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This is a picture I took of a seismic line on a poster at the Soc. Exploration Geophysicists convention. The line is from the Rocky Mountains. The picture is fuzzy, but one can clearly see that the strata is not continuous and has clearly been overthrust over itself. The sediment had to be deposited first, the rocks hardened and then the thrusting. The reason we know this is because of the parallel bedding on the upper fault plate. This takes time.
Below is a thrust from the southern Appalachians which presents real problems for the concept of a global flood.
From A. W. Bally, Seismic Expression of Structural Styles, AAPG.
The line was one shot by Texaco along the Alabama/Mississippi border just NE of Meridian, Mississippi. The reference is A. W. Bally, _Seismic Expression of Structural Styles, Vol. 3, AAPG Studies in Geology Series, #15,, p. 3.4.1-82. It shows a wonderful example of why slow sedimentation must be the rule and presents a big problem for the global flood. I apologize for the size (418 kb) but it was necessary in order to show the detail I wanted to show. A word about seismic. The black peaks and grey troughs are the reflections of sound off of various rock layers which are in the earth. By reflecting the sound, we can produce a picture, like this, of what the earth looks like under one's feet. The picture is about 20 km of seismic data. It can be seen that the valley in the unconformity is about 3 km wide. The thrust block is about 16 km or 9 miles long.
At
the top of the section are the sediments of the Atlantic coastal plains. They
are flatish-lying dipping slightly to the SE. They are about 3500 feet thick and
consist mostly of sands and shales.They
lie on top of a major unconformity which separates the Paleozoic Appalachian
sediments from the Atlantic Coastal plain sediments. Below the unconformity is
the Paleozoic sediments which consist not only of sands and shales but also very
thick piles of carbonate and dolomite. dolomite. They are around 18,500 feet
thick. This is determined by the velocity of sound in those sediments. Rocks in
the Paleozoic are almost always faster than rocks in the younger Mesozoic and
Mesozoic rocks in general are even faster than those from the Tertiary.
If
you look below the unconformity you will find a thrust fault having thrusted the
Paleozoic sediments over on top of themselves Bed a is marked on both sides of
the thrust fault and one can clearly see that it is over thrusted on top of
itself. The friction of the thrust plane against the upper part of the thrust
caused the sediments to be folded. The fold was then eroded. Since bed A to the
right is buried by 1.3 seconds of Paleozoic sediment (approximately 10,000
feet), yet it intersects the
unconformity where it is covered by NO Paleozoic sediment, this means that
10,000 feet of sediment was eroded from the point marked 'hill'. If you look at
the sediments just under the unconformity on the right and move to the left you
will see layer after layer erosionally truncated by the unconformity until you
get to hill where bed A is at the surface of the unconformity.
Where
I marked a hill, If you look at the unconformity, you will see that it drops
down at that point. the flat reflectors above are clearly onlapping the
unconformable surface against the hill. The valley was eroded into the
underlying Paleozoic sediments PRIOR to the deposition of the Mesozoic sediment.
If you look just to the right of the hill, under the word valley, above the
unconformity you will see a black reflector which runs into the hill to the left
and then into the unconformity on the right. The relationship between this
reflector and the unconformity shows
that the valley to the right of the hill was infilled in a rather gentle way
otherwise the sediments would be chaotic. This valley was probably an arm of the
ocean at one point because the sediments that fill it are marine as are all the
Atlantic Coastal Plain sediments.
After
the Mesozoic sediments were deposited, the entire area was slightly tilted to
the SE.
The
sequence of events cause great problems for the concept of a global flood.
Global flood advocates always say that fossilization can only occur during
catastrophic events such as the flood. Well there are fossiliferous Paleozoic
sediments below the unconformity as well as above. Thus the flood advocate must
hold that all the sediment in this picture is from the flood. This means that
during the flood 18,500 feet of Paleozoic sediment must have been deposited. It
must then have hardened. Why? Because of the way the thrusting deformed the
rocks. This is not a soft-sediment type of deformation. The upper thrust block
moved as a solid block. If the sediments had been soft, this couldn't have
happened. Soft ooze and mush won't transmit forces for 9 miles. Assuming that
the Paleozoic constituted half of the flood's time, then in 6 months we must
deposit 18,500 feet of sediment. This is a rate of 102 feet per day. There are
slow-moving invertebrate fossils at the bottom of the Appalachian Paleozoic as
well as at the top. All sorts of stationary shell-fish are found throughout the
Paleozoic strata. Why everything wasn't at the bottom of the pile, after
deposition of the first 102 feet on the first day, I can't comprehend.
A further problem is the burrows which are found throughout the entire
18,500 feet of sediment. One must have exceptionally rapid burrowers in order to
thoroughly burrow 102 feet of strata a day. That is enough sediment to cover a
10 story building each day. Next time you drive down the road, look at a ten
story building and imagine it covered in sediment in one day and thoroughly
burrowed by thousands of animals. Burrowed in such a fashion where the excavated
sediments make a pile around the burrow which are then covered by the next layer
which is a different lithology
After
the deposition of 18,500 feet of strata, and it's hardening (it takes lots of
time for shales to de-water, yet we see no mega water escape structures in this
sedimentary pile either), we must then have the time to thrust the Paleozoic
section creating huge mountains (the Appalachians). After this, we must have
time for the erosion of 10,000 feet of HARDENED sediment, which then becomes the
unconformity surface. Then we must
cover, in a gentle way, the entire area with 3,500 feet of Mesozoic sediment.
This is a rate of 19 feet a day assuming that the Mesozoic here represented 180
days of flood deposition. One could hardly say that 19 feet a day of
sedimentation is 'gentle'. 19 feet
of sediment where I lived a few years ago would nearly cover my 2 story house.