I know I know hard to believe that in the 21st century we have to debunk this Bronze Age myth, but while most of us left the story of a global flood and an arc full of animals back in Sunday school for five-year-olds, 64% of Americans surveyed four years ago actually believe this story is true, and grown-ups with proper jobs have even tried to explain how it could have happened. So in the next two videos I'm going to explain how we know it didn't happen, and then we'll take a look at some of the famous mini-meths that have grown up around the flood story, like polystrat trees, and the five-minute carving of the Grand Canyon. 200 years ago the first geologists believed absolutely what the Bible told them, and set forth to find traces of this great flood. Their view of the world was pretty much the same as creationist today. God had made the earth mostly out of granite and basalt, then along came the flood bearing and preserving all the animals and plants under a massive muddy sediment. Then life returned, the soil was built up, and today we live on top of all these remains. And if you listen to creationists on this subject, this is exactly what geologists have found. But when early geologists looked at these water-lane rocks more closely, they got a surprise, because they didn't find this at all. They found something more like this. They found layers of different types of rock, in no particular order. No sign of that single global flood deposit anywhere. Kent Hoveon pretends not to be surprised. He says we should get layers of sediment from a flood. Moving mud automatically stratifies. Get a jar of dirt, add some water to it, shake it up, and set it now. It settles into layers for you. This is an important part of what Hoveon calls the Hoveon Theory. Yeah, he seems to have dreamed it up by sitting in a chair, because as we shall see, its obvious Hoveon hasn't actually done the experiment to find out what happens. Let's do it for him. To test the Hoveon Theory, add different flood detritus to a jar or a small tank, a few stones, some sand, red clay, weather clay, humus rich garden soil, natural topsoil from the forest, and a bit of vegetation, add water and stir. Let's leave it to settle for a bit and look at more of the Hoveon Theory. When you put out into the canyons near Mousain Hallons, you will see erosion. It was incredible there, and it has the sides of the canyon are stratified, nice neat layers. They said, oh wait a minute, all this mud flowed in here at one time. Why is it stratified? Did Hoveon just say this was mud? Wait a minute, all this mud flowed in here at one time. But this didn't look like a mud flow to me, and I've seen quite a few. Knowing that Hoveon is predisposed to lying through his teeth, I tracked down the picture to a website called wasdarwinright.com. It had been reversed, but it's the same photo, and this photo shows much more clearly the obvious features of ashtoposits and pyroclastic flow from a volcano. The caption on the photo confirms it, it says the bottom layer formed on May 18, 1980, and the middle one a month later. So not only are these two separate layers, both dates go inside with eruptions of pyroclasts from Mousain Hallons, not mud flows. Pyroclasts is basically particulate matter rejected from a volcano as distinct from gas and lava. Only the top layer is identified in the caption as a mud flow, and one that occurred two years later. So not only did they not form at one time as Hoveon claims, they're not even flood deposits. Why is this important? Or to put it another way, why is it important enough for Hoveon to want to lie about it? Well, creationists are using Mousain Hallons to argue that a single sedimentary event can form distinctive layers, and therefore a global flood could have done the same. But as we've seen, Mousain Hallons was a series of separate events, most of which were volcanic and not flood-related. A single flood doesn't produce separate layers of different material, it produces a single layer, a graded material. I'll let Hoveon prove my point by going back to the experiment, he obviously never performed. Here's the tank again a day later, and we can count the number of layers it settled into. One. What you get in this single layer is just a textbook example of what's called graded bedding. Corsa grains and heavy gravels tend to be found at the bottom, and smaller and lighter material like silts and muds are generally found nearer the top. It may look as though there are two or three separate layers here, but on closer inspection you can see the different grain sizes and the blurring of the boundaries. What you don't get are what we see in rocks all around us, clearly defined sedimentary layers, each made of different material, and in no particular order. This photo shows a layer of red limestone topped by chalk. So if Hoveon's flood experiments spectacularly fails to recreate these separate layers, what would do it? Well let's add the same materials again, this time recreating the kind of conditions we see on earth today. First, sprinkle some mud to replicate what we see laid down in swampy areas or in the estuaries of silt-rich rivers. Then the sort of sand that today is being deposited offshore near more arid environments, next we'll add a thin layer of topsoil to represent rapid erosion, then coarse sand and grit to replicate what we see today being deposited in some deltas, and finally a layer of larger stones to represent a conglomerate. And presto, we've recreated the layering we see in the rocks all around us. None of this is magic, I'm just recreating the kind of deposition we see in different environments all over the world today. And it fits perfectly with the distinct layering of separate materials we see in the rocks all around us. Hoveon's experiment clearly doesn't. Now you could argue that God could have deliberately separated out all the grains and put each one into different layers to make it look as though there was never any flood. Or maybe, but the layering isn't the only thing that creationists have to contend with. Let's go back to mounts and hellens. Another reason it's used as an argument for the great flood is because it proves that sediments can be deposited quickly. Well, no surprise there, and no need to go all the way to mounts and hellens to find that out. This has been in the geology textbooks for the last 150 years. We know that some sedimentary material like pyroclast, flood deposit, and breccia is deposited very rapidly. But to argue that all sediments that therefore deposited quickly is nonsense. In fact, we know they aren't. Take chalk, for example. It's made of the shells of trillions of marine algae called coccolithophores. As these organisms die, their shell plates, called coccoliths, fall to the bottom of the sea and accumulate, building up a layer of chalk at a rate of up to two inches every thousand years. We can see it happening today and measure it. And here's the result of it happening in the past. In different parts of the world, we find chalk beds hundreds of feet thick. What you're hearing is the sound of creationists rushing to answers in Genesis.com to find out what they're supposed to think about all this. Well, answers in Genesis suggest that somehow the algae proliferated during the 150 days of the flood because they got more nutrients from all the flood detritors. So instead of making just one inch of chalk in 150 days, their rate of deposition suddenly increased 18 million times, and they made all this over 1,000 feet thick. But even if that was chemically possible and didn't break all the laws of thermodynamics, it doesn't explain why none of that flood detritors got mixed up with the chalk. Fossilized coral represents another problem for the flood story. It's obviously not a flood deposit. Yet we find layers of coral sandwich between what are supposed to be flood deposits. We even find layers of coal above the coral. If we accept the creationist idea that coal seams are ancient forests that got buried by the flood, what are they doing sitting on top of coral reefs? Was there an earlier global flood that we don't know about? So while billions of dead things in sediment laid down by water may seem to be all we've got under our feet, a more detailed and intelligent examination of the rocks shows a very different story. These rocks present no great mystery for geologists because they made of exactly the same sediment being laid down in different environments today, from the slow deposition of chalk and limestone to the rapid deposition caused by local floods and mudslides to the steady buildup of sandstones and siltstones. If creationists like Hovein prefer to sit in their armchairs and make up what they call theories, then there's a very easy way for them to support their case. Before experiments to show that an increase in detritus will increase the population of coccolids 18 million times. Instead of telling gullible audiences that an experiment will confirm the flood theory, do the experiment and show how a mix of sand, silt, mud, shells and grit will miraculously separate into different layers. No it's no good going to answers in Genesis.com. They've never done the experiment. The last thing you want to do when you've got a theory that's wrong is do an experiment that'll prove it wrong. But we live in the 21st century where we don't have to just accept these Bronze Age stories because Sunday school teachers tell us they're true. We're capable of thinking and finding out for ourselves. So that just about wraps it up for the Waterborne sediments. In the next video we'll look at the billions and billions of dead things.