ps418

This thread is for You Betcha and I to discuss whether or not Noah's Flood is a viable explanation for the geologic record. Let's keep it one-on-one, please. By "Flood Hypothesis" I mean the hypothesis that "all or most Phanerozoic sedimentary deposits were formed ~4500 years ago by a whole-earth-covering flood event that lasted less than one year."

This will not be a debate about evolution, or neo-Darwinism, or the age of the earth.

I request at the outset that all claims of fact be accompanied by references. I must be able to know specifically what evidence claims are being based upon, so that I can examine the evidence myself. Vague claims and unsupported assertions have no place in this thread. And the reference itself must actually contain the requisite evidence -- for instance, a reference to a web page or creationist book claiming X, without actually providing evidence for X, is worthless.

I'll start with two basic pieces of evidence which, I argue, unequivocally refute the hypothesis that "all or most Phanerozoic sedimentary deposits were formed ~4500 years ago by a whole-earth-covering flood event that lasted less than one year." I would like You Betcha to explain how these two phenomenon are better explained, or at least consistent, with the flood hypothesis.

Afterwards, we can move on to additional topics. But I would prefer that we deal with one or two points at a time.


1. Dessication/Shrinkage Cracks

Dessication cracks form when fine-grained sediments shrink as a result of the evaporation of water trapped in pore spaces. Everyone has seen them form when mud puddles dry up after a rain. These cracks cannot form without exposure to air, and they cannot form underwater. These are found throughout the sedimentary record, in formations of all ages, and indicate that subaerial desiccation of fine-grained sediments has occured since the time the oldest sediments were deposited.

In many cases, dozens of hundreds of individual mud-cracked bedding planes can be observed stacked on top of each other. In strata of the Colorado Plateau, for instance, dessication cracks occur in the Bass Limestone, Hakatai Shale, mud-facies of the Shinumo Quartzite, the Chuar Group, the Nankoweap, Toroweap, Moenkopi, Chinle, Summerville, and Wasatch formations (e.g. Beus and Morales, Grand Canyon Geology; Baars, The Colorado Plateau: A Geologic History, etc).



Modern dessication cracks. Note algal growth.



Dessication cracks in Triassic sediments



Dessication cracks in Cretaceous sediments, Jindong Formation, Gyeongsang Basin, Korea

How have flood geologists explained this data? Some creationists, for instance Steve Austin in Grand Canyon: Monument to Catastrophe, have suggested that these structures might actually be subaqeous shrinkage cracks, or synaersis cracks. Thus they need not indicate formation under the atmosphere. However, this hypothesis is clearly incorrect, for a variety of reasons:

Syneresis shrinkage cracks do not form in all types of fine-grained lithologies, for instance in carbonate muds. Cuffey (1999, Dec. 1999 issue of the New Orleans Geological Society Log) writes:

"Mudcracks, and associated sediments and sedimentary structures, are well documented from carbonate tidal flats in the Bahamas (Shinn, 1983), Persian Gulf (Bathurst, 1975; Shinn, 1983), and Shark Bay (Schreiber, 1986, p. 201, 202). On these tidal flats, sediment is transported from the subtidal environment by tides or storms onto the tidal flats, where it is deposited as thin laminae. The surfaces of the tidal flats are commonly encrusted by algal mats which help to trap the sediment. Due to the alternate wetting and drying, mudcracks form in abundance by subaerial desiccation. As the sediment dries, it shrinks, cracks, and hardens into tabular chips. During storms, these chips are eroded and redeposited as intraclasts. The association of thin laminations, mudcracks, and intraclasts, is unique to tidal flats (James, 1984, p. 216).

Such thinly laminated, mudcracked carbonates are present throughout the Proterozoic and Phanerozoic, and include the Axemann Limestone (Lower Ordovician, Pennsylvania), West Spring Creek Limestone, Tonoloway Limestone (Upper Silurian, Pennsylvania), and the upper Keyser Limestone (Upper Silurian, Pennsylvania)."
"In the West Spring Creek Limestone, we find thinly laminated and mudcracked lime mudstone interbedded with skeletal wackestone, rippled oolitic grainstone, and intraclastic packstone. The logical conclusion is that these rocks were deposited by a repetitive succession of shallow subtidal, intertidal, and supratidal environments indicating repeated, localized transgressions and regressions on a carbonate platform. All of these sediment types are forming adjacent to one another on the Bahama Bank and Persian Gulf today, and in places can be observed to be in vertical succession (Shinn, 1983). Such successions are abundant in the rock record and have been termed "shoaling-upward sequences" (James, 1984). This type of detailed observation of the succession of different types of sediments, deposited in a variety of different environments, directly contradicts a flood."


More importantly, syneresis cracks can be distinguished from dessication cracks by observable criteria (Fouch & Dean, 1982, AAPG Mem. 31, p. 87-114; Shinn, 1983, AAPG Mem. 33, p. 171-210; Pratt, 1998, Sedimentary Geology 117, pp. 1-10). Reineck and Singh write:

" . . . subaqueous shrinkage cracks differ from subaerial desiccation cracks in that they are not so well-developed, the cracks are rather narrow, and they do not possess well-developed V-shapes in transverse sections. In general, subaqueous shrinkage cracks are less regular in form and often incomplete. Sometimes, cracks are developed as open, straight to curved cracks occurring singly or in sets, having a preferred orientation" (Depositional Sedimentary Environments. Second Edition. Springer-Verlag, New York. 1980 p.60).

2. Evaporites. Extensive evaporite deposits could not have been deposited during the flood. Evaporites require several conditions to form, the most obvious being a restricted marine environment, and an arid climate where evaporation exceeds precipitation. Halite deposits are forming today in arid, restricted marine environments such as the Dead Sea, Salar de Atacama in northern Chile, and elsewhere.

During a global flood, the salt could never get concentrated or deposited in the first place, because it would simply remain in solution and diffuse thoughout the turbulent deluge ocean.

Evaporites are often sorted in inverse order of solubility, meaning that the least soluable salts precipitate first (lowest) and the least soluable salts last (highest). This is exactly what you get when you allow a bowl of seawater to evaporate, only in the case of the geologic record the bowls (or basins) are vastly larger. Sometime salts are arranged in a 'bullseye' pattern, such that the most soluable salts occur in the center of the evaporating basin.

As an example, let's consider the Permian age Castille and Saludo formations, which are part of the Ochoan Series evaporites filling the Delaware Basin. The Castille consists of ~260,000 thin layers of anhydrite and calcium carbonate, each only about 1-1.5mm thick, which can be correlated over a lateral distance of over 110km throughout the Delaware Basin (Anderson, 1982, A long geoclimatic record from the Permian: Journal of Geophysical Research, v. 87, p. 7285-7294).

There are about 1300ft worth of these extremely thin, repetitive layers in the Castille. Some of the couplets also contain tiny layers of organic rich shale with brachiopods and palynomorphs. The thin organic shale layers are interpreted to have been deposited during brief periods of reduced salinity and thus higher biologic productivity, for instance periods when the basin was exceptionally full.

An interesting fact about these thin carbonate/anhydrite couplets in the Castille is that the proportions of them to each other is just right for what you would expect from the evaporation of a pool of seawater of normal salinity, based on the content of CaCO3 and CaSO4 in ocean water.

Above the delicately layered salts of the Castile Formation lies the massive Salado Formation, consisting of about 600 meters worth of bedded halite and other salts. At its thickest, these Ochoan series salts together have a thickness of around 1300m, a lateral subsurface extent of 150,000km2, and a volume of about 65,000km2 (Blatt and Tracy, Petrology, p. 329)!

These salts show a concentric arrangement, as would be expected from a dessicated basin. Blatt and Tracy (Petrology, 1996, p. 330) write:

The distribution of sedimentary rock types in the Delaware Basin shows a crude concentric zonation, characteristic of a dessicating basin. Along the outer fringe are either fine-grained clastics or carbonate rocks, depending on the location of nearby land areas. Within this outer fringe are gypsum and/or anhydrite, followed by halite, and finally by the more soluable salts in the center of the dessicated area - salts such as polyhalite, langbeinite, carnallite, and sylvite.

How do flood geologists explain evaporites? Some flood geologists have proposed a vaguely specificed hydrothermal origin for evaporite deposits (for instance, E. Williams, Origin of bedded salt deposits, Creation Research Society Quarterly 26[1]:15­16,1989; Nutting, D. 1. 1984. Origin of bedded salt deposits: a critique of evaporative models and defense of a by hypothermal model. Masters Thesis. Institute for Creation Research). Tas Walker of AiG writes:

"One explanation says the deposits were formed when the sun evaporated seawater - hence the term 'evaporite deposits'. Naturally, to make such large deposits in this way would take a long time. However, the high chemical purity of the deposits shows they were not exposed to a dry, dusty climate for thousands of years. Rather, it is more likely that they formed rapidly from the interaction between hot and cold seawater during undersea volcanic activity - a hydrothermal deposit"

Hydrothermal systems consist of geothermally heated water flowing through fissures in rocks, and dissolving various minerals out of the rock. When the water cools rapidly, such as when it exits a fissure into cooler seawater, the hydrothermal solution can no longer hold the material in suspension and thus deposits what it cannot hold.

Can such a process explain large salt deposits in the geologic record more parsimoniously than the simple mechanism of evaporation? No, obviously not:

1) Most large evaporite deposits found in the geologic record, for example those in intracratonic basins like the km thick Paradox salts, the 11 seperate salt beds in the Williston Basin, or the 800-2500m thick deposits in the Medditeranean Basin, are not associated with any hydrothermal deposits of iron, manganese and so on, or with hydrothermally altered rocks, or with stockworks, ore veins, or any other evidence of contemporaneous magmatic/hydrothermal activity. That such evidence has not been found in telling, since any event which could deposit large salts in a period of mere weeks or months would be a very high energy event.

2.) Hydrothermal systems operating today in the sea at mid-ocean ridges, or on the continents (for instance in the Yellowstone National Park) do not seem to be depositing any sodium chloride, much less thick, laterally extensive sheets of salts such as those found in the sedimentary record, although hydrothermal systems in the ocean are depositing iron, manganese, copper and zinc sulfates, oxides and silicates. Anhydrite (CaSO4) is present in hydrothermal chimneys, but not as deposits surrounding the chimneys. This is not suprising, given that the mantle does not seem to contain significant source amounts of sodium of other volatile elements for hydrothermal systems to extract in the first place. In fact, hydrothermal solutions appear to contain smaller amounts of Cl and Na (17,300 and 9931 ppm) than normal seawater (19,500 and 10,500 ppm) (The Ocean Basins: Their Structure and Evolution, Open University, 1988, p. 100).

3) Sea floor basalt is often hydrothermally altered to significant depths, but as far as I know, no halite deposits are found in association with sea-floor basalts or in ophiolites. On the other hand, hydrothermal deposits of iron and manganese are almost always found overlying oceanic basalt where cores have been taken through oceanic sediments into the underlying basalt. So, in fact, hydrothermal deposits are found all over the ocean floor -- they just don't contain any evaporite deposits!

4.) Evaporites are usually found in association with other sedimentary structures, such as vertebrate footprints, dessication cracks and occasional raindrop impressions, which are expected in a subarial depositional environments such as playas and sabkhas, but not in a subaqueous, or superheated hydrothermal environment.

5.) Walker's statement that the "high chemical purity of the deposits shows they were not exposed to a dry, dusty climate for thousands of years" is wrong. This claim can be traced back to Sozansky (1973), who claimed that the (alleged) absence of pollen and/or planktonic tests in evaporite deposits argues against an evporation model. However, it is now known, and has been known for decades, that many evaporite deposits do in fact contain "impurities" such as pollen, plankton, algae, fungi spores, volcanic ash layers, and so forth, which we would expect on the restricted-marine, basin-evaporation theory, but not what we would expect if these salts were somehow rapidly extruded underwater in a global flood.

For instance, the 2km+ thick Sedom Formation evaporites in the Dead Sea Basin are about 80% pure halite, with 20% gypsum, marl, chalk, dolomite and shale (Niemi et al., The Dead Sea: The Lake and its Setting, Oxford Monographs on Geology and Geophysics No. 36, p. 46). Significant amounts of pollen are also present in these evaporites as well. See also: Ulrich Jux, The Palynologic Age of Diapiric and Bedded Salt, Department of Conservation, Louisiana Geological Survey, Geological Bulletin 38, October, 1961; Wilhelm Klaus, Utilization of Spores in Evaporite Studies, in Jon L. Rau and Louis F. Dellwig, editors, Third Symposium on Salt, Cleveland: The Northern Ohio Geological Society, Inc., 1970.

The Paradox Basin evaporites, mentioned earlier, in fact have many thin interbedded shale layers containing brachiopods, condonts, and plant remains (Duff et al., Cyclic Sedimentation, Developments in Sedimentology, no. 10: Elsevier Publishing, 1967, p. 204).

Although large bedded evaporites are the ones most often discussed, they are only one variety. Evaporites are often found not as bedded sheets, but as nodules formed by the displacive growth of large individual crystals within a fine grained matrix, such as can be observed in modern inland and coastal Sabkha environments. These nodules also occur in many fossil calisols (ancient soiols) such as calcretes and caliches, of which there are many examples.

These crystals or nodules form not from the evaporation of a body of water in a basin, but rather grow within sediments as saline groundwater is 'drawn upwards' from underlying sediments by evaporation, often forming teepee structures. Again, these can only form when evaporation exceeds precipitation, which it totally incompatible with the flood. As the water evaporates at the sediment surface, the salt nodules (usually gypsum and anhydrite) grow, often forming a chicken-wire structure (Nichols, p. 177). In some cases, the evaporites grow into huge crystals resembling flowers (gypsum rosettes, 'desert roses').

All of these features are known from both modern sedimentary environments and ancient evaporite deposits.



Enterolithic veins of Gypsum in Lower Cretaceous Purbeck Formation at Worbarrow Tout, Dorset, UK.



Enterolithic veins forming at the present day in a sabkha of desert loess between El-Alamein and Alexandria on the Mediterranean coast of Egypt. (See - West, Ali and Hilmy, 1979. Primary ggypsum nodules in a modern sabkha on the Mediterranean coast of Egypt. Geology, 7, 354-358)

The Toroweap Formation in the Grand Canyon region contains evaporites of this type, and here we find that the evaporites laterally grade into mud-cracked carbonate facies, which could not form either in a subaqeous environment. Above the Toroweap, the Kaibab contains these evaporite nodules as well. Other well-known examples include the Devonian Muskeg Formation in Alberta, the Permian Seven Rivers Formation of Texas and New Mexico, and the Miocene Solfifera Series of Sicily, among many others.

So, here are two phenomena refuting the flood hypothesis to start the discussion. How do you explain these features, You Betcha?

Patrick

[ January 03, 2002: Message edited by: ps418 ]

[ January 03, 2002: Message edited by: ps418 ]</p>

ps418

Faded_Glory -

Please move this to the formal debate forum when you get a chance. I'll be back on the 10th to continue the fun.

[ January 03, 2002: Message edited by: ps418 ]</p>

faded_Glory

Patrick,

I have sent you a personal message regarding a formal debate.

fG

[ January 04, 2002: Message edited by: faded_Glory ]</p>

faded_Glory

YouBetcha,

If you are seriously interested in a formal debate with ps418 on Flood geology, please drop me an email so we can set it up. You can find my email address in my header.

Thanks,

faded_Glory, moderator of the Formal Debates and Discussion Forum.

Orpheous99

It will be a total waste of time to debate You Betcha since he is nothing more than a troll and will continue to use all of his/her refuted "arguements" and completely ignore any real evidence. The person is truly out of touch with reality.

hyzer

bump

You Betcha

I will give it a try. Go ahead and set it up. It may go a little slow, but should be a learning experience.

Thanks.

faded_Glory

YouBetcha,

OK, you are welcome. Please drop me an email, I need to talk to you guys off-line to set things up.

You can email me using the icon at the top of this post.

fG (moderator of FD&D)