Adventures in ACE IX: More Senseless about Sedimentary

We left our merry band of Creationists, so ignorant even other YECs can’t stand ’em, breezily ignoring all the sedimentary rock in previously-frozen wastes. Now we shall continue on while they butcher the rest. I hope you have hair. You’re gonna need some to pull out. If nature has blessed you with a pate that requires no shampoo, you may wish to glue some locks to your noggin. Don’t worry about having to acquire appropriate hair-care products: they won’t be there for long.

Now just imagine having to read this tripe repeatedly…

Image is a polar bear standing against a rock wall with its front paws over its face. Caption says, "Ahhh, the horror! Make it stop."

The ACE folks must have heard a few facts about how rocks can form once, long ago, third-hand, and remembered a few bits. They know heat and pressure come in somewhere. So they just have the Floodwaters pile up “many feet (meters) above the mountains, pushing down on the layers with tremendous force.” A bit of hand waving about the pressure heating the sediment, and by gosh, you’ve got instant rock!

Um.

No.

You can’t just pile a bunch of water on sediment and get rock. Limestone’s happy to lithify pretty quick, sometimes, but your basic sandstones and shales, they need plenty of time. Sure, they need to be compacted, probably, but they’ve also got to get rid of excess water, and some nice chemicals to stick the grains together would be favorite. Also, when it comes to really fine grains, you’ve got more trouble than just the long periods they need to finally settle out. There’s a bigger problem: “Simple loading of other materials on top will not do; trapped water in the muds would cause sudden liquifaction of the entire mass…”

Whoopsies.

Then they have the supposedly-lithified layers of sediment getting up to all sorts of shenanigans “[d]uring and immediately after the Flood.” One would think Noah & Co. would’ve noticed all this snazzy new rock acting like it was suffering from St. Vitus’s dance, especially once they’d landed, but nobody saw fit to mention it in the Bible.

Well, perhaps Noah was just too drunk to remember.

Painting shows Noah passed out drunk and nearly nekkid. His sons surround him, putting a red blanket over him, with a bit already strategically draped over his nads. One of the kids looks disturbingly like he's about to feel daddy up.
Giovanni Bellini’s Drunkennes of Noah, ca 1515. Image courtesy Art Renewal Center.

Set aside the handful of hair you’ve ripped out and grab another: Mr. Wheeler’s about to explain about thrust faults. Ha ha ha psych! There are no thrust faults in fundie-land! All you geologists who’ve found old strata on top of young, and found evidence that the strata was overturned and put out of order by faults – you’re wrong! Science sez!

“Scientific examination shows further that some of these supposedly ‘out-of-order’ strata were smoothly deposited on top of each other, not pushed on top of each other.”

We’re told that it’s totes impossible for ancient limestone to end up on top of feisty young shale in Glacier National Park, because it’s really really big, and “Scientists have demonstrated that sliding such a large layer of rock for such a distance would be physically impossible even if the layers of rock were well lubricated.”

Oh, Mr. Wheeler, I have the oddest feeling you know nothing of lubrication, much as your “scientists” know nothing about thrust faults. There was no smooth deposition of old limestone atop young shale, and certainly not a solid, well-lubed or not, layer measuring “350 miles (560 km) wide, and 6 miles (10 km) thick” sliding up and over all in one go.

When a fault moves (for example during an earthquake) movement does not occur all along the fault, and those parts of the fault that do move are not in motion at the same time. An earthquake originates at a point along a fault, and the deformation caused by the earthquake propagates away from that point along the fault, until it dies out. The deformation also does not occur along the entire length of the fault. These observations are based on records of earthquake motions, such as those associated with the Great Alaskan Earthquake, recorded by seismometers. Similarly an earthquake along the San Andreas fault will not result in motion along the entire fault. The claim that the stresses required to cause movement along a thrust fault are large enough to shatter the rocks is based on the assumption that movement along the fault occurs simultaneously. This assumption is not valid, and any calculations made based on that assumption will be wrong.

My gosh, it’s as if the people putting words in Mr. Wheeler’s mouth know nothing about actual science, innit?

Image is a diagram showing the Lewis Overthrust and the other rocks and ranges of Glacier National Park.
Geologic Cross section of Glacier National Park, Montana, USA. Showing the Lewis overthrust fault and the proterozoic rocks above it. Image and caption courtesy Benutzer:Xavax via Wikimedia Commons.

According to the ACE geniuses, high pressure hardens fishies into fossils. No attempt is made to explain why the Flood did this to some of the animals it buried, but fossilized only hard bits like bone and shell for other animals, and pressured only impressions of some. But don’t be surprised Mr. Wheeler’s puppeteers don’t grok fossilization – these are the same folks who point to tree trunks buried upright and scream triumph when geologists actually do know that, yes, sometimes, different sedimentary layers are deposited quickly enough to preserve perishable things like standing trees. They also have a hard time comprehending things like, oh, say, whales getting fossilized in the horizontal, then tilted along with their layers later. No, their rigid faith in the Bible requires them to believe all this stuff happened practically instantly, so they deliberately misunderstand (or outright lie about) fossils like their beloved Santa Barbara whale. And we know it’s willful ignorance or deliberate deception, because scientists have had such polystrate fossils figured out since the 19th century.

No amount of creationist crap on sedimentary rock would be complete without them babbling about bats buried in flowstone. They get positively giddy at the thought of stalagmites forming quickly. Mr. Wheeler tells us that there’s a particular one growing by at least “2.5 cubic inches (41 cm^3) per year.” I tried and failed to find the origin of this claim. It appears not to have come from proper scientific investigation, but has been extracted whole from a creationist bunghole. They may also be conflating what grows in caves with the stuff that grows from water percolating through concrete or masonry, which is a completely different chemical reaction. As for their precious preserved bat – it’s pure bullshit.

Mr. Wheeler ends by telling us about shale, which was once clay mud hardened by – you guessed it – the Flood. You know, aside from the whole aforementioned liquefaction problem, there’s also the sad fact it takes bloody ages for clay to settle out of still water, and won’t settle well at all in turbulent water – a fact I’m sure all in the audience who made mud puddles and whirlpools with their garden hose can attest to.

It’s at this point that I pause again to marvel at the fact that ACE is a complete inversion of the natural order of textbooks; which always contain some errors, but are in the balance correct. These PACES seem to hail from some Bizzarro World where textbooks are meant to consist of endless errors, with the occasional lonely accurate fact stranded like a pristine kernel of corn in the midst of the sludge.

Next, we shall see how they muck up the metamorphic rocks. I hope all that hair you ripped out grows back rapidly – you’ll be tearing it out again shortly.

Image shows a cat with a shaved body and a disgruntled expression. Caption says, "Wut yoo lookin at?"

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Adventures in ACE IX: More Senseless about Sedimentary
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4 thoughts on “Adventures in ACE IX: More Senseless about Sedimentary

  1. rq
    1

    So they just have the Floodwaters pile up “many feet (meters) above the mountains, pushing down on the layers with tremendous force.” A bit of hand waving about the pressure heating the sediment, and by gosh, you’ve got instant rock!

    This sort of exaggerated comparison reminds me of that article on homeopathy I read, where the potentiation (sp?) of the homeopathic water, by slamming it against a surface, was compared to the large hadron collider at CERN… Apparently, the forces in your arm and the LHC accelerating and decelerating molecules, atoms and their components are equivalent.

    Oh, Mr. Wheeler, I have the oddest feeling you know nothing of lubrication

    This sentence took me down a rather naughty track, but I have to agree with the statement. :)

    Now I’m going to go line the desk with something soft and fluffy in preparation for your next post. Or, alternatively, I’m just going to buy myself one of these: with facepalming option.

  2. 2

    Re: Creationists and sedimentary rock. There was a very fun (in a cretinist bashing sense) discussion at TR a few years ago where we had a cretinist insisting the flood was a violent, catstrophic, worldwide process, and in the same breath trying to explain how the footprints of spiders were so well preserved in some layers of the Grand Canyon.

    Good times…..

  3. 3

    I’m leaving tomorrow morning for the vicinity of some actual catastrophic floods. Dana, how about a post (or more than one post) on the Grand Coulee one of these days. It’s becoming one of my favorite geo-places.

  4. 4

    You know, your little hiatus a while back seems to have opened up the buried snark chambers in your soul. Oh, there was always snark, but now it is as if an intelligent power has broken up all the snark fountains of the great deep, and the windows of snark have been opened.

    Which is pretty cool to watch.

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