Someone who admits he knows nothing about geology, asking where the colum came from?

funkmasterCreationists in the past used to make the claims that the geological column was estbalished through 'circular reasoning'. Most present young-earth creationist geologists accept the geological column as described mainstream. We accept the basic fossil order as true. We simply don't accept the mainstream ages.The great ages come from two souces:(1) Generally from assuming that layering has always occurred at slow rates.(2) Specifically, by radiodating of certain minerals. This assumes nuclear radiodecay has always occured at the same rate.Now (1) is completely unjustifiable if one beleives the global flood was a literal event. Of course sedimentaiton rates were vastly increased during the flood and could have generated much of the geolgoical column in a year.However, (2) is a very sensible thing to do. However, creationists have recently found very promising evidence that the radiodecay rate was accelerated in the last 10,000 years. Why would God do this? Radiodecay of minerals generates heat. Mainstream we already know that some of the Earth's inner heat comes from radiodecay. We think decay was acclerated by God to heat up the crust and mantle and rapidly generate continental drift and sea-level changes during the flood.The geological column is fine with me. it's just how it got there that I disagree with evolutionists on. What mainstream geologists rarely point out is that most layering on land is due to marine (seawater) inundations, not rivers, lakes and small floods. The geo-column is very compatible with the Genesis Flood. No-one can explaion in detail why every fossil type is where it is. But as I'm sure you know, almost all fossils appear suddenly in the fossil record without transitonal forms so the evolutionary explantion is a faith based one too.Much of the fact that formations can be correlated semi-globally actually favours the flood model. Many of the formaitons can be associated with particular innundaitons that were almost definitely global. (Sea levels can rise locally if the land subsides of course). Mainstream geologists call these 'epeiric-seas' becasue they think they inundated slowly and formed placid seas. However, the rocks frequently reveal they were formed under strong currents and we simply reinterperet these 'epeiric seas' as impinging flood waters from the sea. Because of their blinkered approach mainstream geologists have completely misinterpreted how the huge formations around the world were formed. I love geology but the flood is the answer, not gradualism.[This message has been edited by Tranquility Base, 11-27-2002]

funkmasterMy geology education has been via the geology department library of our university in addition to posters on this site. I borrowed a dozen or so hihg-level texts on sedimentaiton and stratigraphy. Pettijohn and Blatt et al are good. I also bought my self some basic geology texts (you already have by the sounds of it). My tectonics etc is very rudimentary from introductory texts. However I have read up on straigraphy and paleontology from high-level monographs. I have quoted from these texts in thse forums.My biggest 'discoveries' were about the global sea-level curves, that the majority of layering on land is from marine inundations, that paleocurrents (ripples etc in rocks) reveal strong currents throughout the geo-col and also how paleontology actually works.A monograph by M.J. Benton called 'Vertebrate Paleontology' is very good and shows actual vertical distributions of fossil families rather than the misleading diagrams shown in most other books. From this you find that trees ('cladograms') are built from anatomical similarity. The fossil order distribuitons are rearranged horizontally to match the cladograms and then arbitrary length lines are drawn in to link groups that the similarity tree predicted.In short, any fossil distribution can be made compatible with any anatomical similarity tree by rearranging and drawing in arbitary length lines. Of course these fossil distributions are drawn as continuous flows in almost all secondary sources.My creationist readings have simply backed these readings up. Flood geologists suspect that the inundations are the flood. There is much evidence of rapidity and continuity in layerig. Breaks in layering with trackways etc are explained via flood surges and temporary habitaiton from highlands. They propose catastrophic plate tectonics including computer gnerated dynamic models to cause these things to occur quickly. Recent new findings on helium retention in biotites suggest that radiodecay was accelerated within the last 14,000 years.Have a fun and fruitful journey. And, yes, it is a bizaree planet we live on. The stuff we hear about via TV documentaries is understated if anything.PS: You will find no book that actually systematically describes how the geological column arrived from a mainstream point of view. You will get a lot of books listing dozens of sedimneary environments. But no book will systematically go though 20 local geo-cols and tell you how it got there. If you find a book like that I'll buy it too.When you read about all of the dozens of sdimentary environments just keep remembering that most of the geo-col was deposited by marine inundations onto land. A handful of pages in each book will descirbe this 'epeiric sea' environment even though it is responsible for the majority of the geo-column.[This message has been edited by Tranquility Base, 11-27-2002]

Randy, we fully acknowledge the presence of fresh-water formaitons in-between the marine inundaitons. But these can be interpreted catstrophically also due to the catastrophic rain. What you see as a river detla could be catastrophic erosion of soft sediments. It is actually well known that there is very littel evience of rivers in the fresh-water geo-col. In the Grand Canyon strata for example, there are fresh water beds with land plant material (ferns) strewn thoughout thousands of square miles of plains without any evidence of the geometry of a river delta. These strata are far better interpreted as catstropohic land flooding.

RandyIt's easy to say 'Bunk'.I do not claim to be able to personally explain every formation. What I am saying is that there is evidence for rapidity in much of the column. You have problems with sands being transported over 200-300 miles. You obviously have never, even for a second, pondered the possibility that this was a huge calamity. Of course a marine innundation surging across a continent would transport sand for hundreds of miles!We just have no problem with lots of layers forming quickly - I have seen these form in seconds on video I have in my hands documenting the experiments of a French hydro-geologist.Any cycle of the planet can be fitted to any cycle one sees in varves! Just calibrate to the cycle you want - one simply leaves the time per varve as a free parameter and you can get anything to work as long as it's in the ballpark. As scientists we all do this all the time. It doesn't prove that that cycle was the cycle you thought it was.[This message has been edited by Tranquility Base, 11-28-2002]

What are the ref details Karl? Our library might be getting it/have go it.I have seen a lot of books with that sort of stuff though. What I haven't seen is a book that does this for 20 different local columns so that we can look for patterns. Since the books use differnet nomenclatures and look at differnet aspects it is difficult to do real comparative straigraphy without making it a full day time job.It is a medium-term aim of mine to collate the data on multiple local columns covering several continents and demonstrate to us what parts of it were global, regional and local. Then we can have a proper discusion about things. Just having isolated examples brought up by all and sundry is not that useful.Thanks for your suggestion BTW and I am also a fan of W. 'strata' Smith and even Lyell believe it or not.(Someone here brought up Smith recently).

I just thought I'd bring you guys up to date on c decay issues. Mainstream science recently (2001) discovered that the fine-structure constsant alpha = e^2/h/c has changed by 1 part in 100,000 in the last hundreds of millions of years via measuremetn of spectra from distant galaxies. Earlier this year an argeumetn was made (in Nature)by a well known atheist physicist that it was probably c that changed.Alternatively light could be decaying by much more and e is also changing. This may or may not have creationist repercutions. The creationist cosmology of Humphreys does not need c decay but whatever the case we now live in a universe in which these 'constants' are evolving. Accelerated radiodecay, a ssuporrted by recent geochemical measuremetns, is possibly linked to c-decay.

That's what's got everyone so fascinated.But let's remember where these laws come from: lots of empirical measurment today. c, or at least alpha, is evoloving very slowly or is constant now so our 'laws' reflect that. There are mathematical frameworks where these things can change and no doubt there are some fascinating new PhD projects going on in theoretical physics groups world wide.The Th-physics group I did my PhD in had a student working on the properties of tachyons (> c particles) should they exist. Although a fringe area he got one of the best groundings in physics out of all of us. One month he would rewrite electodynamics and the next month general relativity. He became a true all rounder. I have no idea what he went on to do.

Thanks Frank. It is one of those positive reuslts that needs to be repeated, agreed.