On Tue, 23 Jul 2002 06:05:55 -0700 "Glenn Morton"
<glenn.morton@btinternet.com> writes:
> Austin's model also has another very severe problem that I have pointed
out
> before and received no satisfactory explanation for (which is why I
don't
> intend to do much debate with Bill). Until he can answer questions like
the
> one I asked the other day about the vast quantity of biological
material in
> the coal we observe--it couldn't come from one biosphere.
OK, Glenn, that's a fair question. We know that peat compresses 3 to 5
times to make coal. For the moment let's assume that a global flood
stripped 100% of the vegetation from the continents and all of the
vegetation became a floating mat and eventually became coal on the
continent where it originated. Let's also assume that the entire earth
had a tropical climate with mature, lush rain-forest growth.
If all of the vegetation from an acre of rain forest, including the
roots, were piled up on that acre as peat, how thick would the vegetation
be?
Looking at coal maps of the US, from memory (I can check this when I get
to the office), less than 25% of the US is underlain by coal. I know
Alaska has some coal, I don't know about Canada other than Nova Scotia
(Joggins), which has some coal. Let's take the North American continent
as a unit - that would include all of the US, Canada and Alaska. How
many square miles are in this NA continent, and what is the volume of
coal in this area? If you run the numbers on this Glenn, please give as
much detail on the coal as you can, i.e. list the coal basins or fields,
the seams within each field and the average thickness/areal extent of
each, etc. If a seam is included which extends out beneath the ocean,
such as in Nova Scotia, then that same area needs to be included in the
land mass. I think there may be some shallow seas in northern Canada
that may have once been land; if you know that they were then they should
be included in the land area. The Great Lakes and all other
lakes/rivers/swamps should be included as land since those areas may have
once supported forests. Except as noted above, let's leave the
continental shelves out at this point.
The objective of this obviously is to get the average thickness of peat
over the NA continent and compare that to the average thickness of coal
from within the NA continent if all of the coal (including what has been
mined, of course) were spread out evenly over the continent.
> The floating mat theory has another observational problem. All the coal
in
> the world is on the continental platforms. That is not to say none is
under
> the oceans because continental platforms extend a bit beneath the
> oceans. There is no coal in the deep deep water >600' water depth. If
the
> vegetational mats were floating around on the waters of the global
flood,
> why on earth does NONE of the material drop in the ocean basins. What
> mechanisms restrict coal to the continents? This has absolutely no
answer
> within the Austin paradigm advocated by Bill.
You've asked me this before and I offered an explanation, but you (like
me) seem to have a propensity to forget things that don't fit with your
model. In deep oceans, organic fragments would be disseminated rather
than collecting in a bed.
> The reason I see no need to debate Bill is not because I have never
> seriously considered the YEC model (given that I was a publishing YEC
for
> years). It is because Bill, like many young-earthers, look at any
> unexplained or difficult to explain item and think it proves their case
> while at the same time they fail to see the bigger picture and failings
of
> their theory. For the purposes of determining if there was a global
flood,
> it doesn't matter what sedimentary features are there if there is too
much
> coal to be the result of the burial of one pre-flood biosphere or if
the
> model for coal deposition can't explain the geographic distribution.
Ah, now we're getting somewhere. "It doesn't matter what sedimentary
features are there" is another way of saying "don't bother me with your
empirical observations, I've got my straw man all propped up." How long
did it take you to learn to ignore data? Is that something you learned
as a YEC and just carried over into OEC?
Bill
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