Dinosaurs 4500 years ago

Oh, crud, Robert.
How long was the period from Eden to Flud? Was there time enough in those pre-Tertiary days to build reefs 500 meters thick from slow-growing corals? Was there time enough to deposit all the coal in Pennsylvania? How about to lay down 2500 meters of laminated shale/sandstone in the Delaware Basin? The White Cliffs of Dover?

They've even named a new geological period - the Ediacaran (formerly also called Vendian) because there are such a variety of fossils from just before the Cambrian. Many are bacterial/algal, but many more are multicellular. It's just pretty tough to decide what, if any, more modern forms many of them are related to. And the strata, even long before that, are present - they're harder to find because so many rocks that old have been reworked into new rock or gobbled up by plate tectonics.
And there are sandstones all through the geologic column - from last week back to the first appearance of moving water.

Foraminifera throughout, as I remember it - certainly biogenic. And the Cliffs themselves dont represent the whole thickness of the Chalk in the subsurface. The Permian shale/sand in the Delaware alternates layers of organic-rich shale - from silt and microscopic sea life - with sand that was worked by wind, not water. Desert sand. 2500 meters thick in the center of the basin, with millimeter-scale laminations throughout. And it's localized to the Permian-era basin just south of the reef that makes up El Capitan. Nothing whatever to do with Walt Brown's "liquefaction."

Are you asking "how deep to the deepest Permian" or "how thick is the thickest Permian?" The Permian off Louisiana is surely at least 10 km from surface, if they've even drilled to it at all down there - I don't see Oil & Gas Journal any more to know what age those deep wells down there are in.

The Delaware Basin was a deep, smallish sea next to a large area of desert. In the wet season each year, silt washen in from rivers and critters/algae grew up near the surface, where there was light and oxygen. In the dry season, winds blew angular, faceted sand over the surface, and some sank. No erosion was going on 1000 meters down in the sea, and the area apparently kept subsiding over A Long Time to allow the few million alternate layers to build up.El Capitan at the south end of the Guadelupe Mts. in New Mexico and Texas. It's near Carlsbad Caverns.

The place I'm sitting is on the Permian Basin's east edge. It's 1 to 2 km deep to the top of Permian most places out here - though it's on surface on to the east. I'll look at my map at work tomorrow and tell you more exactly where.And I won't tell these West Texans that you said "central Texas" - they get real touchy about that kinda stuff out here. Edit to add: I wasn't too clear on that El Capitan/the Guadelupes and the Delaware Basin have Permian at the surface.This message has been edited by Coragyps, 07-21-2004 11:34 PM

Wave - or call! - on your way through.
See if you can find "A Roadside Guide to New Mexico Geology" - the Texas equivalent is great! Very nice to tell what to look for and what it is you're seeing.
You can see El Capitan clearly from Carlsbad.This message has been edited by Coragyps, 07-21-2004 11:41 PM

It isn't. By far the majority of limestone and dolomite started out as shells or tests of organisms - a lot of it has been reworked chemically since deposition. There was some inorganic precipitation, apparently, in the Cambrian and before, but the chemical makeup of the oceans since then doesn't let that happen. Corals, etc. merely kept growing there as the seafloor slowly subsided. That's a much larger problem for a Flood scenario than for reality - how do you get six miles of coral to grow, and six miles of subsidence to occur, in a year?This message has been edited by Coragyps, 07-22-2004 12:46 PM

I don't think it would just stop with the core.....
let me check my calculations one time more, and I'll post what uranium decay alone would do to the crust. And I ignore what all that gamma radiation does to life on the crust....