Growing the Geologic Column

Good grief, Faith!! Do you really think that oil companies don't take a very close look at the rock they drill through after that first few feet of dirt? There are hundreds of wells in/around the deltas of the Mississippi and Mahakam Rivers, where sediment is being deposited all the time. There are region-wide maps of all the local stratigraphic columns down to four or five miles deep in places like that! Every sand, every shale, every different foraminifer and coccolithophore is recorded so that Exxon-Mobil and the boys can find fuel for you!Geologists make their living dealing with that concept. You are the one failing to do so.

Of course it's the geologic/stratigraphic column for that locality. Off of Louisiana it goes back to maybe the Cretaceous or so - maybe before that. I haven't kept up with the deephole stuff they drill down there these days.And the column fifty miles south of Grand Isle lines up with the column you see when you drill up north of Baton Rouge, or over at Mobile. The same B. mexicana fossils show up at the same relative spot in all those places.

Igneous rocks (including volcanic ashfalls) are the definitive component of the geologic time scale. Trilobites and glyptodons did not carry pocket calendars with "478,665,212 B.C." or "11,136 B.C." on the front, or if they did, none of the calendars fossilized. Fossils by themselves only have ever given relative dates - trilobites before crabs, or dinosaurs before glyptodons, for instance. Dating of igneous/volcanic layers in the stacks of rocks are how the numbers that you dislike so much were assigned to the layers that have trilobite fossils in them. Steno's Law, y'know.I can scarcely believe I'm typing this, after seeing you told this same thing repeatedly over the last thirteen years.

It isn't a big problem at all. You are just wrong about it. The Siberian Traps are part of the geologic column.And they are igneous. And 251,000,000 years old.

Faith: the Carrizozo Malpais in New Mexico is a surface eruption of lava that covers the local sandstone. (Sandstone is sedimentary rock).It's only about 45 miles long, though, so it may not qualify as geology in your book.

"strata and their fossil contents..."Yes, Faith, that 100% absence of crabs in the strata that have trilobites, and the 100% absence of trilobites up among the crabs are just such a good strong convincer. You keep acting like it is, anyway.But it's the opposite of a convincer. And it's one of a couple of hundred similar non-convincers.

Crabs. Trilobites.HAVE to be explained by something, but not by a flood.

That Gulf Coast diagram most assuredly shows present-day sedimentation. Iowa and Illinois send new dirt down the Mississippi every day to pile up there in the light yellow "Plio-pleistocene" in that diagram. It isn't "the muddy Mississip" for no reason.

Another point about that same Gulf Coast stack of rocks, Faith. Look at the very odd shapes in pink. That is salt. It is in those odd shapes for a reason, and my opinion is that the reason has nothing to to with Satan trying to deceive seismologists and drillers. I think, and can find a lot of opinion to back me up, that it takes those odd shapes because it is less dense than the rock that surrounds it.Google up "the prize beneath the salt" by John Dribus (I can't figure out how to link it on this phone.) Lots of seismology/geology shop talk is there, but I will try to clarify somewhat. The pink on Percy's diagram is the Louann (not Lohan) Salt. It started out pretty horizontal, there at the bottom, in the Triassic. It was buried by silts and sands starting in the Jurassic. Since salt is less dense than shale or sandstone, it is unstable there below those rocks. All the pink tentacles in that pic are places where the deep salt has floated, and still today is floating, up through weaker spots in the rock. You can go to Beaumont, Texas, and see odd hills in the otherwise flat as a pool table terrain that are there because the tips of those pink tentacles are rising below them.You can also go a hundred miles offshore to any of several highly productive oil wells that were drilled through that pink tongue of salt over to the right of Percy's diagram. Those reservoirs are younger rock than the Triassic salt that is above (and below) them - salt has floated up through that rock and then spread sideways. It made an ideal trap for oil being generated in the rocks below - salt doesn't have pores like sandstone does. So the oil is trapped beneath the salt today, just waiting to fuel our SUVs.One other item that ties this to ages: we know how fast salt can flow. It can be measured in the lab or in a salt mine. It can be measured in the Zagros Mountains in Iran, where there are salt glaciers on the surface with precisely the same sort of subsurface activity feeding them. The salt in Iran has nothing but air to block its flow, and only moves about a meter per year. The Louann has a mile or two of rock holding it back, so I'm guessing it moves a bit slower. Too slowly by far to have been emplaced and buried by your Flood and then crept all that way in 4300 years.

Point me to where you have said anything at all about the Louann, or any other salt, that contains facts.

Yup. The strata are certainly on top of each other. But the salt, which is all Triassic in age of its falling out of water, is found in a proper Triassic spot, in a layer way up above that, and in "stocks" where it is flowing from below to above. The point is that it is taking a very long time to get up there.

Longer than you think, Faith. Like tens of thousands of times longer.See, I can play "back atcha" too.They are forming a substantially horizontal upper surface. That diagram maps well over a hundred miles of real estate, and the altitude difference from Lafayette to the continental shelf is less than a mile. Vertical exaggeration is the norm in geological maps - like 100:1 exaggeration. Like in Grand Staircase geological maps.

Compare the vertical and horizontal scales on that. I have lived in several houses with floors less horizontal than that.

Let me add bullet point #6 to your top five bullets, Percy:* Sliding cataracts of mud tend to deposit sediments that look like landslide of mud. Turbidites, I believe. With chaotic internal structure.