Figure 6. (Left) Large boulder of Baraboo Quartzite lying atop the massive Precambrian Baraboo Quartzite formation in Devil’s Lake State Park in central Wisconsin. (Right) Additional Baraboo boulders at the same site. The boundary just beneath the boulder layer is the local expression of the Great Unconformity, the erosional discontinuity that marks the abrupt appearance of multicellular organisms in the earth’s rock record. The intensity of the water process responsible for ripping up and transporting boulders of this size is almost beyond human comprehension. Two ICC technical papers (Sigler and Van Wingerden 1998; Van Wingerden 2003) document the catastrophism associated with this boundary in an even more dramatic way. These papers summarize two masters theses on the pre-Flood/Flood boundary completed at Institute for Creation Research by Sigler in 1998 and Van Wingerden in 2000. These two authors document some 12,000 feet of catastrophic deposits thinning eastward just beneath the Sauk megasequence along the western edge of North America extending from Sonora, Mexico to the North Slope of Alaska. It includes spectacular detachment fault blocks, diamictite, tholeiitic volcanics, Ediacaran multicellular fossils, and salt strata. Although most creationists are keenly aware of the reality and significance of the Great Unconformity, there seems to be no clear consensus on the actual mechanism by which it was formed. However, in the context of the discussion in the preceding section on the cause for the erosional unconformities that separate the megasequences, a reasonable inference emerges. It is that the same mechanism responsible for the erosional discontinuities between the megasequences also accounts for the Great Unconformity at the base of the first megasquence, namely, an episode of cooling of oceanic lithosphere by many hundreds of degrees Celsius and a consequent rapid drop in the global sea level by many hundreds of meters. Such an abrupt drop in sea level would have resulted in catastrophic runoff of water that covered the margins of Pannotia, producing the spectacular deposits we observe today, for example, along the western margin of North America. We therefore meekly offer this as the causal mechanism for the Great unconformity. With this possibility in view, we have included it in the illustrative simulation described below. As emphasized above, God’s cooling of the oceanic lithosphere has been an inherent component of the catastrophic plate tectonics framework since the first paper in 1986. Not until this paper have we suggested that this cooling occurred in distinct pulses. Because abrupt cooling of the ocean lithosphere increases its negative buoyancy and enhances its potential for runaway, a further consequence of the first pulse at the base of the Sauk megasequenceis that it might well have been the trigger that initiated the Flood tectonic cataclysm itself. IV. RESULTS We shall now present results from a case with the water motion driven by large-amplitude tsunamis that includes the continent motion history described earlier. The continent surface is assumed everywhere to consist of crystalline bedrock. The earth is assumed to be spinning at its current rate of rotation. Understanding the results from the model is a challenge because of the model’s many variable quantities such as water velocity, water depth, erosion rate, cumulative erosion depth, suspended sediment according to particle size for multiple particle size classes, deposited sediment according to particle size, and topographic height accounting for erosion, sedimentation, and isostatic adjustment, just to name a few. Each of these quantities varies both in time and potentially with respect to location across some 164,000 individual grid points that span the earth’s surface. The only way a human being can possibly interact with such vast amounts of numerical information is for the information to be represented in a visual manner and then sampled only sparsely in time. Space restrictions in a written paper impose additional constraints. With these considerations in view, we have chosen to include a relatively small set of color plots at a few points in time from the calculation to attempt to afford the reader the opportunity for at least a qualitative grasp of the model results. The times we have selected are at 20, 50, 80, 110, 150, and 200 days from the start of the simulation. Because the continent motion history in this model is similar to that derived by the secular geology and geophysics communities, it is possible to connect times in this model with corresponding points in the secular geological time scale. The continent configuration at 20 days corresponds to 470 million years ago in the secular geological time scale (early Ordovician), 50 days to 320 million years ago (early Pennsylvanian/mid-Carboniferous), 80 days 220 million years ago (late Triassic), 120 days to 150 million years ago (late Jurassic), 160 days to 60 million years ago (Paleocene), and 200 days to 10 million years ago (late Miocene). Fig. 7 provides plots at 20 days for the surface height of either the water or land, whichever is greater, the cumulative depth of bedrock erosion, and the net cumulative depth of deposited sediment. Plots (a) and (b) clearly show water waves in the deep ocean with trough to crest amplitudes of well over 1,000 m! These waves correspond to BAUMGARDNER AND NAVARRO Large tsunamis and Flood sediment record 2023 ICC 374
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