From: Glenn Morton (glennmorton@entouch.net)
Date: Tue Nov 18 2003 - 20:51:17 EST
Somehow, I missed this note until I saw Steve and David reply.
> Sent: Saturday, November 15, 2003 8:52 PM
Bill wrote:
>
> OK, I'll bite. What caused the global oceanic circulation to
> shut down? I
> can't imagine any configuration of the continents which would shut off all
> circulation. I guess if North America and Europe were joined, that would
> cut off the cold polar water from the North Atlantic which would at least
> slow circulation in the Atlantic in the northern hemisphere. I think
> temperature differences are what drives the circulation?
David pretty much handled this one. But I would add one more point. The
Gulf Stream is largely powered by the sinking of cold water in the Arctic
regions. This pulls the surface water north and thereby providing something
like 25% of the heat for northern Europe.
"With a flow equaling that of 100 Amazon Rivers, the conveyor
delivers enough heat to the North Atlantic's northern half to
equal 25% of the solar energy reaching the surface there. Off
Labrador and north of Iceland, frigid winds absorb that heat and
carry it downwind, easing the chill on Europe and adjacent lands
by as much as 10o C."~Richard A. Kerr, "Warming's Unpleasant
Surprise: Shivering in the Greenhouse?" Science, 281(1998):156-
158, p. 156
Islands at the same latitude as Scotland only in the south Atlantic, are
frozen waste lands. The Gulf stream keeps it warm. But, due to the warming
and freshening of the Arctic ocean, the Gulf Stream has been weakening over
the past few years. The consequences of this are not clear, but that region
of the world is a major contributor to the world's oceanic circulation. It
might not take any change of the continents but merely a warming of the
Arctic ocean to shut it down. the times when the ocean was anoxic were
largely in times of great warmth.
And the data is showing this:
"Researchers have found an alarming decline in the strength
of a crucial Arctic current linked to the Gulf Stream, offering
the first evidence that the warm current that acts as northern
Europe's central heating system may be weakening.
?"Such a slowdown would be serious for Britain, bringing the
harsh winters that prevail at similar altitudes elsewhere.
Britain is as far north as Labrador but avoids Canadian weather
because of the warm water that the current carries from the Gulf
of Mexico. Temperatures in Britain are at least 5 C (40F) warmer
than they would be without it." Mark Henderson, "Britain Faces a
Climate as Cold as Canada's," The Times 9-7-01, p. 8
>
> At any rate, Art suggested that the marine blooms depleted the oceanic
> oxygen supply, and also supplied the skeletons to form the chalk deposits
> such as we see at Dover, England and the equivalent in south Alabama.
There is not enough limestone in the entire ocean at any one time to use a
marine bloom to create the chalk deposits which run from Mexico, to the East
Coast, and start again in England and run across Europe and are found in
Israel, and many other places in the world.
> Incidentally Glenn, one of your arguments against transported organics
> forming coal was that currents would carry the organics out to sea, and
> therefore coal must have formed from swamps in situ. Since we know that
> plankton are marine and therefore transported before they were deposited,
> then by analogy the peat that formed coal could also have been transported
> before deposition. The principle is the same.
David also got this one correct. I have argued that the vegetable mat
theory is false because the mats should float all over the world and drop
their coally matter forming coal beds both in the deep water and in the
shallow water. But, we don't find coal beds and seams in the deep ocean
basins,
>
> I saw on some YEC video that oil is forming today in the Gulf of
> California.
> They showed underwater a drop of oil as it escaped from the bottom and
> floated up in the water. The message was that oil is not difficult at all
> to form under the right conditions. We may not know what those conditions
> were, but we do know that oil formed somehow, regardless of our
> ignorance as
> to the process. Understanding the process isn't important in
> this context.
> The question is how do we generate the organics for the process to convert
> to oil.
The sea floor out there is the Monterrey formation, a huge pile of dead
diatoms. And oil doesn't only ooze out on the ocean bottom, I have pictures
of oil seeps onshore California east of Lompoc. That is not in and of itself
evidence that it formed today. all these seeps could be due to oil which
formed a while ago and was trapped, but is now leaking. It could be oil
formed a while ago and is just now being expulsed from the source bed. Or
it could be forming today.
As to the mechanism for how oil forms, we understand that quite well. Only
those who believe in global floods find it mysterious. ;-)
We generate the organics by having a anoxic ocean bottom which preservs what
falls into it. Most of the best areas for source rocks were restricted
basins when the source rock was deposited. The Viking Graben in the North
Sea was a long skinny thing and that restricted circulation. The source
rocks in the Gulf of Mexico were deposited when the Gulf was a restricted
basin. Same with the source rocks of the Persian Gulf which were deposited
in the long skinny basin along which the Tigris and Euphrates run today. The
source rocks along West Africa and South America were deposited at a time
when the ocean was much, much narrower. THat helps anoxia.
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