Evolution Impossible (17 page)

Fossilized remains of reptiles and amphibians were also found in the external adjacent strata, showing clearly that the many layers of sediment that buried these large tree trunks in the vertical position were being deposited very rapidly by fast-moving water.

Numerous examples of near vertical fossilized trees traversing strata have been reported in the literature, particularly in association with coal deposits in many parts of the world, including Antarctica.
²⁶

Not far from where I live north of Sydney are the famous Newcastle Coal Measures. University of Sydney–trained research geologist Dr. Andrew Snelling reports that these coal measures contain repeated strata, with fossilized upright tree trunks. (I have personally seen some of these near Swansea.) Some of these tree trunks are sitting on top of one coal seam, penetrating the sedimentary horizons above and right up through the next coal seam. Dr. Snelling notes that miners have reported upright coalified logs up to 30 feet or more in length, penetrating several coal seams and the layers of sandstone and other sediments between them.
²⁷

One of the commonly observed features of these fossils is that they usually have no root system of any magnitude attached, nor is there usually evidence of soil that they could grow on. Dr. Snelling also notes that even though fossil tree trunks may be many meters long, the tops of the trees have never been found preserved with them. In every case, the tops of the trees have been broken off, and frequently so has the bottom section. This suggests that in many cases the trees were broken off and transported to the location where they were rapidly buried in an upright position. Evidence for this scenario comes from the observation that thousands of trees floated upright in Spirit Lake after the 1980 volcanic explosion of Mount St. Helens in Washington state.
²⁸
Derek Ager, emeritus professor of geology at the University College of Swansea in Wales, also suggests that observations of upright tree fossils are evidence for very rapid sedimentation in the past.
²⁹

Very rapid sedimentation was associated with the Mount St. Helens eruption. Stratified layers up to 425 feet (130 m) thick formed as a result of mud flows and volcanic ash fallout. One such deposit over 100 feet (30 m) thick, which formed in one day on June 12, 1980, contained a 26-foot (8-m) thick layer composed of over 100 thin layers. This was overlain by a 16-foot (5-m) thick mudflow deposit and underlain by a 26-foot (8-m) thick ash deposit. Similar multilayered deposits have also been observed to form after hurricanes and storms.
³⁰
These deposits show how under the catastrophic conditions of a proposed global flood scenario involving massive water movements and volcanic activity, geological formations that would be interpreted as having great age under the conventional uniformitarian long-age geological model can actually be formed in a very short period of time.

The discovery of ancient river channels under the sands of the Sahara Desert, some as large as the Nile River valley, together with fossils of animals such as crocodiles and hippopotamuses, as well as evidence of human habitation including fishhooks and harpoons, indicates that this area was once a much wetter area.
³¹
We also know that in the past many lakes were much larger than they are today. For example, the Great Salt Lake of Utah was about 17 times larger than it is today. Other examples are Lake Chad in north Africa, which was once over 600 miles long (nearly 1,000 km) and required a water intake about 16 times greater than at present, and Lake Manly, a 590-foot (180-m) deep lake that once filled part of California’s Death Valley.
³²
These are further indicators of a very wet past. We also have abundant evidence of extensive glaciation and vast ice sheets forming in the past when much of the mega fauna such as the woolly mammoths became extinct.

Moist, warm conditions, followed by an ice age, followed by gradual warming is the very scenario predicted by the global flood model proposed by meteorologist Michael Oard.
³³

However, glaciologists subscribing to long ages have constructed dating methods that appear to give ice layers at the Arctic and Antarctic regions existence extending back hundreds of thousands of years. To interpret the data over such a long period of time, they have to hypothesize as many as 30 successive ice ages. To try to account for these climate changes, the controversial Milankovitch hypothesis or “astronomical theory” was developed. This theory proposed that slight periodic changes in the earth’s precession and tilt cycles would result in slight changes in the heat radiation received at the earth’s surface and could trigger these multiple ice ages. However, there are serious problems with the astronomical theory. Firstly, the changes in radiation levels are so small as to not be effective in triggering an ice age.
³⁴
Secondly, on the basis of the long-ages interpretation of the ice core data, there was an ice age every 100,000 years. However, there are no known changes in the radiation reaching the earth that corresponds to that time cycle.
³⁵
A detailed critique of the Milankovitch mechanism and interpretations of ice core data has been compiled by retired U.S. government weather service meteorologist Michael Oard.
³⁶

Again we have the situation of a long-age hypothesis that does not fit the observed data. But there is more.

Further evidence for the flood model comes from the observation that the Greenland ice cores show only one ice age. Multiple ice ages do not show up.
³⁷
The global flood-ice age model also has been shown to provide a very reasonable and logical explanation for the ice age extinction of the mega-fauna, and the deposition of ice at the poles over a relatively short period of time. Its explanation of why the deserts that occur around latitude 30 degrees were wet and lush during the Ice Age again concurs with observed data.
³⁸

In fact, it has been argued that the post-Flood Ice Age model is the only scientific model that has been able to successfully explain the development of ice sheets where we know they once existed.
³⁹

There is much more evidence for the current land forms such as rivers that cut through mountain ranges like the Gordon River Splits in Tasmania, mainly resulting from an enormous global flood, followed by the subsequent up-thrusting of the present-day mountain ranges. For a more detailed and heavily referenced source of information, the reader is referred to an extensive evaluation of the geological evidence for a catastrophic global flood in the recently published volumes titled
Earth’s Catastrophic Past
.
⁴⁰

When we consider the overall geology picture of the earth’s surface, we have consistent and coherent evidence that the mostly flat or slightly sloping sedimentary strata that cover much of the earth’s continents could not have been laid down slowly over hundreds of millions of years. Rather, the evidence suggests that there was catastrophic flood, storm, and volcanic activity all over the world at the same time that laid down the sediments that have become known as the geologic column.

In addition to the geological evidence, there is also a substantial amount of historical evidence that this catastrophic global Flood was relatively recent, and this is the subject of the next chapter.

1
. R. Siever, “Sedimentary Rocks,”
McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Science and Technology
(New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1960), Vol. 12, p. 129–135; J.H. Zumberge,
Elements of Geology,
2nd edition (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1963), p. 44.

2
. Derek V. Ager, The New Catastrophism:
The Importance of the Rare Event in Geological History
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995); see also Derek V. Ager,
The Nature of the Stratigraphic Record
, third edition (Chichester, NY: John Wiley and Sons, 1992).

3
. Ager,
The Nature of the Stratigraphic Record
, p. 11.

4
. W.A. Cobban, “Cretaceous,”
McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Science and Technology
(New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1960), Vol. 3, p. 542.

5
. J.C. Avise, S.P. Hubbell, and F.J. Ayala, “In the Light of Evolution II: Biodiversity and Extinction,”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA,
vol. 105, suppl., 2008, p. 11453–11457; see
http://www.pnas.org/content/105/suppl.1/11453
; see also R.K. Bambach, “Phanerozoic Biodiversity Mass Extinctions,”
Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences
, vol. 34, 2006, p. 127–155.

6
. H.E. Gregory,
Geology and Geography of the Zion Park Region, Utah and Arizona,
U.S. Geological Survey Professional Paper No. 220, p. 65.

7
. S.G. Lucas, “The Chinle Group: Revised Stratigraphy and Biochronology of Upper Triassic Non-marine Strata in the Western United States,” in M. Morales, editor,
Aspects of Mesozoic Geology and Paleontology of the Colorado Plateau,
Museum of Northern Arizona Bulletin, No. 59, 1993, p. 27–50.

8
. L.F. Hintze,
Geologic History of Utah,
Brigham Young University Geology Studies Special Publication No.7, 1988, p. 51.

9
. A.A. Snelling,
Earth’s Catastrophic Past
(Dallas, TX: Institute for Creation Research, 2009), Vol. 2, p. 509.

10
. C.W. Gilmore, “Fossil Footprints from the Grand Canyon: Second Contribution,”
Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections,
vol. 80, no. 3, 1927, p. 1–78, cited by A.A. Roth,
Origins: Linking Science and Scripture
(Hagerstown, MD: Review and Herald Publishing Association, 1998), p. 221.

11
. L.R. Brand and T. Tang, “Fossil Vertebrate Footprints in the Coconino Sandstone (Permian) of Northern Arizona: Evidence for Underwater Origin,”
Geology,
vol. 19 (1991): p. 1201–1204; see also, R. Monastersky, “Wading Newts May Explain Enigmatic Tracks,”
Science News,
vol. 141 (1992): p. 5.

12
. R.C. Blakey and R. Knepp, “Pennsylvanian and Permian Geology of Arizona,” in J.P. Jenney and S.J. Reynolds, editors, “Geologic Evolution of Arizona,”
Arizona Geological Society Digest,
vol. 17 (1989): p. 313–347; see also, Snelling,
Earth’s Catastrophic Past,
Vol. 2, p. 505–510.

13
. Ibid.

14
. J.S. Shelton,
Geology Illustrated
(San Francisco, CA: W.H. Freeman, 1966), p. 280.

15
. J.M. Rahl, P.W. Reiners, I.H. Campbell, et al., “Combined Single-Grain (U-th)/He and U/Pb Dating of Detrital Zircons from the Navajo Sandstone, Utah,”
Geology,
vol. 31, no. 9 (2003): p. 761–764; see also, S.R. Dickinson and G.E. Gehrels, “U-Pb Ages of Detrital Zircons from Permian and Jurassic Eolian Sandstones of the Colorado Plateau, USA: Paleogeographic Implications,”
Sedimentary Geology,
vol. 163 (2003): p. 29–66.

16
. S.S. Beus, “Temple Butte Formation,” in S.S. Beus and M. Morales, editors,
Grand Canyon Geology
(Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 107–117.

17
. R.C. Blakey, “Supai Group and Hermit Formation,” in Beus and Morales,
Grand Canyon Geology,
p. 147–182.

18
. A.A. Roth, “Those Gaps in the Sedimentary Layers,”
Origins
(GRI), vol. 15 (1988): p. 75–92; see also, A.A. Roth, “Implications of Paraconformities,”
Geoscience Reports,
vol. 36 (2003): p. 1–5.

19
. Colin Mitchell,
The Case for Creationism
(Alma Park, England: Autumn House Limited, 1994), p. 100.

20
. A.D. Lawson, “Folded Mountains and Isostasy,”
Bulletin of the Geological Society of America,
vol. 38 (1927): p. 253–273.

21
. Mitchell,
The Case for Creationism,
p. 100.

22
. Ibid.

23
. J.W. Dawson, “On the Results of Recent Explorations of Erect Trees Containing Animal Remains in the Coal-formation of Nova Scotia,”
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal society of London,
vol. 173 (II), 1882, p. 621–654.