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Member (Idle past 867 days) Posts: 2339 From: Socorro, New Mexico USA Joined: |
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Author | Topic: Hydrologic Evidence for an Old Earth | |||||||||||||||||||||||
Coragyps Member (Idle past 765 days) Posts: 5553 From: Snyder, Texas, USA Joined: |
Your answer on the other thread assumed salty ocean water in the Flood. That is not assumed by YECs (based on some Biblical hints), so that should be taken out of any consideration of the Flood answer.
Hmmm. But we have some places - Ouargla, Algeria, for one - where there are fresh water aquifers below salt water ones. There's a recharged aquifer there that gets its water from the Atlas Mountains several hundred miles to the northwest. It's about two miles deep at Ouargla. A mismanaged well to down below that fresh water has resulted in an uncontrolled flow (it could possibly have been fixed in the last fifteen years...) up to surface. To get to surface, though, it had to flow up through a minor oil zone with salty water and through massive beds of solid salt from the evaporation of seawater. And above that salt are a couple of thousand feet of sediment. The water from below dissolves the salt and causes the rock to cave in. Then the hot salty water fills up the sinkhole it's made and leaks off into the near-surface fresh water aquifer. The salt zone was threatening the city of Ouargla's water supply and existance when I worked on a project to block the flow off back about 1990. How do we get fresh Floode water below salty Floode water below salt from evaporated salty Floode water below fresh? Sounds like a pretty busy 150 days, Faith. And, for another thread someday, if the Floode was fresh water, how come we still have jellyfish and corals and all that other sealife that dies when it's put in fresh water?
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Coragyps Member (Idle past 765 days) Posts: 5553 From: Snyder, Texas, USA Joined: |
He's talking about the same thing that makes oil drips from your car disappear into the driveway: concrete and many kinds of rock have tiny pores between the grains that make up the fabric of the rock. These rocks have a property - "permeability" in the oilfield biz but maybe "conductivity" in the water-well biz - that is a measure of how much fluid will seep through the rock at some given pressure difference.
In a recharging aquifer, rainwater and snowmelt could pond/puddle up, say, in the mountains in Colorado on top of an outcrop of permeable rock. The slight pressure from that puddle forces some of the water into the rock. Gravity pulls it down to the plains near Lubbock, Texas, where farmers pump it out io irrigate their cotton. But they suck that 100,000 year old water out faster than the sandstone can resupply it from that far away, so they are always drilling deeper wells to get to the water in the very bottom of the sandstone layer. Old water, still. Oh, by the way: your driveway is about as permeable to oil as a typical oil reservoir rock. Edited by Coragyps, : No reason given.
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Coragyps Member (Idle past 765 days) Posts: 5553 From: Snyder, Texas, USA Joined: |
Yes. Essentially all underground water is in the rock itself: caves with pools or srreams exist, all right, but account for a minute fraction of groundwater.
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Coragyps Member (Idle past 765 days) Posts: 5553 From: Snyder, Texas, USA Joined: |
Sure. I wish I remembered what age the aquifer ones in Algeria were - but they're pretty old to be 10,000 feet deep. The outcrop in the Atlas Mts. is there because that portion was bent up and eroded off to expose an "edge" of the originally horizontal beds.
The Oglala rock out here at Lubbock is only 5,000,000 years old or so, though. Just a baby.
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Coragyps Member (Idle past 765 days) Posts: 5553 From: Snyder, Texas, USA Joined: |
So the idea is that as far as the aquifers are concerned the rock was already there, just as it is now, and water seeped into it over time?
Most sedimentary rock - almost all, I guess - had its pores full of water when it was laid down and lost a lot of that water as it compacted and became solid (for that majority of rock that solidified after deposition.) Now it is likely that the particular water that's in a rock today isn't the water that started out there. Most formations have probably had some flow through them at one time or another in their past. I'm quite confident that my aquifer in Algeria started full of (perhaps altered) seawater and didn't swap out for fresh until its edge got exposed to a fresh source, for instance.
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Coragyps Member (Idle past 765 days) Posts: 5553 From: Snyder, Texas, USA Joined: |
Perhaps it floated on top of some very dense material in the waters. White dwarf star matter, perhaps. Or neutron star matter. Though it does need to be pointed out that the iridium in meteorites isn't at all pure - probably alloyed with nickel-iron or in the form of chemical compounds. But still heavy. You're still digging yourself a mighty deep hole here, Faith.
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Coragyps Member (Idle past 765 days) Posts: 5553 From: Snyder, Texas, USA Joined: |
it might be a good idea to return to that topic. It was about aquifers and the rate at which their water is replaced. OK. We got yer Darcy's Law, but I don't know if I can remember the sucker..... but thanks to this Intarweb, I need not:Q = KA (h1-h2)/L and example : K= 10-5 m/s, h2-h1 = 100m, L = 10km, A = 1m2 > Q = 3.15 m3/y; the K value above is typical for a sandstone aquifer
from Darcy's lawthe actual flow velocity v may be calculated with the following formula: v=Q/(A*f)=q/f, f is the porosity, and q the specific discharge if the porosity n is 30%, the flow velocity in the example above is 10.5 m/y 10.5 meters a year is a mile every 150 years. And it's a ways from Colorado Springs to Lubbock.
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Coragyps Member (Idle past 765 days) Posts: 5553 From: Snyder, Texas, USA Joined: |
Faith: post 90, this thread, is asking for your attention.
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Coragyps Member (Idle past 765 days) Posts: 5553 From: Snyder, Texas, USA Joined: |
Wouldn't hydrolic pressure even force cracks and "small tunnels" to form in the weaker sections of the rock?
Not so often out in nature - though it might happen occasionally in a situation like yours where there's exposed rock at the bottom of a cliff/mountain and a column of water clear to the top. Confined rocks get fractured a lot in the oil industry just by water pressure, but the pressures used are a bit higher: they pump into the rock at 3000 (or 10,000+) psi, depending on the depth and type of rock, to make fractures for oil to travel through. And they fill the fractures with sand to keep them from "healing."
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Coragyps Member (Idle past 765 days) Posts: 5553 From: Snyder, Texas, USA Joined: |
Water at the bottom of the ocean, at 7 miles is at about 16,000 psi. With all that weight on top of it, wouldn't water in an aquifer be under similar pressure? Yup. But that pressure is equally applied to all sides of the rock - including any pore space it has - so there's no fracturing. There's not even any flow in that rock unless there's some other cause for a pressure gradient in it - like a hot area or a difference in water density due to salinity.
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Coragyps Member (Idle past 765 days) Posts: 5553 From: Snyder, Texas, USA Joined: |
Wouldn't the water in an aquifer start to boil, or at least be forced upwards by the heat of the earth, and not go that deep? Or is it because it is under pressure, and the boiling point has raised up enough to prevent that from happening? Doesn't then increase the pressure of everything, and allow the water to force itself throuigh the rock quicker? There are some "aquifers," like those near Mexicali, Mexico, that have steam in them instead of water. Similar zones up near Brawley, California have 650-degree water, kept liquid by the pressure, instead. These are all in closed aquifers so that the pressure is trapped (or was until Unocal drilled wells to exploit the energy). That whole area is right on a rift zone and the Earth's crust is very thin - the wells at Brawley aren't even two miles deep.
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Coragyps Member (Idle past 765 days) Posts: 5553 From: Snyder, Texas, USA Joined: |
merely that you can't know whether or not a cataclysmic event might have occurred within a few millennia that created this current constancy you are now measuring, before which things were quite different. What sorts of cataclysmic events would change the permeability of a sandstone from 100 darcies to 0.01 darcy? What sort of cataclysmic events would instantly swap salt water for fresh or vice versa in the pores of a 100-mile-wide sheet of sandstone? Help us out here, Faith: what can this Floode do? Anything at all that you want it to?
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Coragyps Member (Idle past 765 days) Posts: 5553 From: Snyder, Texas, USA Joined: |
And the oceans are not presumed to have been salty at the time, salt being added by leaching off the continents,
So the salty underground reservoirs, like most petroleum reservoirs, got their seawater-like brines from where, exactly? I'm guessing that ten or fifty times as much subsurface water is salty than is fresh. How did it get there from a fresh-water ocean?
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