l-bow

Quote:
------------------------------------------------une,

I don't have enough time to make full reply to your interesting
comments. However, I will give a brief reference to see what you
think. It is in reponse to the following:

> I don't know where you're getting your information on the Yellowstone
> and other paleoforest remains, but it's incorrect. See following for
> more info on Yellowstone and other fossil forests:
>
&gt; <a href="http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/polystrate/yellowstone.html" target="_blank">http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/polystrate/yellowstone.html</a>
&gt;
&gt; <a href="http://www.geocities.com/earthhistory/forests.htm" target="_blank">http://www.geocities.com/earthhistory/forests.htm</a>
&gt;
&gt; <a href="http://www.aqd.nps.gov/grd/geology/paleo/surveys/yell_survey/intro.htm" target="_blank">http://www.aqd.nps.gov/grd/geology/paleo/surveys/yell_survey/intro.htm</a>

Your links actually support much of what I mentioned, to include loss
of branches and bark. What might solve the entire problem however, is
a very interesting experiment done by Michael Arct for his PhD
disertation. Dr. Arct sampled fourteen fossil trees at different
levels in a twenty-three foot section of the Yellowstone formations.
Analysis showed that all fourteen trees matched and that ten of them
died at the same time. The other four trees died seven, four, three,
and two years before the other ten died. I find this quite
interesting. The tree rings of trees from different levels matched
each other. What is the explanation for this? Are there any other
such studies done that discount this experiment or its findings?

Ref: Michael J. Arct, Dendroecology in the fossil forests of the
Specimen Creek area, Yellowstone National Park, Ph.D. Dissertation,
Loma Linda University, 1991; Dissertation Abstracts International
53?06B:2759, 1987?1991.

Sincerely,

Skydancer

This is not nearly enough information - I had not heard of reliable tree-rings being found in petrified wood before. What were Dr. Arct's conclusions about this phenomenon? Was the 23 foot section a single eruptive episode, or was it divided by several ashfalls? If the latter, were the falls heavy enough to have killed the trees in the first place? Pitman has demonstrated on several occasions that he is either willing to misquote studies or too incompetent to understand what they are saying. This particular study seems almost tailor-made to be difficult to check - doctoral dissertations are rarely widely disseminated.

I can picture several light falls accumulating on the ground with no single fall heavy enough to kill the forest - though individual trees succumbed - before the final large eruption buried it. I can also see the dissertation examining a single thick ashfall to see if fossil dendrochronology is even possible before using it in other less well defined areas. I was part of a team that did something similar in the Scotia Sea 20 years ago - we calibrated a new dating technique, sea-floor heat flux measurement, against a well-known one, residual magnetic striping, before using it in a more geologically complex region where the magnetic patterns were too broken up to be useful. This smells like quote-mining to me.

Coragyps

And I hate to appear to be a prick about it, but Loma Linda U. may have a speck of bias when it comes to an "old earth:" it's a Seventh-Day Adventist organization.

Skydancer

Ah. I was not aware of this. So it's likely not even a valid degree by mainstream standards, eh? Should've known. I thought fossilized tree rings sounded fishy.

pz

Loma Linda degrees are valid, but there is a weird bias there. Remember Baby Fae, the victim/recipient of a baboon heart transplant? That was Loma Linda.

scigirl

Loma Linde has a med school. I thought about applying there cuz I heard it was good, but then I looked at their web site. When you are on campus, you have to follow all the 7th day rules - in other words, no make-up and no jewelry for the girls, and no eating meat on campus. Even though I don't wear makeup and jewelry that much, and I could handle being a vegetarian for lunchtime, the fact that they forced you to follow their rules even if you weren't 7th day (and thus going to hell of course anyway ) pissed me off.

Then I saw their stance on homosexuality, and there was NO WAY I was going to give them 2 dollars, much less 150 thou.

scigirl

Skydancer

Yeah, I remember that one. When the doctor was asked why a baboon heart, his answer was in terms of size and pumping power. When asked why not a chimp, based on closer evolutionary relationship and presumably a smaller degree of tissue rejection, he replied that he hadn't even considered the issue, since he didn't believe in evolution. Forgot that was at Loma Linda.

ps418

Pitman "strikes again"? I'd say he "strikes out." Notice that he said that my page on fossil forests somehow supports flood geology. That's complete nonsense, of course. In fact, the evidence presented on my fossil forest page shows how these features provide overwhelming evidence against flood geology (e.g. the orientation of roots, the presence of paleo-soils [paleosols]). The "loss of branches and bark" is an expected consequence of the mechanisms which have buried most fossil forests, for instance debris-rich lahars in the case of Yellowstone and Mt St Helens, or pyroclastic flows in some of the other cases. For further discussion of "fossil forests," see the page:

<a href="http://www.geocities.com/earthhistory/aigcoal.htm" target="_blank">Coal deposits: evidence for the Noah's Flood "model"?</a>

There are many questions:

First, what precisely is meant by "different levels"? Are these different levels on a measured stratigraphic section, or seperate levels clearly seperated by a paleosol? This makes a big difference, because the forests are laterally discontinuous, and coeval "forests" are not necessarily at the same level on a measured section.

Second, how much ring-overlap is suggested exactly? The strength of the putative correlation could be incredibly strong, or extremely weak, depending upon the number of number of rings being compared.

Third, what was the orientation of the trees which were examined, and did they show any evidence of reworking? This is a crucial piece of information, because a) the Yellowstone forests are a mixture of in-place and transported trees (see refs in my fossil forest article), and b) a second lahar could easily rework trees buried by a previous lahar. In fact, the 1980 lahars at Mt St Helens excavated buried forests created by previous flows, and deposited new trees in association with them.

Doubting Didymus

Good greif, you people have to lay out for your education, don't you?

I will be unlucky if I have to spend over ten grand, and even then you don't have to pay any of it back until you are earning over 25000 per annum.

l-bow

I see you're all unable to respond? And just in case, you accuse me of making that post up, here is a link to the orignal t.o post:


<a href="http://groups.google.com/groups?q=g:thl4294003787d&dq=&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&selm=fd67d42a.0210021346.4fcbbdfa%40posting.goog le.com" target="_blank">http://groups.google.com/</a>

[ October 03, 2002: Message edited by: l-bow ]

[ October 04, 2002: Message edited by: pz ]</p>