Okay, I'm Kurt Wise. I'm going to deal with the issue
of the post-Flood period, post-flood epoch, or Arphaxadian epoch as
what I like to call it. Steve was just giving a presentation on
the Flood/post-Flood boundary, and there is going to be
an enormous amount of overlap between the two presentations. Wasn't intended that way,
but that's going to be okay. You’ll see a lot
of the same for slides. And maybe that'll help because you've probably seen
too much stuff at the same time anyway to get everything, so maybe getting it a second
time as a is a good thing. Not a problem. What Steve did was great. I enjoyed it. We're going to look at some of the same things from a
slightly different perspective. He was asking the question, “Okay, in a given
stratigraphic column, a given location, how can you determine where that
Flood/post-Flood boundary is? ” And that his focus. I'm going to take
a slightly different focus. I'm going to say, “ Okay now,
let's say we can determine that. We've already determined
that and ask the question, ‘What was the world
like in the post-Flood?’ So I'm going to try to step
through that post-Flood period, or the Arphaxadian epoch, and ask what it would have been
like to live there. And what was the world like? Now Steve actually referred
to a lot of that. You could infer a lot of that
from his presentation. But his focus was determining which is Flood
which is post-Flood. So we'll be looking
at the same thing, but from, again, a different
perspective of, “Ooh! What would it have been
like to live there? ” And the summary slide really of this of the post-Flood
period is this. At least, I like to say
that if time is along the horizontal axis here, and in other words,
things that are way back in time versus things in the present, and we start with the Flood
as the beginning point, and we’re looking
at the Arphaxadian, or post-Flood world. And of course, it's called
the Arphaxadian epoch because Arphaxad, according to the scriptures, was born two years
after the Flood. He lived for 400 years. So he's living through the stuff
I'm going to be talking about. So it's the Arphaxadian. I love the word too. It's cool. It kind of slides
off of the tongue, you know. Arphaxadian. It’s cool. So before the Arphaxadian epoch, whatever was happening during
the Flood was kind of big! And in time,
those same sorts of things that were occurring during
the Flood are still happening, but just on small-scale. For a lot of things, that really characterizes
this Arphaxadian epoch. BIG STUFF! Little stuff. And then, you know,
everything in between is that time in between the two. Steve talked about vertical
tectonics and isostasy. I want to clarify what this is. Isostasy is the simple concept that things want to get
to a state of equilibrium if they are out of equilibrium. So let's say you got water and
ice cubes floating on the water. If you take your finger and push
one of those ice cubes down, and then let go, the ice cube bobs up
with a very large, quick motion initially,
then slows down in its motion, and eventually settles
to where it wants to be, as a roommate of mine from from New York City
used to say everything. “ Everything wants
to be something. ” So we're going to
anthropomorphise things here. If you push the little
ice cube up higher than it wants to be
and you let it go, it bobs back down and eventually comes
to its proper location, where the total amount
of mass above the center of the earth is the same
at that location as it is every other location. Now if you did that,
not in water, but in, let's say, honey, obviously for one thing
the ice cube would sit higher. But also when you pushed
it down and let it go, it would do the same thing
but much slower, right? So it depends on the viscosity
of the material how fast. And that motion is isostasy. That motion of going
back to normal. I didn't say that,
so I'll clarify that. In honey, something more viscous,
isostasy still occurs. It does do the bobbing, but it does it
much more slowly. Imagine the earth itself, the mantle of the earth being
very viscous, obviously. If something is pushed
down at the surface, the rock is pushed
down at the surface, and you let it go,
it will bob up, but you're gonna have
to wait a long time. Okay, the viscosity
of the earth is so great that, by our estimates, that should take
tens of thousands of years for it to bob back up to
where it's supposed to be. Or if pull it too
far up and let it go, it will bob back down, but it's going to take
an awful long time. In fact, in theory, if you take a really
big boulder, say a mile-diameter boulder, and set it carefully
on the ground and sit back, it will sink. Let's say it's the same
rock type that the ground is. It's got the same
density as the ground. And if you sit it
in place and sit back, it will sink beneath the surface to where it evens up
the surface of the earth. But you well know
that if you did that, even though you've
never done that, you would have to wait
all your lifetime and probably never see that. Okay. It's going to take
a very long time for it to occur. The idea here is
that during the Flood, with horizontal tectonics moving
at meters per second, things were moved
around very quickly, and some things
were pushed up higher as they’re crushed
up against continents. You may have
doubled up material. I said that India smashed into Asia and broke
a piece of Asia off and stuffed it underneath Asia. Now Asia's twice
as thick as it was before. Now during the Flood,
things are going so fast, and the earth responds
so slowly isostatically, that that thicker portion
is going to bob up. It would automatically bob up
because of isostasy. But the Flood is
only a year long. There's going to be some bobbing
that occurs during the Flood, but most of the bobbing is going
to occur after the Flood. And that was Steve's point
about the isostasy. When you see isostasy occurring, that's probably going to have
to be after the Flood. The Flood does
things so quickly, and the Flood is so short, that
that isostasy will be evidenced in post-Flood times primarily. Some of the things Steve went through I'm going
to go through again because there was a lot. I know you couldn't write
everything down on that slide that he had there. Things that caused
rocks to be put too high or too low in the Flood
would bob back after the Flood. One of them is the issue
of the speed of subduction during the Flood. We have subduction occurring
at very high rates. Here's the continent. Here's the plate
that's subducting underneath. There's friction. As the crust is going
underneath the continent, it's going to pull the edge
of the continent down. The faster it's going, the more it pulls
the continent down. When things slow down
at the end of the Flood, then the continent is allowed
to bob back up again. Fast plate motion pulls things
down lower than they should be, and so when the plate motion
slows or stops, things bob back up. You have vertical motion
along the edge of continents. So changes in plate motion
will in fact cause isostatic vertical tectonics. Another thing Steve mentioned, if you have the continent and you've got a plate
going underneath it, it can potentially, theoretically, break off a piece
of the bottom of the continent and shove it off to the side. This is called under-plating. We take the bottom part
of a plate and shift it under the more distant
portion of the plate. Now the result of this, is that right here
the plate now thicker than it was before here. Here the plate is thinner
than it was before. The result of this isostasy is this stuff's going
to want to go down, and this stuff's going
to want to go up. So on two different
adjacent regimes, you're going to
have different types of vertical motion that occurs. So you're going to have uplift that occurs landward
and down drop seaward. We think, and Steve mentioned this,
we think that's possibly what caused the upwarp
of the Colorado Plateau. We think that out to the west, a piece of the edge of the North American continent
underneath was pushed underneath this area of Arizona, and then after the Flood, during the years
following the Flood, it rose up. So this is the same rock unit sitting down here
in the valley here as is sitting on the plateau. You can't tell it
from this picture either. It doesn't look like a big deal. But this is 5000 feet. This is a mile. I mean, you have
to put it on the slide because you don't know
what you’re looking at. No way! It's awesome! So this big piece of plate which is parallel to the edge
of the continent bowed up a long section of the western
North America creating a dam. It's a big hill there. It's got, as Steve described, a basin behind it
that collects water. And it can collect water
that's a mile deep. I mean, it's a lake that backs up against
what's now the plains to create very large lakes
after the Flood, which is part of the story. And in places
that vertical motion is bent. It bends the rocks such
as I just showed, but in other places, if there's already
a fault there, it moves the rocks along faults. And as he showed you,
there's a fault over here. And the upwarp is
occurring over here. This section is rising a mile, and as a result of
that it's taking this material and bending it. This material is going up,
so it's bending this stuff up, creating that deformation, which again, Steve
showed you already. And in fact,
it's quite a bit of bending. Another thing that could happen, potentially, is the plates are
being pulled down by gravity. Let's say a piece
falls off of it. It's going to come back
up as a consequence. So this is another response. Of course, it’s not going
to go up in that much time, that quickly, but isostatically,
it's going to rebound. That's another potential
cause of uplift. So in some places
during the Flood, we have erosion. We talked about
the Great Unconformity. During the Flood, the water was
shaving things off. Well, in some places, it’s shaving off
more than others. In places where it happens
to shave off a little more than something else, the crust is thinner
in those places. And after the Flood,
those places will rise. In other places,
they're dumping material. You got thick sediments. So in one place you're
going to be eroding, and in another place you're
going to be dumping sediments. Wherever you dump sediments
after the Flood, they're going to sink because
they're trying to adjust. Actually, it's the other way. The things that are thicker
are going to rise, and the things that are thinner
are going to sink. And we see evidence
of this in the present, because again, it takes
tens of thousands of years for these things to occur,
at least completely. So for example, and Steve mentioned this,
there's a lot of evidence of this in the Rockies. For example, Grand Tetons, and we’ve got
Jackson Hole here. And the Tetons, even today, the Grand Teton is moving
upward at about an inch and a half per year
compared to Jackson Hole. Now whether Jackson Hole is actually dropping
or whether Grand Teton is actually rising is
a different discussion. This is relative
to the valley here. The mountain is
rising every year. That's current activity. Now you think about
this a little bit, you realize, “ Um, why is it moving like that
if these mountains are 65, 70 million years old or more? ” If it only takes
a few tens of thousands of years to raise to get things
back into isostatic equilibrium. Why are the mountains so active? And that's an extremely
interesting question. Basically, the earthquake
activity in mountains, much of it is best
explained by the fact that only recently have
those mountains been raised to that position, and they're still
isostatically adjusting. Now if you go
to the Himilayan Mountains, then you’ve got a little bit
more complicated situation. As you probably know, these people that like
to climb K2 or Everest, it depends on the day
of the week, and the week of the month,
and the month of the year, as to which one is the tallest
mountain in the world. They're moving upward and
downward rather continuously, and the two trade places
on a daily and hourly basis, moving tens of heat
per year, vertically. And that is isostatic rebound. That's isostatic motion. But people argue that maybe
India is still pushing, and so, you know, there’s still some forces,
some horizontal forces. So there's dispute there. But in the Rockies, we don't think there's
any good reason to believe things are still pushing. So why do we have it? But even better here
in the Appalachians? That mountain chain is 300 million years old
by conventional dating. There shouldn't be
any vertical tectonics going on, except what might be
caused by erosion. You’re eroding the mountains and
so the mountains should rise. But that's not a whole lot. And, in fact,
Cleveland, Tennessee, not too far away from here is the geologically
most active region in the U.S. west of the Rockies. Three to four earthquakes a day. Now admittedly, they're
teeny-weeny little earthquakes. Most people
can't recognize them. But three to four earthquakes
a day indicate geologic activity in the Appalachians, ongoing. And it's a mystery to the conventional world as
to why in the world that should be the case. But it's actually
a consequence of the fact that we are only 4,500 years
since the Flood. Things are still
isostatically rebounding. The Appalachian Mountains are rebounding because
in the collision, subsequent to the collision, the Flood ripped off
tens of thousands of feet of sediment
off the top of that. And so the roots
of the mountains aren't balanced by the stuff
that's been eroded off. So the roots are causing
the mountains to rise by isostatic equilibrium. In places, again, where there was too much stuff,
it's sinking; in places where there's stuff
that’s been eroded, it’s rising. There's even the issue
of the water that was over the continents that presses the continents
down during the Flood. The water leaves the continents and the continents
have been rising, generally as a consequence
of the Flood. Then you have this issue
of glaciers after the Flood that dump themselves
on top of the continents, pressing the continents down
wherever the glaciers were. And there's rebound from that. So in Illinois where I grew up, there were what's called
hinge earthquakes. Earthquakes that are
caused by the land where the glaciers were, now gone, still rebounding
upward from the glaciers. So that's a phenomenon that we experience
in the present. So vertical tectonics,
the result of that, is when things move vertically and rocks are moving
up against rocks, we produce earthquakes. The intensity, or speed, of isostasy
decreases through time. If you watch
that little ice cube, it goes fast
before it slows down. So if you imagine that rather
than ice against water, you have rock against rock, initially the rock
is moving very fast. Then it's moving slowly. And also the amplitude. It's moving a long way. Later, it's moving less far. This would suggest that earthquakes should
decrease in intensity following the Flood. The greatest earthquakes are
probably in the Flood itself, stands to reason. Isostatic rebound earthquakes
aren't as big as these enormous horizontal-motion
earthquakes in the Flood, but the isostatic
earthquakes immediately after the Flood
should be much bigger than those following the Flood
and subsequent to it. So we have, in fact, we would argue since we're less than
30,000 years after the Flood that we're still
in the Flood, geologically. We are still experiencing
the effects of the Flood. The earthquakes of today,
many of them, are isostatic responses
to the events of the Flood so, geologically, we're still in it. This is part of the challenge of determining what’s Flood
and what’s post-Flood. Because unlike the beginning
of the Flood, which is like BOOM, on the same day all
the fountains of all the great deep across the whole
planet were broken up. Yeah! We can probably
find that footprint. Okay? But what about
the footprint of Noah, that footprint that he
made coming off the Ark? Is it likely to be preserved? And while he was
coming off the Ark, were the waters of the Flood completely back into the basins
that they are in now? Now there's good reason
to believe they were nowhere near the Ark, but in the Amazon basin, for example, it's very likely
the ocean was still up against the Andes mountains. In North America, there's evidence that it's all
the way up to Cairo, Illinois, and it's not been fully back
into the oceans again. So Noah is on dry land, but there's other places
on the earth that look like you're still
in the Flood there if you gage it on whether you're
above water or underwater. And if there's catastrophes
occurring after the Flood, big ones, really big ones, what's the difference
between a Flood catastrophe and a post-Flood catastrophe? Sometimes that might be
difficult to discern. So there's a transition, a somewhat gradual transition
in many places probably, between Flood and post-Flood. And it might be very dramatic, very easy to tell
in some places when we got Flood
versus post-Flood. In other places,
we are not so sure. So what's happening,
for example, in mountains, we've got activity
in mountains after the Flood that's going to be very dynamic. There's a good reason
to get out of the Ark, get off those mountains, and get out to some place
other than mountains because the ground was probably
shaking the whole time. I mean, the activity in
the post-Flood world was huge. There's a lot
of things going on here. It's not a nice world
in the post-Flood period. Another issue that comes
into play here that Steve didn't talk about is if you have vertical motion
that's occurring very quickly, and if it's happening quickly
enough, rocks are going from one pressure
to a lower pressure. And they could in fact
be moved at such a rate, especially during Flood, that the decrease in pressure
will cause their destruction. They actually blow up, like the kimberlites
that toss themselves up into the atmosphere and then
blow up and rain diamonds. We have material,
possibly volcanic material, that can get into the crust and push the rocks
above them up so quickly that they can actually
blow the top off. So some volcanoes
might not be volcanoes in the traditional
sense of the word, but they're explosion craters
because of rapid emplacement. We also have temperature changes
that are going to be happening. You've got cold brittle rock, hot material comes
in very quickly. It can fracture
and blow up the rock because it's all
of a sudden quickly heated. We have volcanoes. Big volcanoes during
the Flood, megavolcanoes. We decrease the strength, and you saw this
in Steve's presentation. Volcanoes are decreasing in strength,
decreasing in frequency, in the post-Flood world. And this is incorrectly labeled. You've already seen this. This is the John Day Formation. Not the Chinle Formation. Sorry about that. But in the Flood, we have very thick
volumes of ash. In the Morrison Formation, for example, spread
over huge areas. The Chinle Formation spread
over huge, huge areas. They’ve so wide a distribution
that it's really difficult, almost impossible, to figure out where
they came from. It's kind of like that question
that Steve talked about. If you got sediments
where you can't tell. They’re coming from so far away, and they're distributed
over such a large area, that we actually can't determine
where they come from, as opposed to
following the Flood where they're close
enough to the source that we can identify the source. And yes, I know as he said the Ogallala conglomerate
is coming a long ways. But it's coming downhill. That's a basin from
the Appalachians to the Rockies, and that's all downhill
from those sources. So that is a basin. On the other hand, when you find sand grains from the Smokies
in the Grand Canyon, across the basin,
you'd expect to find it, you know, downstream
from the source. But you don't expect it to go up and on the other side
of the basin. So when you got the Coconino, with sand grains
from the Smokies, then that's Flood. But the Ogallala has sources
from either side of the basin. That's post-Flood. Okay? And the same with volcanic ash. When you're finding it
over huge distances, can't find the source,
the volcano's gone, okay. That could well be Flood? And on the other hand, when you can begin to define
and identify the volcano, the source, and the volcanic ash is
in the vicinity of that volcano, then you're in
those post-Flood times. But you see, this is what Steve
has already shown. This is a decrease
in the volume of ash that's produced by
volcanoes after the Flood. It's reflective of
that dwindling power. It's also a
decrease in frequency. These big ones here are actually
to each other in time. It takes a long time. You have to wait longer and
longer to get the big eruptions as time goes on it. Also, this is just
a measure by ash. You can measure it
in other ways. For example, you can measure how much lava is generated
by an eruption, which may not be associated
with any of these. These did not
generate much lava. Other types of
eruptions generate lava. During the Flood, we have the eruption
of millions of cubic miles of lava in individual eruptions. And the amount of lava decreases as we get into the post-Flood
world towards the present. Now, we have eruptions that are teeny-weeny
little-bitty things that decimate entire
islands, like Iceland. But that's a little
tiny place compared to the volumes we see early
in the post-Flood period. Earthquakes. Again, we see the largest
earthquakes immediately in the Flood itself, and they decrease
in intensity following it. For example, I've shown
the Kingston Range before. But here’s a story
I haven't told with the Kingston Range before. We call this
a range of mountains. It's got a bunch of
individual mountains in there. There's a granite
in the center of it, with sediments laid off
around that granite. And the granite has a very
particular chemical signature. You can chemically
fingerprint the granite. And we found that the granite
that's in the Kingston Range, the Kingston Granite,
matches a certain source area. We've actually got
the base of this granite. Let me back up here. This mountain range
is without a root. This is a weird thing. If you find a bump
on the landscape, a mountain, and if things are
in isostatic equilibrium, you know that there
must be a root underneath it to keep it high. It’s like a keel on a boat to keep the boat
out of the water. If you see a boat
on the top of the water, you know that the bottom of the boat is not level
with the top of the water. You’ve got to have a keel
that goes into the water that allows the part
above the water to stay above the water. Likewise, as a geologist, you would see a mountain
and you'd say, “Oh! There must be a root
underneath it so that it justifies the mountain. ” It's why you have a mountain. This mountain range has no root. You look at the seismic waves, and you find
debris underneath it. It's sediments underneath it,
and not a mountain. Something's wrong here. First of all, isostatically, this mountain chain should sink
because it doesn't have a root, so that would suggest
that relatively recently it's been taken off its roots. Where are the roots? Well, we found that the roots are
about 60 miles away from this location. We find the rocks that are chemically identical
to the granites in this thing. So there was some event that broke this 12
by 12-mile mountain chain off of its base and then vibrated it across
the landscape for 60 miles. That's a monster earthquake! The earthquake needed to break
it off first is mind-boggling. But then you've got to vibrate
it across the landscape to this location. What in the world's going on? This is not anything we're
familiar with in the present. And it turns out that on either side
of the San Andreas fault, we have mountains. It's very possible that there are no rooted
mountains on either side of the San Andreas Fault
in San Diego Country. Every single mountain
has been broken off of its base and vibrated away
from the fault. So the Catalina Islands,
is that what they're called? The Catalina Islands,
they’re off of San Diego. Those are mountains that were broken off their base
and vibrated out into the ocean. This is bizarre stuff. And it can't be
a million years ago or 20 million years ago because they haven't sunk
isostatically into the ground. This is within the last
thousands of years. This is since the Flood. But what sized earthquakes we’re
talking about break mountains off of their foundations and then vibrate them
across the landscape? Fortunately, those
kinds of earthquakes aren't occurring today. But they were occurring
right after the Flood. When Noah gets off the Ark, mountainous regions are
not a good place to be! There are some awesome
things going on here. So they hightailed it out of that mountainous
region pretty quickly. We can also look at the climate. Climatic intensity follows
somewhat the same curve. Basically, the biggest storm in earth history is called
the Flood, right? I mean, that was one big storm. It was a monster storm. We have eeny-weeny, itty-bitty,
little storms today. And again, just kind of roughly, the intensity and the frequency
of storms decreases with time. Larry Vardiman has suggested that there was very possibly
a very different atmospheric circulation going on
following the Flood. In the present world, for example, we have
three Hadley cells of convection between the Equator
and the pole. At the equator, air rises because it's
heated by the ground that's heated by the sunlight. The air rises at the Equator and drops at about 30 degrees
north and south latitude. If you just focus
on the Northern Hemisphere, it rises up and drops at 30, and there's a circulation, or a cell of air,
the Hadley cell. Then the air that drops at 30 degrees
comes back up again at about 60 degrees
for a second Hadley cell. And the stuff that rises
at 60 degrees goes up and half of it drops poles
for a third Hadley cell. And that very much
affects our weather and why we have westerlies and easterlies and all
of that sort of thing. Because if you take motion
and then spin the earth, you create a coriolis effect which turns the air
in a particular direction. And that determines why, for example, here we get
storms from the west that come across here and come
at us from this direction. If you're in other places, you'll actually get it
from the east and so on. But Larry suggested that the post-Flood world
actually might have had a two-Hadley cell
convection system, where air rising at the equator dropped at about
45 degrees north latitude and south latitude, and then came up
again at the poles. And the reason for this,
he suspects, we suspect, is due to the fact
that during the Flood, the oceans were warmed up. They were warmed up by hot lava
that's coming up, forming new plates. That’s the magma from the mantle that’s intersecting
with the ocean waters. It’s warming the ocean waters. We have evidence
in the shells of foraminifera that we find in ocean sediments that the temperature
of the ocean may have risen about 20
to 25 degrees centigrade. So the current temperature
of the ocean is about an average of four to
eight degrees centigrade. It's really cold. That's the average temperature. It’s only the surface
that's swimmable. At depth, the ocean
is very cold. Probably the same temperature
as it was before the Flood. And then during the Flood, it warmed up
to room temperature. 76 degrees fahrenheit
throughout the entire ocean. A humongous amount of heat was stored in the oceans
following the Flood. That warm ocean then evaporates
into the atmosphere, aberration cools the ocean, that's a mechanism
for cooling it. But obviously it's going
to affect the world's climate. You're going to have
a very warm ocean, for example, at the poles. It creates, Larry thinks, a very different
circulation system. A very different storm system than we find
in the present earth. And that it's then late
in the post-Flood period that you begin forming
the third Hadley cell, and that it's in the formation
of the third Hadley cell that the oceans
have cooled sufficiently. By the way,
I’m gonna throw this in too, the evaporation is going
to go up into the atmosphere. It's going to create
warm wet air that moves over the continents. When the earth spins so that it's facing
away from the Sun, the continents cools very
quickly into interstellar space. They cool by radiation. The specific heat
of water is extremely high so it holds its heat, and it doesn't want
to get rid of it. But the rocks of the continents do not hold
their heat very well. They release it at night. So the continents
are relatively cool. So the air over the oceans by
evaporation full of water move in over the continents. The continents, being cool, cooled water causing
great precipitation. We think the precipitation rates following the Flood
are probably huge, maybe a hundred times what
the current precipitation rate is on the continents. Enormous precipitation rates. Now, you're talking about continents that are trying
to recover from the Flood. They're not covered
with forests yet in all places, so there's going to be
a lot of erosion. There's a huge amount
of erosion that's occurring. It is very rainy. It's a warm wet, rainy world. Okay? There ain't no deserts. Here’s another way
to look at it. Here’s a profound statement: the wettest period
in earth history, I would suggest,
is the Flood. And then things
have been drying up. Yeah, I know! It's shocking! And things have been drying
off basically ever since. The warmest period in earth history was
the end of the Flood. The oceans were warmed up, so that would be,
we'd argue, actually when Noah gets off the Ark. He's getting off the ark
to a much warmer world. A warm, wet,
high humidity world. And it's going to have
lots of rainfall while earthquakes and all
that stuff is going on. We've also got all
of this going on. Eventually, the evaporation which is cooling the oceans
cools the oceans sufficiently so that this enormous amount
of rainfall begins to come down in certain places as snow. It's coming down so rapidly
that it cannot melt. There’s just not enough time
for it to melt. And it accumulates in two places
in particular in the world, besides the high mountains. It centered in
the Hudson Bay Area of North America and Antarctica. It accumulates
ultimately as ice. Miles of ice are accumulated
in this process, creating a post-Flood
accumulation of ice. Caused, ironically enough,
by warm oceans. So the Ice Age, or the Ice Advance,
is caused by warm oceans, which seems contrary
to your thinking. Now, Larry has also suggested, and I certainly
like the idea, that during this period, there's sufficient
temperature contrast and conditions immediately after the Flood to actually
create very large hurricanes. Now, this is a picture
of a real hurricane, just a small hurricane,
a regular hurricane. But imagine a hurricane
that's much bigger. Imagine a hurricane that has Europe over here
and North America over here, and it's the
entire North Atlantic. And imagine that this hurricane
is not only large, but persistent. That in fact, it persists. It stays in the same place
for one or two centuries. It's a vacuum cleaner of heat. It pulls up heat from the ocean. Did you see the beautiful
pictures they had after Katrina? Hurricane Katrina? The hurricane’s path through
the Mediterranean up into the, wait not the Mediterranean, through the gulf
up into Louisiana? The surface temperature of the ocean before
the hurricane was warm. It had a warm
surface temperature. And if you follow the path
of the hurricane, it shows a cold zone. I mean, it just sucks up
the heat from the ocean and cools the surface
of the ocean along its path. So this is basically
an air conditioning system that is cooling the oceans. It's not a hurricane;
it’s just too big for that. It's called a hypercane. And we suggest, possibly, that there were two hypercanes
set up on the planet. One over the Hudson Bay,
and one over Antarctica. And they sat there
for perhaps a century or two, first dropping down rain, but eventually they get cool
enough and drop down snow which can't melt. Hypercanes are not just
theoretical phenomena. We have been observing
a hyper cane on Jupiter for 300 years. The Great Red Spot on Jupiter is a hypercane
that's the size of the earth that's been sitting
at that same latitude on Jupiter since it was first observed
three hundred years ago. It is still occurring. It's a big, big hurricane! A hypercane. And so it's very possible that this contributed
to the rainfall after the Flood. This is very early
on in Larry's work on rainfall after the Flood. I don't have better pictures
of more recently, but the point is that he's talking
about a lot of precipitation. According to this simulation, the highest precipitation rates
in the present, it’s from a place in Hawaii where it is something
like 300 inches a year, equals the minimum precipitation in the driest place
on the planet in this period after the Flood. We get lots of precipitation. The result of that is
in places like this, where we have the big upwarp
and a dam was produced, we're dropping enormous amounts
of water over the continent. We are filling that mile-deep
saucer with water. By the way, you can see the outlines
of these lakes in a satellite photo
of the western United States. You can see it. It’s just as clear as a bell. The exact outlines of these things still
are seen in the sediments that can be seen from the air. But that's how big it is too! We're talking about
an enormous system of lakes. Something like ten times
the amount of water in the current Great Lakes
would have been contained by these crazy things
before they finally, as Steve suggested, either overtopped the dam
or found their way under the dam or through the dam
through cracks in rocks like the Red Wall, which has got all sorts
of holes in it, and caves in it. And then once all of that volume
of water has a way through, it very quickly cuts a canyon
in the otherwise flat plateau. First one, probably
one lake collapses, and then the dam
for the next lake breaks. And then one by one,
one after another, they go crashing
through the canyon, cutting out 900 cubic miles
of rock from the canyon, and a hundred cubic miles
from the area's above it, for a total of a thousand
cubic miles of rock. And we see this in a microscale
as the work Steve has done. The excellent work Steve
has done at Mount St. Helens. We see that done
in soft sediments from the avalanche material
from Mount St. Helens. In 1982, there was a mudflow
that cut through that material. The eruption was in 1980. A mudflow out of
the crater in 1982 cut through those sediments, creating a canyon
in those sediments. Created it very quickly. Now it was cloudy. You couldn't see a thing. We didn't actually see
the canyon form, unfortunately, but it's always cloudy
at Mount St. Helens. I mean, it's impossible
to find a day, just about, where it's clear enough
that you can see anything. But we can constrain
the formation of this. It's forming in hours. And what's cool about it... I mean there’s so many things
that are cool about it. I was taught in geology class that rivers that run
slowly meander and you produce the curvy rivers. And by implication then, rivers that are formed fast
should go straight, right? Just as straight as an arrow. That was what I deduced. I thought that
that would be the case. So you would expect
that this crazy thing, which is only occurring in hours of time must be
as straight as an arrow, and it isn't! It zigzags back and forth
across the landscape, just like those little gullies
in your yard after a rain. The micro-gullies. They have the same features. And then these sediments which are full of water slump
into, collapse into, the canyon once the canyons
cut very quickly. Then there's avalanches into the canyon which create
side-canyons perpendicular to the main canyon, which is not the way rivers
generally come together with other rivers. Here's a river canyon
with all the side canyons coming in perpendicular to it. And that's the
characteristic of this. And it even cut through
solid basalt in places. Now, this is done
over time, again, but if you add up
each of the events, this is probably not cut in
more than a few days of time. Even though we got
700 feet of cutting that occurred here. And we see this also when we build dams
that don't make it. They get overtopped and cut out. We see the same kind of feature. But what results are
not the straight canyons or zigzag canyons, they're perpendicular
side-canyons that can go through rock or sediment. There's some neat things Steve and I have seen out there
at Mount St. Helens. I've watched erosion. We got stuck at one place. We were trying to decide
whether we should lead these people across
this little stream or not. We'd be responsible for their
demise if we didn't get back, so we ultimately decided
not to but we debated about it for a while. So we stayed about 45 minutes
at this place, and in that 45 minutes, I watched a stream,
carrying boulders, cut eight inches
into solid basalt. It was cascading
down a lava flow and bouncing off a ledge
in that lava flow. It cut eight inches
in 45 minutes. That rock is hard! I mean really, really hard! It was an amazing experience. I wish I had time to tell the whole story
because it's really, really cool. But the effect of the catastrophic emptying of
lakes are these kinds of things. And it leaves us with this feature
of underfit rivers. I was thinking back there that we should have had
a session on underfitness because, in geology, if you want to characterize
you want to recognize what was done
catastrophically in the past as opposed to what's done today. We have this concept that
under catastrophic conditions certain things happen. Like big things. Big valleys form. And then afterwards, when you're not
in the catastrophe, the subsequent rivers
follow those courses because they take
the path of, you know, least resistance. But they're tiny little rivers
in the midst of a huge canyon. This goes for things
like the Mississippi River. You go to the Mississippi River, the beautiful Palisades of
the Mississippi and so on, you can stand on one side and see
the Palisades on the other side. The big, steep cliffs. And the river,
as humongous is it, is a tiny little river in the
midst of a valley that is 12, 14, 15 miles across. And it's not flowing on rock. It's flowing on debris
that's filled this canyon. If you look at the real
canyon, it’s enormous. There was a river that connected
both rims at one time and eroded that canyon. And as it eased up, it dropped debris in and left
a half-filled canyon. The modern Mississippi River
just meanders its way along the top of that. That's an underfit river. It's not currently
cutting a canyon. It's not even cutting through the mud that is sitting
in the midst of the canyon. Same with the Colorado River. It's not cutting
into rock vertically. It's cutting over the pile debris that was left
behind by something that made the canyon
in the past and was much bigger than the little guy
in the present, leaving us with
an underfit river. A river that doesn't
fit the canyon. It's too small for it. You've seen this before. This is Steve's idea about
how the Grand Canyon was formed. And look, we have
this zigzag pattern. We have side-canyons
coming in perpendicular to the main canyon. We have all the characteristics that we see
with rapidly-formed canyons. We've just talked about the Grand Canyon
and the Palouse River Canyon, and that's cool stuff. We can go further. I'd suggest that all the world's canyons
were formed catastrophically. They just can't
be formed slowly. A slow river over an infinite amount
of time cannot make a canyon, I would suggest. Canyons themselves are
evidence of catastrophism, unlike what's going
on in the present. We also have more of Steve's work as well
from Mount St. Helens. He would have presented this
in his Mount St. Helens lecture, but it goes into
this post-Flood period too because we have fossil forests
in Yellowstone National Park. There are layers of sediment with millions
of trees, vertical trees, that look like a forest. But if you use the criteria
that Steve was talking about, they’re post Flood. So how in the world
do we explain this? These trees were used
in the 1800's, 1870’s, as evidence that
the earth is very old because you have a layer
with vertical trees in it. So you got to have
a forest grow. And then the forest has
to be destroyed and buried. And then another forest
has to grow on top of it. And then that one is destroyed,
and so on. And initially, they thought
there was maybe 10 or 12 layers. Some people argue for 70 layers
in this deposit in the present. So that's going to take
a very long time. You can't do that. I know we have
more time post-Flood than we have during the Flood, but there's only
four thousand years. So, how do you explain this? Steve observed that
in the log mat floating in Spirit Lake, after the eruption occurred
at Mount St. Helens, a certain percentage of
the logs floated vertically. Most of those floated
vertically did so because they had
root balls still on them, and many times having rocks
in the root balls. It was denser wood and that sort of thing that caused them
to float literally vertically, in the same orientation
as they grew. And what's cool is
when they become waterlogged, they drop down
in the same orientation. They drop all the way
down to the bottom, maintaining that vertical
orientation when they settle on the bottom. Then as sediment comes in
and gradually buries them, it will bury them
in that vertical position. I mentioned before the fact that Steve was kind of
examining what falls down and laid out a grid. He comes back and there
was a big vertical tree that dropped right down
in the middle of his grid. Wow! How could you do
better than that? Although it does ruin your grid. There's nothing else you
could observe in there because it takes
up the whole grid. But nonetheless,
it's cool stuff. A side-scan sonar suggested that there were structures on the bottom of Spirit Lake
sticking up that cast shadow like vertical trees would. And if the number of shadows correspond
with the number of trees, and if we project that
over the bottom of the lake, there's a density
of vertical trees a dozen years after the eruption that is the same density
of trees that you find in a living forest. So if you were to
carefully drain the lake and kind of look at it, you might say, wow, this must have been a forest
that grew right here. And it was buried where it is. But it wasn't! The water from Spirit Lake
washed a bunch of trees off of the surrounding slopes and dumped them all together
into one lake. They floated around that lake
and dropped at different times. They're from different places,
and they're allochthonous. They're out of place. They're not where they grew. But they look
like they grew there. And there's even more fun. Steve has some great
ideas through time. He had a friend that he ran into
who could identify the species of trees by smelling them. And these trees have no bark. The things are floating
in the lake. And Steve’s friend could cut
into the trees with a hatchet and smell it and look at it. He knew what species it was. Really cool. And so Steve's idea was to go
out and check the log mat that's floating on the lake
every few years to see if the species composition
of the lake changed with time. So I went out with him once. This is like the stupidest thing
I've ever done in my life. We park our cars
and we walk into this zone. You have to carry
these inflatable rafts. We take them down to the lake
and then we got to blow them up. And we find out that every raft has
a hole in it. At least one. Some of them have more than one. So as we put the rafts
into the water, we've got one,
sometimes two people, with their shoes off and sticking one toe in a hole
and another finger in a hole. And so there's one person trying
to keep the holes plugged. A second person is pumping
the air in the raft. A third person is rowing. Okay? And as if that wasn't bad
enough, you know, you get out to half mile out to the crazy logs
floating out there, and here’s this guy
who takes out a really sharp ax. We’re like, “AH! NO! ” I mean, the temperature
of the water is 38 degrees. We're going to die
before we get to the shore. There's no conceivable way. But that isn't enough. That isn't enough. You're doing this all this way, looking at a smoking gun,
a smoking cannon, a smoking explosion. In fact, there's
a lava dome up there that's not the first lava dome. There's been a series
of lava domes that have blown up and come where? Here! What are you stupid? But anyway, I just
did this once, and never again. I am never going
to do this again! It was cool,
but it was like “ Ah! ” So Steve gives a talk at the Geological Society
of America meeting. He's gotten this data
over the years, and it turns out that certain species fall
out more quickly than others. Some species just keep floating. There's one species, the Douglas Fir,
still floating there. Everything else
has dropped down. But what that leaves us
in the bottom of the lake, if you think about it, is that certain
species fell out first. They're deeper buried. Then other species
fall out later. They're not as deeply buried. And then there's the trees that are still there floating
and dropping down. Their on top. Ironically enough, the terminal climax forest
tree species is the one that is still floating. So this looks
like ecological zonation. It looks like a forest grew
there and gradually changed over thousands of years
to the climax forest. But it's not. It was a really cool paper. There are certain people
who really didn't like it, people that had
a different interpretation of fossil forests. But ultimately what this
does is it allows us to give an alternate interpretation
of the petrified forests that look like vertical forests. But alas, when you look more
closely it turns out that they’re buried
in volcanic sediments. The trees are
at different levels. There's no real soil horizon. The root ball
of one tree is right next to the root balls of trees
on another level next to it. The trunks are broken
off the same way that the logs are broken off
at Mount St. Helens. Roots can sometimes be carried
for some distance, but then they end
in a broken condition. They don't just rot away. And there's all sorts
of evidence here that indicates it was formed
in a very large lake after the Flood
with volcanic eruptions, humongous volcanic eruptions,
humongous lakes, that in fact
created floating logs that drop down in the same way
that we see it at Spirit Lake. You've got mechanisms
for rapid delta formation. Steve talked about that,
so I won't. But we see this
at Mount St. Helens. The enormous deltas
were formed very quickly in that period of time. Let's see. I'm going to skip through this
because I'm going to get to the question. We eventually
have desertification. It dries sufficiently
to create deserts. You change to a three Hadley
Cell convection system. We actually have
dry air coming down at 20 degrees north
and south latitude, creating deserts so that then we can explain
such things as older structures in Egypt are water-eroded. The Sphinx is carved
out of sandstone and has evidence of having been formed
under high rainfall conditions. Then later, the pyramids, which are younger,
have no evidence of rainfall erosion. Only wind erosion. So we have a transition
from a wetland to a dryland. And we see this
under the Sahara. Underneath the Sahara, sonar indicates we've
got river valleys. We've got buried forests. It was a very
well-watered region before it became
what it is today. And of course, that reminds us very quickly
of the biblical account where Lot is given
a choice of where to go, and he decides to go
into the plain of the Jordan, which was well-watered
in those days. It's the Dead Sea. Okay? It is completely dry
in the present. It was well-watered in his day. It is not well-watered now
because of desertification that's occurred in
between those two. Even the description of Canaan as a land flowing
with milk and honey. That's not what
the land is like today. Okay? It's not that way. There's a decrease
in temperature through time. We see this evidenced in the foraminifera shells
that I talked about. The ocean temperatures are dropping 20-25
degrees centigrade. I've already talked about
the mechanism of glaciation that occurred at this time. Also, the system
that's driving the glaciers, stacking up the ice, stops. At this point, the glaciers melt
back rather catastrophically, rather rapidly. You got huge volumes
of glaciers that disappear, or better yet, change into water and spew their
water out over the landscape, creating more canyons,
and so on and so forth. If it weren't for
one weird thing, I would suggest, they would have all melted away and it would have been
a very different world. We wouldn't have had an earth
with ice except for one thing. We have an Arctic Ocean. We have an ocean. On the other side of the earth
we have a continent on the pole. But in the northern hemisphere, we have an ocean
over the Arctic. When the glaciers
melted over Canada, the water flowed
over the Arctic Ocean. And it’s freshwater. It's not ocean water because
the glaciers are freshwater. So a freshwater lens floated
over the Arctic Ocean and froze. If it had been land, it would have flowed off
over a warmer ocean, and it would
have remained water. It wouldn't have frozen. But once it froze,
it now had a reflective surface. It reflects sunlight into space
and it stopped the melting. It kept the earth, for a while, cooler
and maintained the glaciers in Antarctica and Greenland. Now, that polar
ocean is melting. And as it does
its replacing reflective, highly reflective,
ice with dark, heat-absorbing water. That's going to
accelerate the melting, and in creationist terms we’d say it’s going
to be catastrophic. It’s probably going to be
dozens of years at most, not centuries, where it melts all the ice in Greenland and Antarctica
and completes that process that it started at one point. During the same period of time...I’ve got
myself four minutes. Huh. We've got animals
and plants refilling the earth. We have organisms that are diversifying
within created kinds. We know from the hybrids
of camels and from other sources that the entire camel
family is one baramin, one created kind. We've roughly estimated that the level of the family, or
in the mammals probably higher, the superfamily, is
where most of the baramins are. So the modern species
that you have in mammals, you're talking about
a little over a hundred, maybe a hundred and ten,
species per family. All that diversification
is occurring after the Flood. And the crown groups,
like lions and camels, that are some of the last things to speciate are found in
the biblical account very soon, within 200 years of the Flood. And so this suggests that the most
of the diversification of species occurs
within 200 years of the Flood. Now if you think
about what that means, that means that
in his early days, when Abraham was a youngster, every time he flipped
the tent flap open, he would see a new species that wasn't there
the day before. The speciation rate
would have been huge. You're producing
lots of organisms, and they're speciating
at an enormous rate. And we have evidence that species made it
around the world, to Wyoming from the Ark,
within 10 years of the Flood. They’ve very quickly moved across the world while this
diversification was occurring. We got horses
that actually change. This is piles of sediment
in this order. They change from
a browsing animal that's eating plants
under high water, high rainfall conditions, to a grazing animal
that’s eating grass. If you're designed to eat
the plants of the woods, you cannot eat grass. If you eat grass,
you will destroy your teeth. Your teeth will wear out because there's silica particles
in grass that destroy teeth. You need a special kind
of tooth, a hypsodont tooth, to do that. And so you have
to develop hypsodonty, which occurs in the horses, and the rabbits, and
the elephants, and the camels. It happens in 16 animal groups in the fossil record
at the same time, and at the same time that grasses appear
across North America. As North America dries, the animals respond
by developing hypsodonty. It’s an evolutionary
nightmare to have 16 different groups evolve
the same things simultaneously. But if God knows what’s going to be needed, He
puts the information for doing hypsodonty
in all organisms. And under the right conditions, they can develop
that so we have horses and everything else
changing rapidly in response to a changing world. Also, one other
thing for dispersion: when Mount St. Helens blew up, we ended up with a log mat
on top of Spirit Lake with a million logs. Here we are now. That was 1980. We're in 2017. So that's 37 years later. There are still
hundreds of thousands of logs floating on Spirit Lake. Think about that. Okay? 37 years later. Steve and I estimated
the float time, the half-life flotation time, of the Douglas
fir to 75 years. So it's going to be floating,
theoretically, for centuries. There's going to be
some lasting for centuries. Imagine the Flood. Take the entire world's forests. And some of those
are going to be destroyed and buried in the Flood. But what about the rest? What about the billions
upon billions upon billions of fossil trees that are going to be floating
on the ocean during the Flood, and for decades
and centuries to follow. The water that is blown by wind into currents is going
to take that vegetation mat that's going to float
for literally centuries following the Flood, and it's going to create
a transportation system across the oceans. Just hop on on one shore
and cross the ocean and drop yourself off
on the other side. So organisms literally
walk onto these rafts and cross oceans, explaining some amazing things in the distribution
of organisms we find today. We find disjunct populations of species that are found
on either side, opposite sides, of oceans. They're the same species. How in the world
did they get there? You can't explain it
by plate tectonics. You can't explain it
by any other mechanism. But they're right
across the ocean on a current. Even a current current, a modern current goes
between the two. My best favorite example,
the last one, is that we got the big tortoises
on the islands of Aldabra and the Galapagos. The biggest tortoises
in the world. They are in
the genus Geochelone. You look at all of the
Geochelone turtles in the world, almost all of them are
in South America. So that seems to be the source
of the Geochelone tortoises. There's a current
that leaves South America, going to the west, that goes right through
the the Galapagos Islands, goes across the ocean, slips in through the Indonesian Islands into the end
of the Indian Ocean, splits in front of Madagascar, and goes through
the Aldabra island chain. Downstream from South America
are these two islands. Now logs. Imagine logs. What's the optimal organism
for riding logs? What size would be optimal
if you want to ride a log? I’d suggest you’re either really small and crawl
into little holes in the log, and it doesn't matter
what the log does. You know, that's probably okay. Or, a second optimal
size would be if you were just big enough
to hold two logs together. And that would be a good way. Now if you could only
just fit on one log, how long can you walk a log as it's spinning
before you get pulled under and then get ground up
against the next log. I would say the optimal-sized
tortoise for getting off South America is the size of the tortoises we find
in the Galapagos and Aldabra. The smaller tortoises
would be left behind. Also, if you are an elephant,
kind of a bad size, you're too big for two logs. But a dwarf elephant would be
just the right size to hold two logs together. This would explain
insular gigantism and insular dwarfism, the phenomenon in
the world today where in groups of organisms
that tend to be small, the giants are found in islands. And in groups of organisms that tend to be large
the dwarfs are found on islands. And it actually is explained
by this mechanism of rafting as the primary mechanism by which organisms crossed
oceans following the Flood. So that's where
I'm going to stop it because we're supposed
to end it.
