RE: Declining water and oil

Hi Don, you wrote:

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Don Winterstein [mailto:dfwinterstein@msn.com]
> Sent: Wednesday, November 26, 2003 4:35 AM
> Glenn wrote:
>
> "Today we have huge areas of the sea floor which are limestone, but the
> ocean
> waters can only hold tiny amounts. that is the limitation on the
> growth of
> calcium based organisms."
>
> Technical point: If organisms take CaCO3 out of solution, then more CaCO3
> will go into solution, where water contacts limestone (LS), and thereby
> allow additional organisms to take additional CaCO3 out of solution. This
> process can go on in principle until the oceans are saturated with such
> organisms (whatever that means). But as soon as they die, their skeletons
> will be available to contribute to the CaCO3 in solution.
>
> As long as there's LS available to be dissolved, it looks like there's
> always going to be enough CaCO3 available to allow the oceans to saturate
> themselves with these organisms.

I think you miss something. Consider situation A where coccoliths are busy
taking limestone out of solution and putting it into their shells. That
depletes the water column of lime. But the dead bodies of former colleagues
lie on the bottom and their limestone dissolves to replace that removed by
the living coccoliths. Net deposition would be zero in that case because
you have merely a lime cycle. It would look like this This probably won't
look good in the archives:

Situation A

-----------water surface---------------------

coccoliths removing lime from oceanic waters
. lime from water goes down
. ^ |
. | V
lime from ocean bottom goes up
----------limestone water bottom-------------

Nothing is accomplished.

Situation B

This is the situation where lime is removed from the ocean floor in one
location far away from where the coccoliths live and is incorporated into
the coccoliths and deposited at this place. It looks like:

-----------water surface---------------------

coccoliths removing
lime from oceanic <-----------------------
waters |
.lime from water |
.goes down lime from ocean
. | bottom goes up
. V and is transported
----------limestone water bottom-------------

In this case, net addition of oceaniclimestone is ZERO. But if one has a
large bloom in the coccolith growing region, the local waters can become
depleted in lime until there is time for transport of new lime into the
region. Thus the local depletion in lime will be a limiting factor in the
growth of coccoliths.

Both cases leave the ocean bottom no richer in limestone. So, these
mechanisms can not be the way the system works, or we wouldn't have any
thick limestones. The solution (no pun intended) is that lime coming off
the continents adds lime to the oceanic wates wich is then removed by the
lime secreting critters and deposited on the ocean bottom. This requires
transport of limestone by freshwater. If one has a huge oceanic wide bloom
(to account for the chalks that literally cover the southern US, much of
southern Europe, North Africa and Palestine, one could quickly deplete those
waters in lime requiring time for continental erosion to replace the lime
and continue a positive growth of limestone on the ocean bottom. Just moving
lime from one part of the ocean bottom to the next won't explain the growth
in depositional limestone. That is a static zero-sum game.

Such a replacement mechanism requires much time--too much time for the
global flood. Of course, committed YECs will ignore such details because,
as we all know, the devil is in the details and they don't like the devil!
:-)
Received on Wed Nov 26 09:00:42 2003