Quetzal

I just stumbled across a new flood geology book referenced on another BB, "Solving the Mystery of the Biblical Flood" by William Scott Anderson. It doesn't appear to be the usual "Genesis Flood" type "goddidit", but it still seems to conflate and confuse a lot of geology and paleontology to squeeze in to a young earth. Although I haven't read it, two reviews (by the author !!) on amazon.com show some flaws.

Anyone heard of either the author (claims to be a geologist) or the book?

Dr.GH

You mught have seen Billy at tha OCW BB,

<a href="http://www.creationweb.org/cgi-bin/ikonboard/ikonboard.cgi?" target="_blank">http://www.creationweb.org/cgi-bin/ikonboard/ikonboard.cgi?</a>

He is pretty well taken down. Sad really.

ps418

Thanks for that link DrGH. Looks like WeHappyFew has pretty much demolished what little bit of 'evidence' Scott offered. Looks like WHF does his best work on other boards . . . He's a very patient person too.

PS - I'm pleasantly surprised to find my own work popping up in some of those geology threads, and being used effectively to refute YEC idiocy!

Dr.GH

Patrick, The APA style guide provides a format to add web publications to you Curriculum Vita. You should be keeping a publication list. I don't know how the annonomous "handle" issue is to be resolved however. That is one reason I an only "semi-annonomous."

Quetzal

Okay, our good WS Anderson has come up with one I haven't seen before: the presence of "marine" (tbd) diatoms in topsoil as "evidence" of a global flood.

Anybody have any good refs on diatoms, especially on how common they are in inland topsoils?

Thanks.

wehappyfew

Thanks for the kind words, Patrick.

You and Morpho might enjoy taking your turn at him... he's very persistent. Currently, he is camped out at the <a href="http://www.evcforum.net/ubb/Forum1/HTML/000052.html" target="_blank">Evolution versus Creationism</a> forum. If you want to learn about wind-blown diatoms, this would be a good place to practice. As Morpho indicated, knowledge of diatoms would probably be enough to sink him for good, but I am not so equipped.

Eventually I will get around to destroying the mechanisms he proposes for his rapid, stealthy flood.

Quetzal

Hi WHP:

Too late: I'm already engaged with him (see "Quetzal" posts) on that board. That's why I asked about diatoms . He's pretty much already committed hari kari about his Pleistocene extinctions by claiming they all took place at the end of the last ice age instead of being spread out over 90,000 years mas o menos.

Just to forestall comments about soil diatoms - here's the list he claims to have found (all are marine): Asterolampra marylandica, Pseudoguinardia recta, Grammatophora marina, Thalassionema nitzhioldes, Asterionella japponica[sic]. Obviously, he hasn't mentioned how they were identified. He also hasn't mentioned whether they were alive, shells, or fossils (my next questions). I could quibble with his characterization of these as "modern", although they still exist (for ex, A. marylandica has been found in Oligocene samples, and A. japonica in Miocene cores), but I'd rather have something that either says: "they can't occur in inland topsoil so your classification is wrong" or "here's a simple explanation of how...".

scombrid

I just read the thread that WeHappyFew linked. Mr. Scott's (10th in the thread) provides the most compelling interpretation of the concept of isostatic rebound that I have ever seen. By his logic, the more water we put in the oceans the deeper the ocean basins will become as the seafloor is depressed. Likewise, land masses will actually rise in time in response to addition of water to the ocean and isostatic rise as magma is displaced from beneath the oceans.

If this were the case, wouldn't an ice age cause a global flood as the weight of the ice sheets pressed the continental crust down concurrent with the release of pressure on the ocean floor causing it to rebound and push water onto adjacent land masses? That's it! I've discovered the answer to how the global flood really happened by taking Scott's logic a step further. I'm a biologist that has had a course in geomorphology so I'm perfectly qualified to develope this "theory" into the latest greatest sorta-young-earth creationist account of the flood.

ps418

I've read through the whole thread. WMScott's arguments are really weak. He keeps conflating deposits and processes of vastly different age into one event. He doesn't seem to understand that isostasy operates slowly because of the viscosity of the mantle -- for instance, northern Europe rebound at ~few cm/yr, despite deglaciation occurring thousands of years ago, he doesn't seem to have done anything at all to investigate wind-blown origin of diatoms in soil, he didn't really answer how he identified the diatom species in the first place, he vastly underestimates the accuracy of radiocarbon dating applied to recent deposits, and so on.

Also, if I understand him correctly, he lumps the flood as part of the last ice age ('ice-flexing' and so on). However, in the last 600k yrs alone, there have been 6 glacial maxima and minima, with dozens of shorter cycles. Does that mean there were 6 global floods in the last 600k yrs?

I've been collecting references for a paper on hardgrounds. For my next project I may want to look at Scott's book. I'm not very impressed with whats been said so far. In fact, the more questions Scott is asked, the more apparent it is that he hasnt thought much of his argument through, or consulted much of the vast body of literature on the subjects hes dealing with.

Scott doesn't seem to understand that diatoms can be transported by wind (unless he discusses this on a different thread). When we find terrigenous clay and small quartz in the ocean, does this mean that terrestrial environments occurred in the ocean basins?

I found a good bibliography on wind-blown diatoms. I can probably get some of these at the library.

<a href="http://www.indiana.edu/~diatom/windblow.bib" target="_blank">BIBLIOGRAPHY ON WIND-BLOWN DIATOMS, DIATOM DISPERSAL AND AEOLIAN PARTICLES</a>

Also:

<a href="http://igloo.gsfc.nasa.gov/wais/abstracts99/kellogg.html" target="_blank">Wind-Blown Diatoms in Antarctic Ice Cores: Provenance Indicators of former storm tracks</a>

<a href="http://www.nsf.gov/od/opp/antarct/ajus/nsf9828/9828html/b11.htm" target="_blank">Glacial/interglacial variations in the flux of atmospherically transported diatoms in Taylor Dome ice core</a>

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ps418

In case you guys didnt check out those links, I wanted to point out that marine diatoms are found at many, many levels in the Taylor Dome ice core. This alone refutes Wmscott's argument. The graph below shows the ratios of marine and nonmarine diatoms in the TD core over the past 160k yrs.

From:

Antarctic Journal of the United States
Review 1996. Glacial/interglacial variations in the flux of atmospherically transported diatoms in Taylor Dome ice core, D.E. Kellogg and T.B. Kellogg



Diatoms are a small and sporadic constituent of snow falling at Taylor Dome, in a patchy pattern through both space and time ( figure). Six marine and 45 nonmarine taxa were recorded. Abundances range from nil to over 660 specimens in individual samples. Of the 78 samples, 26 (33.3 percent) contain more than 75 percent marine specimens, 16 (20.5 percent) are more than 75 percent nonmarine, 15 (19.2 percent) have intermediate mixtures of marine and nonmarine taxa, and the remaining 21 (26.9 percent) are barren. Lowest abundances occur during glacial intervals (isotope stages 3-5), and higher abundances occur during interstadials (isotope stages 5b, 5d, and 6). Highest values occur at 256.2 m (5,615 years ago: 497.25 specimens per liter, which seems anomalously high) and 542 m (approximately 142,000 years ago: 33.75 specimens per liter). Most species reported were also present in the South Pole ice core and have also been reported by us and/or other workers from a variety of other antarctic sites (Kellogg and Kellogg 1996). No uniquely extra-antarctic taxa were recorded.

The antarctic surface wind field is dominated by katabatic flow, outward and down from the domes of East and West Antarctica toward the sea (Parish and Bromwich 1987). Storms tend to track around the continent. Occasionally, large storms break through the circumpolar flow and penetrate to the South Pole (Bromwich and Robasky 1993). Taylor Dome diatoms were probably deposited by these episodic events, which occur today a few times annually. Specific provenances for our diatoms cannot be identified because the individual species have been reported from a number of antarctic locations (Kellogg and Kellogg 1996). Marine diatom-bearing sediments are widespread in the dry valleys area, especially where Late Wisconsin Ross Sea Drift (Stuiver et al., 1981, pp. 319-436; Denton et al. 1989) is exposed. The marine taxa reported here are present in most samples of this drift that we have examined; similar diatomaceous sediments probably exist elsewhere around Antarctica. That most marine specimens have been reworked from subaerially exposed sediments is further suggested by the high degree of dissolution and breakage exhibited by the marine specimens. Nonmarine diatoms are also widespread in the dry valleys, in subaerially exposed deposits, and in most lakes, ponds, and seasonal meltpools. Many of these water bodies are ephemeral or display fluctuating water levels. Complete or partial desiccation exposes fossil material for transport by winds as described above.

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