Seashells on tops of mountains.

I couldn't agree more. I'm a biologist but have some knowledge of geology from reading geology texts and thus learning something. Generally, when I know nothing I keep quiet or I ask questions. Not all do so.

Let me see if I can help.The "clams on mountain tops" claim generally proposed by creationists as evidence of a flood is usually a reference to the fossil shells found in the limestone deposits on Mt. Everest and other Himalayan peaks. Nice try, but no cigar. Limestone doesn't form in year and the vast amounts of fossils found on Himalayan peaks couldn't possible have grown in a single year. Thus, rather than the mythology of the Bible, we must look elsewhere for a reasonable explanation.So picture this. A shallow sea bottom with abundant life between two large land masses. These land massed are moving towards each other. As they do so, the edge of the minor land mass is pushed under that of the major land mass. But at the same time, the edge of the major land mass acts as a plow that scrapes up the surface of the minor mass as the minor land mass sub-ducts. As these two land massed push together, they form a huge mound of the material that was the sea bottom between them. Thus, there are huge mountains of limestone that contain sea fossils.Of course, the subduction of one tectonic plate under another causes volcanic activity. And that is true of the subduction of the Indian plate under the Asian plate. The Deccan Traps are evidence of the collision of two major land masses. As a result, there were huge volcanic flows and the formation of huge mountain ranges.The thing is that the fossils found in the Himalayas aren't the same as any that exist today. In fact, they didn't exist 4,500 years ago when this miraculous flood was supposed to have occurred.

I stand corrected.

Perhaps it should be pointed out again, for the benefit of Chuck77, that the seashells in question are not "on top of mountains", but rather IN the mountain tops. It should also be noted that none of the species represented are currently extant. Moreover, many of the species represented are Ammonites, an extinct subclass of the Cephalopoda. The youngest example of an Ammonite fossil has been reliably dated to 65.5 million years. That's about 10 million years before the Indian tectonic plate collided with the Asian plate and scraped up the bottom of the Tethys Sea to the top of the Himalayas. Thus, 10 million year old fossils were scraped up some 7 miles, from the bottom of a sea to the top of the Himalayas. And yet, creationists would have us believe that this happened in a single year.

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This is one thing I would like to know from creationists: why do we find sea shells both "on top" and in some mountains, but no sea shells either "on top" or within other mountains?

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Did the "global flood" miss those mountains with no sea shells? How does a global flood explain all those "shell-free" mountains? Just missed by the "flood"?

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What an excellent question! Creationists believe that a great FLUD washed sea creatures up from the bottom of the sea to the tops of mountains, and somehow embedded them inside the mountains. What a display of ignorance of the principles of science. Floods do not wash things up - floods wash things down.I grew up surrounded by mountain ranges and spent lots of time in those mountains as a student biologist. From a hill outside of town I could see the snow capped peaks of five different mountain ranges in July (Pryor (8,822 ft.), Crazy (11,214 ft.), Beartooth (12,807 ft.), Absaroka (13,153 ft.), and Bighorn (13,167 ft.)). As far as I know, no sea shells have ever been found in or on any of these ranges. Compare that with the Himalayas. Wikipedia lists 13 peaks that are twice as high as the highest peak of the Beartooth, and 25 peaks that are higher than any of the ranges I listed. I suspect there are more.And yet, sea shells are found on all of the peaks that tower 4 and 5 miles above sea level while none are found in the smaller ranges of the western United States. How do creationists explain this?

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I'm a bit confused by this statement. Can you elaborate?
  —roxrkool

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Sure. I'll expand. I said, "And yet, sea shells are found on all of the peaks that tower 4 and 5 miles above sea level (I was referring to the Himalayas here) while none are found in the smaller ranges of the western United States (specifically the mountain ranges that I mentioned). By "smaller ranges" I meant that the mountains of western North America are smaller than the Himalayas.On the other hand, there are fossils of fish found in the Rockies. But they are not oceanic species but rather fossils from inland seas, lakes and rivers. They do not resemble the sea shells found in (and I do mean in) the Himalayas. And they aren't found in the tops of the mountains, as is true in the Himalayas and as one might expect if they were buried in the FLUD. They are found in strata well below the peaks - deposited some 50 million years before the peaks of the mountains were deposited. These fossils are of extinct species in every case.It is also interesting to note that the "sea shells" found inside the peaks of the Himalayas are not from any living species of shellfish. The fossils are from species that lived some 200 to 70 million years ago. For example, many Himalayan fossils are from the extinct subclass Ammonoidea of the class Cephalopoda. They went extinct with the dinosaurs.

As has been pointed out, the source of the Himalayas is not vulcanism. It's easy to see the difference. There is an area on the Indian sub-continent to the south of the Himalayas that is the result of vulcanism. This area was roughly opposite the Chicxulub impact event some 65 million years ago. The area of massive vulcanism is in India is known as the Deccan Traps. But none of the mountains of the Himalayas is a volcano.That is also true of the mountains that I previously mentioned. There are volcanoes near the coast, but not as far inland as Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho.However, if the massive earth upheaval that you imagine actually happened in the short time that is required to fit into your mythology, that much earth movement would have produced enough heat to reduce the entire surface of the earth to molten rock.You are aware that tectonic movement that produced the Himalayas, Alps, Andes and Rockies produce heat, aren't you? You are aware that India is still moving north and that the Himalayas are still growing.An interesting example of tectonic movement. Recently my son who was stationed in Japan during the earth quake went running. He uses a GPS device to measure how far he runs. The computer program showed that he had run across the tops of several buildings about 8 ft. to the west of where he had actually run. The quake and aftershocks actually moved Japan about 8 ft. to the east.

Except that every other time he had run that route it showed that he had run along the street. After the quake, it showed that he had run across the tops of the buildings to the west of the street.

I presume that you mean millions of years old. But as I understand it, the Himalayan seashell fossils are older than 65 million years. They are all extinct species. True. True. But creationists don't understand that mature ecosystems develop over millennia. True without question. True. Not "on top of mountains", but deep inside the mountains - in several layers that indicate several succeeding ecosystems. You got me here. The age of the layers date from about 50 million years to about 200 million years. Actually, the biblical flood lasted for a bit over a year. But still, your point is well taken, except that you fail to mention barnacles. OK. But I miss your point. Thanks. I did.Edited by pandion, : No reason given.