At 10:42 PM 8/13/98 +0800, Stephen Jones wrote:
>
>GM>If the area flooded were the Mesopotamian basin, I would agree with you.
>>But with the Mediterranean, where I put the flood, Noah et al would have
>>had to march 800 km across a desert to escape the flood.
>
>Just before I unsubscribed from the Reflector and my wife and I went on our
>world trip in September-December 1997, I delivered what I thought to be the
>coup de grace to Glenn's 5.5 mya Mediterranean Flood theory.
Stephen, if you could provide evidence to falsify my theory I would be
grateful, but you simply haven't done it.
>
>Basically, unless my maths is horribly wrong (which is always possible!), I
>showed that because of the limited 1.8 sq. mile cross-section of the
>Straits of Gibraltar, for the Mediterranean to be filled in a year, the water
>would have to flow through the Straits of Gibraltar at greater than 3600
miles
>per hour (ie. at nearly Mach 5)!! Yet Glenn had previously advised that water
>cannot flow faster than 20 miles per hour.
First off Stephen, I admire the strawman you built above I think his
shirt is very bright and pretty, but it is merely a strawman. While John
Rylander found a mathematical error, there are also many geological errors
in the above. The present Straight of Gibraltar was not in its current
topographic form 5.5 million years ago. Remember that Africa is moving
north colliding into Europe and this collision alters the topography. At 2
cm/year africa is now 110 kilometers further north than in the Miocene.
"The Strait of Gibraltar is a recent morphological feature that cuts across
the structures of the Gibraltar arc, who's similarity on both shorelines
has recently been established. The differential movements between Iberia
and Africa since the Jurassic probably did not occur at the present
location of the Gibraltar strait, but such evidence should be looked for
farther north or south. Likewise, communication between the Mediterranean
and the Atlantic in the Messinian could have existed only farther north
(Gudalquivir) or south (external Rif)." ~ B. Biju-Duval et al, "Geology of
the Mediterranean Sea Basins, in Creighton A. Burk and Charles L. Drake,
editors, The Geology of Continental Margins, (New York: Springer-Verlag,
1974), p. 704.
What this means is that the channel through which the Atlantic waters
re-filled the Mediterranean were not in the present site of the Strait of
Gibraltar. Now before you complain that I use the term Gibraltar, so do all
geologists who study the Messinian desiccation of the Mediterranean.
Secondly, if you had bothered to get the book, and study the original
material rather than condensations from it, you would find that I QUOTE
Hsu's value for the time he believes it took for the Mediterranean to fill
100 years. It is on p. 137. But Hsu doesn't specify the size of the break
he uses.
>
>I can't remember seeing Glenn's reply before I unsubscribed and AFAIK he has
>not raised his 5.5 mya Mediterranean Flood theory since then, so I assumed
he
>had either admitted it was false after I unsubscribed, or had quietly
abandondoned.
Stephen, you have presented bad mathematics and bad geology and you expect
me to abandon my view to that? Sorry. You will have to do much better
than flawed mathematics and geology to get me to abandon my views. Anyone
could do it if they can prove that the Mediterranean wasn't dry. Here is
the calculation of the re-fill time.
The present Mediterranean has a volume of 3.7 million cubic kilometers.
(See K. Hsu et al, "The Origin of the Mediterranean Evaporites, in W. B. F.
Ryan K. J. Hsu et al, Initial Reports of the Deep Sea Drilling Project,
Vol. 13, U. S. Govt. Printing Office 1973pp 1203-1231, p. 1214; and A.
Debenedetti, "the Problem of the Origin of the Salt Deposits in the
Mediterranean and of Their Relations to the Other Salt Occurrences in the
Neogene Formations of the Contiguous Regions," Marine Geology
49(1982):91-114, p. 95.)
As a waterfall cuts through a channel, it undermines itself (this is seen
at the present Niagara falls.
water->
----- |
....| V
...|
..|
.| <---weak point
._____________
If the left edge of the screen represents the Atlantic ocean, when the
weak point breaks, a deep hole is created. How deep was the channel? We
know from Sicily, that the evaporites are overlain by deep water shales
containing Atlantic animals that could only live in waters deeper than 3000
feet or 1 km.
In order to calculate how long it took the Mediterranean to fill one must
determine a reasonable depth and width for the channel. The only real
information concerns the depth of the channel.
"These earliest Pliocene strata contain a benthic ostracod fauna, which
could only live in ocean bottom below 1,000 m. The associated benthonic
Foraminifera are likewise indicative of a deep marine environment of
deposition. The fact that of the deep-swimming planktonic genus
Spheroidinellopsis is the dominant (up to 90%) microfauna lends further
credence to the concept of a deep Mediterranean in the earliest Pliocene."
~ K. J. Hsu, W. B. F. Ryan and M. B. Cita, "Late Miocene Desiccation of the
Mediterranean," Nature, 242, March 23, 1973, p. 240
Is this reasonable? I believe it is.
So, given a channel in the region of the break with the dimensions:
1 km deep x 25 km wide(15 miles) moving at 24 km/hr (15 mph-the speed of
the Johnstown flood) we have:
24 km/hr x 24 hours/day x 25 km^2= 14400 cubic kilometers per day.
Thus,
3.7 x 10^6 cubic km/ 14400 cubic km/day = 257 days or 8.5 months.
Now, the question comes up, did the old Mediterranean have a volume of 3.7
cubic km of water? There is some evidence that when the water was removed,
that the isostatic rebound actually made the seabottom shallower which
would mean that the basin would fill more quickly than I calculated above
or that it could fill in a year with a smaller channel. Here is that
information,
"During the Messinian Stage (5.5 Myr, Miocene/Pliiocene boundary) the 4.2 x
10^23 m^3 of water that now fills the Mediterranean evaporated. Evidence
for this includes palaeogorges 1 km below the present Nile and Rhone
valleys and evaporite depostis, sampled by cores and deep-sea drilling,
that are thicker than 1 km over much of the Mediterranean. Two-dimensional
flexure models, presented here, indicate that the regionally compensated
crustal upwarping from removal of the seawater load would lead to a
Messinian geomorphology with an uplifted Mediterranean basin and shoreline
buldges along its northwestern and southeastern coasts. These shoreline
bulges would cause a reversal of downhil gradient direction in areas with
low original seaward slopes.Such a profile would lead to a landward
reversal of drainage in rivers with low discharge." Sonya E. Norman and
Clement G. Chase, "Uplift of the Shores of the Western Mediterranean Due to
Messinian Desiccation and Flexural Isostacy," Nature 322(1986), p. 450
The weight of the new water would slowly deepen the Mediterranean sea over
a few centuries. The immediate and noticeable refill could easily take a
short time.
>it. The Archive wasbroken until recently and when I last checked it had
August
>1997 missing. However, it now appears that Glenn still believes in his 5.5
mya
>Mediterranean Flood.
Yes I do. Your arguments have not been convincing. Not only can the
Mediterranean fill in the time suggested by the Bible, it could fill even
more rapidly if certain assumptions were made.
glenn
Adam, Apes and Anthropology
Foundation, Fall and Flood
& lots of creation/evolution information
http://www.isource.net/~grmorton/dmd.htm