Re: Flood Deposits in Mesopotamia [Was: Special Creation]

In a message dated 3/3/2006 10:36:10 AM Eastern Standard Time,
glennmorton@entouch.net writes:
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).
I'm sorry I don't follow. Do you mean beaches on the shore of the gulf or on
the shore of the rivers?

I don't imagine the flood was a torrent. I imagine the rivers swelling and
then overflowing the banks out to some wide distance, and then slowly
retreating back to the rivers. As you know sand is not suspended by water unless the
motion is torrential. In the kind of flood the bible describes (as I read it)
there would be sand moving for the first couple days, but then no more sand
would move. When sand does move in slower waters it is by traction (rolling) and
by saltation. These are very slow processes.

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.
If the flood waters entered the basin over a short period and then were susta
ined there by wind for 9 months, then there would not be a lot of water
flowing in from the surrounding areas. It would mostly be just sitting there. How
much clay would have to flow in to coat the entire basin to a thickness of
only half a millimeter? Answer: 1.2 Billion cubic meters. I doubt that much
clay flowed in from the mountains. Also, most of that clay would be
concentrated around the rivers, not spread uniformly over the entire basin. What would
be left 50 km from Ninevah (outside the region where there actually are flood
deposits) would be truly miniscule.

In any case, I'm happy with a flood that matches the known flood deposits
(100 km wide around Ninevah).

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.

So let's change our perception of the mesopotamian flood to match the data.
The flood didn't need to be torrential. If the waters were relatively
stagnant for the entire 9 months, held in place by a northerly wind, then it would
have had much less effect. If the flood was concentrated around the river
basins, then the deposits would be exactly where we do see them.

Phil Metzger
Received on Sat Mar 4 01:39:03 2006