Solving the Mystery of the Biblical Flood

Just one small item to add to Patrick's diatom research...wmscott cites diatoms under boulders as evidence of pre-Holocene deposition of the diatoms.But I wonder what the mobility of diatoms is through soil? Galcial till is usually quite porous. I would expect the average pore size of at least some tills to be far larger than diatom tests. As a result, any significant ground saturation from rainwater, snowmelt, or stream flooding could flush diatoms through the porous soil - under a nearby boulder. Think back a few years to the unusual floods in the Dakotas due to rapid spring melting of a thick snowpack. Even in upland areas, significant flow of water would be expected through the soil, as well as over it.

Hi wmscott,If you're in the question answering mood, I have a few simple ones to add to Patrick's list...You said:

quote:

---

"where, exactly, the largest isostatic readjustments occurred?" The Pacific ocean as the largest ocean would have experienced the greatest depression, perhaps as much as a mile or more. Smaller ocean areas would have experienced proportionality smaller amounts of isostatic depression.

---

I'm a little confused by this aspect of your model. Are you proposing that melting of ice sheets added water to the ocean basins, which depressed those basins by up to 5000 feet or more? Is this the process that allows Flood waters to recede from the land after the "very short" Flood? Is this what you are calling "isostatic depression"?If so, how did you arrive at the "mile or more" figure for the "isostatic rebound" of the Pacific Ocean? Can you express your result in isostatic bouyancy equations describing pre-Flood conditions, Flood conditions, and post-Flood conditions for the various areas (ocean basin, continent, glaciated continent, etc)?Thanks,...and be happy...

Patrick, understandably incredulous, asks:

quote:

---

How much of this [ice mass] was either melted or displaced to the oceans by the flood? A tenth, a quarter, a half?

---

Well, wmscott seems to think half of ALL water on the PLANET was in the ice sheet when he says this:

quote:

---

...based on a worst case scenario of theoretical flood depth, that what if the ice sheets contained half the earth's water and suddenly released them back into the sea. At a theoretical maxim depth of about 4,000 ft for the flood waters, the oceans covering 2/3 to of the earth's surface, would have in theory been depressed about 6,000 ft to hold that much more water...

---

Perhaps he meant to say half of the earth's FRESH water. Please clarify this for us, wmscott. The first interpretation of your statement makes no physical sense on a real earth, the second will not result in any significant Flood. Which do you prefer?Since you have apparently written a book having isostatic rebound as one of the main characters, I am even more surprised that you have not heard of the equations that describe isostacy. Here are a few links to get you started...IsostacyEustasyEquationsMore equationsEquations specifically geared towards glacial isostacyGravity Surveys in Antarcticaand a journal article:Isostatic postglacial rebound over Fennoscandia with a self-gravitating spherical visco-elastic Earth model
E. Le Meur p. 318-327, Annals of Glaciology, Volume 23, 1996

If I may pop back in for a quick interjection...Another question I might ask of wmscott is why are no dropstones found in Iowa, or Nebraska, or Texas, or Tennessee ... or Venezuela, for that matter?If a huge ice sheet several miles thick, covering much of northern N. America broke up and dispersed in a matter of days, on top of a raging flood moving across the continent and back during that time, why didn't the scattered pieces of that ice sheet leave their dropstones everywhere?Remember the release of subglacial meltwaters that causes wmscott's flood? They should be rafting huge chunks of ice all the way to the Gulf of Mexico and beyond.Instead, we only find dropstones in areas KNOWN to have have been actually covered by ice sheets at one time or another. Logically, it would seem this is evidence of glaciation, not flooding.Percy mentions the effect of waves and coastal erosion. We might ask a similar question...What effect would a several miles high wall of water and/or ice released from several miles up sliding into the ocean have? Can you say "scouring" ??? Where ever that water came out, it should have eroded the continent down to bedrock and left huge drumlins, etc. It would have been like a firehose on a pile of powdered sugar.Might it not also produce some sizeable waves? Very small pieces of glaciers sliding into the coastal bays of Alaska produce waves hundreds of meters high on opposing shorelines. When entire continental ice sheets slide into the ocean (or release subglacial melt... same effect), it would produce a tsunami big enough to make the Missoula floods look like an overturned spitoon. Why aren't the opposing shorelines carved up and eroded? We would expect to see streamlined hills, a tremendous layer of debris, coastal sediment washed inland for hundreds of miles, incredible turbidite deposits offshore, etc, etc.None of that is found in the real world - not on the scale required to raise sea-level by thousands of meters. Therefore there is no evidence that a large amount of water or ice surged into the ocean at the end of the Pleistocene.

scott,You have demonstrated yet again why I sometimes find our discussions to be pointless. I made a reasoned, logical objection to various consequences implied by your theory, and you brushed them aside with a one-line response... "You are thinking too sudden"I could dig back into these pages and find some of your own words that indicate "sudden" is a vast understatement. Words like these:

quote:

---

...that would have put between 31,460,000 cukm and 575,292,400 cukm [of water and/or ice] into the oceans in a short period of time.
(post 87)

---

Considering the ANNUAL flow of tha Amazon River is only 6300 cukm, I think we should be able to agree that is a lot of water or ice to travel into the ocean in a few weeks or months. Considering the water or ice has 6,000 to 45,000 feet of head behind it (post 87 again), the erosive force would be earth-shattering... literally. Yet you still do not cite any evidence of this tremendous outflow you theorize to have happened. Outflows millions of times larger than any "super river flood". There should be landforms like the Channeled Scablands, but a thousand times bigger, all over Europe and N. America.You can find no evidence of the tsunamis that should have been dozens of miles high resulting from the massive ice sheets sliding into the oceans all at once. The impact of that big an object sliding into the ocean would displace millions of times more water than an asteroid impact or any other mundane geological disaster. The tsunamis would be far larger than any ever recorded in the geologic record. Millions of times larger.But let's go ahead and take care of a few minor details that are nagging me. You cite dropstones in the Driftless Area of Wisconsin, and other areas of the world, as evidence of your global marine flood. Yet you repeatedly state the scott flood left no significant sediment deposits. There is an inherent contradiction implied in these two positions. Unfortunately your usage of technical geological terms outside of their strict definitions has led you astray. If you apply the correct criteria to identify the "dropstones" you have found, you would realize that they are certainly valid evidence of flooding... but without a correlated sequence of transgressive marine sediments, they are actually just as valid evidence for local non-marine flooding. In other words, they are not evidence against a global flood, but they are not evidence FOR it either. Lacustrine or floodplain sediments containing dropstones are common throughout the geologic record. No global flood is required to explain any of these dropstones, so at best this argument is consistent with, but not diagnostic of, a global flood.Or else they are not actually "dropstones"...You would be safer to use the more general term "glacial erratics". These do have the same strict diagnostic criteria which are working against your argument. If you can find glacial erratics in Alabama, for example, left by ice sheet fragments that floated south as the floodwaters drained off the continent... THAT would be significant. Glacial erratics nad dropstones in Wisconsin? Nobody's going to be puzzled by evidence of glaciation near a continent-sized ice sheet.Even more nit-picky is to point out that you have repeatedly cited geological literature that states the Driftless Area was never glaciated in Wisconsian time. Yet you also claim that the ice sheets could have been far more widespread than geologists currently believe. These positions are also mutually exclusive. One of them needs to be dropped.A more serious concern is your continued use of laughably ridiculous ice volumes to fuel your global flood. Even after Patrick presented several converging lines of evidence to rule out ice volumes significantly larger than 40-50,000,000 cukm, you still blithely postulate a flood depth of 4,000 feet (post 142 ...that post also gives a glaciated area of 192,400,000 sqkm, while your post 87 lists "45,000,000 sqkm believed to have been glaciated"). Assuming the 4,000 feet figure corresponds to post 87's 1219m flood depth, you state this "would take an ice volume of ... 621,202,400 cukm".Problem 1. It appears that this figure ignores isostatic flexing under the ice sheet. The weight of that much ice would depress the land to far below sea-level, and only the portion above sea-level can contribute to a global flood. Therefore your total ice volume needs to be about 50% larger to get the required amount.Problem 2. 50% larger than 621,000,000 cukm is essentially ALL THE WATER ON THE SURFACE OF THE PLANET!!!! The ocean basins would be dry plains with a few puddles on the bottom.Ummm... problems 3-5 are not really neccessary at this point, are they?The only option is to drastically reduce the size of your flood. As soon as you get into a realistic range for ice volume, your mechanism for unprecedented and unsupportable deep-mantle flexing disappears. The weight of a few hundred feet of water redistributed over the planet is inconsequential to deep mantle dynamics. There simply isn't enough energy to flex that much mantle rock. Until you show equations using actual values for mantle rheology, your idea is an elaborate fantasy that adds an interesting wrinkle to an old myth. But it is still nothing more than myth at this point.Anytime you want assistance with proofing your material (are you really considering a second edition?), my original offer still stands. I hope you will take what I have written in this post as helpful criticism towards that end and that you will consider it more carefully than you did for my last couple of efforts.be happy

scott,
I have time for only a few quick points. Much more will be covered later.Mantle rheology:

"Mantle viscosity and lithospheric thickness results of varying a number of model assumptions. The shaded region indicates the range of likely solutions, taking into account combinations of various effects. Seismicity depth ranges are given for western Puget Sound. An upper bound on mantle viscosity in this region is about 1020 Pa s."scott said:

quote:

---

it is only a problem if all the ice were to melt. A major release of water at the Late Glacial Maxim would have left plenty of ice to fill such depressions,

---

Irrelevant. Ice OR water in these depressions cannot contribute to a global flood. Additional ice/water volume above and beyond that amount is required to actually raise sea-level.Also, 150% of 621,000,000 cukm is 931,000,000 cukm. The total volume of ALL free water on the planet is 1,400,000,000 cukm. That means no matter how much the ocean basins rebound, there would be water (very SALTY water) only in the deep ocean trenches and the very oldest and deepest abyssal plains. The rest would be dry. There simply wouldn't be any water left to fill them."glaciated area of 192,400,000 sqkm"...The total continental surface area today is 148,000,000 sqkm. Your number must actually refer to the amount of continent exposed above sea-level at the LGM.While you're at it, care to explain how snow can fall at an elevation of 45,000 ft?Dropstones:We can "drop" this point, I believe..."The deposits of former glacial lakes cover parts of the Central Plain, in the driftless as well as the glaciated area. These lakes were apparently short- lived, for they produced few well- defined shorelines. The existence of these bodies of water is proved by the finding of lake- bottom sediments, as near Grantsburg in Burnett County, and Menomonie in Dunn County...

​

The largest area of lake deposits is on the bed of Glacial Lake Wisconsin. This former body of water left lake deposits over an area of more than 1,825 square miles...

​

The deposits of Glacial Lake Wisconsin include isolated, erratic boulders of granite, greenstone and other crystalline rocks, for example in Juneau County west of Wisconsin Dells, and in Sauk County west of Baraboo. Our best evidence of the height of the lake surface comes from these ice- rafted erratics. Near Baraboo and Wisconsin Dells they do not occur above a level of about 960 feet.

​

To the northwest, rounded sandstone and chert boulders are found in a beach deposit on Mile Bluff south of Mauston. The deposit is less than 980 feet above sea level. Erratics have been found to the southwest near Reedsburg, where there was a bay of the glacial lake."scott said:

quote:

---

We do have a 'correlated sequence of transgressive marine sediments' in the form of marine diatoms and the Michigan whale bones.

---

Apparently you don't know what "correlated" means.Sub-glacial flow rates:
Go ahead and figure out how much water flowed out (enough to raise sea-level to reach the toe of an ice sheet?), how long it took, then divide. Now compare to the annual flow of the Amazon. I dare you.sub-glacial water pressure:

quote:

---

The draining melt waters would for the most part probably lack a huge head pressure due to draining constrictions in the ice.

---

Then how does it get out? It's 22,500 ft below sea-level under your 45,000 feet thick ice sheet, remember?

Ahh... sorry, I was rushed in making that post.A picture tells a thousands words...And a URL helps, too.Wisconsin: Geographical Provinces - The Central Plain