Quetzal

Awesome as always Patrick: "You da man!"

scombrid

Thanks for the links Patrick. My sarcastic rant wasn't terribly informative. He finds a local occurrance and makes up some process to explain it. Then he assumes that this process was flood linked. When his assertions are tested globally by observation, since a flood would have global consequenses, they fail miserably. Others have already addressed his diatoms and chronology problems.

Then there is his concept of stream terracing. He doesn't seem to understand how sea level changes affect base level. Onlap sequences are laid down on the coastal plain during high stand sea level during glacial minima. This is especially evident on passive margins such as the mid-Atlantic East Coast of the US.

He interprets depositional phases as occuring during ice maxima when the land is warped downward. The depostional sequenses are truncated when ice retreats and the land "warps" upward and gradient is increased.
This is backward. The Atlantic and Gulf coastal plains were laid down during a high stand of sea level. During the last glacial maximum sealevel was a 100+m lower than present and the basins that now form the great mid-Atlantic estuaries were formed by erosion. By Scott's model, these coastal plain basins would have filled in with glacial sediment during the glacial maximum and would currently be experiencing erosion as they are thrust upward by the ocean pushing its basin down. There would be no Delaware Bay, Chesapeake Bay, and the lower end of the Chesapeake tributaries would be flowing rivers instead of estuaries. Instead, I look out my window and see a Chesapeake Bay that exist as a depositional basin resulting from geologically recent increase of base level.

His interpretation of isostacy would also dicate that there should be high mountains in the Hudson Bay area since the unloading of all that ice. The Coastal Range of Alaska should be squished into the ground under the load of all those glaciers. Volcanic activity should exist in the northern Appalachians since they were under a huge ice burden and must be lifting rapidly. The crust should fracture due to the distortion from the ocean basin sinking while the adjacent land mass rises rapidly.

He doesn't offer much evidence for his claims and his logic is off. I saw on another board where he asserts that the Carolina Bay lakes were formed either by extra-terrestrial impacts or glacial impacts? I'd like to see his defense of that idea.

ps418

Morpho-
I found some good papers today. I'm gonna set Wmscott straight on the diatoms this weekend.

Patrick

Quetzal

Nothing like bringing in the heavy artillery! I think the diatom issue is pretty well dead. He has no corroborating evidence (i.e., other marine traces) to indicate that either the diatoms he discovered weren't contamination or that they couldn't have been deposited by eolian or glacial transport. He's ignoring the contrary evidence. He hasn't refuted my interpretation. I have about one more correction to his quibble about the dates for the extinctions, and then I think he's pretty well done.

No one's really challenged him hard on the actual theory (instantaneous isostatic rebound). I don't know enough about the mechanisms. That might be interesting...

[Edited to add: Okay, I see you've already started your assault. Ignore my last. "You da man"! <img src="graemlins/notworthy.gif" border="0" alt="[Not Worthy]" />

[ January 24, 2002: Message edited by: Morpho ]</p>