The Roys informed me that my flood experiment addresses only a passe
version of flood geology, that creationary catastrophists are now
proposing that the flood was a combination of hundreds of events, with
each depositing a different load of material. Each event seems to be the
result of an asteroid impact.
There are different classes of such events. Some of them are air blasts,
such as Tunguska (June 30, 1908), near the Curuca R. in Brazil (August
13, 1930), and in 1947 over Kamchatka Pen., I believe. Though the
Brazilian blast caused a mag. 7 quake, these moved nothing more than a
few meters of earth in small spots. This is different from the craters,
from small ones like the Barringer Crater in Arizona or the gigantic
Chicxulub Crater on the NW coast of Yucatan. I think about 140 such
craters are now known. All these craters thrust up a distinctive rim of
whatever strata are there at the time of impact. The incoming bolide and
the material in the crater area are at least partly liquefied and
vaporized, with detritus from the impact spread around. In Arizona, some
of the material condensed and fell back into the hole, which was not deep
enough to provide much, if any, rebound. If my memory serves, the
penetration was about double the depth we now see. In the larger craters,
a central peak and sometimes a ring form, and the whole floor rises to
provide isostatic equilibrium. I'm reminded of the results, revealed by
ultra high speed cameras, of dropping something into a container of milk.
The Chicxulub impact at the edge of land produced a giant tsunami that
threw debris up to 430 miles inland and left wave rubble 30' deep all
around the Caribbean. The ejecta deposit, both near the crater and 360
miles away in Belize, is double--a lower layer with tektites and
carbonate spherules, and an upper layer with boulders in mud. I'd call
these conglomerates rather than sandstones or limestones. I believe that
fine-grained materials generally require weak transporting currents
(probably virtually no currents some places) and quiet depositional
basins. This seems to be the case for the 300 m. of diatomaceous earth in
the beds N of Santa Barbara, CA. They extend over several square miles.
But I turn to a rather different deposit, Checkerboard Mesa, at the W
entrance to Zion National Park. I drove past it several years ago and
know that it towers over the road. However, I am not certain of the depth
of the deposit, for one place I read of 1500-2000' of Navajo sandstone,
and in another of 400-1000'. I don't recall its extent, but it apparently
is great. It has a curious, cross-bedded structure, a bunch of inverted
V's. How can one explain such a large number of heaped up sandy
structures on the basis of a shower or series of showers of meteorites.
Tsunami deposits are not this kind of structure. And, by the way, there
is need to have tracks of small animals on some of these buried surfaces.
I'd like to have a plausible explanation for the Navajo sandstone
structure within the framework of a meteorite shower. Also, can you give
a rough accounting of the number of meteorites necessary to produce all
the hundreds of feet of strata which are not conglomerates, which is what
tsunamis seem to produce?
I also have a problem with the exegesis necessary to produce a rain of
bolides. Rain, _mtr_, as noun and verb, seems consistently to refer to
water except where a specific alternative is given: brimstone (Genesis
19:24; cf. Psalm 11:6; Ezekiel 38:22); manna (Psalm 78:24); flesh (v.
27); righteousness (Isaiah 45:8; Hosea 10:12). Even hail is specified
(Exodus 9:18, 23). So it evidently was 40 days and 40 nights of rain,
especially in connection with Genesis 7:1; cf. 1:7. The second source of
the flood (same verse) was springs, _myn_, connected to the great deep.
What is the linguistic justification for making a torrent of rain and
upwelling springs into a great storm of meteorites causing tsunamis?
Dave
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