Mesopotamian Flood Deposits [Was: Special Creation]

 Glenn,
 
thanks for the reply. You can't evaluate Carol's paper until it appears, so I guess we'll have to wait. But I do have a question. I've seen maps that show widespread deposits in **southern** mesopotamia, and of course closer to the rivers the further north you go. Are you saying that the widespread southern deposits are pre-quaternary? Or were you talking more about mid to northern mesopotamia when you said the deposits are restricted to the rivers?
 
I'm a physicist who studies sand, sedimentation and erosion processes (actually with gases as the eroding fluid rather than with water, but the physics are similar in many ways). Now I'm keenly aware that I'm not a geologist, but only know enough to be dangerous. Here is a question that is intended to inform my ignorance more so than it is to question your statement, although to be honest I am questioning. :-) I have to question because I'm convinced by Gilgamesh that the biblical flood was, in fact, mesopotamian.
 
So here it is: Can we really expect to identify riverine deposits that were laid down by a one-off flood that had occurred over sand (no native silt) in areas far from the river (where all the silt would be)? It seems that any identifiable deposits would be identified as aeolian (a reworking of native aeolian sands) or at most lacustrine (a local pooling of non-native silt during heavy rains), exactly because it **is** far from the river. In fact, I don't think it would be classifiable as riverine at all. The waters would be flowing across a broad sweep of aeolian sands that had been windswept for millenia, and the sand would thus have a log-normal particle size distribution distribution peaked at a rather large particle size characteristic of aeolian sands. When flood waters move these aeolian sands around and re-deposit them, they would still be essentially aeolian, unless massive quantities of silt were brought far from the river and deposited over these vast tracts i
 n such quantity that they became a significant fraction of the deposited sand. This doesn't seem possible, due to the amount of mass that would be required. Only areas that received and kept actual riverine sediments would look riverine when the flood was finished, and since there is only so much river to go around, and since the flow would be downhill, I wouldn't expect to see much in the way of riverine deposits in the northern regions except right around the rivers.
 
Also, I wouldn't expect a one-off regional flood to create vast, contiguous deposits of any sort (large or small particles) in northern mesopotamia, but rather a very large number of smaller disconnected deposits, depending on local topography. Downhill topography would allow the waters to maintain speed, and if the waters were fast enough to bring deposits **in**, then by definition they would be going fast enough to carry them right **away**. Deposits only occur where the water is slowing down, and that would not be everywhere. Thus, if they could be identified as being anything other than essentially aeolian, they would at most look lacustrine. Aren't there lacustrine deposits all over mesopotamia, since it does get rained seasonally? The composition of these deposits may be re-sorted by particle sizes depending on local water speed, so that upland areas would have mostly sand-sized particles, very little in the way of silt, even if they did have silt washing over th
 em from some unknown source. Southerly mesopotamia would have the silt because that is where the waters would be slowest.
 
Further, all the cities are located around the rivers, so we would have no artifacts buried under deposits to help us identify the deposits as fluvial except right around the rivers.
 
Lastly, any deposits from this one-off flood far from the rivers would be re-worked by the winds after the flood was finished, and a long time has elapsed for such re-working to occur. Only if they got buried by a further event would they be maintained, but this would not happen far from the river. Small quantities of non-native silt in the uplands would be carried away or covered by moving dunes perhaps, and I'm not sure how likely it would be that a geologist would notice them if they were a very thin layer under a few feet of sand dune. I wouldn't expect enough non-native silt to arrive over such vast stretches of aeolian mesopotamia to produce a thick layer, identifiable to a geologist working with an oil drilling operation. Oil drilling isn't concerned with the sand in the upper 3 meters, I'm sure. And nobody is digging far from the rivers for any other reason than that.
 
So in summary I'm saying that a very uncharacteristic flood would create very uncharacteristic deposits, and I'm not sure that the geologists who mapped mesopotamia were looking carefully enough to find something that had that very unique character.
 
Criticism? Thoughts?
 
God's blessings to you,
Phil Metzger
 
 
-----Original Message-----
From: glennmorton@entouch.net
To: asa@calvin.edu
Sent: Thu, 02 Mar 2006 07:32:01 -0500
Subject: Re: Special Creation

***
Phil Metzger wrote:
 
>>>Has Carol Ann Hill's paper on the geology of the flood appeared in PSCF, yet? IMO, that paper, and the paper by her husband, answer quite well Glenn's objections against a very significant mesopotamian flood. Maybe it wasn't as large as even Carol and her husband argue, but I think they show quite well the physics and geology for a large regional flood are not out of the question.<<<
 
I would say that in order to answer my objection, they would have to show that the geologic maps of Iraq, which I have studied from several sources, are wrong and that there are widespread Quaternary riverine sediments. What I have seen the quaternary river sediments are confined very closely to the present day river channels. If they can't change that, they can't answer my objection.
 
Received on Thu Mar 2 12:25:26 2006