Kurt: So that cliff
I was talking about, we followed along here and now
it's coming down to the… the trail level. Look at the…
look at the log right there. Del: Oh yeah. Oh my goodness! Kurt: Yeah, right in the middle
of that convoluted bedding. Del: This is… this is massive,
Kurt. Kurt: Yes.
Del: It's just hard to imagine this thing sliding down….
Kurt: And it continues on from here, so it's been half a mile that
we've followed it here. It continues on for another
three quarters of a mile. Imagine this whole cliff is not
in place. It slid down from above.
And the same cliff goes up the other side. So the whole
thing slid down into this valley.
Del: Uh huh. Kurt: It indicates a time when
this valley was cut out very rapidly — much more rapidly than any
process we're familiar with. Del: And that's all post-
flood here, all these…. Kurt: This would be
the Arphaxadian Epoch stuff. It's similar to the present,
just bigger, okay? And we see boulders
in the present eroding off of cliffs….
Del: But not…. Kurt: Not this scale.
Not this scale. Del: It's massive.
Kurt: This is huge. So we're looking at that Arphaxadian Epoch when we
kind of imagine — in your mind — that boulder sliding down
the hillside. Del: But the rocks
themselves are… are pointing to something…
to the epoch before them, to the Flood.
Kurt: Right. Exactly. The rocks that have actually slid down show evidence in them
of a time before that. Del: Yeah. So what are
we seeing, then, in the rocks? Kurt: Well, this…
this is a really cool place. This is a… this…
this is a kill zone. During the time that this rock
was being formed, this would not be a place
that any organism could survive. This was complete destruction.
This is catastrophism on a magnificent scale.
About half way up this… this cliff here, you can see
kind of a blotchy pattern. Del: Oh, yeah.
Kurt: Yeah. Layers above, layers below,
and a blotchy pattern in- between.
It's about six feet thick. That's actually what we call
a seismite. When you've got soft sediment
that an earthquake shockwave runs through,
it forms that sediment. And, in fact,
it settles the sediment down, causes water to come out
which deforms it. And that's called a seismite —
it's made by seismic, or earthquake, activity.
This is six feet thick. Now you're probably not familiar
with seismites… know how incredible that is.
We can produce seismites in the laboratory, or I can go
to the edge of a ocean — over a lake, in that wet zone of
the sand along the shore — and stand there. Now you got
to make sure no one's looking… see this — but you stand there
and vibrate. And if you vibe… you'll notice that when you do,
the sand will almost liquefy; water comes out….
Del: Yes, right. Kurt: …of the sand and runs down
to the… right down to the water. Now if you look closely, what's…
what's happening is you're vibrating the sand —
it's occupying less volume — and it's pushing the water out
from what was between the sand grains,
and it's escaping and then flowing down.
Now if you look closely, you'll see that the water comes
up in little, tiny volcanos here and there —
kind of bubbles up. And if… again, you got to make sure no
one's looking. And you go down there and cut
into the sand — in the middle of one of those
little volcanoes. You're going to see the layers
of sand going down the beach. But in that place where
the volcano is, they're bent upwards. The water has left
the sand and come out of the sand, creating what we
call fluid evulsion structure. Now in your incredible power on
the edge of a body of water, you can produce fluid
of evulsion structures that are about an eighth of an inch high,
something… a quarter inch. Earthquakes are bigger.
They can create bigger structures;
and the bigger the earthquake, the bigger the structures.
So a decent earthquake that is shaking buildings,
produces an inch or so of fluid evulsion structure….
Del: Only an inch, precisely? Kurt: Yeah, yeah.
Now the biggest earthquakes that we've witnessed in the last
50- 60 years, since seismometers have
been developed, produce 11 inches. The big Anchorage,
Alaska earthquake of 1964 — 8.2, something
like that on the Richter scale, monster earthquake —
produced about 11 inches of convolutions or seismites.
Del: Okay. Kurt: Yeah, exactly.
And as near as I can tell, when you double the thickness
of your… your convolutions — your seismite — it requires
an earthquake about 16 or so times bigger.
This thing's six feet, so it's six times….
Del: That's beyond imagination. Kurt: …of the biggest
earthquakes we're familiar with in the present.
So we're talking about a time with earthquakes
that are unimaginable. Del: Right.
Kurt: Huge earthquakes, probably no process on the present earth
is capable of… of doing that. And so we have a period
of huge earthquakes, but that's not all.
Because for that seismite to work,
you've got to have deposited that six feet of sand
very quickly, full of water — still full of water —
to create that. And so we've got six feet
of sand deposited very rapidly, then hit by that earth.
So we've got evidence of very rapid deposition, very deep deposition.
And you can see here, in one layer we've got what we
call crossbeds: the layers cross up into… You've got a bed
of a certain thickness — there's one there,
it's beautiful it's about a foot thick or so. And the beds within
that bed cross it. These are called crossbeds.
So if water is moving and carrying sand, it carries
sand in and deposits the sand down the front face of a dune. Del: It's like we saw
in the Grand Canyon. Kurt: Yes, you would have seen
some very large crossbeds there, and that's indicating
that moving water is carrying sand grains and depositing this.
So it's not just depositing sand very quickly,
it's depositing sand in… in moving water and all these
crossbeds facing one direction — they're all going that way.
In fact, not just here, but everywhere this unit
is found, you've got cross beds that are moving from the east to
the west. And this thing is found
from Alabama to the south to Pennsylvania in the north.
This thing goes across the entire north- south cross
section of the United States, indicating a time when water
is moving across the continent — probably about 1,000 feet above
present sea level — moving ocean across
the continent, carrying sand, depositing it very rapidly —
depositing it in moving water — and, simultaneously, being hit
by earthquakes — enormous earthquakes. Del: So what we have — I mean
right here and just this small area we have — the clear
evidence that this was deposited rapidly, and that there are these
cataclysmic earthquakes that are beyond our imagination,
that are all happening while all of this is still wet. Kurt: Mmm hmm.
And…and there's more because there's a lens
of material here — it starts thin over on this side,
and thin up this side, and it gets thick in between.
It's a lens- shaped structure. Kurt: That's a segment
of this sand that, while it was being deposited —
while it was still soft, it slid down. So the whole area
is apparently being uplifted, upended and stuff is sliding
down as it's being deposited. So we not only have
rapid deposition, but we also have this whole area
being uplifted. Well, what's to the east here?
Where's the… what's the source of the uplift?
Not but a few dozen miles to the east, we have
the Appalachian Mountains. So
while this is being deposited, the Appalachian Mountains are
being raised upward very rapidly.
Water is going over the top of the mountains,
ripping the tops of the mountains off
and carrying the debris into this area —
depositing the sand — and carrying the sand across
the continent. We can… we can trace this wedge of sediment —
which is thickest at the… at the Appalachians —
thinning to the west, past the Mississippi River.
We've actually found sand grains from the Smokies
in the Grand Canyon, on the other side
of the continent! So… so there's this…
there's a time when water was being moved across
entire continents, depositing layers of sediment
hundreds of feet thick. You've seen
it in the Grand Canyon. Del: Yes.
Kurt: Those great layers. Del: Huge, huge. Kurt: Okay, you're just seeing
a part of it — 200 miles of it. That's just 200 miles of it.
It carries across the entire continent. Del: Yeah, that gives you the… the sense of how massive all of
this is. Kurt: Almost incomprehensible.
Underneath this unit — remember this unit doesn't
belong here, it belongs up above. So
if you look at the rocks that are in place here,
one of these rocks is one that I would… I used to do some
caving in. That caving is done
in a crossbedded oolitic
pentremites-containing dolomite… Del: well, sure…. Kurt: You know… you don't have
to know what that means. It's just a very specific
description of a very specific rock.
There's tens of thousands of feet of sediment in —
of rocks, layers — in Tennessee. There's only one, a few hundred
feet thick, that is a crossbedded oolitic
pentremites-containing dolomite. That same unit is on the other
side of the continent as well. It's in the Grand Canyon.
There's a crossbedded oolitic pentremites-containing dolomite
in the Grand Canyon that has caves in it;
it's known as the Redwall. Del: Oh yeah. Kurt: Halfway down…
about halfway down the canyon. That's the same unit,
same lithology, same rock type. Kurt: Up in Montana
it exists also — tens of thousands of feet.
There's one crossbedded oolitic petromites- containing dome.
It's got caves in it — Cave of the Winds, for example, in Colorado Springs.
Del: That's exactly right. Kurt: You're familiar with that?
Del: Been there. I have been. Kurt: That's in that same unit.
You can trace the unit across the entire continent. And so it…
and contained in it, are little critters that come
from the ocean. They have been ripped off
of wherever they lived — like coral pieces,
beautiful coral fossils in this — they have
been carried, broken from where they live —
because coral has to be sitting on a solid surface.
If it's sitting in the mud it sinks into the mud
and the little guy dies, okay, so it's got to be
on a solid surface. But we find these coral pieces
beautifully preserved, sitting in — what? — mud.
We see them sitting in carbonate mud.
They can't have lived there; they were only dumped there.
So these are living organisms ripped off of some source,
thousands of miles away, carried across the continent
and dumped in places like here and across the continent.
So we're talking about a continent- wide scale event
that is depositing thick layers of sediment across
huge distances — thousand plus feet above sea level —
being carried thousands of miles from where it came
from in the place, while enormous earthquakes are
going up that are this… the kinds of things you might
expect with asteroids hitting the earth or something.
And mountains are being raised very quickly at the same time.
That's the flood. Del: This is part of what Peter
is referring to, is the Earth being destroyed at that time. So… so we have the evidence here
of the tumultous moment. But when you talk about little
pieces of the coral, and so forth,
those are pointing back, then, to the ante-diluvian period.
Kurt: Exactly. Del: And it tells us
what was there. What do we see in the rocks here
that help us understand more about what that world was like? Kurt: If we go a little bit
further down the same trail, we'll see some of that.
Del: All right. Okay. Kurt: Let's go on down.
Del: Let's do that. Kurt: So here we're continuing
that same cliff is now below the trail.
It's coming down, and it's coming down towards
the river here, towards the creek. And
this is where it comes down to the creek and then goes up
the other side. And underneath this overhang we
had some cool things to look at. As a matter of fact,
right there. See that structure….
Del: Oh, yeah. Kurt: …right there?
That's a fossil log. Del: You can even see
the bark ridges. Kurt: Yep,
the impression of the bark. You can see that right there.
It's an even bigger one up there. The curvature….
Del: Sure do. Kurt: …curvature of the log.
So we've got a number of logs in this particular sandstone unit. Del: So what is this telling us,
Kurt? What are we seeing here? Kurt: Well, first of all we've
got evidence in this… in this rock of flowing water.
You see this little pebble here? Del: Yes, right.
Kurt: That's a quartz pebble. See, that extends about three
quarters of an inch in diameter and several in here that are
three quarters to an inch in diameter. And…
and a pebble this size, for water to move it,
the water has to be moving at a pretty good clip.
Probably moving at about one to two meters per second.
It's moving from the east to the west. The water velocity,
apparently, to carry this sized pebble is what's necessary
to carry two foot diameter logs. Del: Makes sense.
Kurt: So we have evidence of moving water, which we saw already with the crossbeddings…
Del: sure. Kurt: …and all that sort
of thing. But here we have further
evidence in the things it's carrying. Del: Yeah, so… more indications that all of
this is just not laid down over a long period of time,
with very slow processes. But what we're seeing here
is something is laid down again rapidly under some tumultous
kinds of conditions. Kurt: And it can't be
deposited slowly — you just can't move water slowly
and deposit pebbles. Del: Those things would be
sinking to the bottom. Kurt: That's right.
You can't even roll them along the bottom with water moving
that slowly. So these are entire units —
I mean everything you can see, it's — you're talking about tens
of feet of sediment being deposited at a time.
Steve Austin talks about the nautiloid bed, for example,
a six- foot thick unit being deposited very quickly —
basically moving at, maybe 200 miles an hour —
moving into place and settling in place.
Huge masses of sediment moving very rapidly.
That's really the best way to explain this kind of thing.
Del: That makes sense. Kurt: So we have evidence
of the catastrophism of the flood.
Del: Yes. Kurt: But also it's carrying
evidence of the world that existed before the flood —
“that world that then was, being overflowed with water
perished.” Well, here's an insight
into that world. We're seeing logs from forests
before the flood. Think about the world's forests:
you got forests in the tropics, you got forests
in North America. Del: Yes. Kurt: The world's forests.
Now bring a flood on the world, destroy the entire world.
You're gonna bury some of those trees immediately.
But what about the rest of the trees floating on top of
the waters following the flood? Must have been trillions
of trees! Del: Huge, mass of…. Kurt: Huge mass of trees.
We see in Mount St. Helens, for example, right?
After the eruption of Mount St. Helens, that collapse
of the mountain went into Spirit Lake, pushed all
the water Spirit Lake out of the lake,
and the water went up — 900 feet up the side
of the hills around it; swept all of the soil and trees
from the sides of those hills, came back into what is now
Spirit Lake. At the end of that eruption,
there were about one million logs floating on that lake.
And over the years, they've gotten waterlogged
and sank down to the bottom of the lake. But there's still
a quarter million logs! Del: They're still
floating there. Kurt: It's been 35 years! Now,
if you still have logs floating after 35 years from a small
thing like that — with only a million logs —
how many logs do you think are floating around on the…
on the world's oceans during the flood.
And here's some of those logs. Del: And especially in a…
in that world before the flood. That Ante- Diluvian world
which could have been even more lush than
what we have today. Kurt: Could well be. In fact,
going down the path a little bit further we can see more
information which tells us yes, there is good reason to believe
that it was even more lush world and today, more trees
than today, and a little bit different.
If we look at these logs — kind of hard to tell from this…
from this location — but they're different
kinds of trees than we have in the present. Del: What kind of trees
are they? Kurt: Well, these are…
turn out to be what are called lycopods In the present world we
have scrawny little lycopods. We have herbaceous lycopods:
soft, short plants, not tall trees, but these are
arborescent lycopods. These are lycopods that grew to
the size of trees. So they are in that group
of plants known as lycopods, but they're unlike anything in
the present. And what's really interesting
about them is that they're hollow.
They are logs that actually don't have secondary wood
in the inside, like the trees you have around here — you cut
into them, you're going to find hardwood in the middle.
Del: Right, yeah. Kurt: You cut into these,
you will not find hardwood in the middle.
All you're seeing is the bark, the impression the bark made in
the sand. There is nothing in the middle.
In fact some of them are full of sand, because there
was nothing aside from the bark. And….
Del: Okay. Kurt: And so this is a weird… that's a weird kind of tree.
Del: It is. Kurt: A tree that has no central
core with wood in it. What's going on there? Del: So why would a tree have
now inside? Kurt: Yeah,
that's an interesting question. When we look more carefully
at this, we realize we have more parts than just the bark;
we find also branches, branches are also hollow,
and we find — well, you'd call them roots,
but technically they're not roots,
they're called rhizomes — but those are also hollow.
And the rootlets coming off of the roots are hollow. This is a weird kind of plant:
a whole tree that's hollow in every aspect — in
its branches, in its stem, in its roots, in its rootlets. Del: Okay, there must be
a reason for that. Kurt: Yeah, I think so. In fact,
the rootlets are so soft… can you imagine a root
that is hollow, making its way through soil?
Could it do that? Del: I doubt it.
Kurt: It's gonna collapse. So something's odd about this. Now it turns out in the modern
world we do have some plants that are hollow, with
hollow roots, and hollow rootlets coming off of them.
Now they're all little plants, they're not trees.
But every one of them are plants that live in water.
They float on water. So there's air in the inside of
the trunk and the roots that allows the plant to float.
That's part of what gave me the idea; and, actually,
Joachim Scheven back in the early 80s got an —
he's from Germany — got the idea that maybe these
trees are actually floating. That rather than their roots
going through soil, their roots intertwined
with the roots of adjacent trees.
The trees are light enough to float, and you have
a floating forest in the pre-flood world since
they're all bark and they float. If, once they're floating,
once you've destroyed the forest,
once they're floating logs — because these are horizontal,
there they're apparently floating in water to get down to
this point — while they're floating — and let's say
while they're still floating on top of the water — they rub
against one another and peel their bark off. Now once
the bark's gone, they're gone, but the bark can then filter
down to the bottom of the body of water and accumulate
as a pile of bark. And that big log mat can be
blown around by the wind and deposit that bark over
a large area. And if that was the case,
you would expect that perhaps those layers of bark landed
on a flat surface, built up on that flat surface.
When the log mat blew away, the flat surface would end
and other sediment would come on top and you'd end up
with a layer of bark that had a flat bottom surface,
a flat top surface. When that bark is… is
then coalified, you'd have a layer of coal —
a very special kind of coal: coal that's made of bark. And,
in fact, if we go down the trail we can see some of that coal. Del: Huh. So you would expect
that if we have… if we have trees that were floating,
we'd expect to find a coal bed here somewhere.
Kurt: Yes. We can do that. So if we
follow it, we can… we can go back and
we can take a look at one of those coal seams.
Del: After you. After you.
