Hello Allen,
My congratulations on not just taking the stuff from a book, an article or a newsgroup post as fact but going out and trying it for yourself. You struck me in our earlier conversations as a person who was really interested in learning and not in just parroting what others said.
When I have more time (which won't be for a while) I will look over your data. For now let me just say that as I understand it (and there are none around here, nor have I ever worked on any) the sediments of turbidite and tsunami sequences have characteristics quite unlike those of the of the sediments of which I was speaking. As a quick example: go look at (or just look at the pictures of) the streams etc flowing through the coastal zones of the southern United States. In some places the water is moving so slowly that it appears motionless yet we know at least three things about it. 1) it is moving, otherwise it would back up and the lower reaches would get starved for water as they drained out into the ocean; 2) the rate of sedimentation is very slow; and finally, 3) there are lots of ancient rocks which have the same physical characteristics as the muds, clays, and silts which are being deposited in these channels today but quite different from what is deposited by turbidites and tsunamies. Therefore the most logical conclusion is (at least to me) that those ancient deposits accumulated at about the range of rates as we see happening in these swamps and bogs today and that in itself eliminates hundreds of feet of such accumulation in a one year time. There are such deposits here and I am currently working on them. From everything I can find in the literature they have nothing in common with either turbidite or tsunami deposits. In fact I just got an article in today that discusses the geochemistry of the laterite deposits of the Amazon basin and they are, at a first glance, quite similar to those I find in these sediments.
Darryl
----- Original Message -----
From: Allen & Diane Roy
To: asanet
Sent: Monday, June 26, 2000 1:39 PM
Subject: Re: Ammendment to my own Re: Flood
As you can see here is a definite difference between Jar 1 and Jars 2 & 3. The ratio of water to soil seems to make a difference in settling. With a ratio of 12/1 the soils seems to settle out in the "normal" fashion. However with a ratio of 9.5/3.5 or less -- 6/7, the mixture acts differently -- It acts as a muddy mass. A deposition from these mixture ratios would not occur at the same rate as "normal" deposition even though made up of the same soil. Are not these smaller ratios what we find in a turbidite mixture (or even a tsunami mixture)?
What is apparent here is that deposition of the sediment in all three jars is basically done in 5 minutes. The only thing that happens after that is the compaction of the deposition which is mostly complete in 145 minutes.
It may be that my soil sample partiulates (gotten from by back yard) are larger than what is found in some of the shalely and fine layers in Grand Canyon. I would be interested to see what happens at the small ratios of water to soil similar to that used above.
Allen
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