Questions About Evolution.

Unfortunately, yes, it seems that is what America is all about. That makes me very grateful that I'm not in America, and not an American. Beliefs are over-rated, they encourage the conceited notion that you know things that you don't.

"Its not what you dont know that gets you in trouble, Its what you do know thats just not so-Mark Twain"

Farmerman,

It seems like you are trying to say that flood deposits from a worldwide flood, (i.e. where the earth is completely covered in water for a period of about a year, in effect they are under the ocean. Even the top of Everest was under the ocean at one time. There is coral on top of Everest as you know) should resemble flood deposits from localized floods where relatively small areas are under small amounts of water for a few hours, or a few days. Why would they?

Sedimentary strata which are miles in thickness[/u] (evidence of which are found in various parts of the globe) are very hard to explain when assuming only local flooding.

If no worldwide flood occurred, where did these come from? Obviously these thick strata could not have been laid down by local flooding if the area in question was 'level with' or 'above' surrounding land.

So then, valleys that were miles deep must have been present, received the water and sediment and then later been elevated so that they are now level with or above surrounding land.

If these valleys were miles deep, where are the mountains which made these deep valleys possible? When the valleys were elevated , wouldn't these mountains be elevated as well?

RL, evidence of water deposited sediments , in order for a flood hypothesis to be correct, would have to be conterminous and contemporary. There is no evidence for either. Sure there are very thick sediment deposits, these are defined by a terminal point that is adjacent to another deposit of a totally different age. Sediments of the mid Appalachian basin are lying next to areas of glacial deposits (indicating a land surface) or are erosion planes (indicating a land surface) or are deposits of intermontaine basins(Triassic lowlands).
A flood deposit leaves speciific typeof sediment..

The sediments that are thousands of feet thick are almost all tilted on end or at some angle from their original horizaontality. These deposits form unconformities at their terminii in which one type of deposit lies in an angular relationship to another adjacent one.

Lets look at the deposits of the Grand Canyon. There are included layered sediments of deep water quiet basins (not a flood), thick glacial deposits, sand dune deposits, paleosoils, stream , river, and swamp deposits. There are also gaps of sediment that show the underlying formation has had its top end eroded (indicating that the layer was uplifted and was a land area for a while). Then when it was inundated at some time later, the preserved unconformity shows this "break in deposists"

Also, there are clear physical laws that govern how fast a particle can settle out in various water borne deposits, A river, or a flood deposit show that pebbles and sand and hunks o rock are all found in an "unsorted" (or just dumped in a slurry and deposited). These laws , including Wentworths Laws of hydraulic settling or Hjulstroms LAw MUST BE OBEYED.

A limestone is hardly a flood deposit, when we look around the world where existing limestones are deposited, we see only shallow water quiet water lagoons, barrier reefs, shallow lakes, and a few unusual volcaniv deposits that spit out CO2 and form "carbootites"

The world hasmostly had about 65 to 75% ocean surface, depending on the amount of ice locked up. Through time, additional lands have accreted to continental margins, so almost anywhere one can see some water deposit. You are making the error of connecting them in time and space, and its just not so.
The fact that the Himalayas contain deposits of seabottom is how they were able to interpret the path that the Indian subcontinent travelled took as it left the area of East Africa and ultimately slammed into the belly of Asia. The sediment types on either side of the "slam" lime are of different ages and kind. India gathered up the bottom of the Indian ocean crust and , like pushing a thick pile rug , these sediment layers just folded and crumpled up against each other and raised up , carrying their water deposited sediments up to the sky. In fact its still going on.

In order to interpret this yourself, just look at a geologic map (Id suggest going to te Pennsylvania Geological and topographic survey website and look up MAP 61) you can see that, within a single topo quadrangle, the patterns of deposition and erosion dont suggest anythging like a single "flood deposit". every state and country has a similar set of geologic maps that can be studied and verified by going into the field and working out an interpretation.

Our biggest disagreement, you and I, is that you assert a different "interpretation" for much of the science. I would challenge you, by using the subtasks of the scientific method:(OHEC)
Observation
Hypothesis
Experimentation
Conclusion

To come up with a conclusion that is flood based.

RL.
Such deposits are easy to interpret. Think of present ocean basins, they are thick deposists of ocean detritus and are certainly not floods (they are ocean basins) Such deposits are skidded all around the map by plate tectonics.(the bottoms of the present mid ocean plates are being conveyed like escalators toward continental margins by plate tectonics) The fossils of these deep thick sediments are all either anoxic (low oxygen carbonaceaous) indicating abyssal depths , or else they are continental slope, shelf deposists(few fossils but many indications of mudslides underwater). The gulf Of Mexico is such a model deposit as is the Niger Delta , the MEkong and the Chatanooga (among many others)

rl.

Old style geology would have agreed somewhat with your understanding. They had all kinds of "synclinal" basins because, until Global Tectonics and Continental Drift were understood, the only directions that geologists could explain for basin movement was up and down. (Continental drift adds another component of movement, sideways). Basins downwarp as they fill up, more sediment makes the basin sink even deeper. A model for thick basins is the Eriemu oil field of the Niger Delpta. Here are examples of alternating beds of shales from muddy delta rivers , separated by thin sand layers (showing higer energy water as the rivers flooded periodically) All the sediments washed into a basin that became a huge oil trap (the oil migrated from the fine organic shales)

Youve answered your own question by your last statement, considering the Andes, Himalayas, Rockies , Alaska Range etc, as the mountains were raised by continental drift, the basins came along and actually became part of the mountain rocks. Thats why corals are in the Andes and Deep ocean sediment layers in the Himalayas.

We can age date these accreted sedimentary masses. As they collide or are smooshed together, they loocally melt and the zircon "clocks" are reset. So when drilling occurs in areas we can age date the accreted sediment layers and a pattern begins to develop that the oldest sediment masses are in the centers of the continents and layer upon layer of sediment are added on like clay stripes. So, not only do we NOT have any evidence of a single contemporaneous worldwide flood, we have lateral stripes of successive mountain building and erosion.

I mentioned Blatt and Berry several times before, (so much so that , since the early A2k days, theyve gone into another edition)

Principles of Stratigraphic Analysis
as a really good professional level Introductory text on how sediments are interpreted within their environments of deposition. If you read Henry Morris's Flood Geology (which is still used by Creationists I understand), you can easily see the differences that the hard data available from recent drill holes and isotopic evidence can refute everything that Morris says.

The Atlantic Geoscience Society published a really great treatise on the Stratigraphy and plate tectonics of Eastern Canada. Its called The Last Billion Years. In it are examples of basins and troughs, mountain building and landmass shearing (not to mention evolutionary evidence). It is a well researched and a good introductory text on ouir Northern neighbors geologic condition from the Cnadian Shield outward.

I have to chide you in that you are mixing examples here. Mile thick sediments are from deep ocean basins. Ive never denied the existence of oceans in any of my posts. However, just because its a sediment "laid in the wet" neither can you call it a flood. An ocean is not a flood. A flood is when water rises even above the ocean level, and that where your story hits a wall.

Sorry for being so avuncular in this, but Im just doing an off the cuff on a subject that has many aspects of evidence , most of which you continually deny.
Im curious, youve said that your Creationist view takes the same data we in geology use and interprets it differently. Surely you can share the specifics of where the differences lie. Just making a broad sweeping statement about "thick sediments means a flood" is relly not specific, its more of a tale of belief.
If you would use the scientific method and go beyond the interpretation of science data in a Creationist mode, you could test your hypothesses as well as any geologist. Why doesnt some Creationist do this? (I have an answer but, in order to remain civil, i wont speak it)

Im in a conference call right now and I must get back to it before I start mixing points up.

Whether these thick sediments were subsequently raised and tilted later on is somewhat immaterial. (Although I agree that they were.)

They must have been lower than the surrounding land when they were being formed, or they wouldn't have been formed.

Without a worldwide flood, sediments that are miles in thickness presuppose valleys which are miles deep, which in turn presuppose mountains around them that are miles tall.

Where are those mountains?

To a geologist , such data is critical, we interpret ages and environments of deposition. The incidents of "flood deposits" are relatively infrequent and include deposists from Hurricanes (baraboo shales of Wisconsin), tsunamis(bande Ache and the Santorini tsunami of the Eastern Med).Actual floods include the Scablands of Washington State.

Why do different environments adjoin each other on a map?Mostly because different sediment types were deposited at vastly different times . For example, the upper Ordovician sediments are a delta deposit from offshedding of sediment by the ancient Appalac.hians. These forelands were higher than the adjacent beach deposits. So we have, within 300 iles going from New York to the EAst, we have an Appalachian sediment basin that grades to a delta, to a beach, to a shallow marine that then drops off to the continental shelf. All this was tilted as the Silurian deposits of a prograding (slowly moving inland) marine environment. Thats why we see the basal Silurian as a huge beach deposit all the way from New York to Alabama. Later deposits of the Devonian Sandstones, shales, redbeds etch, all were deposited on top of theeroded Silurian surface and demonstrates environments of deposition all the way from sandy beaches, to deep quiet water basins, to rapidly emerging deltas and folding of the Appalachians as the Iapetus Sea closed and mooshed the sediments into an even higer Appalachian forland..

All this is pretty much what we see today, with a few perturbations that only make my point more .
Geologists have been working on these areas for over 200 years and weve yet to find a deposit that even closely suggests a worldwide flood.
Local flood deposist, certainly, but these are all separated from adjacent deposits by age or environment. Truthfully, this kind of interpretive stuff is elementary and not too difficult to master (2nd year students can do it). It does , however, take some exposure to the science behind it .