active and prolific, any layering that may occur in today’s world in most cases is quickly obliterated by these organisms. However, the presence of the sort of well-defined layers so evident from bottom to top of the Phanerozoic record is in stark contrast with what we observe in today’s sedimentary environments. Another prominent attribute of these sediment layers is their fossil content. Fossilization generally requires that an organism be completely and rapidly buried; otherwise, the organism when it dies will soon lose its identifying features because of scavengers and micro-organisms. Hence, fossils are a reliable indicator of an extraordinary rate of sedimentation. The fact that fossils are so common throughout the Phanerozoic sediment record argues that most of that record must be the product of high-rate sedimentary processes. Yet another feature of the fossil record argues that the total time span for the formation of this record has been no more than a few thousands of years. This evidence is the excellent state of preservation of soft tissue in fossils across the record. Examples include flexible blood vessels containing red blood cells in a femur from Tyrannosaurus rex (Schweitzer et al. 2005), flexible bone tissue, delicate bone cells known as osteocytes, and red blood cells from a Triceratops horridus horn (Armitage and Anderson 2013), and collagen and red and white blood cells from an ichthyosaur vertebra (Plet et al. 2017). Such striking contrasts between the geological processes operating today and those responsible for the fossil-bearing sediments averaging some 1,800 m in thickness that blanket the earth’s continents pose a profound challenge to a premise foundational to modern geological understanding. This premise, adopted in the shadow of the Enlightenment some 200 years ago, is that presentday geological processes, operating at approximately presently observed rates, explain the earth’s rock record with a high degree of fidelity since early in earth history. This premise is generally referred to as uniformitarianism. Expressed more briefly, it is the claim that “the present is the key to the past” in terms of geological processes. However, the glaring points of conflict just outlined between past processes and rates and those of the present are sufficiently serious and also so well-supported by observation as to render that premise false and rationally indefensible. The implication is that the field of geology veered into the weeds 200 years ago and has since been lost there ever since. Figure 1. Photo from the south rim of the Grand Canyon, Arizona, USA. But if uniformitarianism is so profoundly deficient, is there a rational alternative? Indeed there is, namely, the view held by most people in the Western world, even among the well-educated, prior to the late 1700s. It is the understanding that the earth’s fossil-bearing geological record is a consequence of the global cataclysm described in chapters 6-8 of Genesis. This is the strong conviction of this paper’s authors. II. BACKGROUND Just what might a rational defense of the Genesis Flood, within the backdrop of 21st century science, look like? One essential feature is a zeal to examine the full spectrum of observational evidence, including that summarized in the previous section. Another is a zeal to apply the full spectrum of well-tested physical laws to gain insight into the physical processes involved, along with a diligence to obtain quantitative estimates of the process rates as constrained by the time scale provided in the Genesis text. Another is to deal carefully with the tension between the reality that there is a natural order which God Himself established and the fact that God is fully able to overrule that natural order when He so chooses. On this it is to be noted that 2 Peter 3:3-6 implies that God did overrule the natural order in some significant manner during the Flood. As an example of this strategy, let us address one of the more challenging features of the sediment record to explain. This is the vast lateral extent of a significant fraction of the layers as highlighted in the discussion of Fig. 1. It is not uncommon for layers to extend for 1,000 km in one direction and for hundreds of km in the perpendicular direction, often with little variation in layer thickness, sediment grain size, or composition. One question that naturally arises is what sort of water process could suspend, transport, and deposit such a huge volume so uniformly over such a vast area? A. Quantifying the sediment transport and deposition process To deal with that topic in a qualitative way it is helpful to have some estimate for the average rate of sediment deposition over the continental surface during the cataclysm. The average thickness of the fossil-bearing sediment sequence blanketing the continents today is estimated to be between 1,800 m and 2,000 m (Prothero and Schwab 2004; Olson et al. 2016; Baumgardner 2018b). Assuming most of the Flood’s primary deposition occurred within the interval of 150 days during which “the water prevailed on the earth” (Genesis 7:24), one can divide the lower estimate of 1,800 m by 150 days to obtain an average deposition rate of 12 m/day (equivalent to 39.4 ft/ day, 0.5 m/hr, or 1.4x10-4 m/s). If most of the sediment is a product of erosion of crystalline bedrock during the cataclysm, then this number also provides an estimate for that average rate of erosion. With that quantitative estimate for the average deposition rate during the cataclysm, let us return to the challenge of generating uniform sediment layers on the order of 1,000 km in lateral extent. Sediment deposition implies sediment suspension and transport. As a thought experiment let us consider a layer that extends for 1,000 km, or 106 m, in the direction of water flow and everywhere along its length has a deposition rate of 12 m/day or 1.4x10-4 m/s. Let us assume that flow is from left to right, that sedimentation is from particles settling out of suspension from the moving water column, and that at the point 1,000 km from the left edge there is no sediment left in suspension. BAUMGARDNER AND NAVARRO Large tsunamis and Flood sediment record 2023 ICC 364
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