Re: Carbonate buildups

Glenn Morton (grmorton@waymark.net)
Fri, 06 Feb 1998 21:21:26 -0600

At 10:01 AM 2/6/98 -0800, Arthur V. Chadwick wrote:
>At 09:47 PM 2/5/98 -0600, Glenn wrote:
>
>>I got that article in today. Are you using a seminal paper on carbonate
>>debris flows as evidence that all carbonate is rapidly deposited?
>
>Not at all, just that the reefs are not bioherms, and there is a need to
>consider models other than the accepted dogma, especially if you are going
>to try to reinterpret the whole world.
>
But you miss my point. Cook et al do not talk about the reefs, which are to
the west of the debris flow. The skeltal framework facies are the "reefs".
They are not associated with basinal dark limestones.

>>But the basinal area that Cook is talking about has many rock property
>>differences. The shallow water clasts are surrounded by a dark matrix. They
>>give lots of other differences such as the clasts float in the dark matrix,
>>the clasts are unsorted etc.
>>
>>Thus this is not a useful article for trying to have bioherms explained via
>>a rapid sedimentation or catastrophic event.
>
>No, only to point out that the prevaling paradigm can blind workers to the
>data. In these cases, the earlier workers had assumed they were reefs on
>the basis of the presence of fossil corals and the general reef-like shape
>of the mounds. They were wrong.

Obviously those who described the debris flow as reefs were wrong. But that
is how science works, as you know. Just because someone is wrong and
subsequent discovery proves them wrong is no reason to put in abeyance
acceptance of everything else that has not been shown to be wrong.

glenn

Adam, Apes, and Anthropology: Finding the Soul of Fossil Man

and

Foundation, Fall and Flood
http://www.isource.net/~grmorton/dmd.htm