The design of the presentations
on this particular day, which focused really on
the Precambrian, the pre-Flood, the Flood/post-Flood boundary, or Flood/pre-Flood boundary
was really my intent so that we have a day
of focus on this, to focus on things we
don’t know much about. I don't know
that that issue has come across. Each one of us, I think,
has tried to make it sound like we understand what in
the world we’re talking about. When it comes
to reconstructing earth history, I'd like to create what I'm about to describe to help
people understand it. Let’s say you have a picture that you are going to make
into a jigsaw puzzle. So you create the picture, you then chop it up
into a jigsaw puzzle with all the pieces,
you know in that fashion. Now, let us take the jigsaw
puzzle pieces and mix them up, and then make
another jigsaw from that. Okay? So you rearrange all the pieces, and then you glue them
all together or whatever in that new arrangement. Now, let's make a new
jigsaw puzzle of that mess. And then take those pieces, jiggle them up,
fuse them together, and then make a third
jigsaw puzzle out of that. Now put the pieces
back together again. You might find it
fairly easy to put the first order jigsaw puzzle
piece together and realize that you now have pieces
of an earlier puzzle that you now have to cut up and somehow rearrange
and put together. When you, alas, have discovered
that new picture, you realize it's a picture
of further puzzle pieces that have been rearranged
from previous time. And you then have to cut
that up, rearrange it, and put it back together again. The farther you reach back
in time in geology, the more of those successive
jigsaw puzzle pieces we have. We look at the recent geology. Hey, that's almost a no brainer. It’s easy to put
the puzzle pieces together. But the farther
we go back in time, the more the pieces
have been rearranged. The old rocks of the Earth, in fact, have been rearranged
a number of times. To make it worse, in creationism we’ve
got a catastrophe or two that really
muddles the pieces up! So the farther you go back
in time in creationist history, it's a really
substantial challenge. You can do the post-Flood
Arphaxadian period fairly well in a reconstruction, but as soon as you move into the Flood, you've got
a major rearrangement. The farther back
in the Flood you go, the worse it gets. It's even worse if you want to figure out
what's going on in the pre-Flood world because it's got
all the rearrangements of the entire Flood, and the post-flood world that have been superimposed
upon the data. That that sort of thing,
in one sense, would probably make
most people go, “I don't want to do anything! I will deal with the post-Flood. ” You know,
it's easier to deal with. For some of us, like myself, I like
the greater challenge. The more successive reiterations
and scramblings of the data, the better it is. But it is challenging. There is much, much, much about the pre-Flood world
we do not understand. And there's much
about those pre-Flood rocks that we are only just
beginning to understand. There's lots of them. There's tens of thousands
of feet of these rocks in some places and there's been
very little work done on them, partly because there's so few
of us to do the work. But also because
of the challenge of the interpretation. And a further challenge I
suppose you'd have to throw in there as some of the things
that Andrew was talking about. We have to consider what God might have created
in the beginning. So perhaps He created an earth with a jigsaw puzzle
already in place, and we might be
reconstructing a history that never happened
in those rocks. That's a challenge. Where's the line? Where does creation
actually begin? What I wanted to do is
consider at least one example of reconstructing some of earth history (specifically
a time before the Flood) based upon some
of this scrambled evidence that we have. It's specifically something
that, ultimately, I would interpret as
a hydrothermal biome. I first want to look at the data as it's often understood
in the conventional wisdom. There is in fact a superphylum, or above the level of phylum,
stratamorphic series in the fossil record. Above the phylum
would be kingdom. This is a kingdom level
sequence of fossils that evolution maintains
can be explained by evolution and might be a challenge
to other worldviews. And it's really most
easily seen in the fact that the Precambrian
has no macrofossils. In other words, no fossils you can see
with the naked eye. The only fossils we
have are microfossils. As a matter of fact, what we now understand
to be valid fossils from the Precambrian
weren’t understood until 1954. Before that, there were claims
of fossils from the Precambrian, but they have been reinterpreted
as non-fossil material. It's only with the advent
of the application of the microscope
to the Precambrian rocks that we discovered
bacterial fossils that we actually could see
in the Precambrian. Also, a closer examination
of these rocks in the very few places
on the North American continent where they exist just the Great Unconformity. That Great Unconformity is found
on most continents. It's very difficult to find a place where
the unconformity doesn't exist. Steve made reference
to one place in the Mojave, where we have
a continuous sequence through the Great Unconformity. You could run
the Great Unconformity into a sequence of sediments. So that's an erosional surface, and it covers most
of the places on the planet. But there's a few places,
about 12 places, on the planet where the rocks that eroded away in most places
are actually preserved. That's not very many places. They've only recently,
within the last 30 years, been identified and
recognized as such. In a sense, they’ve been able to sort
of stick some things in between the Cambrian and what used to be considered the Precambrian
into the uppermost Proterozoic. Then in fact, more recently, they've even inserted another
system beneath the Cambrian called the Vendian based
upon fossils macrofossils that have been found
below the traditional Cambrian, in those few places where we actually
have good preservation. And so in those places,
such as in the Mojave, we have a sequence
of fossils that, in the Archean, we have exclusively bacteria and
something called stromatolites, which you’ve already
been introduced to and we'll come back
to in a moment here. But these are all bacterial
or bacteria-related. We assume that
the stromatolites are basically built by bacteria, even though it's rare
to actually find fossils of the bacteria
in the stromatolites, based upon similarity with
stromatolites in the present. Miniscule stromatolites, diminutive stromatolites,
in the present are compared to the monsters
in the fossil record. The modern stromatolites
are formed by bacteria, so we presume
that these are bacterial. We've got literally thousands
of feet of sediment and places where all
we've got are bacteria. Then, as you move up
into younger sediments, you get to a point where in addition to
the bacteria (bacteria or found throughout the biostratigraphic
column) you will begin to find some algae. Single-celled algae. Unicellular algae. But algae nonetheless. And that's a significant
difference from bacteria. It’s a very
much larger organism. It's a eukaryotic organism. Its cells are about
10 times the set minimum, 10 times the size,
of a typical bacterium. They also include
cell components, organelles such as nuclei. A little bit further up, usually not very far
very much further, in the pile,
you begin to see protists. The algae, photosynthetic
microorganisms, more specifically the unicellular
photosynthetic microorganisms. Then we get unicellular, non-photosynthetic organisms
that we would know of as protists. For example, in most places
around the world where these things
first show up, they show up as VSOs. That's an acronym
for Vase-Shaped Objects, or Vas-Shaped Objects. Really funny little things that look like little vases
that you put flowers in. So these are VSOs. They are understood
to be protists, or the tests of protists. In other words,
the shells of protists. The algae showed up earlier as
what are called acritarchs, sort of analogous to
the spores of the fungi. They are resistant structures
that are formed when the environmental
conditions are difficult, and they form
these protective capsules. Often extremely ornate. They’re really fascinating structures We believe with
a high degree of probability that these are in fact algae. Although they don't exist
in the present. They’re really restricted to the early part
of the fossil record. Really interesting things. So we begin
getting acritarchs in, and they become very abundant. We begin getting protists
in the form of the VSOs. And then there's
a point at which, in almost all 12
of the localities, we get a group of organisms
known as the Ediacaran fauna, named after the type locality
in Australia, Ediacara, where these were
first discovered. This is a world
of very strange animals. They’re macro fossils. In fact, they're
very large macrofossils. Typically, you know, they’re between one and
two feet in size. Very small organisms. They are almost always only
preserved in sandstone. Sandstone isn't good
at preserving things in micro-details. The very large size is
probably partly a consequence of what they're preserved in. Very characteristic biota. They’re flat. All of them are flat organisms. They're described as
mattress organisms, or because they look very
much like the blown up flotation devices you might lay
on in the water with tubes that are woven together. Some of them look like worms. That's thought to look
like a worm. Doesn't look much like a worm, but they are large,
flat-bodied organisms. Soft-bodied. No hard parts. Above them, invariably
following them (although you sometimes have
Ediacaran fauna that continue), you have another group of organisms known as
the Tommotian fauna, named after the Tommote
area of Russia. These are really small. They are almost all cone-shaped,
calcium carbonate shells. You don't know what they are. They could be little
spicules on the skin of a soft-bodied animal. They could be a shell in which
an organism actually lives. In other words, there's
an organism smaller than that. The little guys are little. The largest one, I think, is about an inch long
or something like that. They're really, really small. They could be structures
on the outside of an organism, or an organism lives within them, or maybe
there's another possibility. In the fossil record, we have these kinds
of structures inside organisms. So who knows? We really don't know. But you'll have a layer of the Tommotian fauna
before you move, continuing on upward, to your lowest layer of trilobites, known as
the Atdabanian trilobites, which is associated
with the Atdabanian fauna. And there's, again,
an invariable sequence. There's only 12 sites, as I said, where you have
these sediments preserved. But in most of those sites, we have all of these
in the same order. It's just the fact
that you have an order, even if we don't know what
in the world they are, that is an interesting issue. Why is it
that they have an order? Of course, evolution would say
you just evolved one organism and to another. They might challenge
us and say, “ Well, if you can preserve bacteria, surely you can
preserve other organisms. ” I mean, especially if you got spores flying
through the air, which are very resistant
and easily-preserved. Pollen flying through the air
is easily preserved, even if you're a long ways
from everything else. Why don't you have anything else but bacteria preserved
in tens of thousands of feet of sediment. It looks as if, and it's the
easiest explanation, the only thing that existed on the planet
at the time these things were formed is in fact bacteria. So it looks like there's
a long period of time in earth history where all
that existed was bacteria. Then there was
a significant period of time, because we're still
talking about thousands of feet of sediment in some cases, where you have
bacteria plus algae, as if some of the bacteria
evolved into algae, and that's all that existed on the planet
for a very long time. These acritarchs are
somewhat resistant, and that's why we
probably find them. But again, if there's real spores
and real pollen, surely you'd have
those things around. So the evolutionary
explanation is that only bacteria existed here. Bacteria evolved
into algae here. We evolved our protists probably
from other bacteria here, and so on. It's the easiest, the most elegant explanation
for these creatures. And so that brings us to a location that Steve
has already alluded to in the East Mojave Desert
at the Kingston Range. We have a nice place where the sediments are bent up
at about 45 degrees. You can walk through
lots of sediment in a relatively short distance; although it is the desert,
that sort of thing. If you got things stacked
up like this and if you start down here, the sediments at this end are only containing
bacterial fossils. You get the VSMs
at this point in the stack. You get the Ediacaran
fauna over here, and there's an awful lot of sediment between
these things, okay? We're talking thousands
of feet of sediment. Very soon thereafter,
immediately above the Ediacaran, you've got Tommotian
Shelly fauna known. And then very soon after that, we got
the Atdabanian trilobites. It's a very dramatic appearance
of trilobites here. So you can literally walk
through a continuous sequence of these sediments and fossils. And it's not just true here,
as I said. It's true in the other locations where this code
thing is preserved. It's a total
of 15,000 feet of sediment that you can walk
through like this. We’re walking through
thousands of feet, 7000 feet, all bacteria. That's all you have. Okay? And I don't want
to disparage bacteria, because I love them. They’re wonderfully diverse. But it's that,
“Why isn’t there anything else? ” question that you have. And then there's another pretty
close to 7,000 feet where you got bacteria plus the one-celled
eukaryotic organisms before you finally get what some people think
of the more interesting things. As Steve has already alluded to, it's when you move back off of that area to the west
of the Grand Canyon, move towards the Grand Canyon, you get to where there's
a Great Unconformity that is there and you’re missing all
of those sediments. There's one place,
it’s Nankoweap Butte, where we get up close to those, but we're still missing a bunch
of sediments even there. But in the Grand Canyon,
you got the Chuar Group here, in which bacteria are the only fossils
in the lower part of. And just below, as you work your way up
to the Chuar, you eventually get to the 60-mile Formation there
and Nankoweap Butte. And just below
Nankoweap Butte’s summit, just below the
60-Mile Formation, you get the VSMs. So even in the Grand Canyon even though you don't have
a All of it. So even in the Grand Canyon, even though you
don't have all of it, the first trilobites we get
are actually significantly up into the Cambrian. They're not
Atdabanian trilobites, and we're missing the Tommotian,
and we're missing the Ediacaran. But we are getting the first two
of those: the bacteria, and then the protists and algae. In the Chuar Group we
also have the acritarchs and that sort of thing as well. And here we got about
25 thousand feet up between the lowest
sediments with bacteria and up to the place where we're getting close
to the boundary. So we have
a stratomorphic series. Again, even though we don't necessarily
understand these things, it is nonetheless some sort
of a sequence of fossils which is in different parts
of the world and must be, or should be, explained. The traditional interpretation
is that it’s an evolutionary sequence
involving vast expanses of time. So what do we do about this? Well, we looked
at the Grand Canyon. You've already seen
some pictures from this. Andrew and I,
Steve and I, looked at it at one point. Andrew and I looked
at it a little more closely. We looked at
this stromatolite forest where we could actually see
these bulbous bumps here. When you look at them
in three dimensions, in places where the sediment
has eroded away to reveal them, there are these
mushroom-shaped structures. When cut in cross section,
you can sort of see it here, it has concentric layers. It builds up in a pillar
that gets larger and larger as it gets up
towards the surface. Again, it’s kind
of mushroom-shaped. This is a hammer for scale. That's probably... it might be me for scale. Looks like he has shorts on it. Looks like it’s
Andrew for scale. I didn't think my camera worked. But anyway, it's the two
of us here playing around on these things. They're close enough together that you can walk
from one another. You can jump
from one to another. And yet their shape is such
that if they were, let's say, ripped out of here
and tossed somewhere, they would probably
be upside down. This is top-heavy. So these things are
all right side up in a very top-heavy condition. This would suggest that these are
actually in place. They haven't been ripped
up from someplace and deposited somewhere
else in the Flood. It strongly suggested to us
that these guys, as Steve suggested,
are actually pre-Flood. You're looking at
a pre-Flood surface. These little things grew up
in a forest of them. It's not seen in this picture, I don't know if I don't have
a picture that shows it, but you can follow this thing. We followed this thing
for more than a kilometer, literally walking. You could walk
from one end to another for a kilometer distance. It's amazing. There's thousands
of these things. A beautiful locality. Stromatolites like these are
very similar to stromatolites we have in the present, in Shark Bay Australia,
for example. That’s the most
famous locality for them. Probably the area that they're just
about the biggest. They can get up to
two to three feet in height in the present world. That's about the biggest
we've ever seen them. They’re in shallow water
along the ocean. They are often
in an intertidal zone, or associated with
an intertidal zone, in the present world. As the tide goes out, the bacteria will shrink
into the sand grains to protect themselves from
ultraviolet light from the sun. Then when the water comes
back in, they grow in between the sand grains and create a biofilm on
the outside of this structure. Then when the tides
go out again, there's usually some sand
grains or whatever that get a fix to that. And so there are
these alternating layers of organic and inorganic
material that grow over time. In the present world,
it's a very slow process. And again, the biggest ones are
only about three feet or so. These guys are significantly
bigger, but they have the same structure: alternating layers of organic
and inorganic material. You don't find fossils in them. No one that I know yet
has actually observed the fossil bacteria
in place in these things. But we presume that's
what made them, as in the present. So we're talking
about a forest of stromatolites built by bacteria. And when you see this in place, and this is almost what it
would have looked like then, but underwater, it's
as if it's a reef structure. There’s enough of these things
that they would baffle waves and function as a reef. And in other locations, such as in the Mojave
and other layers in the Mojave, they can be a kilometer,
two kilometers, in size. Not these little guys
like this, but very, very large indeed. There's places on
the Russian platform where they are 10 to
20 kilometers in size. Huge things. Now, here's one. This is kind of a gully here
that we're walking along and we got a chance
to see one in profile just before it erodes out. But here's another one
that eroded out and fell over, down the gully,
and it falls upside down. That's what you'd
expect it to do. It seems to argue that these things are
actually in place, and it's only
when they're eroded out that they turn over to their
proper hydrodynamic position. So it suggests to us that something happened
in the past before the Flood, because if these things are
in place the Flood would have, you'd think, ripped them up,
moved them around, and they'd be upside down. So it suggests that this is actually a surface
that is below the boundary that Steve was talking about. Using the criteria that he
defined, those five criteria, we can clearly place
the Flood/pre-Flood boundary above this layer. So it could very well be that this is a preservation
of a pre-Flood world. This would suggest that there were stromatolitic
reefs in this place. If they were formed by bacteria
in the similar way as modern bacteria
produced stromatolites, that would infer that there's an awful lot
of time involved. We need to add to these things
to the picture. Some of the pieces that have to be put
together here are what are known as the upper
Proterozoic diamictites. A diamictite (“di”
means two) is a mixture. It's a mixture of two different
sized rock fragments, basically. This would be like boulders
inside a sandstone. And it could be rounded boulders or angular boulders inside
a very different-sized matrix. These are examples of this. This is the
Kingston Peak formation, which you've already
heard reference to. Here are some pictures of some of the smaller clasts
in the Kingston Peak. It's mostly sand, but it's got these,
in this case, cobbles, round cobbles
and angular cobbles. The angular cobbles
would be called a breccia. The rounded cobbles
would be called a conglomerate. Because there's two
different-sized particles, two dramatically
different-sized particles, mixed together,
sand and cobbles, it's called a diamictite. Normally, certainly in the case
of water deposition, water sorts things
by size very efficiently. As soon as water gets involved you pretty much put all
the boulders together, you put all the sand together,
you put all the shale together. Diamictite is a strange rock. It would suggest that water wasn't involved
in the placement of it. Also, wind wasn't involved. Wind also would select things
according to size. So it suggests a very
different mechanism for emplacement of these things. Among these boulders are
some boulders with flat surfaces and scrape marks on them. Striations on them. Mixed also in here with these small things
would be huge boulders. So you've got a diamictite with sand, lots of smaller
cobbles and boulders, and then an occasional
monster boulder in there. Some of the boulders
would be striated, they’re smooth off on one side
and have scratch marks. So what in the world
is going on here? We see this
in Pleistocene deposits. We see this
downstream of glaciers. When glaciers pick up rocks, usually rocks fall
onto glaciers from above, but sometimes they scrape
up rocks from below. They get affixed
into the glacier. If they're fixed
into the base of the glacier, the glacier drags the rock
along its bottom surface, smooths off that one side, and creates striations. Also, then it carries those things all the way down
to the end of the glacier. There's a point
at which the melting of the glacier equals
the movement of the glacier, and at that point
the glacier dumps all of its material into a pile. Well, it's a pile
of not just these boulders, but also sand and stuff. It's grinding some of these boulders
into a fine mesh. So then it ends up in a pile at the end
of the glacier called a moraine. It’s a pile of small
sand-sized particles mixed with boulders and cobbles, including striated,
flattened boulders. And there's the occasional
monster boulder that rolled on top of the glacier and then gets dumped
into the end of the mixture. These are all characteristics
of things moved by ice. Again, it's not characteristic of things moved
by water or wind. So typically a diamictite is interpreted as
due to glacial activity. So we have evidence
of stromatolitic reefs, which would suggest
long periods of time, we've got diamictite, which is interpreted
as a glacial deposit and is slowly deposited. So we have an awful long period of time indicated here, as
it's understood traditionally. There's some things that are a little problematic though in
that traditional interpretation. For example, in the super phylum sequence we
have an interesting observation if you look more closely. This is interesting. This is something from a class I was in
at Harvard University among graduate students
in a graduate seminar. Typically, this is
the kind of thing where a graduate student
is supposed to run the class for a topic. And so each of us bone up on whatever it is that we're
supposed to do for that class, and we come in
and present for the class. The class discusses it
and that sort of thing. And so we were in a class
of Stephen Jay Gould. We were studying
the Cambrian explosion. That was the subject
of the class. So at this point, we're familiar with
the Ediacaran fauna, Tommotian fauna,
the Atdabanian fauna. So alas, different graduate students
get assigned Atdabanian fauna, and another person
the Tommotian fauna, another person Ediacaran fauna, another person that
the acritarchs, you know. So we got a dozen students
each coming in each time with different material. And after we were presenting
and discussing this for a while, we began realizing there's
an interesting characteristic for these things. The Ediacaran fauna... I got the signatures wrong. These two should be switched. Sorry about that. But the Ediacaran fauna almost
invariably is found in sand. And that's interesting that any given fauna
would be all found in only one lithosome. Only one type of rock. The Tommotian fauna,
sorry it's a misassigned, is always in carbonates. And the Atdabanian fauna
is always in shale. So they go, “ Wait a minute. This is something
not right here. ” We've got
a sequence of organisms, a sequence of fauna, that are each specific
to a particular type of rock. It’s a
facies-dependant sequence. “ Facies” would refer
to the type of rock. That's a facies-dependent
faunal sequence. We were discussing this. That sounds a little bit
like Walther's Law. It’s really a principle. But in geology, if you see a series of different lithosomes stacked
in a particular order, it could be that the order is due
to a transgression event or a regression event where the first thing
is formed in shallow water. The next thing is formed
in deeper water. The next thing is formed
in even deeper water. It could be that what you see vertically
could be reflective of what the world was like horizontally
at the time of deposition. So you're actually not looking
at three different-aged things. You’re looking at
three different things at different positions. So for example,
on a typical, traditional understanding
of a shoreline, you've got sand at the shore. You've got mud offshore. And you've got reefs
out beyond that. So you've got sandstone,
shale (or mud), and then horizontally
outward you've got carbonate. If you see a sequence
of sandstone, shale, and carbonate in
a vertical sequence, you might think that what's actually going on
here are three different facies that existed side-by-side and
are in this case buried on top of one another because water
came in over the land, or something like that. So we recognize
that this might mean that these three faunas
are not separated in time, but are separated horizontally. Their horizontal positions
reflect three different fauna living at the same time. They get buried in sequence only
because water is coming in, or water is going out. So at any given point in time, you got the
shallow water critters, and then the medium craters, and then the deep critters superimposed on top
of one another, but they're not different times. Now this was disturbing to this group that
I’m talking with because, of course, there
was traditionally understood a hundred million years
of time here. So, how do you reconcile this? Well, fortunately,
or maybe it's unfortunate, a couple of the graduate
students were assigned the issue of radiometric dating. There was a radiometric
revolution in dating of the Cambrian/Precambrian
boundary occurring at the same time. We recognized that there was
a trend of redating all of these rocks, and rather than there
being 150 million years, it was now down
to about 20 million years, and it looked like it was going. In fact, we concluded as a group that the data suggested
that this whole unit was formed not in a hundred
million years of time, but something less
than a radiometric pixel at five million years. When you’re 500 million years
ago, the Cambrian, five million years
is one percent. That's a radiometric pixel. You can't see anything
smaller than 1%. Arguably, you really can't see
anything less than 10%, but you certainly can't distinguish
the different ages of things if they’re only 1% apart. And so even though it hadn't gotten there
yet (it would in the couple of years to follow) we concluded that the radiometric
data was suggesting that there's less than a radiometric pixel
between these three faunas. Add that to the facies issues
with the faunas and we concluded these faunas don't represent
successive faunas. They represent three faunas
at the same time, buried in that order, but not living
in that order. But there became another issue once we decided on that
and were satisfied with that. We then thought,
“ Well, wait a minute. There's only 12 places where this is found
and they're all in the same sequence. How's that work? ” We're burying them
in the same sequence, suggesting that whatever process takes three different
faunas side-by-side and buries them a particular
sequence is occurring at this in the same way
12 different places around the world
at the same time. That was the next question. We then asked, “ Okay, how closely can we
determine the age of the 12 different deposits
around the world? ” And again, we concluded that we
cannot discern their age. We cannot discern differences in their age at the level
of the radiometric pixel. So they might actually be all at exactly
the same moment in time, and that the same event,
a global event, buried them in the same sequence
for that reason. This was getting more
and more uncomfortable for the people that were
in the group with me. And I was getting more
and more excited about this. This is like...this is cool! Okay, this is a global event. No time is involved. Perhaps there's no time sequence
involved at all. It suggests that,
in my mind, I'm thinking, we got
a global inundation event. A global Flood event. This suggested that, perhaps, the uppermost Precambrian is
actually the very beginning of the Flood deposits, and that they're preserving
a pre-Flood ecological sequence of some sort. Now, let's turn to the upper
Proterozoic diamictites which are also part
of the story. When we look
at these puppies in detail, we begin to see
some extraordinary things. It's hard to see
in this particular photograph. We have these things
called exploded boulders. We're finding these boulders
that are really big! And they're exploded. You can draw a line
around the boulders, and that sort of thing is
a little easier to do in place. It’s often sometimes hard
to do even in place. You recognize that all
the pieces are separated, but you can see where they
could be put back together. The jigsaw puzzle pieces fit. Just put them back,
move them over a few inches, and they just slip
right into place. So the boulder
and cross-section looks like it's been blown up
and then frozen right there. We have phenomena
called sturzstroms, which are very
large avalanche deposits. A sturzstrom is caused
whenever a pile of rocks, something in excess
of 1 billion metric tons, is dropped more
than one kilometer. If you reach those conditions,
even if it's in water, or if it's in air, or even in space, any one of those conditions you
drop more than a billion metric tons of rock one kilometer. What happens is
a sturzstrom results. So sturzstrom is a German word
that means “River of Stone. ” It hits the ground and shoots
out at 100 to 200 miles an hour across the landscape
as a river of stone, taking out cities. This is rock. And it moves as a unit until it reaches about 10 to
11 times its width and length, and then it loses its energy
and freezes in place. Not on a cold freeze,
but a *screech*. And when you cut into the stuff
and look at the boulders, those boulders that dropped
a kilometer explode upon impact. The pieces move apart inches and then get shot along
with (everything moves at the same velocity) sand
and that sort of thing that makes its way
in between the pieces so that when it freezes in place, you have an exploded boulder. And so we know the mechanism
of the exploded boulder. Now remember, this
is a diamictite. It's supposed to be a glacier
moving extraordinarily slowly over long periods of time, and then melting
the little puppy out. There's no mechanism
for a sturzstrom. There's no sturzstrom there. So that puts some doubt in
this diamictite interpretation as a glacial deposit. A second problem is
that these diamictites, which are found around the world
at this particular level, is that when you do paleomagnetic work on them
to indicate their latitude, latitude indicates they are
basically at the equator. Okay. They are equatorial. There's some other
evidence that indicates that they're going
over marine water. So they're equatorial
and oceanic. Equatorial oceans are warm. That's not where you expect
to find glaciers. You find glaciers
and mountainous regions. You do not find them
at the equator. If you find them at the equator,
they’re on top of mountains. They're not associated with mountains with
equatorial oceans. But many of these diamictites
are low latitude, near the low
equatorial latitude. So, what’s going on there? Enter parenthetical note,
by the way: after this work was done, since that time, the conventional world
has actually taken note of this and taken this
seriously and went, “ Well, I guess that means there were
glaciers at the equator across equatorial oceans. ” And so now there's another period of earth
history called the Cryogene, which is the period
of Frozen Earth. It's the period
of the Frozen Earth idea. Because the evidence
indicates we have diamictites at the equator, in the ocean,
it must have been that the equatorial
ocean was frozen. And if the equatorial
ocean was frozen, everything's frozen, right? My question on that, and I'm still
in that parenthetical note here, is if you've got
the whole earth frozen, how do you move glaciers? How do glaciers pick up rocks
and move and drop rocks? They can't! Nobody can move! They’re frozen. So the very evidence
that was used to determine that this is a Cryogene
cannot be produced if there was a Cryogene. You can't do it! I'm baffled by why in the world
this became popular. At one point
it was suggested, and man, it went crazy. It's currently an actual period of time in geologic record, in
the lithostratigraphic column. The Cryogene. Are you kidding? But anyway, close
parenthetical note. There's the low-latitude
paleo-mag evidence. This stuff is thick! It's an excess
of a mile in thickness. The diamictite is huge. Diamictites produced by modern glaciers are
tens of feet thick. Tens of feet in depth. Pleistocene glaciation
produced tens, maybe up to a hundred feet. There's 72 feet
of gravel under Chicago. That's pretty deep. For places with glaciers,
that's pretty deep. These things are
in excess of one mile. They dwarf any known
glaciers we have today, quite significantly. Actually, I had to stop
doing research in this area because it killed off
all my assistants. They wouldn't come
with me anymore. But I was deducing, I think I was right
on the verge of concluding that actually the true depth
of this unit is something in excess of three miles. So I think it's even
thicker than a mile. Also there are enormous
boulders in here. Steve has made allusion to this. This is one of the smaller ones, about a quarter
mile in diameter. It's actually funny. Steve and I started
work on this area. We just so happened
to choose this one place, and we started to work on this. We're taking geological
observations, making geological observations for days. And we're putting in faults
and this sort of thing where you would put in faults because we change the angle
of the rock and all of this. At the end of this,
Steve says, “ Yeah, there's something wrong here. This is not working. ” Our faults were beginning
to define a circle. That's not what faults do. He says, “Do you think we're
actually on a boulder? ” When you're on the ground and
you got something that big... how do you know that? We mapped for days on a boulder! Didn't realize we were
on one boulder! The boulder is itself
layers of rocks. So there's a geology
in the boulder. But it doesn't match the geology
of the stuff it's in. Eventually, you know, we got our heads screwed
on right and we realized, “ Oh, this is a boulder. Cool! ” And then that began a series
of discoveries of boulders. Bigger and bigger boulders. We even rented a plane
at one point to see this because you just can’t see
it from the ground. Now it's even better. You can go on Google Earth. The best photos of these things
are from Google Earth because they're so big! This is amazing. So now, here's a problem. When you get up to...and some
of these are bigger. There are
mile-in-diameter boulders. When you get to that mass, that size, they’ve got
a fair bit of mass to them. There's a problem with ice. If you put enough
pressure on ice, because of the strange
characteristics of water, that upon freezing
or very close to freezing, it actually expands. And if you put enough pressure
on ice it actually melts. It is the only substance
that does that in the universe. Okay? But if you put a big enough rock
in ice or on ice, it melts the ice underneath it. The ice might be able
to roll it in front of it, but it can't carry a boulder
that is a mile in diameter. It melts the ice underneath it. So we've got this problem
with these enormous boulders. And they're not just
enormous boulders, they’re imbricated. They're laying on top
of one another. You can't have floating ice
carrying a boulder that big and dropping
it as a drop stone. It just don't work! So that suggests
something is not right with the glacial interpretation. And again, here we have
boulders, big boulders, out here imbricated in place. A bunch of them. One layer with three
of them sitting on top of one another imbricated. There's several more over here. These particular ones are
about a mile in diameter. About 200 meters thick. Kind of dinner
plate-shaped things, sitting in place
and stacked in this fashion. You can't explain this as if there's a current
or an avalanche direction in a particular direction, which suggested to us that this is not at
all a glacial deposit. This is an avalanche deposit. You got the sturzstrom-caused,
exploded boulders. You're carrying
enormous boulders. This is an enormous deposit,
an enormous avalanche deposit, that apparently dropped
a long-distance something in excess of one kilometer, and then shot quickly
across the landscape. It's an avalanche deposit
that's more than a mile thick. This is a monstrous
avalanche deposit. And the thing is, about this, is that you can find
these puppies the same age around the world. So these are
not glacial deposits. By the way,
the striated boulders, that avalanche material, it's the same way glaciers
smooth out boulders and then striate them. This avalanche does
the same thing to boulders. So we can explain all of the features
of the diamictite and everything by this. But we find these crazy things
through the middle of Australia, through the middle of Asia. They’re global, and they're dated within
a radiometric pixel of what. They're the same age. Whoa, what's going on here? It suggests that
we've got an event that created avalanches
worldwide of enormous extent. What could this possibly be? We suggested that, in fact, this is
the collapse of the edge of the pre-Flood continent
before the Flood. Big pieces of continental mass
broke off and fell. Again, in the current ocean
you got four kilometers depth between the edge
of the continent and the bottom of the ocean. You've got the sufficient
vertical space to get a sturzstrom kind of situation. And if it's a big enough hit, you can collapse
the continental margins around the entire world. So we're talking about
the pre-Flood/Flood boundary. I've got a pile of rocks
here in the Mojave, and a pile of rocks
in the Grand Canyon. We've got the discontinuities
that I referred to before. This allows us to determine where the pre-Flood/Flood
boundary is likely to be. And I'm going to
skip through this. You've already seen
this particular diagram. We'd suggest that
the pre-Flood/Flood boundary is in these positions. Basically at the base
of the Kingston. We're in the middle
of the Kingston Peak formation in the Mojave, and that puts the stromatolites
below this point. So the stromatolites can be
actually a preservation of a pre-Flood world. Here we have a sequence of rocks
leading up to the boundary. So these are pre-Flood rocks. We have a whole bunch
of pre-Flood rocks, and for our purposes here
just to introduce the fact that there is intruded
into them a very thick diabase. It's a very thick molten unit that was stuck into the middle
of these sediments. And so if we look at what's
underneath the stromatolites, we have a lot of sediments
formed by water which are intruded by
a big diabase sill. In fact, there's
more than one sill. So if we look
at the history of this, we have the deposition of
thousands of feet of sediment, which we suspect is due
to the raising of continents and the running off of sediment
from those continents. We have a very big... what do you call it? “ Package” of sediment. Then we have the intrusion
of an igneous unit in the midst of those sediments. And then it's later that we have the formation of,
in that particular area, what’s known as
the Beck Spring Formation. There's a number of evidences
that indicate that it is, in fact, formed by
hot water, probably from this diabase cooling. It's giving off its heat. The heat has been
carried by water, and we're producing a limestone
by hydrothermal activity. This is the context upon which
the stromatolites are observed. So here's some of the evidences
for the hydrothermal activity. We can skip through that. In the Grand Canyon, we also have evidence
of intrusion into sediments that we think were formed in Day 3 of the Creation Week
by the raising the continents. Radiometrically, they are
identical in age to that which is intruded
into the Mojave Desert. That sill in the Mojave Desert is identical in age
to these intrusions here, and chemically it is identical. In fact, it's identical to intrusions that are found
in the midcontinent and across an enormous area. It appears that after
the Day 3 regression, there was an intrusion across the North
American/Laurentian area of this huge body
of hot molten rock that is then cooling by
water coming up through it, picking up its heat
and devolving onto the surface. Taking this hot material and bringing it up
to the surface. Creating hot springs,
very hot springs, at the surface. It's in that context that we find the stromatolitic
reefs of the Grand Canyon. So it's my hypothesis that these stromatolitic reefs
are formed in the hot water by this intrusion. The reason that you don't have
anything but bacteria in these rocks is because nothing else
can live in these rocks. These bacteria are
specially designed for that hydrothermal situation, and it's probably why we
don't even find the fossils of the microorganisms
in the stromatolites. It would decompose
organic matter. And probably even if there were spores
and that sort of thing that floated into this, that's all decomposed by
the hydrothermal situation. And so we reconstruct the edge
of the continent just before the Flood as having
a stromatolitic reef along, in this case, the western margin
of Laurentia with the material underneath intruded by
a very thick hot magma that is producing
heat at the surface, producing hot springs
along here, so the only thing
that can live here are the bacteria
generating these reefs. That in turn produces a lagoon in between the westernmost
portion of the continent and the terrestrial portion
of the continent. In that lagoon we can have
microorganisms living there. I would suggest
your Ediacaran fauna are living in sands that are
at one particular location, probably deep because
of their morphology. Tommotian fauna living
in a carbonate environment, and the Atdabanian
fauna living in muds that are closer to the land. And probably,
more than anything, it's the temperature
of the water that is determining what's living where
in this particular sequence. Then when the Flood comes along, then, that big earthquake
at the beginning of the Flood collapsed the margin
of the continent. For 1600 years we're
building up stromatolites and critters are living
happily so on and so forth. Then at the beginning
of the Flood, there's a collapse
of the continental margin around the world. Big huge pieces of the stromatolitic reef
of all sorts of things collapse into deep water
creating avalanche deposits into the deep water. That opens up
or breaches the reef for the sequential deposition
of the Ediacaran fauna, the Tommotian fauna, and the Atdabanian fauna as it gets carried
in there by the undertow that Steve was talking about. But anyway, what we've got here is
our inference this week on at least one pre-flood ecosystem. When we study the rocks, again, there’s a traditional
interpretation of the rocks. There is a traditional
conventional explanation for these rocks that there's the evolution
of communities through time and that there's glacial activity going on
to produce the diamictites. But when you look more closely, something’s not quite right
with that interpretation. You don't actually
have the time sequence for the faunas. They are all living
simultaneously at the same time. This is not an evolutionary
progression at all. The diamictites are not actually
generated by glaciers. You have to invoke
a different mechanism. And as soon as you get
a reasonable mechanism for them, you've got a catastrophic
situation which is consistent with the catastrophe we hypothesize for
the Flood itself. So I propose that there is or was
a pre-Flood ecosystem of hydrothermal reefs made by
bacteria in the pre-Flood world that was never generated
after the Flood because we don't have those kind
of conditions anywhere in the world after the Flood, and that the collapse of that system explains
the order of the early faunas, the early Precambrian
macrofaunas that we find in the fossil record. Thank you.
