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?<<<<
First off, I absolutely CAN state my criteria for whether or not Carols paper solves the problem. I don't need to wait for her paper to be published to state why I think a Mesopotamian flood is false. I am a geoscientist and have a wee bit of expertise in the area.
Now, sure the riverine deposist spread out at the delta---which is southern Mesopotamia. That is no big deal. One can say that about any river delta in the world and we don't go around the world claiming that there were significant floods in every single delta in the world. The fact that the sediments are wider at the delta is one of those ho-hum concepts which geoscientists are not going to find very interesting. Why should what happens everywhere be considered a significant flood when it happens in Mesopotamia???? Please answer this before Carol's paper is published.
>>>>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.<<<<
Ok, so now we have a Mesopotamian flood. Where did the ark land? Well, it was the mountains of Ararat somewhere about 300-500 miles north and several thousand feet above sea level. Please tell me how you get water to fill up to that level without flooding the entire planet? Do you have a magical wall of water on the south end of the basin? See the little ascii chart I have at
http://home.entouch.net/dmd/mflood.htm
>>>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 in 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.<<<<
I would suspect that most of that sand would have been washed into the sea. There would be beaches along the edge of the water where the waters easily eroded into the sand (assuming that the flood lasted a year). There should also be riverine ripple marks, a clay layer (because that sand still has some silt sized particle and clay sized particles, and there would have been some clay's washed down from higher elevations. One should be able to find minerals which are washed down from the higher elevations. Such features last a really long time even on the surface. There are huge riverine floods which took place in the Altay mountains and in the Washington Scablands from 20,000 years ago, which still have left evidence of their existence in the form of large clasts and huge ripple marks. Yet we find none of this in Iraq. And yet, so many christians like you are totally convinced that Mesopotamia is THE place of the flood. It is an illusion.
>>>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 w! ay of silt, even if they did have silt washing over them from some unknown source. Southerly mesopotamia would have the silt because that is where the waters would be slowest.<<<<
I would expect vast contiguous deposits because we see that elsewhere when there ARE huge riverine floods. For some reason no one who advocates the mesopotamian flood actually looks at other examples of huge riverine floods. Why, I don't know. But I have looked at them. Here is what we should see in Mesopotamia, but don't.
"Pleistocene glacial outburst floods were released from ice-
dammed lakes of the Altay Mountains, south-central Siberia.
The Kuray-Chuja lake system yielded peak floods in excess
of 1 x 106 m3 s-1 and as great as 18 x 106 m3 s-1. The
phenomenally high bed shear stresses and stream powers
generated in these flows produced a main-channel, coarse-
grained facies of coarse gravel in (1) foreset-bedded bars
as much as 200 m high and several kilometers long, and (2)
degradational, boulder-capped river terraces. Giant current
ripples, 50 to 150 m in spacing, composed of pebble and
cobble gravel, are locally abundant. The whole sedimentary
assemblage is very similar to that of the Channeled
Scabland, produced by the Pleistocene Missoula Floods of
western North America." ~ A. N. Rudoy and V. R. Baker,
"Sedimentary Effects of Cataclysmic Later Pleistocene
Glacial Outburst Flooding, Altay Mountains, Siberia,"
Sedimentary Geology, 85(1993:53-62, p. 53
"Large lakes formed from three to five times in the northern
Rocky Mountains. Immense terranes of coarse gravel and sand over
30 meters high line the upper Columbia River valley in Canada,
attesting to staggering volumes of meltwater. In western
Montana, a large basin filled and drained several times to form
Lake Missoula. About 18,000 years ago its moraine dam in
northern Idaho suddenly broke. A wall of water rushed across
eastern Washington with incredible velocity. This catastrophic
flood scoured channels and deposited immense gravel bars over a
large part of the Columbia Plateau (channeled scablands)." Robert
H. Dott, Jr., and Roger L. Batten, Evolution of the Earth, (St.
Louis: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1971), p. 447
>>>>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.<<<
That simply isn't true. We can identify flood deposits without having to have human artifacts around.
>>>>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.<<<
Then why do the documented major floods along the Columbia River and in the Altai mountains say that your reasoning is wrong? If you had major rainfall in the highlands, there would NOT be just a small quantity of non-native silt and shale. There would be huge quantities. We should also find evidence of the flood in the Persian gulf when dropcores are taken. I have never heard of any report of such an event. While you are correct that oil wells are not logged at 3 m, I can assure you that there are plenty of Quaternary geologists who would have noticed something like this and commented upon it. So far, in the secular literature, there are no comments about major widespread floods in the Mesopotamian basin.
By the way, since you are a physicist, please explain to me why, when the water flows south into the Persian gulf from this major flood, the ark is transported north AGAINST THE FORCE OF THE WATER FLOW? Water flows in floods at around 3-10 mph. For comparison, a human can not stand knee deep in water moving at 2 mph. And please explain how the Ark drifted up to a high elevation against the water flow direction. Where did the energy to lift the ark come from? (I am sure you remember what mgh is.) The only way I can see for there to be a Mesopotamian flood is if there is a magical wall of water several thousand feet tall along the southern border of Mesopotamia so that the ark is lifted the several thousand feet and then the wind can blow it to the north to land in Ararat. Without such a magical wall of water, the ark will be pushed (using normal Newtonian physics and normal hydrodynamics) into the Persian Gulf where it is impossible for it to land in Turkey or northern Iraq. The slope of the land is to the SOUTH, not to the NORTH. Please explain how my line of reasoning is fallacious. I would love to hear it.
Sorry to sound so cynical but I find the mesopotamian view of the flood to be so full of physical and geological holes as to be almost YEC-like in its nature. People who would not hypothecate such false ideas on their job (as a physicist) seem to lose their bearings when it comes to explaining the Bible. (maybe I too have lost my bearings with my explanation, but at least I don't have magical walls of water several thousand feet high at the southern end of Mesopotamia). At least Dick tries to explain this by having humans push this monstrous boat against the current, but that too, is futile as humans don't have the strength to do it.
http://home.entouch.net/dmd/physmeso.htmI also have become very cynical about the typical apologetical nonsense that would be shot down in a nannosecond if it was presented at a symposium of physicists or geologists, yet somehow has cache among Christians. This isn't your fault. Christian theology over the past 200 years has been stuck in solutions which don't work---on all sides of the issue. It is time for something brand new that actually pays attention to the laws of physics. I know that is a novel concept (to pay attention to physics) but it is what I believe is necessary even in apologetics.
>>>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?<<<
You have my criticisms. God bless you too, but I can't see why we leave physics at the church house door before we enter the church and suggest a mesopotamian flood.