Okay, my name is Kurt Wise. I'm talking about
the sedimentology of the Flood. Sedimentology is the study
of the sediments of the world. Sediments are basically rocks, or a pile made of pieces
of other rocks. It can be anything from sand, or sandstone made
from it, or mud, or shale made from it, or carbonate mud, and carbonate
that's made from it. These are all sediments. So Flood sedimentology would be the study of sediments
formed in the Flood. Sedimentology is a science. Flood sedimentology
is a science. Now, optimally, what we want to do
in creationism, anyway: we believe that the first place
we go in any science is to scripture to find out what
scripture has to say about it. What did God say
about this issue? That is our starting point. If we do that in the area
of sedimentology, we realize that the Bible has, it seems, to have
very little to say about sedimentology itself. What it does say it seems
to say about the Flood, so that's important. We'll look at,
for a few moments, what the Bible says about the Flood that might be
pertinent to sedimentology. The Flood account begins
in Genesis 7:11 with a comment that "on the same day were all
the fountains of the great deep over the Earth broken up, the windows of
Heaven were opened" and it's the opening salvo, if you wish,
in the Flood account. There appears to be
something happening there. The breakup of the fountains
of the great deep suggests that there's some very
quick cataclysmic event that is worldwide. We suspect that it is impacting
the crust of the Earth, the hard rocks
of the Earth in such a way that it's breaking up
the entirity of the Earth in some way or another. That's probably, if one thinks about it,
going to result in sediments. Break up rocks,
move rocks around, and you're going to produce
sediment in the process. So there's an implication that we have sediments
as a consequence of this. Following that, in
the same statement, we have a sequence of
the reference to the fountains and the windows. We don't know for sure
if they're causally listed; causally as in one
is causing the other. But anyway, we have
these phenomena called fountains and windows which lead ultimately—it
does seem to be the cause of what follows—which is
the description of a Flood that transgresses onto the land, covers ultimately
the mountains of the world, that this is the global Flood
referred to in scripture. It's according to that account
that the Flood remains high, keeping itself
over the mountains, for better than a year of time,
approximately a year of time. And its purpose in the Flood account is
to destroy all humans and all animals
that live on the land. And so it's an event, that says even
in the account later, that it would
never happen again. God promised He
would never do it again. So this is a one-time event
in the history of the Earth, in the past, that probably affected
the Earth's sediments, the rocks of the earth,
across the world. But in the Flood account, the scripture doesn't directly
refer to rocks, doesn't directly
refer to sediments. We can only infer this. This is some of the very
few things we learn in looking at the Bible about
the sedimentology of the Flood. So as a consequence,
having looked at the Bible, we find very little
on the topic. We're really forced to look
at the rocks themselves to learn about the sedimentology
of the Flood. Same time, we should never ignore
the evidence from scriptures. As we go along we might need
to refer to scripture again to check things out;
make sure all along the way that we're not diverging
from the Flood account, or from the scriptural account, or speculating on things
that actually aren't allowed in the account. And in that regard, we have
sediments on the present Earth, so we might ask, "How did these sediments
come to be?" we have sediments
on the present Earth and ask, "How did they come to be?" there's a possibility
given the Creation account that God might have created
the sediments in place. So perhaps all the sediments
on the earth, or significant percentage
of them, were formed in the Creation Week, and they weren't formed
in something like a Flood. So we need to look at the sediments
of the earth to determine, if there's a way to determine,
when they were created. One observation we find in many
of the sediments of the earth is that they contain fossils, such as these
wonderful trilobites. Especially animal fossils
in particular as my interest at the moment, because animal fossils suggest that animals died
to produce the fossils. But the biblical account
strongly suggests that animal death
did not proceed the Fall of Man, that in fact the death
of animals is something that comes as a result
of the curse that God instituted
upon the Earth in response to man's sin. And if that's the case, then it seems unlikely that the God who introduced death in response
to man's sin would have created an earth before that that had evidence
of death before man's sin. It's unlikely that He created
rocks with fossils in it with evidence of death. If, in fact, He at the same time
created an earth that wasn't supposed
to have any animal death. So this suggests that the rocks
that have animal fossils, the sediments that
have animal fossils, were formed after
the Fall of Man. So they weren't created by God
in the creation Week. They were formed
sometime thereafter. Some of those sediments
might well have been formed in the Flood. So you need to now determine
which of those sediments were, in fact, formed in the Flood. So, we're going to look
at the major sediments of the earth to determine where the Flood was
in their formation. We have something
on this planet that geologists refer to as
the lithostratigraphic column. "Lithos" is something meaning
"rock," and "strata" is referring to
the layers of rock. The lithostratigraphic column
is a column of layers of rock. Basically, the idea is if you... *Silence* ...rocks there, it is a series of layers
of rock strata. So it's a
lithostratigraphic column, if you wish. If you just took
one section of it, one column of it, you'd have a pile of rocks there
that make up a column. That would be a lithostratigraphic column
of the Grand Canyon. We're here in Tennessee. Hypothetically, you could drill
a hole down into the ground, or dig a hole, in such a way that you'd be able
to discover the column of rocks that sits below us. The layers of rock
that are found from here to where you don't find
any more layers of rock. You go to other places, and that would be
a lithostratigraphic column for in this case
Dickson, Tennessee. Go to another location. You would find a column
of rocks at that location. What we have done in geology is we have ordered
the lithostratigraphic columns from around the world
and we've compared them. We've realized that there's
some interesting features in those columns. There's a sequence
of rocks in those columns, which is found in all
or most of those columns. This has caused us to conceptualize
a theoretical column that contains all the components
of the columns from all over the world, and it presents a sequence
of rocks in a particular order with a kind of a fingerprint
of a sequence of rocks that is unique. When you take that particular
sequence of rocks and compare it to any real sequence of rocks
like in the Grand Canyon, Grand Canyon might be missing some of the rocks of the whole
lithostratigraphic column, of the global
lithostratigraphic column, but what rocks it contains are
in the same order as this column that we've inferred globally. In fact, no matter
where you go in the world, you'll find rocks in the same order as the global
lithostratigraphic column. And really, in geology, for those of us
who had the opportunity to go from place to place and look
at these things, we really find this rather stunning. I grew up in, Illinois. I became familiar with the
lithostratigraphic column there in northern Illinois. And when I began in family trips to go to places
like Florida and out west, and so on and so forth, and began looking at
the lithostratigraphic columns in those locations even as a child there
were opportunities where I realized, "Wow! This is the same sequence of rocks that I'm seeing
back in Illinois. This is the same sequence
of rocks that I remember seeing in Montana when I'm down
in some other location, Grand Canyon or
something like that." then when I had opportunity
to go to Australia, it was even more stunning. That was probably
the most impressive. So the first time I
really went significantly outside the United States, to actually walk up
to a pile of rocks and think, "You know, if I didn't know anything else, didn't know where
I was in Australia, and saw this sequence of rocks, I would realize
that I bet this is where I'm at in the
lithostratigraphic column." Ask my friend Andrew Snelling
who I was visiting in Australia, and he’ll say, “ Well, yes,
that’s exactly where you're at. ” And I say, “ That’s amazing! ” Are you kidding? That's crazy: the same
sequence of rocks! Go to England and it's
the same sequence there as we find in America. The consistency of
this lithostratigraphic column is quite impressive indeed. Even though it might look
like in detail, the colors, the rocks, and the way they're eroded
might look different, the consistency of
the lithostratigraphic column is truly impressive. This column in the way that I just described has been
known for a couple centuries. For at least two centuries, people have recognized
the sequence of rocks, and have recognized
similarities from one country, one location, to another. And this little stratigraphic
column has been in existence for longer than people
have known about evolution. This is before Darwin's
theory of evolution. It’s been known long before radiometric dating
was put on these rocks to determine their age. The lithostratigraphic column
as an actual column of rocks has been known
for a very long time. The column is several
thousand feet deep, or thick, or tall. However, you want to look at it. In the middle of some
of the continents, it's only a few
thousand feet deep. It’s usually thicker as you get out towards the edge
of the continents on either side. It averages about a half mile
in thickness around the world. When you look in detail at this, most of the column is made up
of three rock types. Almost half of the column
is made up of shale. Shale is made from mud. So it's lithified,
or rockified, mud. About a fifth
of it is carbonate. Limestones, dolomites,
things like that. And about 20% of it,
another fifth of it, is sandstone developed from sand grains that have been
fused together into a rock. They’re not found everywhere, but when we look
at the lowest rocks of the whole lithostratigraphic
column in some regions of the world, they’re consistently
found without fossils when we find them. Well, for a long time, it was thought they had
no fossils at all. In fact, they were
called “azoic” rocks, meaning “no life. ” Beginning in the 1950’s, people looked at these rocks
under the microscope and realized that we
could actually find bacterial fossils in them. But since bacteria are
so small you can't see them without the microscope. So it took that long
before people recognized that there's anywhere any
fossils in these rocks at all. For our purposes here, no animal fossils at all
in these rocks here. So the lowest rocks
have no animal fossils. It’s only after we get animals
that we can be fairly certain that we’re dealing
with time after the Fall and might be rocks
formed in the Flood. Now there are some interesting
and odd features in the lithostratigraphic column. And what I mean by odd are rocks that are either not formed
in the present, or they're rare in the present
and turn out to be in some places very common in
the lithostratigraphic column. So if you studied
the present world, and we're familiar only
with sediments formed in the present world, you might find the discovery
of these kinds of things in the lithostratigraphic
column rather odd. So they are odd features with
respect to modern processes. And a few examples
in the rocks that are below the first animal fossils, we have an interesting group of rocks known as
the Banded Iron Formations. BIF for short. BIF rocks are extremely unusual. We don't find BIF's formed
in the present at all. In fact people have
argued for decades, centuries actually, how in the world
the BIF’s are formed. These are very important rocks,
it turns out. 99.9 percent of the Earth's iron that’s mined by humans
comes out of the BIFs or it comes out of things that eroded directly
out of the BIFs. So there was a period
in Earth history, and of course a pile
of rocks, here. The deepest rocks are thought
to be the oldest rocks, because once you have
a rock in place it’s kind of hard to slip
another rock underneath. So typically, if you see a lithostratigraphic
column, you're going to think that the rocks
on the bottom are older, and the rocks on the top
are probably younger. This is a concept I sometimes forget to share with people
who are listening to me talk. Paleontologists and
geologists have a weird way of looking at time. We often have time at the bottom
of the page going forwards, with the youngest stuff at the top and the oldest
stuff at the bottom. But that's because that's
what we see in the rocks. The rocks on the bottom
are older and the rocks and the top are younger unless something really
weird is going on. The banded iron formations are in really old rocks compared
to the other rocks of the world. So there seems to have been
a time in Earth history sometime in the past early
in the history of the earth where banded iron
formations were formed. We don't even know how they form
or what caused them. It’s a weird thing, and they don't seem
to have formed after that. Now, we go upwards into
what we call the Devonian and we encounter black shales. In fact, if you mention the phrase
black shales to a geologist, he probably will immediately think of two levels
in the lithostratigraphic column where many of the black
shales are found: in the Devonian, and again up further
in the record in the Cretaceous, there a lots of black shales around the world
at those particular locations. They're not unique. There are black shales found
throughout the record, but in those particular levels,
they're really, really thick, and there's lots
and lots of black shale. It's shale that is
black in color. It’s black because it's carrying
a bunch of organic matter. In fact, in some cases, it's carrying so
much organic matter that it transforms into oil or gas and it's a source
of a lot of our oil and gas. So there seems to be
a couple of times in Earth history, at least, where there was an awful lot of production of black shale
compared to other times. Going further up, we have a layer of phosphate
that was basically dumped out around the world. The Phosphoria Formation,
for example, got its name because there is so
much phosphate in it. This is minable phosphate. Most of the phosphate
that’s mined in the world is, in fact, mine from
this particular location. It’s not the only time
that phosphate is found in the record. There are a couple other times where a good bit
of it is formed. But this is a worldwide
deposition of phosphate at one particular level. It seems very odd at
least in its abundance. Immediately above that we have what are called
the Permo-Triassic Sands. In the Permo-Triassic layers around the world we have
these very thick sandstones. Very thick sandstone! There's a sandstone sitting
over Africa, for example. If you took all the sand
of that one unit and put it on North America, making it all even with
the same thickness throughout, it would be one kilometer thick over the entire continent
of North America! That’s a lot of sand
in that one unit! The Permo-Triassic sands
of Africa are huge, but there are Permo-Triassic
sands in North America, and in Europe, and in Asia. Very thick sandstones
over most of the earth, if not all of the earth. It's really, really
quite extraordinary. Why all that sand? In fact, in the case
of the African material, a little bit of the top of that sandstone
has been eroded off the top and blown around
to produce the sand dunes of the Sahara Desert
covering North Africa. This is some amazing stuff! The same sand unit reaches up
into the Middle East, and the treasury in the buildings of Petra
are carved into the sand. It's the same sandstone that
the Sphinx is carved into. It's an enormous sandstone
deposit across Africa. It’s interesting that there was
one period in Earth history where humongous amounts
of sand were deposited. Associated with the
layer of sandstone, but not immediately
associated with it, we have red beds. These would be red shales
extensive over, again, all of the Earth. You have places in New Jersey
with red shales. We got places out west
with red shales. We’ve got them
on every continent. Why red shales at one time
in Earth history, and in such abundance? They're found everywhere through the record
in small amounts, but they're in
humongous amounts. You move on up
to the Cretaceous, which is well known
for its chalk. The White Cliffs of Dover, for example, contain
hundreds of feet of chalk. Now, chalk is made
of the little microscopic shells of microorganisms
(single-celled organisms) that create tiny, little microscopic shells. How many microscopic shells
does it take to make chalk? It used to be,
back in the old days in school, we had chalkboards
where we had pieces of chalk that we would write
on chalkboards with. We don't have that anymore. We have a whiteboard
here, for example. And it used to be kind of fun. I would like to do this
every once in a while. I'd pick up a piece of chalk, and just make a frivolous mark
across the board. And I would point
to that and say, “You know, hundreds of thousands of
microorganisms gave their lives for that frivolous mark
of chalk there. ” Just imagine how many shells it took
to produce a hundred feet of chalk covering
most of the world. It's an astonishing amount
of chalk in a particular layer in the column. Again, you find chalk
in other places, but never as abundant as
at that particular level. Here, we have some photographs
of banded iron formations. It represents oxidation
states of iron, so it alternates often between
red rusted iron and black, which is anoxic iron. Very pretty stuff. In this photograph we see
the Sphinx, again, carved into the Permo-Triassic
sands of Africa. And this photograph shows
the White Cliffs of Dover there in the Cretaceous. These unusual rocks characterize
the lithostratigraphic column. This alone immediately suggests that we have a history
of the earth that's linear in nature. It is not cyclical. It's common in some Eastern
religions and among individuals in the history of geology
to have the presupposition, or the belief, that Earth history
is cyclical and repetitive. There have been others,
like Aristotle himself, who felt that Earth
history was non-changing. It was always the same. But the lithostratigraphic
column tells us, among other things, that the Earth has not been
the same through its history. It's changed through time. And secondly,
that it has not cycled. It has not started at one point,
changed to something else, and come back
to that same starting point. Again. It's a linear Earth history,
something that changes. It's not clear that it's degenerating
or getting better or getting worse. It's changing, and it's
linear in its change. And this is interesting because we immediately
recognize the consistency with the biblical account, where God created the Earth
at one point in time. It's gone through
history since then. There's an arrow to history. It's a linear history. It's not a cyclical history. It is going in one direction. So the
lithostratigraphic column, at the broadest view, is one that indicates
a linear history similar to that indicated in scripture. Now again, looking a little
more closely at this, we recognize that there's
a certain section of the rocks that contain animal fossils. The fossils are in sediments that are found draped
across entire continents. The individual rock units, the sediments that we
find the fossils in, can be traced, not just
across countries and states, but across regions
and even continents. For example, when I was living
in Dayton, Tennessee, I had an opportunity
to do some caving in something called
the St. Genevieve Limestone. It was the name given to
a particular limestone layer, pretty close to the middle
of the column. If you step back away
from the specific name, and look at the description
of the rock, you’ll see it was
cross-bedded, oolitic, pentremites-containing dolomite. You don't have to know
what that means. It's just a very specific set
of descriptors of the rock that narrowed the description
down to this 30, 40 or 50-thousand
feet of sediment that’s in Tennessee. This sediment is laying
at a little bit of an angle so that the oldest
sediment is exposed at the North Carolina border. If you drive to the west, across Tennessee, you are actually going
from the lower part of the lithostratigraphic
column all the way up the column to the very youngest sediments
in the Mississippi River. So if you're looking for rocks of a particular
age in Tennessee, you just drive
to an appropriate position, east-west in Tennessee, and you can find rocks of that particular position in
the lithostratigraphic column. I was at a place
in eastern Tennessee where there was
a cross-bedded, oolitic, pentremites-containing dolomite. That's a particular layer
of rock that in 30, 40, or 50 thousand feet
is very characteristic. There's no other rock like that. There's only one layer of rock,
a couple hundred feet thick, that is cross-bedded, oolitic,
pentremites-containing dolomite. It's very characteristic
out of this entire pile. You go to Montana and look at the
lithostratigraphic column there, got 50,000 feet
or so of sediment. There's one layer in there
that is cross-bedded, oolitic, pentremites-containing dolomite. Only one! Guess what? It's got caves in it! It's called The Madison
Limestone over there. It's got a different name, but it's got
the same description. It's the same rock. Go down to Arizona,
to the Grand Canyon, and there's one rock
in the tens of thousands of feet of sediment in the Grand Canyon
is a cross-bedded, oolitic,
pentremites-containing dolomite. It’s called the
Red Wall Limestone, and it's got caves in it. So there, you've got a unit that is found across
the continent of North America. And it's even got caves
in it just about every place it’s found. That's a sediment that is laid down
across enormous extents. Now that's unlike the present. It's an odd feature because, in the present world,
you find sediments formed in a lake
for the extent of the lake. You find sediments downstream
of a mountain on either side, or all sides of a mountain, as far as the rivers go away
from the mountain. You don't find it
across entire continents. You don't find sediments formed, especially underwater sediments,
formed across entire continents. This is an interesting feature
which suggests to me that there's some
sort of mechanism for blanketing an entire
continent with sediments. Especially water-lain sediments. It suggests there's water
across the entire continent that laid down sediment
across an entire continent. That's consistent with the idea
of a global Flood, which the Bible describes, where water was
over the entire continent that could then deposit
continent-wide sediments. I don't know
any other way to do it. So I would suggest that the Flood is actually
then represented by the lithostratigraphic column
to this extent. It's starting sometime after whatever formed
these sediments down here. It ends at a certain
point above that. The sediments are no longer
found across continents. They're found over smaller
and smaller regions, until now and today
we're finding it in very local areas in individual lakes and ponds and streams
and things like that. This appears to be the part
of the stratigraphic column that's formed by the Flood. So sedimentology of the Flood would focus on this section of
the lithostratigraphic column. If we look more closely
at the rocks of the Flood, these would be Flood fossils. The sediments are
consistently very thick, hundreds of feet thick. Again that's in contrast
to modern sediments which might be inches
to a few feet thick, maybe a score of feet thick. But hundreds of feet thick is
well outside the range of modern experience. They’re very uniform
in composition. Here's the Red Wall
Limestone, for example, that I was referring
to in the Grand Canyon. It’s over 800 feet thick, and varies even up
to over a thousand feet thick in certain places. It’s very, very uniform in composition and spread again
across the entire continent. And so we're
talking about sediments that are deposited
not just over a big area, but in big volumes. So something is producing
them that's big! It's a big scale thing
that is producing them. It’s consistent with
a global Flood. In fact, these sediments are found
across entire continents again. Here's a drawing of the extent
of the Sauk Sandstone. This sandstone is at the bottom of this pile
of Flood rocks on this diagram. It's not the
bright yellow stuff, it's the muted yellow stuff. That is the extent of the Sauk. It's found up in the Arctic, over most of
the western, central and eastern United States. It's got a huge extent. It's across the entire
North American continent, suggesting again that
we've got a global, or at least
a transcontinental event that is in fact depositing it. Here's another
interesting thing. When you look at the rocks that are found
across the continent, you find that there's
a consistent east to west current direction. If you have water-lain rocks, that is, rocks that are dropped
out of water, very often, it'll leave evidence
of the moving water. For example, if the water is dragging
objects on the bottom, it will leave drag marks. If the water is moving fast
enough to create dunes, it carries sand up
one side of the dune, cascades it down the other
side of the dune, and it creates a series
of what we call crossbeds. The sand grains are in lines that cross across the normal
flat orientation of the beds. The direction of those cross
beds indicates the direction of the current. Those and several other
indicators will give us a clue as to the direction
that the water was going. Art Chadwick, beginning
some decades ago, began checking PhD dissertations
in geology departments in universities across
the United States and then went on
to other countries for evidence of cross-bedding, or of anything that
indicated current directions. He went into dissertations because boring evidence
like the direction that the current was going is
not something you publish. People don't publish every
single observation they make, but graduate students
record everything, hoping that collectively
they're going to get something that is accepted as a thesis. I was with them on one
of these one of these trips. We went into a library and we
just sat down all day long. We pulled theses off of the shelves and looked
through them for descriptions of the rocks and descriptions
of cross-bedding. Then we wrote down the evidence, where it was located in terms
of the longitude and latitude, and then he's able
to collect this data. At that particular longitude and latitude he can put
in an arrow indicating the direction of the current. Sometimes we even have
something of an idea of the strength of the current
at that particular location. Ultimately, he has collected
more than a million data points of the direction of currents in the production
of sediments around the world. What he finds interesting is that in sediments beneath what
we're calling Flood sediments, the current directions
are every which way. You've got some areas
where it's facing east, and some areas
where it is facing west? There's no consistency to it. Likewise in the
youngest sediments above the Flood sediments, we've got all sorts
of different current directions. If you're looking
in the United States, for example, you
might find currents that go down the Mississippi
River towards the Gulf, between the mountains, and then on the other side
of the mountains they would be running
towards the ocean. That is the direction
the water is going. So it either made some sense
in terms of draining off of the continents
as we understand it, or they went every which way. But in between the youngest
and the oldest in the Flood sediments he finds
consistent current directions. When you reconstruct
the orientation of the continent at the time the continent
was receiving the sediment, it’s running from the east to
the west across the continents. Across all continents! So as the continents
moved and rotated, it’s still always
going east to west. This is really cool because sometimes it's even
going through basins. There's bumps and the continent, for example, the Illinois Basin
where I grew up. There's a Michigan Basin. These are huge dips in the geologic record
among the sediments that indicates that there was
a low area for some reason. It makes sense
that in a low area, currents should all go towards the center
of the low area. But what his currents
show is that while sediments were
being deposited during that particular part of
the lithostratigraphic column, the sediments have
current directions that go up to the basin
from the east to the west, and go right through the basin
from the east to the west. They go down the one side,
which makes some sense, but they go up
the other side and out. They just ignore all
of these features as if there’s a moving ocean
over the continent, moving from east to west, depositing material consistently
in that fashion. It’s an interesting question as
to why that might be. It's perhaps not a coincidence that if the moon holds water
under it by its gravity, which it does in tides, and the Earth spins
underneath it, it would seem that the water would then move over the continent
from the east to the west. So we suspect that this feature of east to west current direction
is a consequence of the tidal effects
of the moon during the Flood. But the result of this is
something very unusual. The result of this
would be very unusual, in the present, anyway. It would be one
of those unusual aspects of the Flood sediments that is consistent
with the idea, perhaps, of a global Flood
and nothing else. This certainly suggests moving
water and the consistency in its direction. We also need to consider
the issue of lamination. These sediments that are found in the Flood
rocks are laminated, meaning they're finely-layered. What is this? And what's the
significance of that? In the modern world, we either just do not find
laminated sediments, or they form only in certain
instances in the modern world. Most sediments in the modern world are
what we call bioturbated, where the lamination is gone. The idea is that there are organisms
in the modern world that live on top of the sediment
underneath the water. So you got water and then
sediments down below it. There's critters that like
to live right there. They like to burrow
into the sediment. They like to dig around
in the sediment. They're looking for food
in the sediment. Some of them are living
in the sediment. Some of them are interacting with other organisms
in the sediment. And what they do in digging through the sediment like that
is they mix the sediment up. If there were layers
in the sediment when the sediment
was originally laid down, these little guys will just
destroy that layering. They're very good
at homogenizing, or destroying, the lamination of sediments. In fact, on ocean beaches
of the modern world, these critters will typically
bioturbate sediments 30 or more feet down into the sediment. It’s really quite extraordinary! One of my favorite things to do when I go to the Geological
Society of America meeting, where you have two thousand papers presented
in four days by geologists all over the United States coming
together to share their ideas, I love what I call
the hurricane papers. They don't always have them,
but I look for them. They used to be a little
more common in the past. I haven’t seen them
in a few years now. Here's the idea
of a hurricane paper. There's some graduate student
who is in biology. He's studying critters. He's a marine biologist. He wants to study
marine organisms. Even better, he wants
to study marine organisms on his favorite beach, right? He then goes out in the water
there offshore and finds a community of organisms that he hopes hasn't
been sufficiently studied. He determines to do his dissertation studying
that community of organisms. So he goes out there and snorkels or dives his way
down to the bottom there and lays out a grid defining the
community he’s going to study. Now, you know, you got
to take years to do this. It’s just laborious stuff. You got to come back
to the same beach, to study and he comes back
and he has to come back. you got to go back
to the same place, you got to dive down there, Now, you know,
you got to take years to this. You got to keep coming back
to your to that same Beach. It's just a laborious stuff. You got to come back
to the same Beach. You got to go back
to the same place. You got to get a dive down. I mean you have to do this. You got to dive down there. You got to get a look
at all those little critters. First of all, you have to figure out
where everyone is and give them all names. You identify where they’re
at in your grid. Then you come back the next
year and see who's moved, who's had babies and, you know, you're studying this community
over three or four years. But, alas, every
once in a while, one of these poor souls
has chosen a beach that, just before he
finishes his work, a hurricane comes in
and lands on that beach. It takes the sand of the beach and dumps five or six feet
of it on top of this community. It's all gone. So there you are. You’ve got a dilemma. Let’s see, option one:
go jump off a bridge. We’ll try not to do that, OK? Well, I guess one
possibility is give up, find another beach
and start over again. But you’ve already spent
three years at this, you know. You don’t want to do that. So you think, “Is there another way
to deal with this? Maybe you can give up and go
into English or something. ” No, let’s not do that. Here’s an idea: how about we turn our project from a study of a community
under normal circumstances to the recovery of a biological community
from an ecological catastrophe? The recovery of the biological
community from a hurricane. This is great! So we can go out, and use GPS to put our markers
down as close as we can to where they were before, some five feet down
from its present location. It might extend
our study a little bit, but we’re insistent on seeing if we can watch
how the community recovers. Hurricane talks are so cool because every one of them
turns out the same way. Within one year
of the hurricane having come in and leaving three to five feet
of sand over that region, there is no evidence that the hurricane
ever was there. You've got a community that has recovered
and come back to the surface. It has dug down
into the sediment and homogenized the sand with the mud underneath
up to some 30 feet down. It is so homogenized that you can't even identify
this huge sand layer. The community is perfectly happy
as if nothing ever happened. It's really cool! Organisms are extraordinarily
efficient at destroying the lamination that
might have been there when the sediments were formed. In the modern world, because there are burrowers
that burrow into the sediment, and because there's enough time
for them to burrow, any lamination is
destroyed and we get what we call bioturbation
(“bio” meaning life, “turbation” as in turbulence)
of the sediments by organisms. If you see laminated sediments
with nice layers in there, it must mean they're either no burrowers or there's
no time for burrowing. For example, there
are laminated sediments underneath the Dead Sea. Why are there
laminated sediments underneath the Dead Sea? It’s called the DEAD Sea because there’s no
critters there burrowing into the sediment! So when you find lamination, you can deduce that either you
don't have burrowers, or there's not been
time for burrowing. What you find
in these Flood sediments, and there's thousands
of feet of Flood sediments, is it is almost all laminated. It’s hard to find
bioturbated sediment. So what’s going on here? Does that mean there
are no burrowers, or that there’s
no time to burrow? Well, in these same sediments we
find fossils of the burrowers. We find lots of fossils
of the burrowers. They’re there, or at
least they died there. That suggests it isn’t
because there are no burrowers. It must be that there's
just not enough time for them to
bioturbate the sediment. So we have rapid deposition
of these sediments into layers and we’re doing it so fast that the little critters
might be able to make individual little burrows (
and we do see those). But they can't spend
enough time there to bioturbate the sediment before they get buried too deep and they asphyxiate
under those circumstances. So we apparently have extremely
rapid deposition in this. Another observation from these Flood sediments is
something we call megasequences. I have to first explain
what a sequence is. In geology, a sequence
is a pile, or package, of sedimentary rocks that is bounded below
and above by erosional surfaces. So it's a stack of sediments. I got them
represented over here. At the base of the sediment,
you have evidence of erosion. We have sediments
underneath these that have been cut
into in some way or otherwise giving us evidence
of erosion or a period of time where there's no deposition. Likewise, at the top
of the sedimentary pile, we have further
evidence of erosion that serves as the base of
the next sequence of sediments. So first of all, it is a package of sediments
with erosion surface above and below but there
that's not enough. That's not the whole definition. A sequence also says something about the particular
sequence of sediments that is deposited therein. The order is important. You might be missing one
or two of these, but even if you're missing
some they're always in the same order. If you have a complete sequence, you have the rocks
at the base of the sequence which are made of big particles. That's a conglomerate. It might be gravel. It might even be bigger. It might be a bolder bed. It might be a cobble bed. It might be a mega boulder bed. But you’ll have the biggest
sedimentary particles in this lowest layer. As you move upward, the particles making up
the sediment decrease in size. So you go from a conglomerate
to a sandstone. Go to a coarse sandstone and then to a finer
and finer sandstone. Eventually you get
to a siltstone. Eventually, you lose all
of the larger particles and you’re left only with the
tiny little particles of clay. 50, 60, or 70-micron
sized particles of clay. And then finally, way at the top
of the sequence, you don't have clay. You have carbonate, which is limestone,
or dolomite, or something like that. So this sequence is
a fining upward sequence. Conglomerate, sandstone,
shale, carbonate. The size of the particles
is decreasing as we go up. Now, if we see a sequence,
it's sort of automatic in your training to see
a sequence of go, “ Well, I can explain that! ” It means that this is
a single sedimentary package. A single unit
that's deposited in one event. The event is water that is decreasing
in speed with time. So water initially, at the bottom here,
is moving so fast that it can carry everything. It can carry the boulders. It can carry the gravel. It can carry the sand. It can carry them mud. It can carry the carbonate. It carries everything. It can’t even drop anything
because it's moving so fast. But it's not only moving fast. Since it's also carrying
all this abrasive material. It can also erode. It can cut into
these sediments beneath and create that erosion surface. As the water slows down, it gets to a point
where it can no longer erode, and in fact starts
dropping out its stuff. It first drops
out the big stuff. It drops off the boulders, and then as it
slows down further, it drops out the cobbles. As it slows down even further,
it drops out the gravel, then the sand,
and the silt, and then the shale. It's a single depositional
event, one surge of water, that's very fast
and then slows down, depositing a sequence. Okay, that's somewhat logical. It's what we observe even right now in floods
and so on and so forth. What we find in the Flood
sediments between those that have no animal fossils
and these up here that are after the Flood, we find what we
call megasequences. These are sequences of rocks that aren't just,
say a few feet thick, they're hundreds of feet thick. In some cases two thousand
or several thousand feet thick. So for example, starting here at the base
of these Flood sediments, we have something called
the Sauk megasequences. These are named
after Indian tribes. This was first discovered
in North America by an oil company employee
whose last name was Sloss. So these are called
Sloss’s megasequences. In this diagram, which is based
off of Sloss’s work, the right side of the diagram
corresponds to the eastern North American shore. The western shore
is represented on the left. In those locations, we have very thick
sedimentary units. In this diagram, those things that are
orange here are places where there's no rock known. The places that are
in blue are the rock that is known. So the Sauk megasequence
is very thick in the eastern United States. It's very thick
on the western United States. It's very thin halfway,
in the midcontinent. So we have a sequence of rocks: very thick on the coasts
and thins to the center of the continent. Again, this is a sequence. The base of it is
an erosional surface. The top of it is
an erosional surface. It starts with
conglomerates and sandstones, and goes into shales
and carbonates at the top. Then on top of that, there's another one
called the Tippecanoe. Again, thick at the coast
and it thins to the middle. Again, it’s a sequence. Kaskaskia is the next,
followed by the Absaroka, and then the Zuni. Some people claim that there's
a Tejas sequence above it. But it's violating
the rules of a sequence, because there's no erosional
boundary on the top and it's not a complete sequence. In fact, it isn't
a sequence at all. It doesn't include
a conglomerate, sandstone or shale sequence. It's a bunch
of different kinds of rocks. So actually, the Tejas
is not a sequence at all. We have one,
two, three, four, five distinct megasequences
in North America. Now again, this is
a mind-boggling concept here. A sequence is a single
depositional event. It's a single event
with one surge of water with high velocity at the beginning and decreasing
velocity with time. We have evidence here of five,
humongous surges of water. Each one was depositing hundreds of feet of sediment
across the entire continent of North America. What I've got here is a map
from a whole series of maps that were produced
by the Correlation Of Stratigraphic Units
of North America project. They shortened it
to the COSUNA project. This is one of the COSUNA
charts from that project. This is a region of North America
represented on this chart, which is a north
Appalachian region. What they've done is
they have a series of stratigraphic columns. Here is one
stratigraphic column. From the bottom,
the oldest rocks, all the way up
to the youngest rocks. Here's another
lithostratigraphic column, from the oldest
to the youngest and so on. We have several dozen columns
up the Appalachian mountains. I believe the numbers run from
the southwestern Appalachian mountains all the way up to the northeastern portion
of the northern Appalachians. We're sticking columns
side-by-side and to see features and compare columns
from one place to another over a region. There's a dozen or so such maps
that cover North America. Each map is four feet
by three feet, and if you laid out all of them
you’d need a big room to kind of see the pattern. But it is a cool pattern
when you see it! I've taken the picture
of the chart and scaled it down to
where we see the megasequences. The other cool thing about this chart is every time
they've got a carbonate rock, they made it blue. Every time they
encountered a shale rock, they made it a gray color. Every time they
encountered a sandstone, they made it yellow. When they encountered
conglomerates, they made them orange. I know you can't see this
on the diagram here. It's much better in real life. But what you have from here
to here is a bunch of blue. That's the top of a sequence. At the base down here,
you have a little bit of yellow. There's a little bit of orange. So we have the sequence
of orange to yellow, a tiny bit of gray,
and then a whole bunch of blue. Then we have a bunch of orange,
a bunch of yellow, gray and blue again. Then we have yellow. Don't see much orange, but we have gray,
and then blue again, and then we have
a bunch of orange. Then we have yellow,
and we have blue again. We see the repeating
sequence of orange, which is conglomerate,
then sandstone, and shale, then carbonate. And so these sequences: the Sauk sequence is found
right across here. The Tippecanoe sequence
is found right across here. The Kaskaskia is here. The Absaroka—all we have
are the conglomerates of the Absaroka. We don't have the remainder of it at least in this portion
of North America. At the base of these
megasequences is something known as the Great Unconformity. The base of
the lowest megasequence, which is the Sauk,
is the Great Unconformity. Here we see it
in the Grand Canyon. We have sediments below
the Great Unconformity coming in at an angle with respect
to the sediments that are above the unconformity. Here's the Great Unconformity, and perhaps you can see
that you've got the sediments of the Flood up here, and sediments of the pre-Flood
down below it. The Sauk Megasequence, then, is this first set
of sediments here in the Grand Canyon. If we look more closely
at the Great Unconformity, we have this extraordinary
surface in the Grand Canyon. It’s extraordinarily flat
over a humongous distance. There are some highs and lows. There are some highs, for example, in the place
where the rocks underneath the Great
Unconformity are really hard. There's something called
the Shinumo Quartzite, which is a really,
really, really hard rock. And over that rock, the Great Unconformity
comes up about 300 feet. And then downstream—again, we can tell
the current direction—downstream from the high point there are
chunks of Shinumo Quartzite that are 40 to 50
feet in diameter. These are boulders that have been ripped off
the top of the Shinumo and deposited downstream in the
base of the Sauk Megasequence. It's awesome stuff. But if you're
not over a really, really hard rock, then the Great Unconformity
is as smooth and flat as you could possibly imagine. Over not just the distance
of the Grand Canyon, which is a couple hundred miles, but across the entire
North American continent. Think of this: the Sauk Megasequence
is this surge of water that has enough power
to rip maybe thousands of feet of sediment off
of the North American continent, shaving it flat over the width
of the continent. Then as the water eased up,
it dropped out first boulders. Boulders that are 50 feet,
30 feet or 20 feet in diameter. And then smaller boulders,
and then gravel, and then sand, and then shale, and finally carbonate
to come after that. It's an amazing thing
to think of what kind of power was involved
to produce this phenomenon known as a megasequence. That suggests that
during the Flood, at least in North America, there were five pulses of sedimentation of almost
incomprehensible power. Another observation is that each of these megasequences
is capped by a carbonate. I've implied that the sediment of the sequence is made up
of particles that are smaller and smaller as you go up, and the carbonate at the top has
the smallest particles of all. That makes them
really interesting because the carbonate at the top of the megasequences
of the Flood is micritic, meaning it’s made of particles
that are micron-sized. A micron is a millionth
of a meter. It's the size of a bacterium. We ourselves are tens
of microns in size. They're microscopic, but they're huge compared
to micron-sized bacteria. This is a carbonate made
of micron-sized particles. So what? The thing is, in the modern world,
almost all the carbonate that’s produced (the limestone, the dolomite, that sort of thing) is made
of larger particles than that. They're not micron-size. They're millimeter-sized
or bigger. 90, or actually, 98% of all the carbonate
in the world is formed of much larger particles
than micron-sized. How do you get
micron-sized carbonate? Actually, in the modern
world we do produce micron-sized carbonate
in very rare instances. And in every case, it's formed by
micron-sized critters. It's formed by bacteria. Bacteria precipitate out
particles of calcium carbonate and calcium magnesium and dolomite that's
the size of the bacteria, micron-sized. But in the modern world, this is found
in really small places where you got lots
and lots of bacteria. This is just not
a normal phenomenon. And beside, when a carbonate
is recrystallized, which often happens, recrystallization increases
the crystal size. So we don't know
of any way to precipitate out such small particles
without doing it with bacteria. In addition, when I went
through geology classes, they said the carbonate
was actually made not by precipitation
out of the water, most of the time, but by crunching up
the shells of macrofossils. Those are macroorganisms. The shells of clams and snails
and things like that. And truly, those shells
are made of carbonate. But when you grind them up, you cannot grind them
to a micron size, especially underwater. Ever tried to fight
somebody underwater? It's something about fighting
your way through, and when you finally
hit them it's like, “I didn't really hit him. ” You can't put
the power into it. And this is where, if you got kids that are misbehaving and they
want to beat each other up, put them in the pool and say
they gotta fight underwater. That'll wear them out. They probably won't hurt
each other very well either, unless they drown each other. But the thing is
that in water, you can't crush things
to a micron size. So there's no way to take shells of organisms and make
micritic carbonate from it. So the only way we know
to produce micritic carbonate is by microorganisms. But the carbonate of the lithostratigraphic column
amounts to better than one-fifth of all of the rocks. In places, it’s thousands
of feet thick! This is weird! Carbonate produced in this
fashion must be a process very unlike the present. It's as if there was
an enormous number of bacteria that would be necessary
to produce such carbonate, such as a bacterial bloom. And I think that's
what happened during the Flood. Now the Flood was
not a good place for humans. You just didn’t want to be there
unless you were on the Ark. But if you're not on the ark, it's a bad place
to be a dinosaur, to be a human,
to be on the land, or just about anywhere
on the planet. But if you're a bacterium, the Flood might be
a great place to be. During the Flood
the water is warming up because it's being
heated up by magma during the course of the Flood. There's a bunch of humans that have been ground
up by the Flood, and their bodies
are floating around. Lots of food and nutrients. There's all these
animals and plants. All those nutrients. There's volcanoes
blowing their tops and dropping all sorts
of nutrients in the water. Oh my word, the Flood might be
like the perfect place to be a bacterium! And so in the midst
of the Flood, while most things were familiar with were
dying and disparaging, the bacteria are like, “Whoopie! ” They take off,
and unbelievable algal blooms, or bacterial blooms, might actually be responsible
for precipitating hundreds, in some cases thousands,
of feet of micritic carbonate. There's really no other way
to explain that carbonate than in the course of the Flood. So it turns out, the carbonate is not just
normal sediment of the lithostratigraphic column. It is, again, odd structures and odd sediment,
probably only producible in the course of a Flood. In addition, if we look back at some of these
things I've mentioned before, there’s good reason to believe that the banded iron
formations are produced by bacteria as well. Don't have time to get
into the rationale here, but there seems to be
a point in earth history when a whole bunch of bacteria, perhaps blooms the bacteria
in the Creation Week, maybe actually generated
the banded iron formations. If we look
at the black shales, what makes the shales black? Organic matter. Where's the organic
matter coming from? I think it's very possible that the organic matter is
coming from blooms of bacteria. In this case, they're actually associated
with what I believe are floating forests during the Flood. They’re underneath the floating
forest in an anoxic region, lacking oxygen. I believe there's algal blooms
that are occurring there, and the bodies of the bacteria, literally, are living and dying
and falling to the bottom. Because it’s anoxic, they’re not being decomposed,
not being broken down, they’re just collecting
on the bottom in the mud. You got a bunch of, well, I can't say billions
because it's far beyond that... it’s quadrillions! It's how many bacteria we’re talking about mixed
in with a Flood to leave us with black shales. Also, way up there
in the Cretaceous chalk, the chalk itself is
the shells of microorganisms. Not bacteria, these
are bigger critters. But nonetheless, single-celled organisms that are
in very thick accumulations. It would be an algal
bloom in that case. A bloom of algae,
eukaryotic algae, that is taking advantage of the nutrients of
the Flood to prosper. And then, we get
to our black shales that are associated
with the chalks. What an incredible contrast! We've got these
bright white chalks, and we've got these very dark,
almost black shales. Very often in juxtaposition
of each other. What's going on
with the black shales? Well, in the algal blooms what often happens is
the algae will take all the oxygen out of the water
in the midst of their bloom. This creates an anoxic,
a lack of oxygen, situation which often kills fish
and other organisms that need the oxygen in
the water in order to breathe. But under those circumstances, the bacteria don't need
the oxygen to breathe. They can live
in an anoxic conditions and will thrive in the presence
of all of the food that the organisms producing
the chalk generate. So the chalk would have
an algal bloom at the surface, which would anoxify, or take the oxygen
out of the water underneath, and the bacteria would respond
by blooming in response. Then they would rain
a black organic matter on the material at death
to produce black shales. And so, it may in fact be that the Flood
in particular gives us the mechanism to explain
the unusual sediments that otherwise are not explainable in terms
of modern normal processes. I have to add one other interesting bit
of research to this. This research was done
by Steve Austin in the Grand Canyon;
more specifically, in the Red Wall Limestone, which I referred to earlier,
in the canyon. He started this research in
a place called Nautiloid Canyon, a tiny little side canyon to
the main canyon of the river, which was named after a set of fossil nautiloids
found in that Canyon. Here's a picture
from Steve's repertoire of pictures of one
of these nautiloids. He's got his compass there
for size comparison and so on. These are cone-shaped shells that average about
three feet long. They start from five or six
inches in diameter, and typically go down
to a not completely sharp, but nearly sharp, tip. They have chambers in the shell. The organism lives
in the biggest chamber on the big end of the shell. It has an extension of its body
which goes through a hole which runs through
the middle of the shell. The organism looks like a squid. So, it’s an animal
with arms and eyes. What it's able to do
in the shell is pump water or air into the chamber, kind of like
how a submarine works, so that it can adjust its
position in the water column. It's a carnivore. It goes swimming
after other organisms. Here's an attempt at a
reconstruction of the nautiloid, with its long,
cone-shaped shell, a head, and many arms. It looks like an octopus
or a squid at one end. In this particular bed, there's a bunch of nautiloids
preserved in one bedding plane. Here's the Little
Creek Nautiloid Canyon that has eroded a flat surface
through the Red Wall Limestone. Each place you’ve got
a piece of paper here, we are noting the location
of an nautiloid. And here I am sitting
next to Steve there. We're studying the nautiloids
in Nautiloid Canyon. And here's a part of a map
we made of the location of the nautiloids
in Nautiloid Canyon with their orientations. There's a tendency for them, in one portion
of the canyon at least, to be kind of lined up
in the same kind of area. Most of them are sitting
in a horizontal position, but there's a few like these which actually show
up as round circles because the shell
is not laying down, but is actually vertical. You're looking straight
down on the shell, which is coming
out of the limestone. It's been eroded
away on the top, so all you see is a circle. This is an odd thing. You might expect that shells might get collected
on a surface and lay down horizontally. But you wouldn't expect the
shells to be sitting vertically and to wait for sediment
to gradually accumulate. Especially since, according to the
conventional wisdom, this limestone or dolomite
is actually generated at only about 6 inches
per thousand years. It's going to take a very
long time to bury these puppies. It's going to take longer if these guys
are sitting vertically. Much longer than
they could survive. In addition, not only
did we study the nautiloids in Nautiloid Canyon, but Steve began following
the layer they're found, which was found by
others in the 1960s, but Steve followed the layer
to other places in the canyon. He realized that
it's not just found where it has been it
has been previously published but it's found everywhere that particular layer
is exposed. In fact, along the 200 miles
of the Grand Canyon itself, plus over into Lake Mead,
and on into Las Vegas, and into the hills
over Las Vegas, he's found nautiloids
over the entire distance. It’s probably... I’m going to
guess...350 miles or so. Lots of nautiloids! Probably, if you think
about the total extent of this thing, it’s probably billions of
nautiloids over this extent. They're found in
a particular layer that’s about six feet thick. Here’s Steve. He's about six feet. You can see a rather
distinctive layer in the midst of the Red Wall, and the fossils are found
in the middle of that layer. Three feet above it
and three feet below it, there are no fossils. It’s just micritic carbonate, and the fossils are restricted
to the middle zone. This is a really weird thing! A water pulse will drop
the heavy stuff, and then lighter stuff. So things go from big to little. We're used to that. That's called normal graded
bedding, as a matter of fact. And there are weird situations where we can get it to go
from fine to coarse, but how do you get coarse in the middle and no fossils
on the upper and lower part? And that was the question Steve
was interested in answering. Ultimately, he came
to understand that the way you do this is with an underwater
gravitational flow deposit. Basically an
underwater avalanche. Now it has to be underwater, and I’ll try to
explain why that is. If you've got a debris flow
of some sort, you’ve got mud
plus the stuff in it that's moving across a surface. The surface isn't moving. The mud is moving. Right where the mud is going
across the surface, the mud is obviously
slowed down by the fact that the bottom isn’t moving. So the bottom layers of mud are moving slower
than the layers above it. If there's a velocity profile, the mud at the very bottom
isn't moving at all, and then the mud is moving faster the farther you
move up into the mud. There gets a point,
just above the base somewhere, where the speed of all
of the mud is going at the same rate. But what happens then, is if there happens to be
a fossil or an organism stuck in that zone of shear (that’s where there’s different
speeds of mud), the fossil will get turned and will get rotated
out of that zone. If the mud flow goes far enough, it rotates out
of the middle zone and towards the middle
of the deposit. And so that's how you get rid
of all the fossils in the bottom part. Now, if the flow is in the air, perhaps coming off
of a mountain or something, there's almost no shear
between the top of the unit and the air itself. So the velocity of the mud is
pretty much the same all the way to the top of the unit. Fossils will remain
in the top of the unit. If it's not air above it, but water, more specifically
heavy water in the sense that it's deep water, and that water is pressing
down on the top of this flow sufficiently, it causes the top of the flow
to again have zero velocity at the top of the flow, and increased velocity
towards the center of the flow. Once again, fossils in the top of the unit get rotated
towards the middle. When this thing finally stops, if it's gone far enough, and if it's under enough water,
it's going to end up with a situation
with no fossils on the top. No fossils in the bottom. All the fossils will be
oriented in the middle. And because the fossils
have been rotated into that central position, a bunch of them are going
to be vertical, not horizontal. You're going to get a mixture of
horizontal and vertical fossils in the middle of this unit. This is characteristic of
a deep underwater clastic flow. The only way to really
interpret the nautiloid bed is that there was
an underwater landslide deposit that ran along the bottom
of a deep water. In this case,
it's the ocean over the land. It's in the middle of the Flood. The direction of flow indicates that it came somewhere
from the east, ran across what is
now Grand Canyon, and this is really interesting: this stuff out here
in Las Vegas shows a place where it finally
loses its energy. It stays six feet thick
through this entire region of the Grand Canyon, which suggests that this stuff
is probably on a very thin film, hydroplaning for most
of the distance through the Grand Canyon. It probably moved
a hundred miles an hour underneath the water here before it finally loses
its hydroplaning characteristics and then breaks up. It kind of blows up
in the the far side. Where does it come from? We don't know, but it could be hundreds
of miles away from here. So what we have here is a unit
(here we see it from the air). Here’s the nautiloid bed
in the midst of other beds of the Red Wall. It's six feet of carbonate
that was deposited in seconds. It was coming along so fast! The conventional wisdom, again, is that carbonate is formed
6 inches per thousand years. So we've got
six feet of carbonate that would traditionally
be understood to be 12,000 years of deposition of carbonate. But here it’s done in seconds,
minutes at most. If you back up and look
at the rest of the Red Wall, you will see that's
not the only unit that looks like that. That might be
the only unit with big, old fossils in the middle, the only one that caught
a whole group of nautiloids. But many of these units have
the same characteristics, the same thickness, and it suggests that maybe this isn't the only
layer that's deposited in this fashion. So Steve was suggesting that similar flows
might be responsible for most of the deposition
of the carbonate. Carbonate is generated
from carbonate mud. He can extrapolate from this carbonate mud
to other types of mud. Remember, carbonate makes up
almost 50% of the fossil record, and 22% of the
lithostratigraphic column. If you add these
two things together, nigh unto three-quarters
of all the rocks in the lithostratigraphic column
might actually be deposited in this sort of fashion, with these underwater
debris flows shot into place very quickly! We're producing hundreds or thousands of feet
of this material very rapidly. So the combination
of the critters that are very rapidly
producing carbonate mud, which is then
being shot laterally and accumulated very
quickly in many layers, would suggest that we could
probably produce three-quarters of the lithostratigraphic column
in the matter of days, weeks or months at the most. What about the sandstone? We're working on the sandstone. There are sandstone units people have argued
aren't made underwater, like the Coconino Sandstone
of Grand Canyon. But the evidence
for underwater formation of the sandstone is profound. Most of the sandstone, like the purple
Triassic sandstones, are highly crossbedded, which suggests that they
are formed very quickly by moving water. The evidence is
that they're formed underwater, and some of those in
the Grand Canyon, for example, have 90-foot high crossbeds. This suggests that
the dunes that that's from are twice that high. 200-foot dunes. But actually, when you look at
the three-dimensional geometry, these are not dunes. These are sand waves. Sand waves are
a particular bed form that’s only formed underwater. The biggest modern sand waves
we know of are formed under the San Francisco
Bay Bridge by water that comes in during high tide
and high volume. Then as the water recedes, it has to come out
through a narrow inlet to get back to the ocean. And so waters speed it up
underneath the bridge very, very fast, producing
very large sand waves. These sand waves are
about three feet high. That's the biggest sand waves
we know of in the present world. In the Grand Canyon, we have sand waves
that would be 200 feet high! That requires a water depth
five times that, which is a thousand
feet of water. You've got to have
a thousand feet of water moving at several meters per second
over an extensive area. Basically all of
the western United States to explain these crazy
Permo-Triassic sands. The same with the sands that we
find across Africa and so on. So we're not just talking about water sitting
over the continents. They’re moving at a very, very fast pace to produce
the structures we have. I think we're very
close to arguing that the only way we can explain 98% of
the lithostratigraphic column of what we understand to be
Flood sediments is in fact in a global Flood. Even things like the phosphate. Phosphate is formed
in the present world in places called upwellings. That’s where water from ocean depths comes up
towards the surface. It's formed by a certain type
of circulation of the water that brings those nutrients up. It suggests that
during the Flood, to have a global distribution
of phosphate means that we've got some global
recirculation of water from the ocean depths
bringing up nutrients to the surface around the globe. This really can't be explained by anything other
than a global Flood. The last observation that I think I'm going
to make here is that from the base
of these Flood sediments up to the Permo-Triassic sands, we have fossil evidence that indicates that these are
all marine sediments. All formed from marines sources. In other words,
it's not just that they're deposited
in marine conditions, the sediments are coming
from what were formerly ocean positions and carried
to where they are now. There are some terrestrial
fossils found in here, but I’ve reinterpreted them as
being part of a floating forest. A forest floating
on top of the oceans. Technically all of this is
apparently entirely marine. And then, it's only after this that we get evidence
of true terrestriality mixed in with the marine. So it would appear that this Flood event was first
of all a marine event, burying things in
the ocean only, and then moved on to bury
things on the land. It very well could be then that the Permo-Triassic sands
are the transgressing waters of the Flood picking
up the sand dunes of the world’s beaches and then spreading them
across the planet. Subsequently, the critters that are found
on the land were buried. So the process is responsible
for the major features of the Earth's lithostratigraphic
column are global. They’re brought about by water. And it is a true catastrophe. It’s something that happened
very fast on a very big scale. It would have been
destructive as well. These are things that are best explained as
being part of the Flood, being part of the result
of God's judgment on human sin that came to the Earth
in the days of Noah. I think in the end there's going
to be no other way to explain the major features of the lithostratigraphic column
than by this mechanism. So we have here
extraordinary evidence of God's response to human sin. God does not take
human sin lightly. It is a serious issue. We want to think
that we're not that bad. But in fact when you see
our unrighteousness compared to the righteousness of God, His Holiness is so awesome that it justifies
the incredible power and horror of the Judgment that God leashed upon
this planet at the time of Noah. Thank you.
