Free Hit Counter Visitors to these pages since 12-29-97
My Blog on Global Warming issues http://themigrantmind.blogspot.com/
Microfossil Stratigraphy Presents Problems for the FloodThis may be freely distributed so long as no charge is made to the reader and no alterations are made to the text.
http://home.entouch.net/dmd/micro.htm
Free Hit Counter
Visitors to these pages since 12-29-97
"The hydrodynamic sorting action of moving water is quite efficient, so that each stratum would tend to contain an assemblage of fossils of similar shapes and sizes." (Morris, 1967, p. 40)
If the prediction from the global flood is that small creatures
should all be sorted out at the same time, the the fossil record does not
satisfy that prediction.
Foraminifera are small, single cellular animals
which would have existed in the oceans prior to the flood and due to their
small size should be found all mixed together in the same or closely related
strata. Foraminifera are used in the oil industry to determine where
we are in the stratigraphic section while we are drilling a well.
They range from .1 millimeters up to 10 millimeters or more. But the average
size of foram test ranges between .1 and 1 mm. (Bignot, p. 30). Foram's
have tests rather than shells. A test is an intra-ectoplasmic skeleton
and are formed from small chambers connected via openings called foramina,
hence the name of the group. The ones shown in the figure are fusulinids
from the Permian Brushy Creek Formation in SE New Mexico.
Figure 1. Permian Fusulinids--a type of foraminifer
Given the small size of the average species, they should all sort out at about the same time from the waters of the flood with the largest at the bottom and the smallest at the top. This is not what we find when we look at the foraminifera fossil record. Genera of forams, all possessing the similar shape and similar size and only differing in the details of the test decoration, are found over vast vertical distances in the geologic column. We also find an almost invariant order of these tiny animals in the sedimentary column. In the Gulf of Mexico when we drill sediments that are not near salt the order is invariant. (Salt moves through the sediments of the Gulf of Mexico churning up the sediments near it)
Here is the vertical order of the foraminifera we find in the Gulf of Mexico. If a young-earth creationist does not want to believe the age dating, that is ok. The order here is the observed stratigraphic succession of them with the top forams in the table always found above those listed lower down.
"Interpolated and adapted from Berggren et al., 1995"
Benthic Foraminifera Planktonic Foraminifera
Nannofossil
AGE m.y.
0.10
Globoratalia flexusa acme
0.25
Pseudoemiliania lacunosa A
0.50
"Globorot, truncatulinoides coil change R/L"
0.55
Pseudoemiliania lacunosa B
0.60 Trimosina A
0.80
P. lacunosa variety
1.02
Sphaeroidinella dehiscens acme A P. lacunosa C
1.19
Geophyrocapsa large
1.35 Hyalinea balthica
Helicosphaera sellii
1.45 Angulogerina B
1.55
Sphaeroidinella dehiscens acme B Calcidiscus macintyrei
1.95
Discoaster brouweri
2.02 Cristellaria S
2.10
Globorotalia crassiformis Discoaster
brouweri A
2.20
Globorotalia menardii coil change L/R
2.25 Lenticulina 1
2.30
Globorotalia miocenica
Discoaster pentaradiatus
2.55
Discoaster surculus
3.00
Globorotalia multicamerata
3.09
Globoquadrina altispira
Discoaster tamalis
3.12
Sphaeroidinellopsis seminulina
3.47
Sphenolithus abies
3.58
"Globorot, margaritae"
3.64
Reticulofenestra pseudoumbilica
4.18
Globigerina nepenthes
4.30
Sphenolithus abies B
4.38 "Buliminella 1/Tex. mexicana
Amaurolithus tricorniculatus
4.90
Globigerinoides mitra
Ceratolithus acutus
5.10 Textularia X
5.10
G. menardi coil change R/L
5.20
Discoaster A
5.30
Discoaster quinqueramus
5.92
Discoaster B
6.00
Discoaster Berggrenii
6.15 Robulus E
6.38
Discoaster C
6.91 Bigenerina A
7.27
Discoaster neohamatus/calcaris
7.40
Discoaster loeblichii
7.50
Catinaster mexicanus
7.60 Cristellaria K
7.80 Cyclammina 3
8.80 Bolivina thalmannii
Globorotalia lenguaensis Discoaster
prepentaradiatus
9.10 Discorbis 12
Discoaster bollii
9.40
Discoaster hamatus
9.50 Textularia L
9.90
Catinaster coalitus
10.80 Bigenerina 2
Globorotalia mayeri
10.85 Cibicides carstensi
10.95 Uvigerina 3
11.00
Coccolithus miopelagicus
11.90
Globorotalia fohsi robusta Discoaster kugleri
acme
12.00 Textularia W
12.80
Globorotalia fohsi fohsi
12.82
Discoaster sanmiguelensis
12.85 Bigenerina humblei
13.55 Cristellaria 1
Globorotalia fohsi barisanensis
13.60
Sphenolithus heteromorphus
14.80
Praeorbulina glomerosa
Sphenolithus heteromorphus acme
14.90 Cibicides opima
15.47 Amphistegina B
Helicosphaera ampliaperta
15.60
15.85 Robulus L
16.39 Camerina 1/Robulus mayeri
16.77 Gyroidina 9
17.00
Catapsydrax stainforthi
17.08
Sphenolithus belemnos
17.10
Catapsydrax dissimilis
17.30 Cristellaria A
18.20 Marginulina ascensionensis
18.30
Discoaster calculosus
19.50
Discoaster sanudersi
20.20 Siphonina davisi
21.50 Cristellaria R
22.90
Helicosphaera recta
23.90
Dictyococcites bisecta
24.00
Globigerina ciperoensis
24.00 Robulus A
24.20 Discorbis gravelli
24.30
Globigerina sellii
24.35 Heterostegina sp.
24.50 Cibicides jeffersonensis
24.60 Bolivina perca
24.75
Sphenolithus ciperoensis
25.05 Marginulina idiomorpha
25.25 Marginulina vaginata
25.95 Marginulina howei
26.50 Textularia 14
26.60 Camerina A
27.10 Miogypsinoides A
27.50
Sphenolithus distentus
27.75 Cibicides hazzardi
28.10 Cyclammina A
28.60 Marginulina texana
29.00 Bolivina mexicana
29.40
Sphenolithus predistentus
29.70 Nonion struma
29.90 Nodosaria blanpiedi
30.40 Textularia seligi
Globigerina ampliapertura
30.60
Discoaster tani nodifer
32.20 Textularia warreni
32.30 Cibicides mississippiensis Reticulofenestra umbilica
32.40 Loxostoma B
32.80
Ericsonia formosa
For those who would dispute the ability of these tiny foraminifera to rule out the global flood they need to consider that the same order of forams is found over vast areas. Note that the same forams are listed in the same order from a well offshore New Jersey! (Gartner and Shyu, p. 54, 57)
New Jersey order
Gulf of Mexico Order
Discoaster. brouweri
Discoaster. brouweri
D. pentaradiatus
D. pentaradiatus
D. surculus
D. surculus
D. tamalis
D. tamalis
Sphenolithus abies
Sphenolithus abies
Reticulofenestra pseudoumbilicus
Reticulofenestra pseudoumbilicus
Ceratolithus acutus
Ceratolithus acutus
Discoaster quinqueramus
Discoaster quinqueramus
Discoaster berggrenii
Discoaster Berggrenii
Discoaster Loeblichiii
Discoaster Loeblichiii
Discoaster Bollii
Discoaster Bollii
And Glob. Nepenthes is found in the same level offshore Bombay,
India (Dave, 1998, p. 1475). And in the Phillipines (Bandy,1962, p. 260),
we find the following order of Miocene foraminifers:
Phillipines
Gulf of Mexico
Order
Order
Globorotalia truncatulinoides
Globorotalia truncatulinoides
Sphaeroidinella dehiscens
Sphaeroidinella dehiscens
Globorotalia menardii
Globorotalia menardii
Globoquandrina altispira
Globoquandrina altispira
Globigerina nepenthes
Globigerina nepenthes
Globorotalia fohsi robusta
Globorotalia fohsi robusta
Globorotalia fohsi fohsi
Globorotalia fohsi fohsi
Globigerina ciperoensis
Globigerina ciperoensis
In the central Pacific several of these forams are found in the same order as they are found in the Gulf of Mexico(Quinterno, 1994, p. 268-269):
Tonga Ridge Order
Gulf of Mexico Order
Pseudoemiliania lacunosa
Pseudoemiliania lacunosa
Discoaster brouweri
Discoaster brouweri
Reticulofenestra pseudoumbilica Reticulofenestra
seudoumbilica
Discoaster tamalis
Discoaster tamalis
Ceratolithus acutus
Ceratolithus acutus
Discoaster quinqueramus
Discoaster qunqueramus
And a comparison of the forams in the Pliocene and Pleistocene of Gulf of Mexico, Caribbean and Mediterranean showed that the order from top to bottom was the same in the three regions(Lamb, 1969, p. 2038):
Globorotalia truncatulinoides
Sphaeroidinella dehiscens
Globorotalia crassaformis
Globorotalia margaritae
Given what creationists like Henry Morris say about the turbulence of the flood, how on earth can these tiny little floating creatures remain segregated and not mixed up. Just to refresh everyone's memory Henry says:
"Not only do the fossils contained in the sedimentary strata demonstrate the necessity of catastrophic deposition, but the very strata themselves indicate this. As already noted, most of the earth's surface is covered with sediments or sedimentary rocks, originally deposited under moving water. This in itself is prima facie evidence that powerful waters once covered the earth. " (Morris, 1970, p. 104)
Planktonic forams float in the waters of the oceans. Thus each species is spread widely around the world. Below are the latitude ranges observed for the living forams. One can easily see how they can become spread around the world via ocean currents. In today's oceans to go from the Atlantic to the Indo-Pacific oceans requires that they live as far south as 36 degrees south latitude. Clearly, this is no problem for all but a few forams. The currents along South Africa move both east and west allowing free-floating creatures access to all the world's oceans. This means that when a new form evolves, it can rapidly be dispersed across the entire globe, making these creatures ideal index fossils. This is the basis of the stratigraphic order we find in microfossils.
Today there are only about 44 species of planktonic forams. This presents problems for the global flood scenario. If the geologic column was the result of a global flood, then we would expect the preflood world to have had lots of species of these little floating creatures and as the flood went on, they would go extinct, due to the turbulence and pollution of the flood waters. This least to a conclusion that we should see a pattern like this:
# species
older --------------------> younger
Start of flood (lowest sediments) 596->402->330->254 ->189 -> 84-> 44 at end of flood
We should find the survivors of the flood in all sedimentary layers because they were able to survive through the entire depositional/catastrophic event.
Well, what do we find? Something entirely different. Planktonic foraminifera don't even show up in the record until the Jurassic. That means that half of the flood deposition had occurred prior to the appearance of these animals that float in the water. Where were they in the preflood world?
And when they appear, not a single modern foraminifera is to be found. If one looks at only those species that live today (called extant species) and dig into the earth to see how far back they exist and at the same time look at forams that don't exist today (extinct forms) and see what their distribution is, we find this order:
Top
of column
Recent 45 extant species 0
extinct species
Pleistocene 44 extant
species 8 extinct
species
Pliocene 42 extant
species 42 extinct species
Miocene 22 extant
species 143 extinct species
Oligocene 3 extant
species 114 extinct species
Eocene 0
extant species 133 extinct species
Paleocene 0 extant
species 72 extinct species
Cretaceous 0 extant
species 152 extinct species*
Jurassic 0
extant species 14 extinct
species
Triassic 0
species
0 species There simply are
Permian 0
species 0 species
no planktonic forams
Pennsylvanian 0
species 0 species
to be found below
Mississippian 0 species
0 species
the Jurassic.
Devonian 0
species 0 species
Silurian 0
species 0 species
Cambrian 0
species
0 species
Bottom of 'flood deposition'
*Dr. Dan Georgescu (private communication, Jan. 14, 2003) informs me that the Cretaceous species have been reduced but apparently the number is not settled.
Data for this analysis was collected by Duncan Stewart and can be found at: http://palaeo.gly.bris.ac.uk/personnel/stewart/databaseintro.html Analysis performed by Glenn Morton
We can clearly see that we don't have the pattern of microfossils predicted by the flood model. If there were planktonic creatures in the preflood oceans, they would exist in the Cambrian through Triassic sediment. They don't. Why? Because these forams evolved in the Jurassic. These conclusions are totally compatible with and display a very similar pattern to that seen among the fish and the mammals. http://www.glenn.morton.btinternet.co.uk/fish.htm
The species we see on earth today are not to be found (or very rarely to be found) in rocks older than the Miocene. The oldest living forams are found in the upper Oligocene and no deeper. There are only 2 living species of mammals found in the Upper Miocene and none are found any deeper than that. When one goes up a taxonomic level to the level of genera, the oldest fish genera is from the Jurassic but none of species in that genera live today. Prior to the Jurassic all fish on earth are fundamentally different than living forms.
Gradual Evolution-Transitional forms
And these fossils give good evidence of gradualism in the fossil record. Anti-evolutionists often state that there are no transitional forms or sequences in which gradual evolution is seen. Yet this claim is totally false. Forams provide the clearest and smoothest transitions between species and genera. This is because they are preserved more easily than many other life forms. They are so small that when they fall to the ocean bottom they fit between the gaps in the sediment grains and therefore avoid being crushed. One pictorial which shows the GRADUAL evolution of life is seen below. I don't have this picture on my web site, it is being served from www.don-lindsay-archive.org/creation/foram_work.gif
One can clearly see the gradual transformation of the earliest into the latest species.
This sequence shows the animals approximately every 500,000 years. The change is gradual and imperceptible. Tony Arnold and Bill Parker studied the 330 species of planktonic forams (depending on the taxonomic scheme there are between 330-600 species total. The gradualism makes species boundaries indistinct.) and created this type of transitional series for the entire group. To read about it see http://www.don-lindsay-archive.org/creation/foram_article.html
Contrary to what anti-evolutionists say, there are some sequences of fossils which allow us to see gradual evolution. To paraphrase Duane Gish, Evolution: The Micro-Fossils Say YES!
Conclusion
Even if a young-earth creationist dismisses the radiometric dating processes, one can not escape the conclusion that the foraminifera rained down on the ocean bottom in a particular order all over the world. This means that there must have been a common cause for this foraminifer rain. Evolutionists simply say that the forams evolved, floated around the world in the ocean waters and when they died, fell to the sea floor. The order is caused by the time when a given species either goes extinct or evolved.
It is very difficult to see how each species of foram could have been on the earth and avoided burial while their fellow forams, which differed very little in size or shape, were all buried together at one time at one level. How in the world a turbulent, global flood could sort these tiny creatures by species is beyond me. As Morris predicted, the global flood should sort things out by size, yet we don't see things sorted by size in the geologic column. If Morris' prediction is correct we should expect almost all foraminifers to have been deposited nearly last and to be only in the uppermost sediments of the geologic column. They aren't. What Morris and other young-earth creationists require is for the global flood to sort these animals by minor visual clues. It is like throwing similar size and density sand particles, which are colored different colors, into a river and having the colors all sort out. This is impossible. Yet forams are so sorted. The only conclusion can be that their order is not due to a global flood but to a long period of deposition in which the animal life changed. The rain of dead forams from a sea with life forms that change over time explains the observed order quite well.
Thus the creationists are wrong on three points.
1. The sorting of the forams and other microfossils show that the deposition of the geologic column was NOT turbulent and catastrophic as they claim.
2. The pattern of species found in the geologic column merely by digging down through the rock layers does not match the survival expectations one would find in which a preflood biosphere was inundated with species dying off with time as the flood progressed. Indeed the absence of oceanic floaters until rocks halfway through the supposed flood period argues strongly against the flood view
3. Gradualistic evolution is documented among these tiny creatures laying bare the false claim that there are no transitional forms. What it shows is that the flood-advocates don't read anything except their own literature.
Back to DMD Publishing Home Page
References
Bandy, Orville L.,1962. "Cenozoic Foraminiferal zonation and Basinal Development for Part of Philippines," AAPG Bulletin, 46:2:270.
Bignot, Gerard, Elements of Micropaleontology, (Boston: International Human Resources Development Corporation, 1985).
Dave, A., 1998 “Planktic Foraminiferal Biostratigraphy and Biochronology of the Post-Miogypsina Neogene of Bombay Offshore Basin,” J. Geol. Soc. India, 51(1998):4:533-542, cited in Petroleum Abstracts, May 1, 1999.
Gartner, S. and J. P. Shyu, "Aspects of Calcareous Nannofossil Biostratigraphy and Abundance in the Pliocene and Late Miocene of Site 905," in G. S. Mountain, et al, Proceedings of the Ocean Drilling Program, Scientific Results, Vol. 150, p. 53-61, p.54, 57
Lamb, J. C., "Planktonic Foraminiferal Datums and Late Neogene Epoch Boundaries in Mediterranean, Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico," AAPG Bulletin, 53:9:2038
Morris, Henry M., Evolution and the Modern Christian, (Phillipsburg: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1967)
Morris, Henry M. Biblical Cosmology and Modern Science, (Nutley, New Jersey: Craig Press, 1970)
Qunterno, Paula J., 1994, "Calcareous Nannofossil Biostratigraphy Sites 840 (Tonga Ridge) and 841 (Tonga Trench)" Proceedings of the Ocean Drilling Program, Scientific Results, 135(1994):267-284.
Modified 7-1-01
cited on the internet at http://nsmserver2.fullerton.edu/departments/chemistry/evolution_creation/web/