Why so many layers in a single flood event?
Lou asked how can all these layers come from a single event. I think one reason this question comes up is that we tend to think of the flood as like filling up a bath tub with some sand in it, stirring the sand around in the water, then letting the sand settle and the draining the water. that would leave a record a single event.
I find this idea of the flood very simplistic. Instead I think of the flood as a series of thousands of cataclysmic events each of which has left a record of its effects in the geologic record. And these events are not necessarily global in effect. many are local.
I envision the flood to have been precipitated by a "storm" of asteroid impacts, (over 170 impact structures have been located so far on the continents in flood sediments) of all sizes over a period of the first 150 days of the flood. Each asteroid impact would cause different levels of destruction and deposition according to it's kinetic energy. The most immediate effects would be extreme destruction within the "death zone" of the impact. There would be impact-quake effects. large quantities of water vapor, rock vapor, liquid water would be injected into and above the atmosphere. Rock fragments of all sizes would be thrown around in all directions. Besides massively disrupting the atmosphere with the atomic sized explosions which would set in motion massive evaporation and associated condensation and precipitation, the impact ejected water and vapor would cascade down in cataracts on a global scale and meta-hurricane wind speeds. While rains would cause flooding of rivers, the most massive destruction would be caused by thousands of impact tsunami, some up to 3 kilometers high, which would invade the continents from every direction. Each tsunami would cause its own destruction and deposition as it moves inland and across continents. Add to this the tidal effects of the moon on the flooding waters which would wax and wane as the tides move at jet plane speeds around the globe. And then the atmosphere, which had all but been nearly destroyed by hundreds if not thousands of impact explosions would struggle to seek equilibrium again and the climate of the world would adjust to new conditions brought on by the catastrophe.
That is a rather simplified version of what I believe happened during the flood. Each event would cause a record to be left in the sedimentary deposits. And thus we get what we see in the above photo.
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Permalink Reply by David Thomas Posey on -
When Michael Oard was the "expert", he said that he believed the areas that are now land would have had to sink lower than the surrounding sea in order for the sediment to run down and settle there. Does that make sense to y'all geologists?
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Permalink Reply by Allen Roy on -
@ Posey. Oard is a good friend of mine. however, he and I have different flood models. in the case of tsunami flooding the continents, they would not need to be lower than the oceans. As tsunami sweep ashore, the breaking front of the wave acts like a gigantic grinding machine (or perhaps one might envision an old rotary lawn mower) which rips up whatever is in front of it down to a certain depth depending upon the energy of the wave and the material it is grinding over. the material, (rock, mud, houses, trees, etc) is picked up into the wave. immediately behind the high energy breaker is calmer water, it is flowing forwards fast, but no longer chaotic. as the material in the water gets left behind by the breaker, it immediatly begins to drop out of the water, depending upon shape and density. The heaviest and largest things first. As the following water looses more and more energy, more and more material drops out of the water.||
The result is that a deposition layer forms immediately following the passing of the chaotic breaker front. So the tsunami both rips up and deposits at the same time (but in different parts of the wave). And this all happenes while the wave is flowing up hill onto the continents. And if the tsunami is large enough and the continent not too high, the tsunami can pass right over it, ripping and depositing at the same time.
Different tsunami, coming from different directions, would pick up and carry different loads of different types of material, so one can get alternating layers after the passing of different tsunami.
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Permalink Reply by Allen Roy on
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@ Elle The biblical account is extremely brief, giving us the barest of facts. But we know that it happened, it was global and killed of all animals on land that breathed through their nostrils. from this we conclude that the geologic record, which is filled with fossils, all happened during the flood. that being the case, when we find through out the geologic record asteroid impact craters (not just on the last layers or the bottom layers), then we know that they must have struck the earth during the Flood. We know of over 170 impact craters in the flood strata which range in size from a few thousand feet across, to more than 180 miles across, the average being 30 to 49 miles across. Just one of those impacts the naturalistic geologists are blaming for the extinction of the dinosaurs. So we are talking about 170+ impacts during JUST ONE YEAR of the flood! Nothing like that is happening today or has ever happened in the history of mankind. Any way you look at it, 170 impacts of the magnitudes recorded in the rock, is going to be a HUGE factor in the flood.
The Bible does not directly mention asteroid impacts, however I believe that it does hint at it. It talks about the "windows of heaven being opened" . this is typically understood to be talking about vast quantities of water falling to the earth. However, the word windows is translated from a quite interesting Hebrew word. It is arabah, derived from the verb arab which means to ambush. Other derivatives from arab all have meanings to do with being ambushed or doing ambushing, etc. Why is arabah translated as window? Besides being translated as window, it is also translated as dove cote and lattice. I believe that the idea of lattice can bring this all together.
In Middle Eastern countries glassless windows are covered instead by ornate lattice work. These accomplish two things, it allows for unrestricted flow of cooling wind and to hide those inside from direct view from outside. In strict Muslim countries, women are not allowed to be seen, and lattice windows allow them to see out without being seen. How this relates to ambush may be like this. If some one wished to ambush a passerby, he could hide behind a lattice window and then, when the victim is with in reach, he could fling open the lattice window and attack the victim.
In the flood account, the opening of the window of heaven might imply a similar action. Unlike comets, asteroids are invisible to the naked eye. It is not until an asteroid burns its way through the atmosphere that it becomes visible. Thus they remain hidden ambushers, lurking unknown in space, until one crashes through the atmosphere and ambushes the earth.
One reason why there is no direct observation of an asteroid impact in the Bible may be because for a vast majority of the known impacts, if you were close enough to see it pass through the atmosphere to hit the earth 11 seconds later, you were in the kill zone. The Ark survived the impacts of over 170 impacts during the flood, so it was not close enough for them to observe the impacts.
(The 170+ known impacts are almost all on continental land mass. Continents represent only 1/3 of the surface of the earth. Therefore it is possible to extrapolate close to 600 asteroid impacts over the entire globe.)
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Permalink Reply by Allen Roy on
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look here.
http://www.passc.net/EarthImpactDatabase/index.html
They list 182 confirmed impact sites. and their locations. you can see most of them on google maps or google earth.
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Permalink Reply by Lou Hamby on -
There are historical observations by different cultures that did see these, the Sumerians I believe have recorded these, and others. If I can find a link, will post it.
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Permalink Reply by Lou Hamby on
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Allen Said:
So we are talking about 170+ impacts during JUST ONE YEAR of the flood!
Lou Said:
Allen--I have a couple observations about this...I am no expert about this nor have I even considered it, but------
How do we know 170 impacts during the flood year? I ask that because we have had these recorded in recent history?
Also maybe I am not "imagining this right", but think about it, if a stone hits a pond its trajectory and power is cut and it hits the water so far down and then sinks. I just don't imagine the impacts of a meteor having any affect on the layers of the earth, and since coal is found every where it seems these layers are made by some uniform process (not invoking an evolutionary process) Given the thickness of these layers it would seem that even one hit if it could be causal would not be an affective agent given the thickness of these seams, layer upon layer..... Your thoughts?
Also it is my understanding that many of these seams when taken down, show not just layers, but actual forest after forest on top of one another? This does not seem to be consistant with these explanations...but we all must agree some cataclysm must have caused this? We have Coal Seams in one strata and Dinosaur bones in another, and mammal bones in another? I personally believe that that dinosaurs, man, and mammals all lived together, as a product of Gods creative acts in the beginning. Obviously they all lived on beyond the flood....so given Genesis they had to be part of Gods original creation....again your thoughts?
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Permalink Reply by Allen Roy on
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An asteroid has to be above a certain kinetic energy in order to make a crater. Kinetic energy is mass times speed. The speed of most asteroids are typically more than 1000 times faster than the fast bullet man has ever fired. Thus the mass of the asteroids need not be super great to make craters. If I remember correctly, the iron asteroid that made the 1 mile across and 500 feet deep Meteor Crater in Arizona is estimated to have been about 100 meters (600 feet) across. The asteroids that made the twin craters on the Canadian Shield (one 40 miles across and the other about 32 miles across) are estimated to have been between 1 and 1.5 kilometers across. The asteroid that is blamed for the extinction of the dinosaurs is estimated to have been 10 kilometers across.
You are correct that asteroids that can make craters on land will not have as much effect when hitting deep water. However, the average depth of the oceans is about 4 to 5 kilometers deep. An asteroid 1 to 1.5 kilometers across is not going to be stopped by water only 5 kilometers deep. And asteroids 10 kilometers across are not even going to feel water that is only 5 kilometers deep.
The amount of kinetic energy which a asteroid has is staggering! The asteroid that made Meteor Crater in Arizona had an explosion in the atmosphere more than 10 times that of the atomic bombs at Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Scientists tell us that the explosion caused by an asteroid represents less than 10 percent of the total kinetic energy of the asteroid. More than 80 percent of the kinetic energy gets injected directly into the planet. In the case of Meteor Crater that means that the energy absorbed by the earth as shock waves (earthquakes) was approximately equivalent to 80 times the force of the atomic bombs on Japan. And we are talking here about a small asteroid among the 182 known to have caused craters on the earth. And these represent only those that landed on 1/3 of the earths surface. Are you beginning to get the picture?
While it is true that Meteor Crater probably hit the earth several centuries after the Flood, most of the 182 craters are spread through out the geologic record that Flood catastrophists typically consider to be flood deposits. So the logical conclusion is that most of them happened during the year long flood.
The asteroids would cause many impact-tsunami per impact, not just one. Most earthquake caused tsunami usually travel in threes. The larger the energy that causes the tsunami, the more tsunami there are created per incident. (and impact energy is typically many magnitudes greater than earthquake energy.) The result is that there would have been thousands of tsunami ranging across the flood waters and up onto land masses through out the flood for as long as asteroids were impacting the earth.
Creationist have shown long ago that all of these supposed fossil forest on top of fossil forests are imaginary. I.e. the ones in Yellowstone have long been explained by creationists as logs settling vertically on the floor of a large basin of water just as what happened and is happening at Spirit Lake after the explosion of Mt. St. Helens.
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Permalink Reply by Lou Hamby on
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I will look at the documentation for Yellowstone, I appreciate your explanation. So basically you would say that Tsunami's were very instrumental in affecting layers of strata?
Just a curious question....I will tell you that my view are different than many on this site, but I do ascribe to 6,000 years and 24 hour days... So having said this and keeping with strata and layers:
When God originally created the heavens and the earth and moved forward to "preparing the earth" for all the flora and fauna diversity he was going to place on the planet...What do you think was under the suface substrate which the grasses, jungles, deserts and other eco-sytems which would house of animal diversity...what was under the ground? Once ground and mountains were created by God. All Mighty God spoke it all into existence, but the response of the earth to Gods edicts were maybe through the same natural laws and means we surely observe today?
So would there have been strata at Creation below surface substrate?
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Permalink Reply by David Thomas Posey on
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Lou mentioned the asteroids that were documented by ancient cultures; am I correct that you are not using any of these documented asteroids in the 170+ figure, Allen?
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Permalink Reply by Lou Hamby on
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IS YEC teaching that there was no coal previous to the flood? I read an article on AIG site about this,and apparently 128 years of growth at our current rate would have been enough to produce coal seams as they exist today?
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Permalink Reply by Allen Roy on
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@ David: There are 182 impact craters known so far. These were cause by very large asteroids which flashed through the atmosphere for the 11 seconds it takes to enter the highest atmosphere till it hits the earth. During those 11 seconds it would have been called a meteor. And afterwards, what ever pieces are left would be called meteorites.
There have been thousands upon thousands of meteors throughout history, most caused by minute pieces of dust which burn up as they go through the atmosphere. Over the years some of the particles that have caused meteors have been large enough to make it to the ground before they completely burn, thus up becoming meteorites. I believe that the largest meteorites found so far are chunks of iron[-nickle that range of 1 to 3 meters across. Some may have formed craters of a few meters across.
The asteroid which made the craters in the geologic record are several magnitudes greater than what cause most meteors and the meteorites which have been recorded in history. These historic meteors, while impressive sights, pale in significance to the asteroids that made the impact craters in the geologic record.
@ Lou. It seems to me that in the process of causing the 'dry land' to appear from under the waters, the surface became covered with an assortment of soils suitable for plants to grown in. One of the reason why flood geologists have different opinions on which of the lowest strata are flood or pre-flood is that no one knows just how extensive the soils and sub-soils were and of what they were composed. Certainly there are remnants of those pre-flood soils that exist in places at the bottom of the sedimentary layers. There has been some and needs to be much more intensive geologic research to be able to discern where pre-flood soils leave off and where Flood deposition begins. Any volunteers. There are only a half-a-dozen to a dozen creationary geologists in the whole world. We need hundreds and hundreds of trained creationary geologists to just begin interpreting the geologic record within Flood Catastrophism.
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