As the fully PhDed Dr. Meert pointed out, TB’s original quote in this thread is misattributed. In TB’s defense the place he got this from is a mess, with poor referencing. It is difficult to determine what is quoted and from whom it is quoted. The quote comes from
http://www.biblestudymanuals.com/k31.htm and is reproduced below with TB’s excerpt bolded.
quote:
The quotation referring to the tree standing upright in the sediment: here is one of the illustrations that accompanied an article in Scientific American several years ago. [The] tree was 43 feet high with hundreds of layers surrounding it, just as well preserved at the top as at the bottom. Now, can you look at that and imagine 2700 years a foot?... And in another illustration in a similar article, we see 50 trees described. Now this was from France. Now what would possibly explain this kind of phenomena? You see trees buried standing upright with huge amounts of sediment. No, it takes something like a large flood - a catastrophic flood - to [deposit sediments which] bury a forest and cover the trees and then [to have these sediments] form into rock rapidly in order to preserve the detail that we see in these trees as well at the top as at the bottom... I think that's an excellent description and estimate of what happened and it fits best with the evidence. A beautiful example of this phenomenon is seen near Cookville, Tennessee in the coal measures there. This tree standing upright in the sediment actually extends through two cyclotherms. A cyclotherm is a series of ten different rock units where we find coal forming. And this sequence - this series - of ten rock units repeats some 50 to 100 times. Trying to explain those cyclic deposits by normal uniformitarian processes gets very entertaining. I think the tidal forces of a huge flood are much better at explaining the cyclic forces. But if we look at the picture and notice that we've got coal down near the bottom that extends through numbers of layers up into another layer of coal above, what we're seeing there is a picture that demonstrates you can't form coal over hundreds of thousands of years. It has to be basically a catastrophic event that deposits this sediment and covers it and forms it into rock rapidly or you don't get this kind of picture with the tree standing upright well preserved from top to bottom in it. Actually, experiments with the formation of coal show, contrary to what we read and hear continually, does not take a long period of time [to form]. Consider the quotation from Chemtech of several years ago giving the results of an experiment where a fella for years and years to form coal in the laboratory and couldn't get it to happen. He says the reason is [that] he assumed it took a long time. But rather accidentally he found out that he could do it if he did it rapidly. He says, 'A rather startling and serendipitous discovery resulted... These observations suggest that in their formation, high rank coals, ...were probably subjected to high temperature at some stage in their history. A possible mechanism for formation of these high rank coals could have been a short time, rapid heating event.' [Six hours]
[George R. Hill, Dean of College of Mines & Mineral Industries, Chemtech, May, 1972, p. 292]
Carl Baugh (and many other creationist web sites) also gets some mileage out of the Cookville polystrate tree He says the following:
quote:
This is a 30 foot vertical fossil tree, which according to evolutionary geologists, must be extending through millions of years of strata. This tree is one of hundreds found near Cookville, TN in the Kettles coal mines and proves strata forms rapidly many layers at a time.
Here is a picture of the tree.
http://www.bible.ca/tracks/tracks-petrified-tree.jpg
The reason I put tree in quotes is because the formation isn’t a tree. The fact that it is in the Kettles coal mine should be a clue. I’ll leave it to the geologists to explain the difference between a kettle and a polystrate tree if anyone is interested.
In a related link, Glen Morton is a geophysicist who is a former young earth creationist. He puts to rest the idea that polystrate trees penetrating multiple coal seams are common at the flowing URL.
http://www.asa3.org/archive/evolution/199702/0111.html
Glenn reviewed all available creationist work and much conventional literature concerning polystrate trees and coal and came to the conclusion that there is not one example of a tree penetrating multiple coal seams.
Joe T.
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