roxrkool

Oh, they have an *answer* for everything.

http://www.icr.org/newsletters/drjohn/drjohnnov02.html

ps418

Except that the answers are false. The article says:

Liar. There are "impurities" of various kinds in evaporite deposits, such as foraminifera and pollen grains. 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 model, but not what we would expect if these salts were 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. (See also Ulrich Jux, The Palynologic Age of Diapiric and Bedded Salt, Department of Conservation, Louisiana Geological Survey, Geological Bulletin 38, October, 1961, and 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 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). Of course, we should question the logic of requiring such material in the first place, since hypersaline basins are not typically full of living organisms.




The hydrothermal "model" is hopelessly inconsistent with the structure of most evaporite formations.

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 (Morton, The Entire Geologic Column in North Dakota) or the 800-2500m thick deposits in the Medditeranean Basin, are not associated with typical 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 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 often 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 which are totally inconsistent with formation in a subaqueous, hydrothermal environment.


In fact, 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 crystals or nodules form not from the evaporation of a body of water in a basin, but rather grow _within_ supratidal sediments as saline groundwater is 'drawn upwards' from underlying sediments by evaporation. 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, and are again totally inconsistent with formation in a subaqueous, hydrothermal environment.

Patrick

MrDarwin

All of which still begs the question of how these things came to form between sedimentary layers supposedly deposited during a single flood.

(BTW Patrick I don't give you enough of these::notworthy )

Coragyps

One of the most astounding things about lameness of the ICR "hot brine" argument has to do with the solubility vs. temperature relation of salt. Sodium chloride's solubility in water increases quite slowly with temperature, so that injecting hot, saturated brine into cold, more-or-less fresh water won't drop salt out - it'll just give you a less-than-saturated solution at the final temperature. (I no longer have my chart of salt solubility up to 800 degrees F, or I'd post examples.)
I'm not all that sure how Morris is going to keep "superheated, supersaturated salt brines" supersaturated in their underground reservoirs for that whole thousand years from Creation to the Big Flud, either, but I would guess "goddidit" would be his first answer. Jesus not only saves, but he inhibits crystal nucleation, as well.

roxrkool

Excellent, Patrick!

Valentine Pontifex

Patrick, this post can be easily made the basis of
a proposed T.O. Archive FAQ. Maybe it could be called "Evaporated Sea Salt: A reply to John Morris and the Institute for Creation Research." Much of the material
is already here, the biggest thing it would need is to be cleaned up.


"Liar" is not something we can say for sure. After all he can be just plain incompetent or blinded by his own dogma. It would be better to say "This is completely false."

Explaining what halite means would be best. I doubt that most people know what it means.




I am not sure what the difference between playas and sabkhas are. A brief explanation might do good.

I strongly recomend that you post a proposed FAQ to the talk.origins newsgroup. If your ISP does not provide you with newsgroups then groups.google.com will let you post. Be sure to put "Proposed FAQ" in the subject line. If you have difficulties in this someone here can post for you.

Getting it on T.O. has some advantage for you. For one thing a link to your web site can be provided. Another is that far more people will see it in Talk.Origins than will ever see it in GeoCities and that annoying ad structure will not happen in the T.O. Archive.

And the Archive, like any web site trying to make its mark, needs a steady supply of new materials.

ps418

And given how massive some evaporite deposits are, and how quickly they would need to be deposited, "supersaturated" brine is far from doing the trick. Even if pure salt were shooting out of the earth at a rate of hundreds of km3 per day and somehow not being redisolved by the ocean water, you still couldn't get enough salt extruded quickly enough to form some of these deposits.

Add to that the requirement for some deposits that the salt be deposited in thin, rhythmic layers correlatable over thousands of square kms and not contain signficant admixture of clastic sediments from the flood waters, and the only option left is direct intervention by Jeebus or some other supernatural being. From an old post discussing the Ochoan series evaporites (my favorite example):

Patrick

roxrkool

Which, I believe, require prolonged periods of evaporation from supersaline(?) brines/solutions.



I would be interested in seeing a Creationist explanation for the concentric zoning pattern of the salts.

Gooch's dad

Patrick, let me also give you a :notworthy

Hey, any chance you could jump in over at TheologyWeb and present this stuff about evaporites? The YECs over there need a good butt-kicking.

-Kelly

Coragyps

Carnallite, huh? That just proves that you atheistic pinko geologists are just out to doodle a nice Christian girl!

(Apologies to William Burroughs.)