In the RATE thread, John Baumgardner made a claim that there was lots of evidence in the rocks for a global flood. Having left YEC because I not only failed to see that evidence as I worked in the oil business, but saw data which actively argued against a young earth, this post is to allow one of YECs most influential people demonstrate how superior that the YEC interpretation is. My gut tells me that John won't respond to this because I have yet to see any of the YEC biggies explain this data.

Originally posted by John Baumgardner

Thanks, Jorge, for saving me the effort in composing a post with essentially the same points! It is simply impossible honestly to square a local Flood/standard time scale view with the biblical account! Besides, there is so much clear, objective evidence for the global Flood in the rest of the rock record. Almost the entire Paleozoic and Mesozoic sediment record screams out catastrophic process for which there is no modern day analog. I send out the invitation: take off your uniformitarian blinders!!

Such a statement is simply nonsense. there is no evidence of a global flood in the rocks. A 36,500 foot pile of sediment (which is not exceptional) means that 100 feet per day of sediment must have been deposited ON AVERAGE during a one year flood. That means 4 feet per hour. Most burrowers can't burrow that quickly and would quickly be burried.

Ophiomorpha, a burrower in marine sediments lines its burrows with its fecal pellets. Why do we see fecal pellets lining a burrow in Jurassic sediments of the North Sea (see picture below). Why can I regularly find burrows throughout an entire well bore? Burrows in these wellbores occupy thousands of feet of sediment.

see http://home.entouch.net/dmd/burrows.htm



But here are a couple of pictures for you. The jurassic ophiomorpha burrow with fecal pellets lining the burrow and one of the core photos with thousands of feet of burrowed sediment. Please explain how this happens in a global flood.

John, there is NO evidence of a global flood in the rocks.

The picture with the d in it is from Martin and Pollard (1996, Fig 6D, p. 176
Martin, M. A., and J. E. Pollard, 1996. "The Role of Trace Fossil (Ichnofabric) analysis in the Development of Depositional Models for the Upper Jurassic Fulmar Formation of the Kittiwake Field (Quadrant 21 UKCS)," in Andrew Hurst et al, editors, Geology of the Humber Group: Central Graben and Moray Firth, UKCS, Geological Society Special Publication No. 114, (London: The Geological Society), Fig 6d, p. 176

For your information burrowers burrow at the rate of about 5 inches per hour, too slow for these to be escape structures.

Maybe they were burrowing away from one of the fires that was going on during the flood!:

Glasspool, I.J. et al. (2004) Charcoal in the Silurian as evidence for the earliest wildfire. Geology, 32, 381-383.

Originally posted by grmorton

For your information burrowers burrow at the rate of about 5 inches per hour, too slow for these to be escape structures.

It's worth adding that plenty of burrowers make horizontal networks which certainly cannot be interpreted as escape structures; presumably the animals were so casual as to amble around in the sediment without a care that they were being buried alive.

Here's a nice horizontal trace network, in this case Thalassinoides [www.wooster.edu/geology/Paleo.html]:

K

Originally posted by SteveF

Maybe they were burrowing away from one of the fires that was going on during the flood!:

Glasspool, I.J. et al. (2004) Charcoal in the Silurian as evidence for the earliest wildfire. Geology, 32, 381-383.

Those fires were on the floating veggie mats of course Steve

K

[Edited to add: and they were probably started by the meteor bombardment....]

Originally posted by Kulindrichnus

Those fires were on the floating veggie mats of course Steve

K

[Edited to add: and they were probably started by the meteor bombardment....]

Maybe they were started by spontaneous combustion? My understanding is that runaway subduction, meteor impacts, superfast radioactive decay, latent heat release, etc., would combine to make things pretty hot for Noah et al..

Originally posted by Cyrus Johnson

Maybe they were started by spontaneous combustion? My understanding is that runaway subduction, meteor impacts, superfast radioactive decay, latent heat release, etc., would combine to make things pretty hot for Noah et al..

A very worthwhile hypothesis. One wonders why it isn't being taught in the schools.

K

John B. You can do YEC a huge service by explaining these burrows in the YEC paradigm. Here is another set of burrows, This is a termite nest in the Jurassic Morrison formation. Care to explain why the termites were burrowing during the global flood?

To all of you presenting actual data, YECs have denied the Bible gives honest witness. They reject scripture.

Nuf said.

Well, it looks like you've proven that there was never any flood in ancient times. (Not that I believe there was a global flood, but maybe there were several local floods . . .)

Originally posted by Augustine2004

Well, it looks like you've proven that there was never any flood in ancient times. (Not that I believe there was a global flood, but maybe there were several local floods . . .)

I believe that modern geology can suupport that there are local floods (not to mention modern observation). But, I hope you aren't thinking along the lines of multiple local floods all over the world at the same time. That would not work very well.

One other thing that Baumgardner needs to explain given his claim that there is lots of evidence for a young-earth in the rocks are canyons. Here are some pictures from oil industry seismic. Oil industry geophysicists get to see this kind of data, mathematical computer modeling geophysicists like John, don't get to see this kind of data. John's world involves him more as a mathematician. My world involves me more as a geologist even though we are both called geophysicists. So, since John doesn't get to see this kind of data I thought it might be interesting to give him a chance to SEE what it was the data was that drove me out of YEC.

The two pictures are from my web page http://home.entouch.net/dmd/canyons.htm. There are other pictures on that page. But of the first picture I wrote:

The first picture is of a dendritic incised canyon found underneath the Mahakam Delta, Kalimantan, Indonesia. Such features only form under subaerial conditions, not under water at all. Underwater canyons don't have that sharply dendritic pattern. It is from Alistair R. Brown, Interpretation of Three-Dimensional Seismic Data, AAPG Memoir 42, 1999, p. 115

Why were subaerial canyons dug during the middle of the global flood? Or is this another case like Samuel Shenton, the leader of the flat earth society who said when shown photos of the round earth from the moon: "It's easy to see how a photograph like that could fool the untrained eye."

Of the second picture I wrote:

Here is another example of buried topography from western China. It shows that this type of topography, which takes a long time to be formed(like the picture of the erosional lands I took from the air north of Beijing), can then be buried deeply by thousands of feet of other sediments. The upper picture shows a seismic line across the topography. The lower picture shows the map of the surface of the irregular buried surface seen on the upper seismic. Look closely at the upper picture and you will see colored lines marking the rock layers Tg3, Tg2' and Tg. You will also see a dark blue line running along the karst. These lines are the marks the geophysicist makes on seismic when he or she is mapping the geologic structure of the earth.

There are several very interesting things to see on this seismic line. On the right side, the Tg3 marker runs into the Karst upland. That Tg3 rock layer represents either a lake or sea deposit which was laid down when the Karst was an island. The same with the Tg2' bed. Since the Tg2' bed is above the Tg3, it was deposited AFTER the Tg3, so we can see the relative times between events. What we see is that the karst island was slowly being buried. The lack of Tg2' and Tg3 sediment on the peak of the karst island shows that there was no sediment filled water covering the island at that time. The island was finally covered only after the Tg event.
We see two periods of erosion in this picture. The irregular karst surface is due to erosion as is seen on the surface today north of Beijing. But just below the TG level, on the right side of the seismic line, one can see the lower beds truncating into the Tg level. That truncation shows that some sediments were laid down over the karst upland and then later eroded off of that upland. That means there is a time separation between the deposition of the rocks below the purple Tg event and the beds laid down above it. How much time? Enough time to erode that much sediment. It was more time than merely a day or two.

Now, the seismic line in the upper picture is one of thousands of closely spaced seismic lines. The typical 3D seismic survey is about 10 x 20 kilometers long and has one of these lines every 12 meters. So, modern seismic is like a sonogram of the earth, and they show incredible detail about the geologic processes. When the times of the karst surface itself are colored and laid out on a map, they show the eroded topography seen in the lower picture. You can actually see the drainage pattern in that surface. YECs need to explain this kind of data. You won't see any of this kind of science shown in any of their books, which means they are showing their gullible followers only half the story.

This is a chance for Baumgardner to show how viable YEC is at explaining geologic data. Ignoring data like this is exactly what Shenton did when that president of the flat earth society saw the first picture of the round earth taken from the moon. The question is what are the YECs, Flat-earthers or scientists. They claim to be scientists, but they fail to ever explain or even comment on data like this, which is what I work on as opposed to the formula John works on.

Originally posted by Dr.GH

To all of you presenting actual data, YECs have denied the Bible gives honest witness. They reject scripture.

Nuf said.

Yeah, they ignore the clear verse in the Hebrew in which God ordered the earth to bring forth living creatures--the earth was what did the bringing forth and YECs ignore scripture. In Genesis 1:24 the word Earth is an imperative, a command.

Gen 1:24, and God said, "Earth! Bring forth living creatures..." If one hot August day, I order someone to mow the lawn, if I say, "John Baumgardner! Mow the lawn," It won't be me who is sweating in the hot sun. So when God ordered the earth to bring forth life, it was the EARTH which did the work, which is what modern science says. God DELEGATED the creation of life to the earth, just as in my lawn mowing example, I delegated the mowing of the lawn to John Baumgardner.

But, I have no doubt that John won't show up to comment on any of these pictures. He has no explanation. But, being the Quixotic figure that I am, I keep trying by presenting real data for them to ignore and never publish in any YEC article. They engage in information control, not showing their followers what is really out there.

Originally posted by grmorton

Yeah, they ignore the clear verse in the Hebrew in which God ordered the earth to bring forth living creatures--the earth was what did the bringing forth and YECs ignore scripture. In Genesis 1:24 the word Earth is an imperative, a command.

Gen 1:24, and God said, "Earth! Bring forth living creatures..." If one hot August day, I order someone to mow the lawn, if I say, "John Baumgardner! Mow the lawn," It won't be me who is sweating in the hot sun. So when God ordered the earth to bring forth life, it was the EARTH which did the work, which is what modern science says. God DELEGATED the creation of life to the earth, just as in my lawn mowing example, I delegated the mowing of the lawn to John Baumgardner.

But, I have no doubt that John won't show up to comment on any of these pictures. He has no explanation. But, being the Quixotic figure that I am, I keep trying by presenting real data for them to ignore and never publish in any YEC article. They engage in information control, not showing their followers what is really out there.

Information control ... what an excellant way to put it! Between only showing one side, actively discouraging open inquiry and equating open inquiry with 'siding with the devil', they keep most of their paying customers from wandering too far. For those that do slip up and actually look at data such as what you have shown on this thread - well we saw first hand how quickly the discussion goes from science to labelling us scoffers and infidels on the RATE thread - especially if we ask questions for which they do no have answers.

I like that Glenn - information control ... very cult like behaviour in many ways ...


Jim

Excellent posts and pictures
The usual "flood geology" answer to this is that they're all escape burrows which is shown to be incorrect by burrows which obviously are not escape burrows such as the horizontal networks provided by SteveF. The fact is we can find such tunneling going on in all directions – horizontally, vertically and diagonally. This includes an abundance of U-shaped burrows made when the creatures first dug down and then horizontally while looking for food, and finally dug back up. If a flood was depositing sediments at a rate necessary to be responsible for laying down most, if not all, of the Geologic Column, these U-shaped tunnels should resemble fishhooks in that the creatures would never be able to dig their way back out. Instead, they would continue tunnelling upward until they expired, leading one to conclude that these "escape burrows" must be filled with the remains of the creatures that died in vain trying to escape if they were made during Noah's Flood. But that isn't what we find. In fact, what we do find is evidence for activity that seems awfully strange for creatures tunnelling for their lives trying to escape entombment. For if that were the case, then many of them stopped to build nests and search for food. Many newer burrows cut through older ones. Some areas are so churned up that it is impossible to follow individual burrows. Something like this takes time to create and time was something they wouldn't have during the Flood. In the end, it appears that the vast majority of these burrows can be associated with typical day-to-day activity rather than signs of creatures desperately attempting to dig their way out.
What many young earth supporters seemingly don't understand is how extensive such burrowing is in the fossil record, I think they imagine a few being located here and there not realizing that it is an incredibly common feature in sedimentary rock. Hence, any explanations for them consisting of temporary lulls (eye of the storm, so to speak) doesn't wash, in that their frequency and abundance would mean that most of the planet had to be i that "temporary lull"

Good examples, Glenn.

Three words explain why the vast majority of all scientists favor the mainstream view over YEC:

Confluence of evidence.

-Neil

Originally posted by oxmixmudd

Information control ... what an excellant way to put it! Between only showing one side, actively discouraging open inquiry and equating open inquiry with 'siding with the devil', they keep most of their paying customers from wandering too far. For those that do slip up and actually look at data such as what you have shown on this thread - well we saw first hand how quickly the discussion goes from science to labelling us scoffers and infidels on the RATE thread - especially if we ask questions for which they do no have answers.

I like that Glenn - information control ... very cult like behaviour in many ways ...


Jim

If my daily job hadn't been of such a nature that I was forced to look at seismic data and the geology seen there, I would never have escaped YEC. As it was, its draw is so powerful it took me 20 years to finally give up on it. When I finally did leave, I was mad at YEC leaders for not showing or discussing, in their journals, the data I was seeing every day at work. And that data is available to anyone who wants to go to the library.

The name calling is all about innoculating people from listening to you. It is why I have been called "like my father satan" by Carl Froede, it is why I have been called heretic, apostate and other names by their leadership. They want people to have a biased view of what I am so that their followers won't listen to anything I might say. It doesn't matter that I spend time arguing against atheism and defending the historicity of the Bible. The only thing they will accept is total mindless following.

Originally posted by rogue06

Excellent posts and pictures
The usual "flood geology" answer to this is that they're all escape burrows which is shown to be incorrect by burrows which obviously are not escape burrows such as the horizontal networks provided by SteveF. The fact is we can find such tunneling going on in all directions – horizontally, vertically and diagonally. This includes an abundance of U-shaped burrows made when the creatures first dug down and then horizontally while looking for food, and finally dug back up. If a flood was depositing sediments at a rate necessary to be responsible for laying down most, if not all, of the Geologic Column, these U-shaped tunnels should resemble fishhooks in that the creatures would never be able to dig their way back out. Instead, they would continue tunnelling upward until they expired, leading one to conclude that these "escape burrows" must be filled with the remains of the creatures that died in vain trying to escape if they were made during Noah's Flood. But that isn't what we find. In fact, what we do find is evidence for activity that seems awfully strange for creatures tunnelling for their lives trying to escape entombment. For if that were the case, then many of them stopped to build nests and search for food. Many newer burrows cut through older ones. Some areas are so churned up that it is impossible to follow individual burrows. Something like this takes time to create and time was something they wouldn't have during the Flood. In the end, it appears that the vast majority of these burrows can be associated with typical day-to-day activity rather than signs of creatures desperately attempting to dig their way out.
What many young earth supporters seemingly don't understand is how extensive such burrowing is in the fossil record, I think they imagine a few being located here and there not realizing that it is an incredibly common feature in sedimentary rock. Hence, any explanations for them consisting of temporary lulls (eye of the storm, so to speak) doesn't wash, in that their frequency and abundance would mean that most of the planet had to be i that "temporary lull"

I have seen a few beds (pure sand) which show no evidence of burrowing, but as you say, burrows are so incredibly common, and stack up on top of each other. I took a field trip to carbonate country in South Texas in 1984. That trip alone caused me such serious doubt about YEC that I mark that point as the beginnings of my struggles to leave YEC. Here are 3 photos from that old field trip--they are old slides turned into pictures and the colors have faded over the years.
This is from my web page http://home.entouch.net/dmd/hardgrounds.htm

In March of 1984, I was sent on an AAPG field trip to look at carbonates in South Texas. The area we examined has at least 15,000 feet of sedimentary rock below it. Global flood advocates claim that all of this sediment was deposited by Noah's catastrophe. The rocks we saw presented a serious challenge to that view, a view which at that time, I held.

One of the sites was along Bear Creek where we saw a series of hardgrounds. A hard ground is a slowly deposited carbonate which is very hard and resistant to erosion, which is why they form ledges along the banks of this creek. What happens is that the land subsides, and a softer form of carbonate is deposited, which then fills the void caused by the sea level drop. As the carbonate gets near the sea surface, the rate of deposition drops and the hardground carbonate is deposited. The fuzzy photo below is from a slide I took which shows the hardground limestone ledges jutting out from the cliff face.

{see first picture with lots of red arrows}

But that doesn't stop biological activity. In the shallow waters, especially when the softer carbonates were being deposited, dinosaurs walked in search of food. Below is a photo of a dinosaur track which walks in the softer sediment above the lowest observed hardground. If this was during the middle of the global flood, at a point in the flood where ,There are creatures, like clionid sponges, which burrow into carbonate rocks.

{see dinosaur footprint 2nd picture}

But an even more interesting record of the time it takes for this section to be deposited comes from the nature of the biologic activity seen on the hardgrounds. Each hardground is highly burrowed by animal life. These animals are clionid sponges which eat shell material as part of their search for food. Below is a rock I brought back from this sight. You can clearly see the burrows, and the fact that the waters were very shallow is shown in the crack which was filled by an evaporative mineral, celestite.

**end of page*

I will add that the evaporative mineral and desciccation cracks means that the water was very very shallow. It is as NeilUnreal says, a confluence of evidence.

Come on John, You made the claim that there was lots of evidence of an young earth in the rocks. You live your life among mathematics but never as a geophysicist actually get out to see the rocks. Please explain this kind of data so that those who admire YEC can see how superior YEC is. Of course, you won't because it would be too embarassing to acknowledge that you can't explain them. Just remember, I was staying out of the RATE issue until you made that highly misleading claim.

If you would but say all the geological features I am showing are miraculous, I could have no argument with you, but by saying that there is evidence of a young earth in the rocks, I can't go along. In that RATE thread you said you feared God so you remain YEC. I fear God because he is a God of Truth. How can I not mention the data I truly observed? How can I stand before God knowing that I ignored tough questions, and refused to answer any issue that challenged my belief system. Honesty requires answering questions one doesn't like answering.

Where would we be if God had not goaded Paul on that road to Damascus? Geology was God's way to goad me to leave YEC every bit as much as the bright light was God's goad to Paul to cease killing Christians.