From: alanf@tekig6.PEN.TEK.COM (Alan M Feuerbacher)
Newsgroups: talk.origins
Subject: Re: A Response to the Flood FAQ
Summary: The Mediterranean Was A Desert
Date: 16 Dec 92 18:49:37 GMT
Organization: Tektronix, Inc., Beaverton,  OR.

In article <1992Dec15.191142.2201@aurora.com> isaak@aurora.com (Mark Isaak) writes:
>
>Wayne Folta has responded to my flood FAQ by email, raising many points--
>some valid, some not, and some which I can't evaluate myself.  He has given
>me permission to post the email, but the whole thing is too long and diverse
>to post at once, so I'm excerpting parts.  This posting deals with arguments
>from Whitcomb and Morris.  I hope those who are familiar with those specific
>arguments will comment on them.
>
> [....]
>All of the non-quoted material which follows is from Wayne.
>----------------------
>
> [....]
>
>>   How could the flood deposit layers of solid salt --- sometimes meters in
>> 	width.  This apparently occurs when a body of salt water has its
>> 	fresh-water intake cut off, and then evaporates.  These layers can
>> 	occur more or less at random times in the geological history, and
>> 	have characteristic fossils on either side.  Therefore, if the
>> 	fossils were themselves laid down during a catastrophic flood, there
>> 	are, it seems, only two choices:
>> 	(1) the salt layers were themselves laid down at the same time,
>> 	during the heavy rains that began the flooding, or
>> 	(2) the salt is a later intrusion.
>> 	I suspect that both will prove insuperable difficulties for a theory
>> 	of flood deposition of the geologic column and its fossils.
>> 	[From: marlowe@paul.rutgers.edu (Thomas Marlowe)]
>
>Whitcomb & Morris, pg 412-417. Two simplified explanations: 1) the deposits
>were moved from elsewhere, where they had been since the creation; or 2)
>they were created by a lot of heat in a short time rather than a little
>heat over a long time (volcanic versus solar).
>
>Also, salt domes are so large that a non-Flood explanation has problems,
>too.  They claim that there are salt domes 3000 feet deep and deeper, and
>Europe has domes that may be 15,000 feet deep. To have evaporated in place
>would create enormous difficulties.
>
>They claim that such large deposits are only explainable in terms of non-
>sedimentary mechanisms. The later intrusion mechanism above, sounds like
>this.
>

I'm certain Whitcomb & Morris are able to explain the salt deposits
left over from drying cycles in the Mediterranean basin, as well as
many other phenomena spoken of in the following material.

=====*=====*=====*=====*=====*=====*=====*=====*=====*=====*=====*

The Mediterranean Was A Desert

In the past three decades convincing evidence has been found
that the Mediterranean Sea has completely dried up at least
once, and probably many times.  The first solid evidence
came in the summer of 1970, when geologists aboard the deep
sea research and drilling ship _Glomar Challenger_ brought
up drill cores containing gypsum, rock salt, and various
other minerals that could only have been formed by drying up
of seawater.  What was remarkable was that these minerals
were found on the ocean floor, one to three kilometers deep,
buried under as much as 200 meters of deep-sea oozes, which
are the shelly remains of microscopic plankton that rain
down on the ocean bottom.  These oozes accumulate at a rate
of about two centimeters per thousand years.

The story of the discovery is told in a fascinating book,
_The Mediterranean Was a Desert,_ [Kenneth J. Hsu,
Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 1983.
A Voyage of the Glomar Challenger] by one of the principle
scientists on the expedition, Kenneth J. Hsu.  Here are
some extracts from this book.  Speaking of another of the
scientists aboard the ship, Hsu describes some of the early
discoveries about the Mediterranean:

   Ryan had worked with a `continuous seismic profiler,'
   or CSP, which was a super echo sounder:  besides
   recording sound echos bounced back directly from the
   sea floor, this instrument could send and pick up sig-
   nals of acoustic waves that were able to penetrate the
   bottom and reflect off hard layers several kilometers
   below.  The instrument had been developed in the late
   1950s, and in 1961 Ryan sailed with his mentor, Brack-
   ett Hersey, on the American research vessel _Chain_
   from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution to
   explore the Mediterranean with the newly developed
   CSP.  They soon discovered an acoustic reflector 100
   to 200 meters beneath the Mediterranean sea floor.
   They had no idea what it could be or why it should be
   there, but for the sake of easy reference they named
   this mysterious layer the M-Layer, and its top, the M-
   reflector.  American and French scientists continued
   the CSP surveys of the Mediterranean during the next
   ten years, and wherever they sailed they could iden-
   tify on their records the ubiquitous M-reflector.
   Furthermore, the geometry of this reflecting surface
   closely simulated the topography of the bottom of this
   inland sea; the sediments under the reflector covered
   the basement of the Mediterranean like a thick blanket
   of snow on a mountain plateau.  Obviously the M-layer
   was deposited when the deep basin of the Mediterranean
   Sea had already been created and had almost the same
   bathymetry as it does today. [p. 7]

Hsu describes the discovery of the key core:

   .... we hit the jackpot in Hole 124.  On the morning
   of August 28, the _Challenger_ was drilling south of
   the Balearic Islands in almost 3,000 meters of water.
   Ryan and I had again stayed up into the early hours of
   the morning, when the drill pipe apparently hit the
   hard M-layer.  The drilling rate dropped from several
   meters per minute to a meter per hour.  Impatient with
   the slow progress, we went to bed just before dawn.

   We were not to rest long.  Soon we were awakened by
   John Fiske, a marine technician, who came to report:
   `We found the pillar of Atlantis!'  We dressed quickly
   and rushed to the ship's laboratory to see the new
   find.  Lying on the long worktable was a beautiful
   core, which did indeed resemble a miniature marble
   column.  That was the evidence I needed....

   Our `pillar of Atlantis,'.... consists of anhydrite
   and stromatolite.  This type of sediment has been
   found only on arid coastal flats.  Prior to the _Chal-
   lenger_ expedition, my associates and I at the Swiss
   Federal Institute of Technology, supported by a
   research grant from the American Petroleum Institute,
   had studied the sabkha sediments of the Arabian Gulf.
   We dug scores of trenches on the sabkhas of Abu Dhabi
   and found anhydrite, a calcium sulphate salt, only in
   those places where the saline ground water was suffi-
   ciently close to the surface to be heated to tempera-
   tures exceeding 30 degrees Celsius.  Where the water
   table was deeper and the water cooler, gypsum, or
   hydrated calcium sulfate, would be precipitated out in
   place of anhydrite.  This finding is in accordance
   with chemical studies in the laboratory, which reveal
   that the transition temperature for calcium sulfate
   precipitated from saline ground waters should be above
   30 degrees Celsius, or almost 90 degrees Fahrenheit.
   We thus have good reason to believe that anhydrite is
   not likely to be found in any environment other than
   hot and arid sabkhas, because surface temperatures and
   ground water chemistry elsewhere rarely permit anhy-
   drite precipitation.  We are almost certain that anhy-
   drite could not be settled out of a deep sea.  Even
   the Dead Sea is too deep a body of water to be heated
   hot enough to precipitate anhydrite; on the bottom of
   this salt lake only gypsum crystals are found.

   The anhydrite found under sabkhas was precipitated by
   ground waters like concretions in arid soils.  Fine-
   grained anhydrite would accrete and grow together as
   nodules underground, replacing preexisting carbonate
   sediments.  The nodules might range up to several cen-
   timeters in length.  As the replacement proceeded
   toward completion, anhydrite nodules would coalesce to
   form a layer in which only wisps of preexisting car-
   bonates could be discerned.  The dark wisps of carbon-
   ate in a white background of anhydrite look like the
   wire mesh used by farmers to make chicken-wire fences.
   Thus petroleum geologists who first encountered such
   anhydrite in their study of borehole cores dubbed the
   rock type `chicken-wire anhydrite.'  We really do not
   know why anhydrite grows in this particular form.  We
   can only rely on the repeated observations by sedimen-
   tologists during the last few decades that this vari-
   ety of anhydrite is typical of Recent and ancient
   sabkha sediments.  Until we find evidence to the con-
   trary, we feel content to consider the chicken-wire
   anhydrite a signature of sabkhas.

   Stromatolite is another distinct sedimentary struc-
   ture.  It had been considered a fossil or an inorganic
   structure of chemical precipitation until the 1930s
   when a British sedimentologist, Maurice Black, waded
   across the tidal flat of the Bahamas and found a dense
   growth of blue-green algae forming a thin mat on the
   flat shores.  After a severe storm the mat would be
   buried under a thin cover of sediments, but the algal
   growth would persist and a new mat would be con-
   structed.  This alternation would ultimately result in
   the laminated sediment called stromatolite, which
   means literally `flat stone.'  Since the very exis-
   tence of algae depends on photosynthesis, the presence
   of a stromatolite structure is considered evidence of
   deposition in very shallow waters, commonly less than
   ten meters deep.  In fact, repeated observations have
   confirmed that algal mats are a characteristic feature
   of intertidal environments.  In the coastal areas
   between low and high tides, or the intertidal zone, of
   Abu Dhabi we found the current crop of lush growth in
   algal mats as well as old algal mats formed a few
   thousand years ago and now buried under the windblown
   sand of the coastal sabkhas.  Transpiration of ground
   water led to precipitation of gypsum or anhydrite in
   these fossilized intertidal sediments.  That August
   morning when I was called in to admire the `pillar of
   Atlantis,' I saw the same phenomena of a stromatolite
   partially replaced by nodular anhydrite.  What could
   be a better indication that these sediments were
   formed on the tidal flat of a desiccated Mediter-
   ranean?

   The `pillar of Atlantis' was sampled from a layer of
   rock sandwiched between ocean oozes that contained
   abundant fossil skeletons of foraminifera and nanno-
   plankton.... the plankton found here once swam in the
   near-surface water of the oceans.  After they died,
   their calcium carbonate shells fell to the ocean bot-
   tom and were buried and preserved as microfossils....
   The deep-sea floor is a cemetery for billions upon
   billions of these tiny dead plants; the skeletons of
   nannoplankton may constitute more than ninety percent
   of the bulk of an oceanic ooze.  When these oozes are
   mixed with fine terrigenous particles of clay, as they
   are in the modern Mediterranean, geologists use the
   term `marl oozes,' or simply `marls.' [pp. 10-19]

   There is strong evidence that there were several cycles
of desiccation and reflooding.  Upon closely examining the
above mentioned Hole 124 core, Hsu found that

   The oldest sediment of each cycle was either deposited
   in a deep sea or in a great brackish lake.  The fine
   sediments deposited on a quiet or deep bottom had per-
   fectly even lamination.  As the basin was drying up
   and the water depth decreased, lamination became more
   irregular on account of increasing wave agitation.
   Stromatolite was formed then, when the site of deposi-
   tion fell within an intertidal zone.  The intertidal
   flat was eventually exposed by the final desiccation ,
   at which time anhydrite was precipitated by saline
   ground water underlying sabkhas.  Suddenly seawater
   would spill over the Strait of Gibraltar, or there
   would be an unusual influx of brackish water from the
   eastern European lake.  The Balearic would then again
   be under water.  The chicken-wire anhydrite would thus
   be abruptly buried under the fine muds brought in by
   the next deluge.  The cycle repeated itself at least
   eight or ten times during the million years that con-
   stituted the late Miocene Messinian stage. [p. 105]

The Mediterranean basin has been deep for a long time:

   The first and most obvious support for the concept of
   a deep Mediterranean basin came from a study of the
   seismic records.  The M-reflector had been discovered
   before the Leg 13 expedition, and everybody was then
   convinced that the sediment constituting the reflect-
   ing layer had been laid down in a Mediterranean basin
   whose topography was not much different from the
   bathymetry of the Mediterranean today.  Except for
   some local disturbances the Mediterranean seabed 6
   million years ago lay at about the same depth that it
   does now.  In fact this was Ryan's reason for having
   once argued for a deep water origin of the evaporites.
   Other evidence was provided by.... shipboard paleon-
   tologists.  The fossils in the sediments immediately
   underlying, immediately overlying, and interbedded
   with the evaporite beds all represented deep water
   creatures.

   One final reason for our not accepting the shallow
   bottom hypothesis derived from our knowledge of the
   geological history of the Mediterranean.... During the
   last 5 million years, the eastern Mediterranean had
   not foundered, which would have required regional ten-
   sion.  On the contrary, the sea bottom had apparently
   risen under compression as Africa and the eastern
   Mediterranean seabed were pushed northward toward
   Europe. [p. 127]

   The remains of many canyons have been found, which had
been cut into the sides of the Mediterranean basin when it
was dry:

   Ryan, for his part, began to recall the gravels
   dredged up some years ago by Bourcart from submarine
   canyons in the Mediterranean.  Apparently the French
   had been busy exploring the underwater topography of
   the western Mediterranean during the decade after the
   Second World War when Bourcart and his associates
   found many of these submarine canyons.  The Mediter-
   ranean canyons seemed to be different from those found
   on the continental margins of the Atlantic and
   Pacific, however.  They appeared to be drowned river
   valleys, whereas the Atlantic and Pacific canyons
   appeared to have been cut by submarine turbidity cur-
   rents.  Furthermore, many of the canyons off the Cote
   d'Azur had not eroded recently, or during the Pleis-
   tocene, as the Atlantic and Pacific canyons had; they
   had been cut during the late Miocene.  They were
   partly filled with late Miocene river gravels and then
   covered by ocean oozes of Pliocene age.  The heads of
   many of these large submarine canyons could be linked
   to the mouth of modern rivers in southern France, Cor-
   sica, Sardinia, North Africa, and Spain.  The bottoms
   of the canyons could be traced to about the level of
   the Balearic abyssal plain.

   The origin of the canyons and the gravels had consti-
   tuted a puzzle.  Bourcart was convinced that the
   canyons had been cut above sea level by late Miocene
   streams.  Not aware of any good evidence to suggest
   that the Mediterranean might have dried up, he pro-
   posed the less outrageous hypothesis that European and
   African continental margins had been bent down,
   drowning the Miocene coastal streams.... As we sat in
   the core lab admiring the red and green desert sedi-
   ments, we saw a new explanation to Bourcart's find-
   ings.  The Mediterranean had been dry during the late
   Miocene, and we could envision a painted desert at the
   bottom of the present continental slope, stretching
   across the side expanse of what is now the Balearic
   abyssal plain.  The desert floor then lay more than
   2,000 meters below the level of the sea on the other
   side of the Gibraltar.  Rivers in circum-Mediterranean
   lands were no longer emptying into an inland sea at
   sea level.  Instead, they had to run a steep course
   down the newly exposed continental shelf and slope....
   Rejuvenated streams made deep indentations on the
   edges of these plateaus and sculptured grand canyons
   on their way down to the dried up abyssal plain.
   Gravels were dumped in the canyons and variegated
   silts were piled up on alluvial fans at the foot of
   the escarpment.  With this hypothesis, we not only
   explained the occurrence of red silts at Site 133 but
   provided at the same time a neat answer for Bourcart's
   canyons and gravels; we also resolved the long stand-
   ing mystery of the down cutting of the Rhone in south-
   ern France. [pp. 149-153]

   .... Shortly after we returned to port, [Ryan]
   received a letter from a Russian geologist, I. S. Chu-
   makov, who had learned of our findings through an
   article in the _New York Times._ Chumakov was one of
   the specialists sent by the USSR to Aswan to help
   build the famous high dam.  In an effort to find hard
   rock for the dam's foundation, fifteen boreholes were
   drilled.  To the Russian's amazement, they discovered
   a deep, narrow gorge under the Nile Valley, cut 200
   meters below sea level into hard granite.  The valley
   had been drowned some 5 million years ago and was
   filled with Pliocene marine muds, which were covered
   by the Nile alluvium.  Aswan is about 1,200 kilometers
   upstream from the Mediterranean coast.

Concerning this canyon beneath the Nile at Aswan, another
book said:

   [Chumakov's] research had included the study of 15
   holes drilled into the bottom of the Nile River just
   south of the Aswan High Dam....  Soviet engineers were
   helping build the new dam, and the holes were sunk to
   determine the depths to bedrock and the nature of the
   sediment on top of it.  This revealed that under the
   relatively flat bottom of the present river the
   bedrock forms a canyon some 290 meters deep, now
   filled with sediment.  The lowest part is a narrow
   gorge with almost vertical walls.  Most remarkable,
   Chumakov found, is the nature of the sediment in the
   bottom 150 meters of this canyon.  It proved to be
   filled with oceanic fossils of the Pliocene.

   In other words this canyon 1200 kilometers (750 miles)
   up the Nile, was once flooded by a sudden incursion of
   the sea some 5.5 million years ago.  The most likely
   explanation, Chumakov believed, was that the canyon
   was carved when the Nile flowed into a Mediterranean
   Sea 1000 to 1500 meters lower than today.  Then rapid
   filling of the sea sent salt water up the canyon, and
   only when the latter silted up higher than the exist-
   ing sea level did the accumulating fossils change to
   fresh water forms.  [Walter Sullivan, _Continents In
   Motion_, pp. 166-167, American Institute of Physics,
   New York, 1991.]

_The Mediterranean Was a Desert_ continues:

   In the Nile Delta, boreholes more than 300 meters deep
   were not able to reach the bottom of the old Nile
   canyon.  Chumakov estimated that the depth of the
   incision there might reach 1,500 meters, and he visu-
   alized a deeply buried estuary under the sands and
   silts of the modern Nile Delta.  Chumakov was right; a
   narrow 2,500-meter-deep canyon under Cairo was
   recently discovered during geophysical explorations
   for petroleum in Egypt.

   Note that 2,500 meters is 8,200 feet.  This is much
deeper than Hell's Canyon of Idaho and Oregon, the deepest
in the world today.

   Chumakov was not the only one who found buried gorges.
   Petroleum geologists exploring in Libya described
   their surprises.  First, their seismograms registered
   anomalies: there were linear features underground
   transmitting seismic waves at abnormally high veloci-
   ties.  Drilling into the anomalies revealed that they
   were buried channels incised 400 meters below sea
   level.  The geological record tells the same story:
   vigorous down-cutting by streams in the late Miocene
   and sudden flooding by marine waters at the beginning
   of the Pliocene.  Ted Barr and his coworkers in the
   Oasis Oil Company, based in Tripoli, Libya, concluded
   in a report that the Mediterranean Sea must have been
   a thousand meters or more below its present level when
   the channels were cut.  They could not get their
   manuscript published in a scientific journal since no
   one would accept such an outrageous interpretation.
   Still other buried gorges and channels have been found
   in Algeria, Israel, Syria, and other Mediterranean
   countries.  [pp. 173-5]

   In 1975 another expedition of the _Glomar Challenger_ was
undertaken, with Hsu aboard.

   .... We managed to do what we could not have done five
   years previously--namely, to penetrate the Mediter-
   ranean evaporites so as to obtain a record of the ear-
   lier Mediterranean history.  We found unequivocal evi-
   dence that the Mediterranean had been a deep sea, for
   15 million years at least, prior to the Messinian
   dessication. [p. 182]

   Interestingly, Hsu makes some comments about his initial
skepticism and later acceptance of the revolutionary
seafloor spreading hypothesis I've already mentioned in con-
nection with plate tectonics.  This hypothesis is strongly
confirmed by the presence of symmetrical magnetic stripes on
either side of spreading centers.

   Correlating the width of the magnetic stripes with the
   duration of successive reversals of magnetic poles,
   the sea floor spreading hypothesis should provide a
   means of determining the age of the ocean floor: the
   farther away from the ridge axis, the older the ocean
   crust would be, and the ratio would measure the rate
   of sea floor spreading.  The Leg 3 [Deep Sea Drilling
   Project] expedition to the South Atlantic was planned
   to test the hypothesis.  By drilling, sampling, and
   dating the ocean crust, we should find out if the
   ocean floor at a number of chosen sites was indeed as
   old as the hypothesis predicted.

   Working on _Glomar Challenger_ during the Leg 3
   drilling, I witnessed the most amazing confirmation of
   this concept of sea floor spreading.  We bored ten
   holes, and the age of the sea floor at every site was
   almost exactly that predicted by the hypothesis.  It
   is always hard for me to accept other people's bril-
   liant ideas and admit my own errors in judgment, but
   faced with ironclad proof, I had no choice but to join
   the `revolutionaries.'  [pp. 31-2]

The previous material on the Mediterranean's drying up con-
tains abundant evidence that creationist speculations on the
geological events related to the Flood are incorrect.  The
most damaging is the finding that the Mediterranean basin
has been deep for a very long time.  Whether or not the 15
million or more year time spans mentioned above are correct,
it is clear that all the described geological features could
not possibly have been formed during and after a great Flood
just 4000 some-odd years ago.  If the "shallow sea basins,"
which would have included the Mediterranean, were deepened
during the Flood, how were the buried gorges such as the
Nile's formed?  Especially so since the sea basin would have
been filled with seawater?  How could up to 200 meters (650
feet) of sea-bottom oozes, consisting of mostly the skele-
tons of plankton, have been deposited in such a short time
span?  Especially since the current rate of accumulation is
only two centimeters per thousand years?  If the Mediter-
ranean were shallow prior to the Flood, when and in what
manner did all the evaporites become deposited?  Especially
since there is clear evidence that there were a number of
cycles of drying and flooding, that deep sea oozes were
interbedded among the evaporites, and that the oozes have
been shown to evenly blanket the basement rock of both shal-
low and deep regions.

   The only logical conclusion is that the creationist
explanations about the supposed "shifting of the earth's
crust" during and after the Flood are erroneous.  Their
explanations of salt deposits do not take reality into
account.

Alan Feuerbacher
alanf@atlas.pen.tek.com