RE: diatoms and the global flood

Kevin L. O'Brien (klob@lamar.colostate.edu)
Sun, 27 Sep 1998 15:53:27 -0600

Greetings Karen:

"Yes. And that removal was probably not by evaporation (the deposits are
too pure) but by vast precipitation from supersaturated solution in those
areas."

That wouldn't work. It is chemically impossible to have a local
supersaturated solution within a much larger body of unsaturated water,
especially during a catastrophic event like the Noachian Deluge. Also,
salt does not precipitate, it crystallizes. What this means is that even
if a supersaturated solution could exist long enough to produce
crystallized salt, only the amount necessary to bring the solution to
saturation levels would crystallize out. The rest of the salt would remain
in solution and get mixed throughout the rest of the Flood. On top of
that, there is plenty of evidence that the deep interior of the earth
contains little or no salt. Magmas extruding to the surface of the earth
can contain sulphates, silicates, carbonates, etc., but contain no salt.
Hence there is no evidence to support the claim that the "fountains of the
deep" would contain any salt at all, much less enough to create the
geologic salt beds.

Oh, and by the way, the geologic salt beds are not all that pure, and
evaporation can produce beds of (reasonably) pure salt.

Kevin L. O'Brien

"Good God, consider yourselves fortunate that you have John Adams to abuse,
for no sane man would tolerate it!" William Daniels, _1776_