TEMPORARY: So how did the GC (Geological Column) get laid down from a mainstream POV?

Edge, you write off our scenrio very quickly. It's also possible that there is detailed support for our scenario in the details too. I don't expect a vast flood to deposit exactly the same layers over entire continents. But, boy, they come pretty close to traversing across US states. I'm fully aware that layers come and go horizontally. I really don't have a problem with that.The 'undisturbed sea-floors' I'm referring to the fact that the layers don't look lived in. Apart from burrows which we put down to one-off escape routes (supported by the lack of mixing in the sediments) the layers, at least in Grand Canyon, are remarkably devoid of evidence of habitats that we see on any shelf floor today. And I posted a mainstream ref that supported this if you read it.The paleocurrent issue. When I say different I'm obviously comparing epeiric seas to modern shelves - that was the issue we were discussing! The paleocurrents do no support the idea of placid epeiric seas. The data supports catastrophic inundation far better.I'm fully aware that there are unconformities throughout the geological column. But if you go to the vast layers I'm talking about (eg in the Grand Canyon) there are hardly any major ones. There are only a handful that could point to a period of non-depositon and erosion. The relief at the formaiton boundaries are generally trivial. What I was actually talking about was no evidence of unconfomrities within the formations - this of course makes sense, many sequences are defined as appearing between unconfromities. The point is these sequences really do tell the story of continuous periods of deposition. The Grand Canyon strata above the angular unconfromity tell the story of about 8 periods of continuous deposition. It's within the sequences that I am talking about lack of unconfromities (and even between these formations the relief is minimal or even non-existant).

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[This message has been edited by Tranquility Base, 05-30-2002]

TC - the difference between what you are saying and I am saying is only an issue of extent. Whether it happened in the last part of the 400 days or 10 years later doesn't make that much difference. Either way the sediments would have been soft allowing for rapid erosion. I guess in your scheme you can argue for enough time for the layers to harden sufficiently - you might be right. My only constraint is whether there is enough water then. Either scenario is plausible IMO.And the deep fracture mentioned by Edge is a very good reason to explain why the Grand Canyon is where it is regardless of whether one is an old or young-earther.

edge - I'm talking about subsidence and runaway erosion. I don't need the fracture to actually appear at the surface. You just need to 'seed' the gully via a depression, give it a water source and it will form no questions asked, following the route of the fracture generated depression.

Edge, I have also seen mainstream refs that descibe the difficult of distinguishing eolian from aqueous depositon. Creationists have studied eolian tracks and demonstrated them to be amphibian although long agers deny it.On the undistubed nature of typucal marine strata:

quote:

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"the ocean bottom is subject to too many disturbances to permit any kind of gradual undisturbed accumulation."
Edwin L. Hamilton: "The Last Geographic Frontier: The Sea Floor," Scientific Monthly, Vol. 85, Dec. 1957, p. 296.

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If some (or all) creaitonist web sits are not completely honest about erosional features I apologize on their behalf. But I sand by what I am saying that in the vast beds that traverse 100s of milions of years of marine and non-marine depositons we see very few major erosional surfaces.I woudn't say there were 8 regressions. The '8' formaitons include multiple sequential marine (or non-marine) depositons. Eg, transgression/recession could be responsible for 2 formaitons or, alternatively, major formaiton boundaires could also be due to vast hydrodynamic sorting in our model too. Of the top of my head I would say the Grand Canyon region talks of about 3 marine transgression/regressions.

TC, there is no doubt by either side that there was a lot of erosion of the upper Cenozoic and Mesozoic strata at Grand Canyon which (at least the Mesozoic) can be found still in place to the ?north?.

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[This message has been edited by Tranquility Base, 05-30-2002]

TC - good point. The flatness of the Grand Canyon plateaus supports catastrophic run-off too rather than miscellaenous low energy events which would have carved out gullies etc.

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[This message has been edited by Tranquility Base, 05-30-2002]

That logic doesn't follow from my statement Edge. What is true is that low energy will not generate sheet erosion. High energy can presumably do both sheet erosion and gullies as we can see from the geological column.

Edge, your flat surface erosion that you see - I doubt you see it across US state sized surfaces depositing 1000s of feet of sediment? And do you expect the newly carved flat surface to then sit there for a million years without vast gullies forming, waiting for the next period of sheet erosion/deposition?By low energy I guess I mean low flow rate and volume.Grand Canyon presumably represents the transition from sheet erosion to non-sheet erosion as the water volume/energy decreased. Meander is simply due to the path of least resistance isn't it?

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[This message has been edited by Tranquility Base, 05-30-2002]

Edge, no, I wasn't saying that 'flat surface erosion' can't deposit 1000s of feet. I was doubting that you could show me a non-marine example in operation today. This is just a misunderstanding Edge - we have to both remember that we are coming fom opposite directions!Newly eroded plain? Well I can't see why you would expect a neat plain to stay uneroded for millenia. Where are they today? Any flood plain today is either recently deposited or heavily eroded!I realy don't see why one can't get meander in soft sediments. You can't just state some long age dogma, what is the reason?

Thanks a million Moose. I've read a lot of them before but I'll check them out. They wouldn't mention paleosoils by any chance would they? . . . and dinosaur footprints? No comment on my points?

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[This message has been edited by Tranquility Base, 05-31-2002]

Just what I needed Joe .

OK, I've got your point Moose. I agree that the source of the sediments is non-marine from a mainstream POV. For us it is presumably due to both (i) catastrophic freshwater erosion (the 40 dyas of rain - condensed tectonically heated steam in our view) and (ii) catastrophic marine inundation. In either case the source material would be continental. So I agree.But in terms of the origin of the waters that laid the geological column, the eperic seas are certainly primarily (just about all?) marine and represent the major proportion of the palezoic and mesozoic eras. Then in betwen these epeiric sea deposits it seems to me (based on eg grand Canyon area) vast but smaller neatly layered non-marine deposits. In the 200 million years or so of the paleozoic I only see evidence for a handful of genuine unconfromities displaying localized phenomena (which for us would be due to the dregs of regression and the beginnings of the next fresh water surge from the highlands).I find this way of thinking of the geolgoical column to be internally concictent and accounts for the data rather nicely. Even for the mainstreamer no one would doubt it is important to closely consider the qualitatively different aspects of the geolgoical column and I doubt that what I have said (minus the flood geology!) would be denied. On top of that I find the flood explains all three qualitatively different aspects 'naturally' (in the scientific model sense).

I claimed Cambrian to Cretaceous Joe. I suspect the tertiary was due to flow from recent catastrophic glacial melting and associated sea level rise. I am fully aware that this is under fierce creationist debate.For now I am happy to put forward a qualitative flood model as follows:1. Catastrophic tectonics induces sea level surges (IMO induced by accelerated radioisotpic heating)
2. Tectonically heated steam condenses as rain
3. Continents experience 1 and 2
4. This generates massive marine depositions on land under rapid flow
5. During retreat it become catastrophic sheet ersosion/deposition fresh water event due to the catastophic rain.
6. Due to topographical relief the sheet deposition degenerates into lower energy local events carving out local features.
7. This iterates three or four times via tectonic induced global sea level effects.
8. The last cycle of fresh water erosion carves out feautres like Grand Canyon out of relatively soft beds.
9. The ash in the air due to tectonic activity generates a nuclear winter which initiates the formation of glaciers in the highlands at the higher latitudes.
10. As the ash falls out we get glacial melting and formaiton of more fresh-water and, due to sea-level rises, marine depositons.
11. Everything settles down over a few hundred years to modern day rates by purely deterministic processes of tectonic cooling, glacial warming and associated sea level stability.I wont lay that down in stone but I doubt my view on the above will change an awful lot. I'm convinced this scenario is consistent enough to qualitatively explain a lot of the data. I'd be the first one to agree that I wouldn't expect everything to intuitively pop out of such a model.PS - I awould love to see the sort of analysis you are talking about Joe, from both the long-age and flood point of views. If anyone does have links/refs showing world wide correlations of local geological columns (ie including many multiple epochs), eg showing which cusps on the sea level curves correspond to which local eperic sea I would be fascinated. Otherwise I'll have to piece it together myself.

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[This message has been edited by Tranquility Base, 05-31-2002]

Joe, I think Setterfield is on his own on the Precambrian flood.I agree that I don't want to hand wave forever. I await the installments from the career flood geologists. I do mainstream protein folding and genomics so it wont be me!I know you think we're trying to shoehorn geology but that's not how it feels to me. Lyell was critisied from many corners for 'a priori' reasoning (it's outlined in Hallam's 'Great Geo Controversies') as well so the creaitonists wouldn't be the first to do it! We see it as a model and we're 'fitting' it and testing it like any model. Even the standard model of paticle physics has 26 undetermined parameters!I am thinking of summarizing some data from good examples of local geological columns. Is there some classic 'atlas' of local geological columns? I like things neatly set out and sometimes one does just have to do it oneself.

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[This message has been edited by Tranquility Base, 06-02-2002]

Edge, thank-you for the correction in terms on erosion. But I think it's clear that the ultimate phenomonon of layered beds has a two fold mechanism: (i) erosion and (ii) a depositional environment, regardless of geobable (which I am enjoying learning BTW so keep correcting me).Do you really know if your plains are producing strata that look like those in the Grand Canyon or do you just assume it? I'm just raising the question.Becasuse of soft sediments it's possible that the regression was slow enoug ht ogenerate meander andfast enough to carve it out. I'm not claiming anything other than plausibility.