From: alanf@tekig6.PEN.TEK.COM (Alan M Feuerbacher)
Newsgroups: talk.origins
Subject: Re: A Response to the Flood FAQ
Date: 16 Dec 92 10:46:22 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 a one-year flood deposit the following: "In Yellowstone Park
>> 	there is a stratigraphic section of 2000 feet exposed which shows 18
>> 	successive petrified forests.  Each forest grew to maturity before
>> 	it was wiped out with a lava flow." [J. Laurence Kulp, quoted in
>> 	Strahler, _Science and Earth History_, pp 221-224.]
>
>This is an easy one. These are not 18 separate petrified forests, but the
>repeated, rapid, cataclysmic deposits of trees from elsewhere. The "trees"
>found are in fact tree stumps, without extensive roots or branches. It is
>well-known that tree stumps that are ripped up in floods often are deposited
>roots-down. (For example, this month;s Science magazine shows such an effect
>from a huge flood in Washington. Gish and company have also found the same
>sort of event at Mt. St. Helens.)
>
>Thus, what looks like "forest killed by volcano, tens of thousands of years
>until new forest, which is killed by volcano, ..." could have actually been
>entirely been deposited in rapid succession from a forest at another
>location. In fact, I think they presented (at their seminar) information
>that one of their group had gotten a Master's Thesis out of looking into the
>different forest's tree rings and finding that the many layers were from the
>same forest (tree rings corresponded).
>-- 

Let Mr. Folta use Whitcomb and Morris's above ideas to explain
the effects of flood basalts in India and North America.
These phenomena are very well explained via plate tectonics.
The following material is from non-specialist publications,
so the sources should be readily available.

   A striking hotspot track that illustrates continental
drift is seen in the geology of the Reunion Island hotspot,
the Seychelles islands and India.  The article "Volcanism at
Rifts", _Scientific American_, July, 1989 describes the pro-
duction of flood basalts that formed India's Deccan Plateau:

   Sixty-six million years ago the earth rifted open on
   the west side of India, and huge volumes of molten
   rock poured onto the land.  Close to two million cubic
   kilometers of lava were released in less than half a
   million years, blanketing much of west-central India
   in layers of basalt hundreds of meters thick.  The
   episode may have dealt a major blow to the climatic
   and ecological stability of the planet, and some theo-
   ries even blame it for the extinction of the
   dinosaurs.  Yet it was far from unique; many similar
   cataclysms have taken place on rifting continents dur-
   ing the course of geologic time.

   .... the largely submerged continental block that
   bears the Seychelles islands rifted away from western
   India.... This rift extruded vast amounts of magma
   onto the continental margins.... The melt also poured
   hundreds of kilometers inland, forming a vast basalt
   plateau called the Deccan Traps.

   After the rifting the Indian subcontinent continued to
   drift northward on a collision course with Asia.  It
   left the plume responsible for the volcanism far to
   the south, where it now lies under the volcanic island
   of Reunion.  A trail of volcanic islands, sea mounts
   and ridges left on the oceanic crust that has moved
   across the hot spot shows that 66 million years ago it
   lay directly under the developing rift.

   A catastrophic series of flood basalts formed the
Columbia Plateau of eastern Washington and Oregon somewhere
between 13 and 17 million years ago.  That this was a series
occurring over a long period of time, and not a single
event, is clear.  _Landprints_ [1] says

   Between the periods of eruption there was time for
   grasslands to reestablish themselves and again become
   inhabited by horses, camels, rhinoceroses, mastodons,
   and other creatures.

   .... Remnants of a forest were preserved at Ginkgo
   Petrified Forest.... in central Washington.

   [Walter Sullivan, _Landprints_, p. 152, Times Books,
   New York, NY, 1984.]

   A rhinoceros fossil was found in 1935 in the basalts of
Grand Coulee in Washington, and described by a Professor
Beck.  It is known locally as the Blue Lake Rhino and is a
favorite summer hiking goal.  _How to Deep-Freeze a Mammoth_
describes the events.

   The original discovery was made by a party of hikers.
   In the basalts which crop out along Jasper Canyon,
   they observed a number of small caves, and amused
   themselves with investigating them further.  In one of
   the caves they found some bone fragments, which were
   eventually turned over to Dr. Beck and which the pale-
   ontologist Chester Stock identified as belonging to an
   extinct rhinoceros.  Dr. [D. E.] Savage later identi-
   fied it as the genus _Diceratherium,_ which lived in
   North America during the Miocene epoch, some 20 mil-
   lion years ago.

   Beck and one of his assistants visited the cave and
   found it to be small, elongated, and of a very odd
   shape.  On the right there were two pairs of short,
   pipelike extensions, one pair being located at the
   very entrance of the cave.... while the other pair was
   located further inside the cave.  Beyond that pair,
   the cave narrowed, then widened again, and ended.

   The two scientists must have been thrilled to realize
   that they were in fact poking their heads into a
   20-million-year old rhinoceros, through its left hind
   leg.  This seemed to be the only rational explanation.
   Apparently, the flowing lava had engulfed the carcass
   of the rhinoceros, and when the lava cooled and the
   carcass decayed, the mold and the bones within it were
   preserved in about the same way as the famous molds in
   volcanic ash preserved at Pompeii.  The mold had then
   remained buried for millions of years, until the river
   finally cut its way into the ancient lava flow....
   exposing the cave.

   .... It turns out that the lava had been flowing out
   into a lake, where it formed _pillow lava_--large,
   plastic lumps with a tough and cooled surface but with
   a liquid, burning hot interior.  These pillows were
   packed around the carcass of the rhino, which had been
   floating in the lake, and so have preserved the shape
   of its exterior....

   Casts of the rhino have been made from the basalt
   mold; one of them is on exhibit in the Burke Museum of
   the University of Washington in Seattle.  It seems to
   record faithfully the shape of the body of the extinct
   rhino.  The head is especially rhino-like.... The head
   has been pulled up in a typical _rigor mortis_ posi-
   tion....

   The animal was lying on its left side, and its body is
   very bloated, which suggests that it had died some
   time prior to its being embedded in the basalt.  Per-
   haps it died from the heat and the gas that was given
   off by the eruptions.  The final reconstruction thus
   shows a much slimmer animal, not unlike a modern
   rhino.... It confirms in all essentials the image that
   had been formed earlier of this animal, on the basis
   of fossil skeletons.

    [Bjorn Kurten, _How To Deep-Freeze a Mammoth_,
    pp. 42-48, Columbia University Press, New York, 1986.
    English Edition]

   I recently climbed inside this rhino cast.  It was really
an experience.  There is the cast of a one foot diameter
tree lying right next to the rhino.  On the talus slope
trails leading to the cave, there are many casts of large
tree stumps, some of which are eight feet in diameter and
fifteen feet high.  Many are standing upright, and the tex-
ture of the bark is readily seen in the lava pillows.  There
are bits and pieces of petrified wood in many of the caves.
The layering of the lava flows is very evident, and the
casts all occur at what is clearly the boundary between
flows.  Some individual flows are over a hundred feet thick.
Note that many of the canyons in Eastern Washington, includ-
ing the Grand Coulee, were carved out or enlarged by a
series of possibly forty gigantic floods (the Missoula
floods) that occurred around 13,000 years ago as the
Cordilleran ice sheet began to break up and Lake Missoula
drained catastrophically as ice dams gave way.

   The Deccan and Columbia flood basalts could not have
formed during or after the Flood--there is simply not enough
time for the sequence of events to occur.  The Columbia
basalts are composed of several hundred individual flows,
forming a plateau averaging half a mile thick.  The flows
buried the roots of already existing mountain ranges, leav-
ing the tops of the mountains exposed.  The highest in Ore-
gon, the Wallowas, are over ten thousand feet.  They are
eroded remnants of ancient sea sediments.  The Wallowa moun-
tains first had to form and erode, then several hundred lava
flows had to fill the canyons to a half-mile depth, with
some of the flows cooling down enough for soil to form in
the time between flows--enough to support a population of
animals, some of which became trapped in subsequent lava
flows.  Later the Snake and Columbia Rivers had to cut com-
pletely through the flows that had entered their valleys.
Finally the Bonneville and Missoula floods had to come
through and deposit giant gravel bars in the Snake River
Canyon and Columbia Gorge.  To claim all this happened in
the 4000 some-odd years since the Flood is stretching
credulity.

   The only alternative is that the Flood waters _must_ have
been deep enough to cover the Wallowas, over ten thousand
feet.  But there is not enough water on earth today for
that.

Alan Feuerbacher
alanf@atlas.pen.tek.com