http://home.entouch.net/dmd/hot.htm
Free Hit Counter
Visitors to these pages since
12-29-97
Related Pages:
One of the things that young-earth creationists don't get much chance to see are oil well cores. But then, they don't go looking for them either. That being said, here are three oil well cores which show how hot it was in the middle of the geologic column, which the YECs claim was deposited in one year in the global flood.
What you will see is a form of anhydrite which is only known to be deposited on hot sabkhas, like in the Persian Gulf.
“Our drill site was positioned slightly
north of the abyssal plain of the Balearic basin; our precision depth recorder
registered 1,417 fathoms. The drill penetrated 1,000 feet of soft oozes before
reaching the top of the hard layer. The core came up, and it was a late Miocene
evaporite, as we expected. What was surprising, at least to those who advocated
deep-water salt deposition, was the sampling of nodular anhydrite and
stromatilitic dolomite.
“Stromatolite cannot form in deep water because the growth of algae requires
sunlight. Moreover, one could not expect the bottom of a deep-water
Mediterranean to ever get as hot as the 35 degrees C. (95 degrees Fahrenheit)
needed to precipitate anhydrite.” Kenneth Hsu, “When the Mediterranean Dried
Up,” Scientific American, Dec. 1972, p. 31
**
“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 centimeters in length. As the replacement
proceeded toward completion, anhydrite nodules would coalesce to form a layer in
which only wisps of preexisting carbonates could be discerned. The dark wisps of
carbonate 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
sedimentologists during the last few decades that this variety of anhydrite is
typical of Recent and ancient sabkha sediments. Until we find evidence to the
contrary, we feel content to consider the chicken-wire anhydrite a signature of
sabkhas.” Kenneth Hsu, The Mediterranean was a Desert, (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1983), p. 14
The red arrow marks the chicken-wire anhydrite. It proves that this ocean bottom sediment, which is now under 8500 feet of water and 1000 feet of ooze was deposited during a time when there was no ocean above it and it was very, very hot (above 95 degrees F.) On the right side of the picture are stromatolites, which don't seem to form in water depths greater than 30 feet. Once again, this is inconsistent with the global flood.
But such features are found in lots of oil wells. Below is a similar case from the St. Louis Limestone of the US mid-continent. This core is from 1795 feet deep!
And out in West Texas, it was equally hot during the global flood. This is a core from around 4100 feet below the surface.