Below is a picture of a seismic line going over the Great Stone Dome batholith which is 70 offshore New Jersey. Seven oil wells have been drilled into this feature so the information below is supported by direct observation by well bore.
In my description of the time taken for the deposition of this feature, I want to start about 500 miles south of the Great Stone Dome, where the Georgia Embayment Cost Well GE-1 drilled Tertiary, Upper Cretaceous and Lower Cretaceous sediments when they drilled into a graben (seen on seismic which was the target of this well) which was filled with metamorphosed Devonian sediments. See USGS Circular 800, "Geological Studies of the CST GE-1 Well, United States South Atlantic Outer Continental Shelf Area".
The timing for this event was that A graben had to form in crystalline basement. Sediment infilled it. Most likely more sediments were deposited on top of the graben, but they were all eroded off. The Devonian sediments were then cooked and metamorphosed by a general thermal event associated with the Variscan orogeny. The area was then covered by Lower Cretaceous (Neocomian) sediments. These sediments, above the metamorphosed Devonian rocks, are not metamorphosed themselves. Thus we know that there was a period of time between the deposition of these sediments and the metamorphic event. This becomes important because it takes time for the cooling of the rocks, as well as for the initial heating of them. David Tyler says that this can happen in thousands of years. Fine, lets say 3000 years for the cooling of the Devonian rocks before the Lower Cretaceous was deposited.
The 3000 years comes from a creationist source, so we will use creationist material and show that it still doesn't work. Snelling and Woodmorappe said:
�The effects of changing permeability K, on cooling time, is striking. An infinitely long batholith that is 11 km wide, 16.5 km thick, and is buried 20 km below the surface of the ground, when at zero rock permeability (that is, conductive cooling only) needs a few million years to cool. But with the intensity of convective cooling that is allowed by a permeability K of 10 millidarcies (easily exceeded�see below), the time to cool this batholith falls to a mere 3000 years.� Andrew A. Snelling, and John Woodmorappe, �The Cooling of thick Igneous Bodies on a Young Earth,� Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Creationism, (Pittsburgh: Creation Science Fellowship, Inc., 1998), p. 532
Now, we can follow these sediments north on seismic lines. I have personally done it. For three years I was the Area Geophysicist for the US Offshore Atlantic. When we follow these Neocomian sediments north to the Great Stone Dome, we find that they are eroded and partly metamorphosed by the intrusion of the Great Stone Dome Batholith. So, 500 miles south, they cover a metamorphic event, here they are involved in a metamorphic event. Now to the picture of the Great Stone Dome.
The sequence of events is as follows. Approximately 15,000 feet of sediment was deposited. This was then intruded by the batholith which metamorphosed the sediments next to the stock. Sediments more distant were not metamorphosed. It also uplifted an area 28 miles in diameter and the center of the dome by a mile in elevation. Erosion cut off the Cretaceous Neocomian sediments which used to lie above the intrusive and part of the intrusive itself. These are the sediments we saw above the metamorphism in the Georgia embayment.
You can see the dip of the strata below the erosional unconformity dipping away from the dome in both directions. This is the structural deformation which took place when the batholith was emplaced. Then By the end of the Albian Time, 2200 feet of sandstone was emplaced on top of the unconformable surface. The added weight compressed the sedimentary strata away from the dome. The incompressible volcanic material of the dome remained high while everything around it sank a bit. This compaction takes time. It isn't something that occurs instantly during a global flood. It occurs one particle at a time in the sediments being compressed. Then after this, another 4000 feet of sediment was deposited on top of the area. Diagrammatically it looks like:
The sediments immediately above the dome are not metamorphosed, and show no sign of having been heated. The sediments immediately below the unconformity are heavily metamorphosed. David Tyler will say that the batholith cooled off quickly, but it was originally under a mile of sediment and even if we grant that hydrothermal flow cools the batholith, according to the Creationist, Woodmorappe, such things would require about 3000 years. That is 3000 years in the middle of the global flood.
But wait, there was another metamorphic event which occurred 500 miles south which also required time. So now, using Snelling and Woodmorappe's estimation for the very rapid cooling of a batholith, we have 6000 years in the middle of the flood. Of course, no batholith cools that quickly. If they did, we would not have any geothermal energy left--all the batholiths would have had time to cool since the flood.
Can any YEC explain how this happened in a consistent fashion?
Can the YECs explain why their leadership, their geological leadership doesn't show them this data in the YEC journals?
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