This is the online edition of In the Beginning: Compelling Evidence for Creation and the Flood
(7th Edition) by Dr. Walt Brown. The online version of the book is designed to be read online.
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Water Lenses
An important phenomenon, which will be called lensing, was observed in the sediment tank. Some layers were more porous and permeable than others. If water flowed more easily up through one sedimentary layer than the layer immediately above, a lens of water accumulated between them. Multiple lenses could form simultaneously, one a short distance above the other. Water in these nearly horizontal lenses always flowed uphill.15
Throughout the flood, water lenses formed and collapsed with each wave cycle. [See Figure 92.] During liquefaction, organisms floated up into the lens immediately above. Water’s buoyant force is only about half that of liquefied sediments, so a water lens was less able to lift dead organisms into the denser sedimentary layer immediately above the lens. In each geographical region, organisms with similar size, shape, and density (usually members of the same species) often ended up in the same lens. There they were swept by currents for many miles along those nearly horizontal channels.16
Coal. Vegetation lifted by liquefaction into a water lens spread out and formed a buoyant mat pressed up against the lens’ roof. Vegetation mats, composed of thin, flat, relatively impermeable sheets, such as intertwined leaves, ferns, grass, and wood fragments could not push through that roof. These mats also prevented sedimentary grains in the roof from falling to the floor of the lens.
Each vegetation mat acted as a check valve; that is, during the portion of the wave cycle when water flowed upward, the mat reduced the flow upward through the narrow channels in the lens’ roof. During the other half of the wave cycle, when water flowed downward, the mat was pushed away from the roof allowing new water to enter the lens. Therefore, water lenses with vegetation mats thickened and expanded during the flood. Vegetation mats became today’s coal seams, some of which can be traced over 100,000 square miles.
Figure 94: Drifting Footprints. Hundreds of footprints, involving 44 different trackways, were discovered in cross-bedded sandstone layers of northern Arizona. Surprisingly, movement was in one direction, but the toes pointed in another direction—sometimes at almost right angles. These and other details made it clear that the animals, probably amphibians, were walking on the sand bottom of some type of lateral-flowing stream.18 This contradicts the standard story that the cross-bedded sandstone layers were once ancient sand dunes. Almost all trackways moved uphill. Obviously, thick sediments must have gently and quickly blanketed the footprints to prevent their erosion—a vexing problem for evolutionists who try to explain fossilized footprints.
How could this happen? Today, salamanders buried in muddy lake bottoms can “breathe” through their skins and hibernate for months. During liquefaction, salamanderlike animals floated up into a liquefaction lens, where water always flows uphill.15 Footprints could be made on the lens’ floor for minutes, as long as the lens stayed open and no more liquefaction occurred to obscure the footprints. When the water lens slowly drained and its roof settled onto the floor, footprints and other marks were firmly protected.
Cyclothems. Sometimes, 50 or more coal seams are stacked one above the other with a special sequence of sedimentary layers separating the coal layers. A typical sequence between coal seams (from bottom to top) is sandstone, shale, limestone, and finally denser clay graded up to finer clay. These cyclic patterns, called cyclothems, are in the order one would expect from liquefaction: denser, rounder, larger sedimentary particles at the bottom and less dense, flatter, finer sedimentary particles at the top. Cyclothem layers worldwide generally have the same relative order, although specific layers may be absent.
Fossils. When a liquefaction lens slowly collapsed for the last time, plants and small animals were trapped, flattened, and preserved between the lens’ roof and floor. Even footprints, ripple marks, and worm burrows were preserved at the interface if no further liquefaction occurred there. A particular lens might stay open through many wave cycles, long after the lens’ floor last liquefied. At other places, the last (and most massive) liquefaction event was caused by the powerful compression event. Footprints formed in those lenses were preserved, because no further liquefaction occurred.
Fossils, sandwiched between thin layers, were often spread over a wide surface, which geologists call a horizon. Thousands of years later, these horizons gave some investigators the false impression that those animals and plants died long after layers below were deposited and long before layers above were deposited. A layer with many fossils covering a vast area was misinterpreted as an extinction event or a boundary between geologic periods.
Early geologists noticed that similar fossils were often in two closely spaced horizons. It seemed obvious that the subtle differences between each horizon’s fossils must have developed during the assumed long time interval between each horizon. Different species names were given to these organisms, although nothing was known about their inability to interbreed—the true criterion for identifying species. Later, in 1859, Charles Darwin proposed a mechanism, natural selection, which he claimed accounted for the evolution of those subtle differences. However, if sorting by liquefaction produced those differences, Darwin’s explanation is irrelevant.
Two Faulty “Principles.” Early geologists learned that fossils found above or below another type of fossil in one location were almost always in that same relative position, even many miles away. This led to the belief that the lower organisms lived, died, and were buried before the upper organisms. Much time supposedly elapsed between the two burials, because today sediments are usually deposited very slowly. Each horizon became associated with a specific time, perhaps millions of years earlier (or later) than the horizon above (or below) it. Finding so many examples of “the proper sequence” convinced early geologists they had found a new principle of interpretation, which they soon called the principle of superposition.
Evolutionary geology is built upon this and one other “principle,” the principle of uniformitarianism, which states that all geological features can be explained by today’s processes acting at present rates.17 For example, today, rivers deposit sediments at river deltas. Over millions of years, thick layers of sediments would accumulate. This might explain the sedimentary rocks we now see.
After considering liquefaction, both “principles” appear seriously flawed. Within a tall liquefaction column, sediments were re-sorted and deposited almost simultaneously by a large-scale process not going on today. (These “principles” are really assumptions. Calling them “principles” gives them undeserved credibility.)