From: Glenn Morton (glennmorton@entouch.net)
Date: Tue Sep 23 2003 - 07:29:18 EDT
>-----Original Message-----
>From: asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu [mailto:asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu]On
>Behalf Of bpayne15@juno.com
>Sent: Tuesday, September 23, 2003 5:35 AM
>I responded on Sep 15 with an explanation for two of your objections (coal
>and oil). I was suspicious that you might ignore any response since you
>furnished an excuse in advance: "Due to several personal situations, don't
>expect much of a reply. I simply couldn't let this nonsense go by
>unchallenged." It is apparent that your "several personal situations" have
>not interfered with your ability to respond to other subjects.
The personal situations included being at my father-in-laws for my
mother-in-laws funeral and other issues which haven't yet interferred as
much as I thought they might. I was merely trying to let people know that I
might not respond at that time. and I didn't respond to Paul Greaves
publically. You have no reason to be mad at me for not responding when you
weren't the addressee on my note.
>
>I have no problem with you ignoring rational empirical data which conflict
>with your OEC model, but, in light of your eschewing data, I do have a
>problem with statements like those above where you refer to my
>interpretations as "nonsense", and claim "They simply have everything of
>importance wrong! I am highly
>confident of that fact."
>
>I presented four lines of evidence which cannot be rationally interpreted
>within the swamp model for the origin of coal. You have ignored those
>statements, made by people who believe as you do, that coal was a swamp
>deposit.
Bill, I won't discuss coal with you. It is a total waste of my time. You
have never listened to the counter arguments and I see no reason why you
should now. To repeat that discussion wastes both our times.
>
>Here is another observation from a technical journal. Since you are so
>confident that what I say is nonsense, let's see if you can make sense of
>this:
=[snip]
and
>
>So let's hear it Glenn. Tell us how nonsensical it is to postulate a flood
>model which agrees with the observations of over 400 man years, and how
>rational it is to say that although "The established notion of a forest
>setting is therefore not supported by observation, and contrasts
>with both a
>lack of tree preservation in intraseam tonsteins and only sparse tree
>preservation in interseam tuffs. It should, however, be recognised that
>this is a negative argument, and that a lack of preserved trees is not
>direct evidence for a lack of trees." And "Such an absence of topographic
>relief is not only difficult to envisage in a forest setting, but is also
>inconsistent with other irregular peat surfaces such as raised bogs."
>
>The spotlight is on you - long, tall Texan; here is your chance to vanquish
>this dumb old Alabama redneck hillbilly geologist. Tell me how your faith
>is built on those negative arguments. Talk to me, Glenn.
You haven't dealt with the quantity of coal. You assume an impossible rate
of growth for trees in a pre-flood world (in you post of the 15th. Then you
say, voila the problem is solved. Coal isn't the only biological matter
which needs explanation in the flood model as you are well aware. You can't
deal with the problem by only looking at coal in isolation. Remember there
is a bigger world out there than merely coal. I will not defend the number
of animals Morris claims for the Karroo, but if it is true, then here are
the consequences.
Bill, you can't solve each of these problems with no thought for the other
problems. Your claim to solve the coal quantity problem rings very, very
hollow in light of the other evidences of pre-flood life forms. Thus, until
you face this issue, it is a waste of our time to discuss it.
The following is from Foundation, Fall and Flood
****start***
Too Many Animals
Advocates of the global flood claim that all the fossils are the remains of
animals that died in the flood. Morris states,
"Still further, the creationist suspects that the fossil record and the
sedimentary rocks, instead of speaking of a long succession of geologic
ages, may tell rather of just one former age, destroyed in a single great
worldwide aqueous cataclysm."37
If this claim is true, that the fossil record represents the remains of a
single prediluvial world, then there should not be enough fossils to
overcrowd the world. Most animals would be destroyed in the Flood, not
preserved. Thus if the geologic column consists of one single biosphere
which was destroyed in one year, there should be very few fossils and
certainly not enough of them to fill up today's earth. But this isn't what
we see. What we see are too many animals, which means that we have buried in
the geologic column more than one biosphere.
Whitcomb and Morris cite with approval a paleontologist who estimates that
the Karroo Formation of southern Africa is believed to contain 800 billion
fossil vertebrates with an average size of the fox.38 There are 126 billion
acres on the surface of the earth. Only 30 percent of this area is land,
giving a land area of 38 billion acres. If 800 billion animals were spread
over the 38 billion available acres, there would be 21 animals with an
average size of a fox, per acre, from this deposit alone. This does not
include all the vertebrate fossil deposits throughout the rest of the world.
Assuming that the Karroo beds are only 1% of the fossil vertebrates in the
world (the Karroo beds occupy much less than 1% of the sedimentary column)
means that 2100 animals per acre occupied the preflood world. Since an acre
is 4840 square yards, each animal would have only 2 square yards, or 18
square feet, of territory. That is an area only 4.2 wide by 4.2 feet long.
This can be put in a setting that most Americans can understand. The
average house lot is about a quarter acre. Can you imagine every house in
your neighborhood surrounded by 525 hungry animals the size of a fox? I, for
one, would not venture out of doors. Obviously this is far too many animals.
Too Many Plants
If we further consider the quantity of plant matter which must have
occupied the single preflood world envisioned by young-earth creationists,
these results pale in comparison. There are an estimated 15 x 10^18 grams
of carbon contained in the coal reserves of the world.39 An acre of
tropical forest contains 525 kilograms of plant matter per square meter.40
Assuming an 18% carbon content of plant matter41 we have 94.5 kilograms of
carbon per square meter. Multiplying this by the number of square meters on
land, we have approximately the quantity of carbon contained in coal, 15 x
10^18 grams. One can account for all the carbon in coal only by
postulating a tropical rain forest over the entire world.
But this is impossible, because many of the animals in the fossil record
require low productivity regions to survive. Grazing animals that live on
grass can not live in tropical rain forests, because carpeting grasses do
not live there. Now we have too many animals on each acre and almost too
much plant matter. But we are not through.
Whitcomb and Morris believe that oil and natural gas are the result of the
decay of plants and animals that lived before the flood. These authors
state,
"The exact nature of the organic material has been as yet quite unsettled,
but there seems little doubt that the vast reservoirs of organic remains,
both plant and animal, in the sedimentary rocks constitute a more than
adequate source."
"Although the details are not clear, the Deluge once again appears to
offer a satisfactory explanation for the origin of oil, as well as the other
stratigraphic phenomena. The great sedimentary basins being filled rapidly
and more or less continuously during the Flood would provide a prolific
source of organic material, together with whatever heat and pressure might
have been needed to initiate the chemical reactions necessary to begin the
transformation into petroleum hydrocarbons. Of course, not all organic
debris deposited during the Flood was converted into oil; apparently certain
catalysts or other chemicals were also necessary, and where these were
present, it was possible for oil to form."42
If all the oil were the result of the decay of organic matter, then there is
far too much oil and natural gas in the world. There are 201 x 10^18 grams
of carbon in the hydrocarbons of the earth. In all of the world's living
things, there are only 0.3 x 10^18 grams of carbon. There is 670 times more
carbon in petroleum than there is in every living plant and animal on earth.
Surely the world was not 670 times more crowded at the time of the Flood
than it is today!
Too Many Plankton
There are also too many microscopic animals. Most limestone is deposited by
bacteria and invertebrate animals. The Austin Chalk, which underlies
Dallas, is a 400-foot thick limestone bed made of the remains of microscopic
animals, called coccolithophores or coccoliths. It is about 70% coccoliths.
The coccolithophore is a small spherical animal, between 5 and 60
micrometers in diameter, each having about 16 coccoliths that separate upon
the death. According to Stokes Law these animals would fall through the
water at a rate of .1 millimeter per second. To fall through a 100 foot (33
meter) depth of water would take 4 days.
The time required to form the Austin Chalk is far longer than one year.
The coccolith skeleton, when pressed flat, is about 1 micron or one
millionth of a meter thick. A deposit of coccoliths 400 feet thick must
represent many thousands of years of deposits. One hundred twenty-one
million coccoliths could be stacked up like coins across the four hundred
feet. The length of time necessary to deposit these 121 million coccoliths
can be calculated by assuming the maximum density of living coccolithophores
in the waters above. Such measurements can be made during an event known as
a red tide.
Occasionally, growth conditions become so favorable that they grow beyond
all reason. As many as 60 million creatures per liter of water grow and
quickly use up all of the oxygen and nutrients in the water and then die.
Their decay continues to use any oxygen entering the water and also gives
off poisons. Fish who swim into one of these areas often die from lack of
oxygen and the absorption of toxins emitted by the dead microorganism.
These water blooms last only a few weeks as the microorganisms deplete the
water's nutrients rapidly and die. However, even at their most dense, 60
million microorganisms per liter, only 39 layers of organisms are stacked in
a single cubic centimeter. Thus, to stack 121 million coccoliths would
require the death of nearly 8 million organisms. A 100 foot water depth,
filled to the maximum with coccospheres, would only generate a thickness of
six feet of chalk! The four hundred feet of chalk of the Austin formation
would require 66 such blooms. If it required two weeks between each bloom to
recharge the nutrients and one week for the bloom to occur, it would take 4
years to deposit the chalk. And these values are wildly optimistic for the
deposition of chalk. This size bloom is not possible.
The coccolithophores remove calcium carbonate from the water to make their
skeletons. In water depth of 100 feet there is not nearly enough calcium to
deposit such a volume of chalk. One hundred feet of seawater contains only
enough carbonate to deposit a little over 1-millimeter of carbonate. Thus,
no bloom of the size mentioned above can even occur. Using the two-week
recharge and one-week bloom mentioned above, it would take 7,000 years to
deposit the chalk. Obviously, the chalk under Dallas would require much
more time to deposit than merely one year. In southern Louisiana, the chalk
is 2100 feet (640 meters) thick. I have drilled it. This would take
considerably more time than seven thousand years.
Additionally, the quantity of chalk seen in the world is far too great to
have been contained in the preflood world hypothesized by young-earth
creationists. The Austin Chalk is a chalk deposit that stretches from
Mexico along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico into Louisiana, a distance in
excess of 800 km. In Mexico, the Austin Chalk is named the San Felipe
Formation. A glance at the geologic data shows that the band is about 160 km
wide and appears to average 120 meters in thickness.43 In the chalk in Texas
alone there are enough dead coccolithophores to cover the earth to a depth
of 3 centimeters. But Texas is not the only place on earth that has deposits
of chalk. In Alabama and Mississippi, the chalk is known as the Selma. The
Niobrara chalk - 5,000 km long, 1,400 km. wide and 6 meters thick - runs
through much of the western part of the Great Plains of the United States.44
The Niobrara would add another 7 centimeters of cover to the earth.
Throughout Europe Upper Cretaceous chalks cover large areas. The White
Cliffs of Dover are made of chalk that is as much as 215 meters thick in
parts of England. This chalk sweeps across southern Scandinavia, Poland and
into south Russia where it attains an amazing thickness of up to 1000
meters. It is stopped by the Ural Mountains. The chalks of western Europe
are enough to cover the entire earth to a depth of 83 centimeters.45 West of
the Urals, in the Central Asian Tuar-Kyr mountain range, a deposit of chalk
20 meters thick is found. In Israel, Jordan, Egypt, Syria and Saudi Arabia,
an Upper Cretaceous chalk is around 180 meters thick. If all the fossil
record was the record of the destruction of one preflood biosphere, as
Morris suggests, it must have been a crowded place. The worldwide quantity
of dead coccoliths would cover the earth to a depth of one meter.
Too Many Diatoms
A deposit that is similar to chalk is diatomaceous chert. These siliceous
deposits are made of little more than dead diatoms. A diatom is a small
single-celled animal that lives in the sea. As diatoms collect on the ocean
floor and are buried deeper and deeper, they are compressed and changed from
a form known as diatomite, which is used in swimming pool filters, to opal.
Upon further burial, with increased temperature and pressure, the opal is
changed into chert. The Monterey formation of California is such a deposit.
It is the light-colored rock that forms much of the landscape of southern
California. The deposit is 1,200 kilometers long, 250 kilometers wide and
averages half a kilometer in thickness. This single deposit of dead diatoms
is large enough to cover the earth to a depth of nearly 1 foot, or 0.28
meters.
But this is not all. There are over 300 such siliceous deposits around the
world. If each one of them is only one-fourth the size of the Monterey, then
there are enough dead diatoms to cover the earth uniformly to a depth of 21
meters, or 70 feet! So we now have a preflood world which contains 2,100
terrestrial animals per acre (none of which are human), a tropical rain
forest everywhere, 20 meters of dead diatoms over the entire globe and 1
meter of dead coccoliths. Where is everyone going to live? And we are not
through.
Too Many Crinoids
The Mission Canyon formation in the northwestern United States is part of a
truly remarkable deposit. It is largely made of the remains of dead
crinoids, which are deep-sea creatures called sea lilies. Clark and Stearn
report,
"Much of the massive limestone formation is composed of sand-sized
particles of calcium carbonate, fragments of crinoid plates, and shells
broken by the waves. Such a sedimentary rock qualifies for the name
sandstone because it is composed of particles of sand size cemented
together; because the term sandstone is commonly understood to refer to a
quartz-rich rock, however, these limestone sandstones are better called
calcarenites. The Madison sea must have been shallow, and the waves and
currents strong, to break the shells and plates of the animals when they
died. The sorting of the calcite grains and the cross-bedding that is
common in this formation are additional evidence of waves and currents at
work. Even in Mississippian rocks, where whole crinoids are rare fossils,
and as a result, it is easy to underestimate the population of these animals
during the Paleozoic era. Crinoidal limestones, such as the Mission
Canyon-Livingstone unit, provide an estimate, even though it be of necessity
a rough one, of their abundance in the clear shallow seas they loved. In
the Canadian Rockies the Livingstone limestone was deposited to a thickness
of 2,000 feet on the margin of the Cordilleran geosyncline, but it thins
rapidly eastward to a thickness of about 1,000 feet in the Front Ranges and
to about 500 feet in the Williston Basin. Even though its crinoidal content
decreases eastward, it may be calculated to represent at least 10,000 cubic
miles of broken crinoid plates. How many millions, billions, trillions of
crinoids would be required to provide such a deposit? The number staggers
the imagination."46
In just this one deposit, there are enough crinoids to cover every square
inch of the earth to a depth of 1/4 inch. Where would the vertebrate
animals (in the Karroo Beds mentioned earlier) live if the whole world were
covered with crinoids? But this deposit is not the only crinoidal deposit.
Rocks of the lower Mississippian age are largely composed of crinoidal
calcarenites - translation: dead crinoids. Further north in Canada, the
deposit of crinoidal limestones is called the Rundle, and it is called the
Lisburne limestone in Alaska. Both of these beds contain vast quantities of
dead crinoids. Farther south, the crinoidal limestone is called the
Leadville Limestone in Colorado, the Redwall in Arizona, and the Chappell in
Texas, the Burlington and Keokuk limestones in the Mid-Continent region.
The Burlington alone contains another 719 cubic miles of dead crinoids.47 It
is called the Edwardsville Formation in Indiana. This Mississippian
crinoidal rock unit is called the Ft. Payne in Tennessee, Kentucky and
Georgia. But this is not the extent of this crinoidal limestone.
In Australia there is a deposit of crinoidal limestones called the Namoi
and Bingleburra Formations.48 In Libya near the Timenocaline Wells, there is
a 6 foot bed of crinoidal limestone.49 White crinoidal limestones are found
along the banks of the Zilim River in the south part of the Ural
Mountains.50 Belgium boasts a crinoidal limestone that reaches 2,100 feet
thick.51 Without further documentation, which could have been provided,
these crinoidal limestones are found in Egypt, Central Asia, and China. A
Mississippian crinoidal limestone even tops Mt. Everest! With crinoids all
over the Northern Hemisphere, where did land animals live? Where did the
tropical rain forest live? Where did the diatoms come from? Where did the
coal come from?
When it is realized that almost all of the limestone deposits in the world
are biologic in origin, a problem quickly arises. There are 6.42 x 1022
grams of carbon in the limestones of the earth and only 3 x 10^17 grams of
carbon in the biosphere of the earth. The flood must have buried 214,000
times more living matter in limestone alone than is currently on the earth.
There are far too many dead animals to have fit on the preflood earth as
envisioned by the global flood advocates. The fossil record can not even
begin to be considered the remains of one preflood biosphere. It would have
been too crowded! Glenn Morton, Foundation, Fall and Flood, (DMD Publishers,
Spring TX, 1999), p. 83-86
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