This is the online edition of In the Beginning: Compelling Evidence for Creation and the Flood, 8th Edition (2008), by Dr. Walt Brown. It is designed to be read online.
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Testing the Theories
How can we compare and test the two conflicting explanations: liquefaction versus uniformitarianism and the principle of superposition over billions of years?
1. A sedimentary layer often spans hundreds of thousands of square miles. (River deltas, where sediment thicknesses are greatest, are a tiny fraction of that area.) Liquefaction during a global flood would account for the vast expanse of these thick layers. Current processes and eons of time do not.
2. One thick, extensive sedimentary layer has remarkable purity. The St. Peter sandstone, spanning about 500,000 square miles in the central United States, is composed of almost pure quartz, similar to sand on a white beach. It is hard to imagine how any geologic process, other than global liquefaction, could achieve this degree of purity over such a wide area.19 Almost all other processes involve mixing, which destroys purity.
3. Today, sediments are usually deposited in and by rivers—along a narrow line. However, individual sedimentary rock layers are spread over large geographical areas, not along narrow, streamlike paths. Liquefaction during the flood acted on all sediments and sorted them over wide areas in weeks or months.
4. Sedimentary layers are usually thin, sharply defined, parallel, and horizontal. They are often stacked vertically for thousands of feet. If layers had been laid down thousands of years apart, surface erosion would have destroyed this parallelism. Liquefaction, especially liquefaction lenses, explain these sharp boundaries.
5. Sometimes adjacent, parallel layers contain such different fossils that evolutionists conclude that those layers were deposited millions of years apart, but the lack of erosion shows that the layers were deposited rapidly. Liquefaction resolves this paradox.
6. Many communities around the world get their water from deep, permeable, water-filled, sedimentary layers called aquifers. When water drains from an aquifer, the layer collapses, unable to support the overlying rock layers. A collapsed aquifer cannot be replenished, so how were aquifers originally filled?
Almost all sorted sediments were deposited within water, so aquifers contained water when they first formed. Today, with aquifers steadily collapsing globally, one must question claims that they formed millions of year ago. As described in this chapter, liquefaction sorted sediments relatively recently.
7. Varves are extremely thin layers (typically 0.004 inch or 0.1 mm), which evolutionists claim are laid down annually in lakes. By counting varves, evolutionists believe that time can be measured. The Green River Formation of Wyoming, Colorado, and Utah, a classic varve region, contains billions of flattened, paper-thin, fossilized fish; thousands were buried and fossilized in the act of swallowing other fish. [See Figure 7 on page 11.] Obviously, burial was sudden. Fish, lying on the bottom of a lake for years, would decay or disintegrate long before enough varves could bury them. (Besides, dead fish typically float, deteriorate, and then sink.) Most fish fossilized in varves show exquisite detail and are pressed to the thinness of a piece of paper, as if they had been compressed in a collapsing liquefaction lens.
Also, varves are too uniform, show almost no erosion, and are deposited over wider areas than where streams enter lakes—where most lake deposits occur. Liquefaction best explains these varves.
PREDICTION 10: Corings taken anywhere in the bottom of any large lake will not show laminations as thin, parallel, and extensive as the varves of the 42,000-square-mile Green River Formation, perhaps the world’s best known varve region.
8. In almost all cases, dead animals and plants quickly decay, are eaten, or are destroyed by the elements. Preservation as fossils requires rapid burial in sediments thick enough to preserve bodily forms. This rarely happens today. When it does, as in an avalanche or a volcanic eruption, the blanketing layers are not uniform in thickness, do not span tens of thousands of square miles, and rarely are water-deposited. (Water is needed if cementing is to occur.) Liquefaction provides a mechanism for rapid, but gentle, burial and preservation of trillions of fossils in water-saturated sedimentary layers—including fossilized footprints, worm burrows, ripple marks, and jellyfish. [See also “Rapid Burial” on page 11.]
Thousands of fossilized jellyfish have been found in central Wisconsin, sorted to some degree by size into at least seven layers (spanning 10 vertical feet) of coarse-grained sediments.20 Evolutionists admit that a fossilized jellyfish is exceedingly rare, so finding thousands of them in what was coarse, abrasive sand is almost unbelievable. Claiming that it occurred during storms at the same location on seven different occasions, but over a million years, is ridiculous.
What happened? Multiple liquefaction lenses, vertically aligned during the last liquefaction cycle, trapped delicate animals such as jellyfish and preserved them as the roof of each water lens gently settled onto its floor.
9. Many fossilized fish are flattened between extremely thin sedimentary layers. This requires squeezing the fish to the thinness of a sheet of paper without damaging the thin sedimentary layers directly above and below. How could this happen?
Because dead fish usually float, something must have pressed the fish onto the seafloor. Even if tons of sediments were dumped through the water and on top of the fish, thin layers would not lie above and below the fish. Besides, it would take many thin layers, not one, to complete the burial. Today’s processes seem inadequate.
However, liquefaction would sort sediments into thousands of thin layers. During each wave cycle, liquefaction lenses would simultaneously form at various depths in the sedimentary column. Fish that floated up into a water lens would soon be flattened when the lens finally drained.
10. Sediments, such as sand and clay, are produced by eroding crystalline rock, such as granite or basalt. Sedimentary rocks are cemented sediments. On the continents, they average more than a mile in thickness. Today, two-thirds of continental surface rocks are sedimentary; one-third is crystalline.
Was crystalline rock, eroded at the earth’s surface, the source of the original sediments? If it was, the first eroded sediments would blanket crystalline rock and prevent that rock from producing additional sediments. The more sediments produced, the fewer the sediments that could be produced. Exposed crystalline rock would disappear long before all today’s sediments and sedimentary rocks could form. Transporting those new sediments, often great distances, is another difficulty. Clearly, most sediments did not come from the earth’s surface. They must have come from powerful subsurface erosion, as explained by the hydroplate theory, when high-velocity waters escaped from the subterranean chamber.
11. Some limestone layers are hundreds of feet thick. The standard geological explanation is that regions with those deposits were covered by incredibly limy (alkaline) water for millions of years—a toxic condition not found anywhere on earth today. Liquefaction, on the other hand, would have quickly sorted limestone particles into vast sheets. [See “The Origin of Limestone” on pages 226–231.]
12. Conventional geology claims that coal layers, sometimes more than 100 feet thick, formed from 1,000-foot-thick layers of undecayed vegetation. Nowhere do we see that happening today. However, liquefaction would have quickly gathered vegetation buried during the early stages of the flood into thick layers, which would become coal after the confined, oxygen-free heating of the compression event.
13. Coal layers usually lie above and below cyclothems. Some cyclothems extend over 100,000 square miles. If coal accumulated in peat bogs over millions of years (the standard explanation), why don’t we see such vast swamps today? Why would a peat bog form a coal layer that was later buried by layers of sandstone, shale, limestone, and clay (generally in that ascending order)? Why would this sequence be found worldwide and sometimes be repeated vertically 50 or more times? To deposit a different sedimentary layer would require a change in environment and/or elevation—and, of course, millions of years. Liquefaction provides a simple, complete explanation.
14. Fossils are sorted vertically to some degree. Evolutionists attribute this to macroevolution. No known mechanism will cause macroevolution, and many evidences refute macroevolution. [See pages 6–21.] Liquefaction, an understood mechanism, would tend to sort animals and plants. If liquefaction occurred, one would expect some exceptions to this sorting order, but if macroevolution happened, no exceptions to the evolutionary order should be found. Many exceptions exist. [See “Out-of-Place Fossils” on page 12.]
15. Animals are directly or indirectly dependent on plants for food. However, geological formations frequently contain fossilized animals without fossilized plants.21 How could the animals have survived? Evidently, liquefaction sorted and separated these animals and plants before fossilization occurred.
16. Meteorites are rarely found in deep sedimentary rock. [See “Shallow Meteorites” on page 38.] This is consistent only with rapidly deposited sediments.