>Obviously pebbly sheet sandstones of zone 2 are due to water deposition. In
>this I would agree with you. I would not agree that the zone three, the
>eolean dunes could be deposited by water.
Why not? That is a statement with broad implications. As far as the sed
structures are concerned, there is no way to tell if a deposit is subaerial
or submarine. This is apparently true for deep marine as compared with
shallow marine as well. As a matter of fact, as a result of the work of
Brand and myself, i would be willing to bet that you can't tell anything
about the origin of a sedimentary deposit by the sed structures (not bad
for a bunch of creationists!). This whole thing has not shaken out yet,
but when the initial studies were done earlier this century, certain
assumptions were made which have been falsified, such as that you don't get
dunes underwater, and that if you see certain structures in a modern
environment that you can see, those structures can be safely used to typify
that environment. But since nobody has studied sed structures in the
modern marine environment, there is still a lot of guess work which has
apparently led geologists astray.
>However, just because there is runoff from the mountains through the
>alluvial fans does not mean that this was a global flood. Such deposits are
>being laid down today in Utah which is generally quite dry!
Relax, I won't make that extrapolation. But the alluvial fans in Utah
don't look anything like the sedimentary beds in question in China, which
are flat lying and uniform thickness for miles.
>I spent some time studying the Nubian a few years ago. There is one problem
>with it. It seems to cover a huge stratigraphic interval. Another term for
>the Nubian ss is the Continental Intercalaire. Furon writes:
>
>"A complete series is now known from the Carboniferous and including Trias,
>Jurassic and Lower Cretaceous, comprising a remarkable development of
>Continental intercalaire."~Raymond Furon, Geology of Africa, translated by A.
>Hallam and L. A. Stevens, (London: Oliver S. Boyd, 163), p. 99.
>
>So the finding of a gradational bottom between the devonian and the
>Carboniferous is not to be unexpected.
In whose model? Can you suggest what might have been going on during the
260 million years between the dropping of the last grain of L. Devonian
sediment and the first grain of U. Cretaceous sediment that would not have
eroded or deposited anything in the Saudi deposit? To say that is not
unexpected is to say that it is expected, so there must be a good
explanation for how this can occur.
As far as the Nubian is concerned, giving this phenomenon a fancy new name
doesn't alleviate the problem of explaining 260 million years of continuous
deposition of the same sediment, while nearby in Saudi, during the same 260
million years not a crumb was deposited. I see this as a problem for the
standard model that will not be defined away.
Art
http://chadwicka.swau.edu