Evidence for the Flood Part 3 - SC2521

SPEAKER 1 Welcome to Science Conversations. I'm Kaysie Vokurka. Is there any geological evidence of a catastrophic global flood? Joining me to discuss part three of this topic is Dr. John Ashton. Welcome once again, Dr. John. SPEAKER 2 Hello, Kaysie. SPEAKER 1 And Dr. John has written a book entitled Evolution Impossible 12 Reasons why Evolution Cannot Explain the Origin of Life on Earth. We are talking about some details from chapter seven in this program. Now, there's a very interesting phenomenon which you write about in the book in Chapter 7 about footprint Trackways of amphibians and reptiles that are found in the Coconino Sandstone formations around the Grand Canyon, I believe. And can you tell what is significant about this evidence? SPEAKER 2 Okay, so we have, for example, in the uniformitarian model of the fossils, that these animals are somehow buried. In the flood model, of course, there's a global catastrophic event. Now, in such a situation, we'd expect animals to be fleeing as the flood waters are rising again, obviously some of them don't make it and they get buried and so forth. But you've got to have a massive situation there. And also the water has to be increasing. And I think those trackways, and there's been many of them discovered not only in the Grand Canyon, but in Mongolia and and other places in Africa as well. You've got trackways of animals that have been made while the animal was wading through water uphill. So it's going up a bank or up an underwater dune. It's trying to get away by walking uphill. And as it's walking, speaking in the softer material that's been deposited, those footprints are being buried. And one of the fascinating things is, of course, that these trackways, instead of going straight up the hill, are drifting. So they're moving off on an angle. And that angle fits with other evidence that we have of water flow, which we get from the layers. So what we call cross bedding. So from cross bedding, we can calculate this is where, if you can imagine a slope of a dune and the wind depositing up on an angle, from the slope of those angles, we can estimate the rate at which water was moving. So this is just basic fluid dynamics calculations. And so, again, one of the fascinating things is that these animals are being slowly pushed by this current. They're trying to walk uphill. We have evidence that they're being pushed by this fast flowing current that is moving sideways. Now, again, it's this powerful evidence of a very major flood situation, particularly if some of these tracks are made by, you know, larger animals, you know, like large dinosaurs and these sort of things. So Again here we have captured a model that again fits the global flood model. And again we find these trackways, some of them have been quite extensively studied in North America. But I noticed some research papers have come out not so long ago where a number of trackways have been found in Mongolia, again with the same phenomena. And one of the other fascinating things I remember reading just recently about the ones in Mongolia is that there are all different types of animals all mixed up together that is, and they're all going the same way. SPEAKER 1 Wow. SPEAKER 2 So there's big animals and there's little animals. So it's like we're not interested in eating just at the moment, but we want to get out of here. SPEAKER 1 Yeah, that's quite a. SPEAKER 2 So this is. And it's not, it's like huge numbers of these animals are involved in making these trackways. I think in one of them, if I remember correctly, I think they estimate there are a thousand or so animals involved in making these trackways that have been preserved then because they've been buried so quickly. So for again like in the Queensland floods that I've referred to that we had a few years ago, massive floating there, but we didn't see this sort of event recorded. SPEAKER 1 So this track wise are very transient. I mean, yeah, that's the wind can blow and it's gone if it's dry. So the fact that these have been preserved tells of some very unique conditions. And I actually had a look, I was so interested in, when I was reading this about, about this in the book, I actually had a look at some, some pictures, I wanted to see some pictures, some diagrams of these trackways, what it looked like. And, and yeah, when you see that the animal at one point is walking normally, the footprints are going straight up and then next minute the footprints are like this in a drifting capacity. When you look at those prints, if it was in a dry condition with no water drift influencing, the animal could not physically produce that kind of pattern. It's just not even possible. Very, very powerful. Fascinating evidence for the dynamics of water moving in this kind of situation to create this, this fossil footprint. SPEAKER 2 There's another area too, perhaps you didn't discuss so much when you did the fossil chapter, but when they've looked at some of the fossils where we tend to find, you know, the, you know, we find an articulated skeleton somewhere. But a lot of the bits of the fossil, say for the dinosaurs in the Morrison Formation have actually been separated as well according to their size. In other words, we find in the lower layers we find the bigger Bones in the upper layers, we find the smaller bones. And so this is exactly what if we've got large flow of water. These animals have been smashed up and this sort of thing and broken up. And then we're getting them, them separated so the bodies are being smashed up. Now, recently, of course, we had a case of a man here in Australia who there was heavy flood, flood waters. He got out of his vehicle, was washed away, and his body was terribly smashed up. And as the bits become separated, of course, and then they get buried and fossilized. And so this is one of the things we find. The larger bits tend to be down lower, the smaller bits are up higher. So again, this again fits fast flowing water separating as these creatures are broken up and then buried. SPEAKER 1 Yeah, yeah, Very, very interesting. And of course, all of this talks to the incredible power of water when it's in a flood condition with raging currents and everything like it. The power of what it can do is tremendous. And one of the, one of the other things that we can discuss that illustrates this is the phenomenon of the polystrate fossil trees. Tell us a bit more about that and the unique aspects of those fossils. SPEAKER 2 Right, okay. So again, when we look at these layers that they're laid down, we tend to think that, yeah, they've been separated by a long period of time. But in Nova Scotia, and actually many coal seems around the world, we find the trees go through many layers. And so really those layers can't be thousands of years or millions of years apart because we've got this one tree going through them all. Now, what shed a whole lot of light on this was the massive explosion of Mount St. Helens. I think it was about 1980, something like that. And in the lake there, they found these trees. And essentially the top of the tree had been blown off, separated, the main trunk was separated from the root system. And so these trunks were floating vertically in the lake. And then, of course, you have silt and sort of ash and stuff from the volcano then can bury them. Now, this fits a scenario of a number of deposits that show that again, there's been massive volcanic activity disrupting things and burying these layers and shows that these layers have formed very quickly. Now, another situation showed that you had a number of these different types of volcanic ash burying and these trees and forming these different layers. And we know with the Mount St. Helens available, we saw deposits, you know, hundreds of feet thick, formed very quickly, a matter of days, hours. That would be interpreted in terms of their layers as, you know, thousands of years. And so this showed us how this situation occurred. And of course there's situations nearby here because large coal deposits near here where the miners have reported these polish rates of trees going through a number of coal seams, the sedimentary rock layers in between, up to the next coal seam, again showing that these things were all buried very rapidly. The, the material in the making up, the coal obviously was buried very, very quickly. Large amounts of forest buried probably under high temperature as well, occurred and coalified them. So we have this evidence. But another fascinating thing that fascinated me, they intrigued me about the polystrate fossils that were found, for example, in Nova Scotia. Now, early on, like Charles Lyle, he visited them and in, in his book, actually had drawings of these polystrate fossils. A number of these trees were hollow and we find that there were animals seeking shelter in these trees that then became fossilized. But the thing is that we had marine and land animals all mixed up. So there were marine animals washed in with them as well and fossilized together. So again, this is powerful evidence that we had a massive disturbance occurring where you had marine creatures mixed up with land dwelling creatures. Some got washed into the hollow trees, some may have been already hiding in the hollow trees and also buried surrounding them. But these trees then span multiple layers, you know, maybe, you know, 10 meters or so of layers. That again shows that these layers, even though they're, you know, 10 meters thick and composed of many, many layers, were all laid down at once, close together. And these polystrate fossils that we find in deposits around the world are very, very powerful evidence that when we attempted, when we attempt to date and work out ages by counting layers, we're on very, very shaky ground there because there's quite obvious if we have these catastrophic conditions, you can have many, many layers formed all at once. It can give the impression of thousands or tens of thousands of years, when in actual fact, there may have only been hours involved in that situation. So the polystrate fossils, again, the fact that we find fossils mixed up, marine and terrestrial animals, and of course this is also mentioned when we look at just some of the layers that we find that are spread over massive areas. These sedimentary layers often contain, for example, wood as well as marine creatures. So we have, you know, land material, some land animals mixed up with marine, spread over very, very large areas. So a major disturbance of the ecosystem of Earth occurred. And again, the picture points to a massive event that occurred once, not multiple events occurring on small scale in local areas over, you know, separated by hundreds of millions of years, which is the sort of the standard picture the picture that we should be teaching the young people fits the biblical geological model that interestingly used to be taught in universities up until the sort of 1800s. And that actually fits the evidence that we now observed. As we've drilled down, as we've done more research, paleontological research, studied the fossils, the way the fossil layers are laid down and so forth, we have powerful evidence that fits one global fossil flunt event that occurred. And if we look at erosion rates not that long ago either. SPEAKER 1 Very interesting. And just before we finish this topic, the ice age, that's a sort of related area and it was responsible for the extinction of things, megafauna type creatures like the woolly mammoth and those kind of creatures. Does ice age evidence fit better with the long age theory or with a global flood theory? SPEAKER 2 Look, there's actually no scientific model that can really explain the ice ages other than the global flood. So there's the Malekevich theory, which relies to try relates to slight changes in the Earth's tilt and solar radiation, this sort of thing. But those variations are nowhere big enough to produce the changes that would produce an ice age. But so scientists are really, really struggling. But the global flood model, where we have hot water being released from in the flood, the Bible talks about the fountains of the deep and then that cooling fits an ice age probably about 4 to 600 years after the flood. And there's a lot of historical evidence for that as well. So the flood model provides just the right environment for four global ice ages, which is quite fascinating. And we also have fascinating evidence that the so called ice cores dating hundreds of thousands of years. During World War II, there were a number of airplanes that had to make fighter bombers, had to make an emergency landing in Greenland. They are now buried under about 200 meters of snow. SPEAKER 1 Whoa. SPEAKER 2 And so we know from the rate of snow deposition that when we drill down the ice cores and the thickness these claims that the ice sheets are 100,000 years old and this sort of thing, if we look at the rate of deposition of snow and that they could be deposited in a thousand years or 2000 years. So no, we don't need those long ages. Again, when we look at the current evidence that we have. SPEAKER 1 Fascinating, Very, very interesting. And of course in the next chapter there's more evidence to consider relating to the global flood scenario. And so the thank you for the discussion we have had in these three parts. Next time we'll be examining the question, is there any historical evidence for a worldwide flood? Be sure to join us.