At 01:05 PM 10/25/1999 -0600, dfsiemensjr@juno.com wrote:
>On October 13, in response to Bob DeHaan's reference to an "inferno of
>heat," Glenn cited the Kalahari Desert, where rivers evaporate in salt
>pans. But it is at least several hundred meters above sea level, whereas
>the floor of the Mediterranean would be well over a kilometer below. With
>a temperature difference given as 3.3 F per 1000 feet, other things being
>eaual, we have over a 10 C difference, roughly the difference between the
>average temperatures of Houston and Spokane.
given that Death Valley gets up to 140 F and there is still life there in
that nearly waterless region, if you added water to it, you would find much
more life. 140 F is 27 F hotter than the record for Dallas which was 113
F. Thus Death Valley, with living animals is 15 C hotter than the hottest
day ever in Dallas (which occurred in June 1980 or 1981, I was there and it
was miserable). But, by night, it was down to a manageable 90 F. My point
is that this concept that it was a hell hole is simply not a viable
objection. Death Valley is a hell hole and it has life. And in the summer
Houston generally doesn't get much above 100 F (38 C) and adding another 10
C gives us 118 F (48 C) I was in Ardmore Oklahoma in the early 60s and the
high temperature of the summers there every summer was in that range
115-118. We didn't all die--I survived!
>
>Glenn also referred to the Messinian strata in the Piedmont near Alba.
>The earliest has a lampfish which only "lives in water greater than 150 m
>deep." This is about the 500 feet I noted in my response.
You miss the 'greater than'. The water had to have been deeper than that?
How deep? Hundreds of meters according to the ecozones of the benthonic
foraminifera. Struani states:
"In the lowermost part of the unit these benthonic assemblages include such
intermediate- to deep-water forms as Propeamussium, Nucula, Tugurium and
Galeodea, showing that the depth was still in the order of some hundreds of
metres." Carlo Sturani,"A Fossil Eel (Anguilla SP.) from the Messinian of
Alba (Tertiary Piedmontese Basin). Palaeoenvironmental and Palaeogeographic
Implications," in C. W. Drooger, Ed., Messinian Events in the
Mediterranean, (Amsterdam: North-Holland Publishing Co, 1973), pp 243-255,
p.244
I can't find my foram book but I bet those are animals that live in much
deeper water than 1000 feet. None of these genera are listed in the present
day Mediterranean as being in the 0-200 m range Frank Fabricius and Paul
Schmidt-Thome, "Contribution to Recent Sedimentation on the Shelves of the
Southern Adriatic, Ionian and Syrtis Seas," in The Mediterranean Sea Ed
Daniel Stanley, (Stroudsburg, Dowden Hutchinson and Ross, 1972)
Let it be more,
>this is the edge of a hole at least five times deeper, and so would
>average at least 10 F hotter. So the strata at Alba cannot represent the
>conditions of the eastern basin, which would certainly be hotter. There
>is no place on earth today that begins to equal conditions there. I don't
>think there was ever another hold that deep.
Once again, I don't think you are paying attention to the 'greater than' in
the lampfish sentence. 150 m is the MINIMUM depth, not the maximum.
>
>The Italian peninsula was already in place 5.5 Mya, along with the
>shallow sill that stretches south to Africa.
But we are not talking about the peninsular area of Italy. It is true that
the Appenines were probably above sealevel then, but there was a basin, the
Po Basin, which Alba is in, which has the Oligo-Miocene Gonfolite
formation. This formation contains limestones (limes are marine). (see G.
Errico et al, "Malossa Field, A Deep Discovery in the Po Valley, Italy"
AAPG Memoir 30, p. 531)
And Sturani, remember notes that the water depth was 100s of meters deep
according to the forams.
So anything near the area
>that gave rise to the strata at Alba would have been carried north and
>west by water flowing into the Mediterranean.
Do you mean north and east? The water flowed in from the west and traveled
to the east.
Water flowing through a
>nattor opening into a wide area does not flow linearly (A), but eddies
>more extremely that represented by (B). Indeed the current flow of the
>Mediterranean is marked by two large counter-clockwise eddies, one in the
>western basin and the other in the deeper eastern basin. Only after the
>water reaced the top of the sill would it begin to flow into the eastern
>basin, where the Ark would have to be to be carried ashore in Asia Minor,
>as postulated by Glenn's theory.
>
> A B
>
> ^
> -----> | /
> ----------> / /
>---------------> --------------->
> ----------> \ \
> -----> | \
>
You forget the effects of topography. And exactly what the direction of
flow at Alba means for the ark I wouldn't guess. I am never specified a
point at which the ark would have been picked up.
>I found another complication for it mentioned in the literature, namely
>that the Mediterranean basin flooded and desiccated many times between 6
>and 5.5 Mya. This would certainly be a problem for anyone attempting to
>live there. But I have no data on which to evaluate this claim of
>multiple (partial ?) inundations.
My first reaction is so what about the multiple fillings. I believe that
God created man if he did it during the last desiccation, so what? Then my
second reaction is to acknowledge that this is one of the theories because
the amount of salt is so great that a huge amount of ocean water needs to
evaporate there. However, this could be solved by having a constant
spillage of some ocean water into the basin and thus requiring only one
refilling.
In addition, if the deepest subduction
>areas, especially south of Turkey, never dried out completely, the
>humidity of the area would probably remain high, intensifying the effect
>of the temperature.
ACtually humidity moderates the temperature as does water. Dallas gets hot
because it does not have lots of water. Houston doesn't get as hot (all
time record high 107 F) because there is lots of water here to evaporate
and remove the heat.
>
>As to the surge I mentioned, I never expected a 5000 foot wall of water.
>However, the breakdown of the dam at Gibraltar, as illustrated by Glenn:
Illustration snipped
>would surely lead to a wave similar to a tsunami. Since these propagate
>across the entire Pacific, such could have reached the western edge of
>the infilling Mediterranean.
A tsunami is an entirely different phenomenon and not the same as a flood
of waters from a broken dam. Secondly given the narrowness of the opening
which would have only allowed a limited amount of water to come into the
basin and the friction of the water with the sea bottom, the eastern basin
would receive a rather gentle flooding.
Were the Ark in deep water away from the
>shore, such a wave would have passed innocently, probably unnoticed.
Hey, there was no water in the basin when the dam broke!!!!! Stick with the
program please. And at the latter stages of the flood, there would be
tsunamis because there would be earthquakes as the land re-adjusted to a
layer of water. But not all tsunamis are big and destructive. a 10 inch one
hit Seattle in 1994.
But
>this seems unlikely. If the break occurred before the water reached the
>Ark, there would be no effect. If the break came before or just as the
>western basin filled, this would be the scenario. But were the Ark
>already carried by the inflow toward the shore, the surge could have been
>devastating, with the vessel stranded with a stoved in hull and more
>water coming. This is not in the least unlikely.
This entirely misses the point.
>
>However, what seems to me more likely is that a family smart enough to
>build an Ark would have the good sense to get out of an area hot enough
>to make Death Valley or the Dead Sea look like paradise.
So, why do people live in desert areas today? Are you saying that they are
all stupid? People love the areas in which they are born, regardless of
what it looks like. Were my parents stupid to live in hot Ardmore,
Oklahoma? THis is an ineffective argument.
glenn
Foundation, Fall and Flood
Adam, Apes and Anthropology
http://www.flash.net/~mortongr/dmd.htm
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