In 1990, I took a trip to northern Mexico to study the Cretaceous/Paleocene Difunta group. The group is a delta and prodelta group which is 18,000 feet thick. To deposit this formation in a global flood would require 50 feet of sediment per day to be deposited. And this doesn't take into account the additional tens of thousands of feet of sediment below the Difunta. So, when you look at this data, remember that there should be no evidence of things which take lots of time. The Muerto formation is the first influx of coarse material into the basin. It consists of volcanic conglomerates. Below is a photo of that.
There are two things which you should notice in the above photo. First the particles are rounded and are not sharp and angular shaped. The rounding in rocks only happens after they bounce for a while along a river bottom. The bouncing knocks sharp edges off the pebbles and rounds. them. This takes some time. Secondly, notice the many colors. These pebbles come from different volcanic terrains. And some, the large banded gray rock at the top of the picture, appear to be sedimentary, meaning they were deposited, hardened, and then re-eroded and then deposited finally here.
Above this are turbidites of the Lower Mudstone Member.
This photo was taken from across a valley. Many of the beds are much bigger than they look and I will show this in a minute, but the thing to notice is the change from shale(grey) to sand (orangish) to shale to sand. In this photo there are hundreds of alternations of sediment from nearly pure shale to nearly pure sand. This nearly perfect segregation of lithology must have taken place in seconds in order for this 200 ft section to fit into a one year global flood. There is little way for this to happen in a turbulent flood. Take sand and shale, shake it up in a jar full of water and see if you really get alternating layers of sand and shale like this. You will get most of the sand at the bottom of the jar and most of the shale at the top, totally unlike what you see here.
One thing to note is how much shale is in this section.
To show the scale of these layers I include the following photo. The guys are sitting on a sandstone turbidite. I am the guy in the cowboy hat with the ugly red/white barrel shirt (much thinner back then). The leader of this field trip asked me today if my wife had picked out my wardrobe! I said yes--I didn't want to take responsibility!
A closeup of some of the layers will show that they are mere inches or less in thickness but are just as free of shale as the big sand layers. To see how extensive the layers of these turbidites are, look at the laminations on the far hill below:
Shoreface sands show evidence of shallow water animals burrowing into the sediments. Below is an orphiomorpha burrow, which shouldn't have had time to burrow with 50 feet or more of sediment raining down on his head every day.
Also, in the nearshore environment are gyrolithes in the shales. Below you can see the burrow, marked by the red arrow. How on earth did this animal have time to burrow with so much sediment falling on him, trying to crush and kill him?
But these are not the only burrows to be seen in the nearshore environment. This burrow is the light grey protuberances parallel with the hammer.:
But even other items show that the depositional rate was slow. There are several buried oyster beds in these rocks. Below is a photo of one. Given that some creationists claim that animals are found in the fossil record according to their ability to flee the flood, this seems really tough to explain. How in the world do oysters run away from the flood? All the preflood oysters should have been buried in the earliest flood deposits.
I collected several oysters from this area, but they aren't my favorite fossils. What does one do with a oyster made of rock?
In the Cretaceous part of the Difunta, one can find dinosaur bones in the near-shore rocks. Below is an example.
At the top of this prodelta/delta sequence is the channel sand. This can be seen below,
The big channels form cliffs because the sand can't be eroded quite as rapidly as the shale can. Even here, below the lower channel, you can see laminations in the sediments. In going from the turbidites to this site, we have gone from out in the ocean to the delta channel sands.
The typical explanation is that a delta formed these deposits over time. There is nothing in the data which could say that isn't true. There is much to say that these deposits couldn't have been due to a global flood. At the end of the day, the young-earth creationists must be able to come up with cogent, coherent, and logical explanations for the data seen here. The lack of explanations, means that they simply don't have anything worth believing. The sad thing is that their leaders never show the laity any of the data like this.
No comments:
Post a Comment