flood explanation of how the pollens all got collected in a single slab of shale, you haven't said anything to explain how that could happen on YOUR theory.
Well for starters, as usual, you are wrong: it is not on one single layer of shale, every single dark layer contains pollen -- that's 6 million layers.
It is distributed to each layer as they are formed by the sediment, with the pollen appearing in the dark organic layer and not in the light layer.
Curiously, I DID explain it, TWICE:
Message 1311: Because the pollen grains only occur in the dark layers, as they are released in the spring of the year. The light layers are from the dry seasons and they have no organic material, including no pollen.
Each dark layer has accumulations of pollen, each light layer does not. Six million each.
....
While I on the other hand, only need normal deposition of sediments over time, with the normal observed behavior of such materials, with the alternating layers accumulating with the alternating seasons of the year, year after year. Simple, normal, and what we see occurring today. No magic, no mystery, no problems.
Now I'll also add another tidbit: the density of the pollen in the layers is not constant, it varies from low in the bottom of the dark layers to high in the top layers --- and that matches the pattern of annual release of pollens by plants.
so now you have another sorting problem to explain ...
AND you have still failed to provide a mechanism to do the sorting at such a fine scale that layers less than the thickness of a dime are laid down one atop the other, consisting of fine materials that would be swept up by any current passing over them.
... Sedimentation is a weird idea, somehow it's expected to come along for no good reason, just one particular sediment, and somehow create huge flat sedimentary rocks from time to time. ...
Sedimentation of just ONE sediment that falls down from mountainsides just doesn't compute. ...
What do you mean by "ONE sediment?" One type of sediment? Dust is one type of sediment.
What happens when you don't dust? It accumulates, doesn't it? Yes or No
When they blow over lakes and oceans and settle they sink to the bottom and become uniform layers on the bottom.
... Dirt, including the dust that settles in houses, isn't likely to be made up of a single sediment, and yet the strata are mostly composed of layered single sediments.
Betraying again that you don't know what you are talking about.
Types of rock are classified by the way they form:
... Sedimentary rocks are one of the three basic types of rocks, with the other two being igneous and metamorphic. However, of the three types only sedimentary are capable of containing fossils ...
... In the case of sedimentary rocks, we see that they mainly form from sediments that get compacted or cemented together. Sediments can be defined as fragments of organic or inorganic material that have been broken down.
So, if you are holding a sedimentary rock in your hand, that rock might actually contain little weathered pieces of preexisting rocks, or it could have fragments of shells or minerals, or even the remains of plants and animals. These fragments settle in areas on the Earth's surface or at the bottom of a body of water and get squeezed or glued together over time forming strata, or layers of sediment. The formation of strata, along with the ability to preserve fossils, are two distinct features of sedimentary rocks.
There are three types of sediment, and therefore, sedimentary rocks: clastic, biogenic, and chemical, and we differentiate the three based on the fragments that come together to form them. Let's take a look at the first type mentioned, which was clastic. Clastic sediments are composed of fragments of rock. In fact, a 'clast' is the word we use to describe a rock fragment, so this term is fairly easy to remember if you recall that fact.
We classify clastic sediments based on the dominant grain size. So, you could have a clastic sediment where the predominant clast size is a boulder. This would mean that the fragment has a diameter that is bigger than 25.6 centimeters, which is about the size of a basketball. The fragments then go down in size with the next largest being a cobble, followed by a pebble, sand, silt and finally the smallest grain, which is clay, which if you held in your hand would feel very fine, like you had a handful of flour.
... biogenic sediments are created from the life activities of organisms.
Limestone is an example of a sedimentary rock that is composed mainly of calcium carbonate from the skeletal fragments of marine organisms. Another sedimentary rock that comes from biogenic sediment is coal. Coal forms when plant and animal remains accumulate and get compressed and converted to solid carbon. ...
The last type of sediment for us to consider is chemical. Chemical sediments are different because they are not made up of fragments that get weathered or broken down, but instead they are composed of mineral crystals that form out of solution. ...
The different kinds of clastic sediments are classified by dominant (largest or most common) particle size. So sandstones are mostly sand sized particles and siltstones are mostly silt sized particles -- but they can have random large particles and they can have smaller particles.
Deposition over ocean or sea basins provides a sorting method by particle size, and we can discuss Walther's Law again. This gets us to your next claim
Not to mention that this sediment has to form a huge FLAT STRAIGHT NAKED ROCK that covers the entire territory where you claim there was once a body of water ...
As in a large inland sea or an ocean bottom. We see evidence of such large inland seas in the west and midwest because of the fossil shorelines. The area where the Green Lake Varves formed for instance was covered by large lakes.
You don't bother about the Flood so you can just make up whatever you want that you think accounts for it. But a huge quantity of water accounts for it very nicely.
A large quantity of water ... over a long period of time (liked 6 million years in the case of the Green River formations). This is shown by the evidence of shorelines, aquatic life fossils (plant and animal), etc.
A brief event like a temporary flood would not leave the kind of evidence that is observed, nor can it explain the sorted particle sizes in the sediments and fossils.
AND again, it's impossible for there to have been a landscape where there is now a slab of rock in the geological column.
Why? and what do you mean by "landscape?" -- a living surface not covered by water? We have seen many instances of this, so I am curious why we can see something that is impossible?
I'm never talking about some kind of PERFECT homogeneity for pete's sake, this is just a silly straw man. The overall homogeneity is however only something ...
... deposition over large bodies of water could accomplish. AND this explains the imperfections as well as the large levelish deposition.
... The teensy weensy little roughtnesses on the surface of some of the strata that show the effects of run-off between the layers, ...
Except that this is a fantasy of yours and not based on actual physical behavior of rocks and water. The depositions above the unconformities do not show the effect of erosion, only the ones below the unconformities.
And whole river cutouts that are filled with the size rocks found in riverbeds and which are then buried under later depositions. Hardly "teensy weensy" - especially when you can see them from across the canyon.
Big wowsy ...
... fantasy without any evidentiary basis, pure hokum.
What you ignore does not vanish from the actual face of the earth.
Deposition over large bodies of water as an alternative to the Flood is really funny since it is actually ...
... based on evidence.
quote:The Western Interior Seaway (also called the Cretaceous Seaway, the Niobraran Sea, the North American Inland Sea, and the Western Interior Sea) was a large inland sea that existed during the mid- to late Cretaceous period as well as the very early Paleogene, splitting the continent of North America into two landmasses, Laramidia to the west and Appalachia to the east. The ancient sea stretched from the Gulf of Mexico and through the middle of the modern-day countries of the United States and Canada, meeting with the Arctic Ocean to the north. At its largest, it was 2,500 feet (760 m) deep, 600 miles (970 km) wide and over 2,000 miles (3,200 km) long.
Western Interior Seaway during the mid-Cretaceous, about 100 million years ago
At its largest, the Western Interior Seaway stretched from the Rockies east to the Appalachians, some 1,000 km (620 mi) wide. At its deepest, it may have been only 800 or 900 metres (2,600 or 3,000 ft) deep, shallow in terms of seas. Two great continental watersheds drained into it from east and west, diluting its waters and bringing resources in eroded silt that formed shifting delta systems along its low-lying coasts. There was little sedimentation on the eastern shores of the Seaway; the western boundary, however, consisted of a thick clastic wedge eroded eastward from the Sevier orogenic belt.[1][2] The western shore was thus highly variable, depending on variations in sea level and sediment supply.[1]
At the end of the Cretaceous, a continuing uplift in a mountain-building episode called the Laramide orogeny hoisted the sandbanks (sandstone) and muddy brackish lagoons (shale) — the thick sequences of silt and sandstone still seen today as the Laramie Formation — while low-lying basins between them gradually subsided. The Western Interior Seaway divided across the Dakotas and retreated south towards the Gulf of Mexico. This shrunken, regressive phase of the Western Interior Seaway is sometimes called the Pierre Seaway.[1]
By google for Cretaceous inland sea images I find several showing different stages of innundations.
Based on evidence of sea plants and animals, fossil shorelines, etc.
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