hedonist ogre

Today I was driving through rural VA flipping through the radio stations. I came across a program describing hurricanes. I thought it sounded interesting, especially when they mentioned that one of the scientists who was talking was from the ICR. Well, it turns out that they turned the subject to validation for the flood. This was one I'd not heard before and thought I'd share.

The program mentioned that before 3,000 - 5,000 years ago, there was no evidence of a major hurricane impacting Lake Shelby on Alabama's Gulf Coast. The narrator took that as evidence that there was a major climate shift around that time which happens to fall in the range of Noah's flood. After looking at this link, it does appear that the first hurricane that appears in the sediment core is around 3,000 years ago. The narrator said he asked the author of the study if he thought this was due to a limitation in his study and claimed the researcher said no.

Well, it turns out that the core only goes back 7,000 years. I plan on emailing the author to see what she thinks about her research being used to support a global flood.

ETA: Oops, looks like I got two abstracts confused, the core that goes back 7,000 years is from a lake in FL, the Lake Shelby abstract doesn't mention how long the record was.

ps418

So? It doesn't matter where your evidence comes from, since the point they seem to want to make is that there were no hurricanes before 5,000 years ago, either in the Gulf of Mexico or worldwide, and either way there is plenty of evidence that that is horseshit.

The oldest evidence for trees in my back yard is a 50 year-old tree. Does that mean that I should ignore the existence of 300 year old trees down the street, and hypothesize that trees did not exist in my neighborhood prior to 50 years ago? I think not.

Liu, K.B. and Fearn, M.L. 2000. Reconstruction of prehistoric landfall frequencies of catastrophic hurricanes in northwestern Florida from lake sediment records. Quaternary Research 54:238-45.

Patrick

Lobstrosity

No, but it does indicate a recent radical shift in tree growth patterns in your back yard that could only have been caused by some sort of catastrophic global flood.

ps418

Hedonist,

In the Western Lake record, which goes back 7000 years, there is indeed a relatively quiesent period from 5000 to 3400 yr BP, and a very active period from 3400 to 1000 yr BP. However, there are still hurricanes reported prior to 5000. The abstract of Liu and Fearn (2000) suggests that their core from Western Lake does in fact show evidence of hurricanes from 7000-5000. I'll get the article on my next trip to the library and tell you what it says.

For those who don't know where these lakes are, in the illustration below, Shelby Lake is #10, and Western Lake is #15. As you can see, Lake Shelby is right next door to Western Lake.



Neato. Maybe I can enter this tree into the creation science fair?

Patrick

MortalWombat

Only if you refer to it as "polystrate."

Mageth

Neato. Maybe I can enter this tree into the creation science fair?

Is your tree a Gopherwood tree?

hedonist ogre

I got an email back from Dr. Fearn. She was quite amused by the ICR using the hurricane data to support the flood. She said the Lake Shelby cores went back just over 6,000 years. Of course, that's the entire history of the earth for creationists.

ICR's use of this data got me thinking again about how inconsistent they are at using data. To draw the conclusions they want, Lake Shelby would have had to exist before the flood, with sediment collecting with no sand inclusion from hurricanes. Then, the worldwide flood happens, then hurricanes start occuring and sweeping sand into the lake to show up in the cores.

If you think about all the things creationists say happened during the flood, what with the continents moving several feet a day and geothermal vents opening up all over the place, it is ridiculous to assume that a costal lake before the flood would even return to being a lake after the flood, much less remaining in the costal zone to collect hurricane evidence. Not to mention the fact that there should be some obvious saltwater sediment inclusion sandwiched in between.

Another interesting thing is that these cores are dated using C-14 analysis, which creationists usually reject out of hand, unless the timeline suits them.

Apocolips

Hola!

About 5,000 years ago lived this real old dude (around 600 year old) who lived in Mesopotamia. He had a wife (Mrs. Noah, aged 550, but does not look a day over 400) and his three sons Shem, aged 227, Japeth aged 203, and the youngest Ham aged 193. Shem and Japeth were good sons, always willing to help their father out. Ham, on the other hand, smoked weed, was a closet homosexual, and liked to listen to acid rock.

One day ol' Noah was tending his grape vinyard when God came to him and told him to build a large boat. Made from gopher wood, not beaver wood, mind you. "But God," Noah protested, "This boat will be bigger than the QEII". God told Noah, get your sons to help. I nget 10% percent off at Home Depot. They have a sale on Gopher Wood.

Noah and two of his sons spend the next 40 years making this big ass boat. Ham was usually scoring blunts and scratching his ass waiting for a handout. He was occasionally stealing for others. He knocked up a local fly girl and had a kid named Caanan.

God told Noah to get two of every beast. fter scouring the zoo and pet stores of Ur, Noah did it. Noah was a good dude and told his people that God was pissed and was going to drown everybody. Even though the townspeople saw Noah put in his boat two Kangeroos and two elephants and a bunch of other critters, no one repented. many thought that the boat was a gambling ship and the menagerie was part of a Seigfried and Roy show (yes, Siegfried and Roy are that old). Nope, not a casino.

It rained. The people never saw rain. But God shut the boat up because Noah, his wife, and 2 out of three sons were righteous under the lord. After a long time cleaning shit from every beast in Gods creation and old Noah needing a drink from his vinyard, he sent a bird to find an olive leaf. The first one ran off. he sent a dove, the dove came back. The ship crashed on Mt Ararat. Amen.

Noah grew a vinyard, got Nked and fell asleep in his tent. Ham looked at Noah's johnson for some odd reason. Noah woke up from his drunken rest and cursed ham's son Cannan.

Shem became the father of the White race and the Asian Indians, Japeth the Asians and American Indians and Ham the Africans. The decendants of Shem are blessed, God could not care less about yellow people, and God hates most blacks, except for Bill Cosby, Michael Jordan, Eminem and a few others.

GLORY BE TO GOD

REVEREND SENOR

VonEvilstein

Eeeeeh, Senor, you owe me a new coffee!

ps418

Ok, I went to the library. I was wrong about what the Western Lake record shows - there is no good evidence for major hurricane in the Western Lake record interval from 5000-3400 yr BP, but it is not clear if there were any major hurricanes (category 4 or 5) in the covered interval prior to 3400 yrs BP. The following is a brief discussion of Liu and Fearn and how the evidence refutes rather than supports YEC.

Liu and Fearn's (2000) Western Lake record extends back to 7000 years BP, well before the flood. Large hurricane landfalls are recorded in the Western Lake record in the form of beach sand layers, which are transported into the lake basin as overwash by large storm surges. Only large hurricanes would leave such a record in Western Lake. The category 3 Hurricane Opal, for instance, which made landfall in 1995 only 75km to the west of Western Lake, only a small amount of sand was transported into the lake via a tidal channel. Liu and Fearn (2000) hypothesize that the sand layers they identify as hurricane deposits represent category 4 or 5 storms, with associated storm surges greater than 6 meters. It is quite possible, indeed likely, that many powerful hurricanes comparable to Opal occurred during the interval represented in their cores but did not produce sufficient overwash to leave a record.

Liu and Fearn (2000) attempt to reconstruct the hurricane landfall
frequency using the Western Lake record. Because the record in Western Lake extends to 7000 yrs BP, and the record from Shelby
Lake extends to 5000 yrs BP, neither or these records can be used to make inferences about hurricane landfall frequencies prior to 7000 yrs BP. Within the interval covered by the cores, it appears that 11 of the 12 hurricanes occurred between 3400 and 1000 14C yrs BP, and another at about 400 yrs BP. The intervals from 5000 to 3400, and 1000 to 0 yrs BP, are relatively quiescent periods. This is significant in that the interval 5000 to 3400 yrs BP should record the global flood, if any occurred. Instead, it is a quiescent interval. This is supported by the record from nearby Lake Shelby, which also shows a quiescent interval from 4800 to 3200 14C yrs BP (Liu and Fearn, 1993).

Liu and Fearn (2000) provide an elegant, testable explanation of
these millenial-scale changes in hurricane landfall frequency. Their explanation is that the changes in landfall frequency along the gulf coast is due changes in the position of the Bermuda High. Liu and Fearn (pp. 243-244) write:

One prediction from their model is that an anti-phase landfall frequency relationship exists between the Atlantic coast and the Gulf coast. That is, hurricane infall frquency along the Atlantic coast should increase when the hurricane infall frquency along the Gulf coast decreases. Though more records are neeeded, new records of hurricane infall along the Atlantic coast support this. Liu and Fearn (2002) state that a new 3000 yr proxy record of hurricane infall from Cape Cod shows "that hurricane activity increased significantly during the past 500-1000 years, just as the Gulf coast was amid a quiescent period of the last millennium."

Also, Zong and Tooley (1999) present evidence for nine storm events between 6030±70 years BP and 5740±60 years BP from deposits in Morecambe Bay, northwest England, a high infall frequency at a time during which the infall frequency along the Gulf coast appears to have been low.

In summary, the records at both Lake Shelby and Western Lake cover the interval during which the flood is supposed to have occurred (~4500 yr BP), yet no record of such a flood is present. The Western Lake record itself seems to rule out any such flood during the past ~7000 yrs. Furthermore, neither record supports an increase in hurricane frequency or intensity at the time of the flood. Instead, the interval from 4800 to 3200 14C yrs BP is fairly quiet along the Gulf coast. On the other hand, there is evidence for strong storm-surge-producing storms along the Atlantic coast at least as far back as 6000 yrs. Documenting changes in storm frequency further into the past will require longer proxy records.


Refs

Liu and Fearn, 1993. Lake sediment record of late Holocene hurricane activities from coastal Alabama. Geology 21, 793-796.

Liu, K.-L. and M.L. Fearn, 2000. Reconstruction of prehistoric landfall frequencies of catastrophic hurricanes in Northwestern Florida from lake sediment records. Quaternary Research 54, 238-245.

Liu, 2002. Millennial-scale Variability in Atlantic Hurricane Activities: Possible Links to the Hadley Circulation. Abstract presented at the Conference on The Hadley Circulation: Present, Past and Future, November 12-15, 2002, International Pacific Research Center, Honolulu, Hawaii.