The TRVE history of the Flood...

There is abundant evidence against a single post-flood Ice Age, and against catastrophic plate tectonics.About 100 years ago the geologist Du Toit could not make sense of the distribution of fossils and the direction of movement of the Permian ice sheets in South America and Africa. He heard of the ideas of Wegener for moving continents and realised putting them together made a good fit.
This showed that the Ice Age occurred BEFORE the continents parted.Cores from the ocean floor near the coast of Spain gives an example of other evidence. Layers of fine silt with forest pollens alternate with ones of coarse deposit and grass pollens. This is because under warm conditions the core site is far from the shore so only fine silt from the nearby rivers reach it, and a warm forest grows on the land.Under Ice Age conditions, lower sea level means the core is close to the shore so heavier sediment is still reaching it, and cool grassland is on shore.Even without absolute age determinations, a significant time is required for many cycles of warm and cool cycles to occur.As RAZD indicated, using time determinations cycles of 23,000, 40,000, 100,000, and 400,000 years can be seen. For many years it was not clear why the 100,000 year cycle occurred, but it is now resolved. The fact that the problem was openly discussed is an indication that what was being reported was true, and not due to a long age mindset.As an aside, Noah did not seem to notice the Ice Age when he planted his vineyard

There are chains of sea-mounts and islands in the oceans with probably the best known the Hawaiian-Emperor sea-mounts which are formed as a tectonic plate moves over a hot spot. The magma from the hot spot builds up an undersea mountain which will break the surface if it gets big enough.
As the plate moves it carries the mount away, that volcano dies and a new one forms over the hot spot. The weight of the mount gradually causes the ocean crust to sag and the mount sinks, often with a growth of coral if it were high enough.RM dating of these sea-mount chains shows an increase in age as you move away from the hot spot, and this increase is consistent with the expected age with the rate of plate movement.The YEC idea of catastrophic plate tectonics (CPT) and accelerated RM decay during the Flood requires the two processes to amazingly occur in step to make it look as though it took a long time.

Associated problems with CPT include -1. Rate of magma production needs to be 10,000,000 to 100,000,000 times current rates to build the mounts before they move off the hot spot. At least 3,000,000 cubic kilometres of basalt has to be poured out on India for the Deccan Traps as it moves over the Reunion hot spot.This has to cool quickly enough to show discrete layers (Trap comes from a word meaning step).2. An appropriate of amount magma has to be poured out at the mid-ocean spreading ridges as the plates move apart, again orders of magnitude faster than currently observed.This has to cool fast enough to take on the appropriate magnetic pole direction, as, for some reason, The Flood is accompanied by frantic reversals of the magnetic poles in CPT.3. At the other end of the plates as they subduct, they have to rapidly dive 400 km deep to melt to magma, which then burrows up to build the island arcs such as the Aleutians, and all the volcanoes of the ring of fire with massive production of volcanic ash etc.4. This all happens without leaving a massive layer of volcanic ash around the Earth, and with the heat from the accelerated RM decay not melting the Earth.The ideas of CPT and a post-Flood Ice Age are dead in the water, so to speak!

Hi ICANT,I agree that any creative deity worth his salt could move the land masses around in a nanosecond. The first question that could be asked is "From where?" since the evidence is that they came together and parted several times.But leaving that aside, if the land masses were moved in a nanosecond:- Why are there chains of sea-mounts that look like they were formed successively by passing over a hot spot?- Why do they look older as you move away from the hot spot.- Why are their radiometric ages consistent with current rates of plate movement, or near to it?- Why are the ages of seafloor older as you move away from mid-ocean ridges, up to a maximum of 200,000,000 years as seafloor is subducted, and consistent with rates of movement?- Why is there a chain of volcanic plugs with the cones eroded away in Eastern Australia, getting older from south to north, with ages consistent with the rate of movement of the Australian plate?- If I am wrong in inferring from this evidence (not to mention a mass of other evidence) that the world is old and Science has it right, what conclusion should I reach?

Ice cores are not counted by guess-work. As well as visible layers, chemical determinations are done which include Ca, Na, nitrate, and sulphite. Comparisons are made with other cores and land and sea cores, which are many - I would appreciate it anyone has an idea of just how many there are.Lead is seen to increase about 2500 years ago when it was starting to be used in Greece, increasing at first then decreasing during the Middle Ages, to increase with the Industrial Revolution.With no obvious difference in the earlier layers there is no reason to think different conditions such as a Flood caused the earlier layers.In three Greenland cores alone - DYE3, GRIP, and NGRIP, totalling 5700m of ice, counted to about 60,000 layers, 175,000 isotope determinations and more than 1,000,000 chemical test were done. This is a fair bit of work to miss the fact that they are looking at storm layers!I have not seen any evidence that CMI or AIG went along to help with their testing, but I expect the researchers would appreciate being shown where they are getting it wrong.
Volcanic signatures can also be seen.

The ash from individual volcanic eruptions often has distinctive suites of minerals,allowing its identification in deposits.Mt Mazama eruption has a RC date of 7680+/-10 and is found in ice core at 7676 years.Toba volcano in Indonesia had the biggest eruption in the last 100,000 years, RM date 74,000, and there is a major sulphate spike in cores at 74,000 years.Further with Toba :
Cores from Lake Malawi show increasing RC date with depth to its limit of 50.000 years. About half as far again is a layer of Toba ash at 28m depth. There are 500m more of lake deposit before reaching sedimentary rock.These findings, with different methods giving similar results, to me are good evidence that RC and RM dating, and ice core counts, are reliable.What alternative conclusion is there?Edited by Pollux, : sulphite changed to sulphate

Information from http;Research at Centre for Ice and Climate — University of Copenhagen at the Neils Bohr institute, though I am not sure now where it is buried there.

Toba and its record in ice and lake cores is covered in articles at Naturalis Historia , which site has many interesting entries.For those unfamiliar with Toba, its 2800 cubic km of volcanic product is 100 times that of Krakatoa. Human artefacts are found above and below its up to metre of ash placed on India, and signs of cooling for decades or more are seen in ice cores, and altered pollens in India indicate cooling.This is of course excellent evidence that humans have been around for more than 74,000 years, and there was no Flood in that time.Interestingly, there seemed to be little climate change in Africa with similar pollens above and below its deposit.

Faith seems to have gone strangely quiet in this thread but I have been thinking it would be good to look in some detail at her claims the strata support a recent Flood.There are 10 major geological systems from Cambrian to Cenozoic or Tertiary. Their limits are defined by the appearance or disappearance of particular fossils, and were worked out in early 19th century. The ends of some, particularly Permian and Cretaceous, are marked by a serious extinction event with the vanishing of large numbers of species, genera and families, followed by a time of gradual diversification of the survivors.In addition to the five big extinctions there are several smaller ones.Even without these major events, the fossil record often shows the arising of a type of plant or animal, its spreading and diversification, and eventual decline and maybe disappearance.The trilobites as mentioned by RAZD are an example.Ecological zonation as put forward by Creationists, that thy fossil record shows different area being successively overcome by the Flood can not explain this, especially with the earliest critters all being in the sea.Faith et al have been repeatedly asked to produce a mechanism whereby the Flood could do this sorting, to no avail. It is a problem admitted by the SDA Geoscience Research Institute which was set up to find evidence for the Flood.Also remember the earliest geologists were creationists who went looking for evidence to support the Flood, and could not find it.So explaining the major geological divisions seems a well nigh intractable problem for Floodists, YEC or OEC.But wait, there is more!

The SDA GRI has been around for over 50 years without coming up with a Flood model to explain the evidence, Faith's protestations notwithstanding. In their early days they had some frank articles addressing YEC problems, and had 2 on early geologists being Creationists with difficulty finding evidence.In fact some of their articles helped me on my journey away from YEC.

Let's look at some more difficulties in the sorting of the fossils.
Each of the major geological epochs is further subdivided. For instance, Permian has stages called Rhaelian, Norian, Carnian, Ladinian, Anisian, Olenakian, and Induan. From Cambrian to Cenozoic there are about 100 stages.Each of these is defined by the appearance or disappearance of specific fossils. The details can be seen in Wikipedia, where it is easy to click forward or back from one stage to the next. I have checked through many of them and the majority were worked out in 1850 to 1870.So as long ago as that it was realised that the fossils were in a distinct order, consistent around the globe. The well nigh impossible problem of the Flood explaining the fossil order has got 10 times harder.But wait, there is more!

There have been some comments while I was preparing my third message, which seems to have disappeared into the ether, so I will try again.Each of the 100 stages is further subdivided into two or more substages, again determined by fossil order. So this further multiplies the Floodist difficulty, still not being explained by Faith.But wait, there is more.As indicated by others, scattered through the fossil layers are igneous layers dateable by RM dating. These dates are consistent with the fossil order. As I said in an earlier post, one of the supporting evidences for the accuracy of Rm dating is the way the ages of seamounts in a chain increase in tandem with the expected rate of tectonic plate movement over a hot spot. So the Flood has to sort the Isotopes as well as fossils in the correct order.How much more does that increase the Floodist's problem?But wait, there is more!Or rather it is what is not there.
A single though large eruption of Toba in Indonesia put a discernible ash layer in a lake in Africa. A recent Flood requires a massive amount of volcanism in a short time, which managed to leave no relevant ash layer in the ice, land or sea cores.I think the degree of difficulty for the Flood to explain things has been raised to impossible.

Hi FaithHow did the Flood manage to mimic a massive extinction of 96% of marine and 70% terrestrial vertebrates at the end of the Permian, with Lystrosaurus being the main vertebrate survivor? This was followed by a mimicking of a slow increase in biodiversity while isotopes were sorted to make the recovery seem to take millions of years. How did the Flood do it?

Discussing with Faith reminds me of Bassanio's comment in The Merchant of Venice : "Gratiano speaks an infinite deal of nothing ..... His reasons are as two grains of wheat hid in two bushels of chaff - you will seek all day ere you find them, and when you have them, they are not worth the search."As far as I can see her argument is "The Flood did it in a way that it did therefore it did it"