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A chart of major layers of strata (sedimentary rock) at the Grand Canyon. |
If you’re a secular scientist who believes that our planet is billions of years old, earth’s layers of rock don’t play fair.
If you know anything about geology, you’ve probably heard of the Geological Column. It is a non-existent extrapolation of all the rock layers of earth from top to bottom based on how geologists believe they fit together. Nowhere on the planet can all these layers be found together one on top of the other. Scientists have put the Geological Column together by analyzing different layers of rock all over the earth and fitting them into a hypothetical Geological Column where they seem to fit best. They do this based on the type of rock a particular layer is made of, what kind of rock the layers above and below it are, what kinds of fossils they tend to find in those rock layers, and if all else fails, they date it with radiometric dating. But trusting this extrapolated column of “earth’s geological history” presents a major problem when you look at what’s between these layers of rock.
Rock layers are believed to form over a long period of time one on top of the other with each layer usually representing hundreds of millions of years. As already mentioned, nowhere on earth can all of the layers in the Geological Column shown in textbooks actually be found. Scientists believe and state that this is because of erosion washing the missing layers away.
This is a difficult issue though, because it means that erosion has to be very particular about what rock layers it completely erodes away and what layers it leaves behind. You can visit two different locations within miles of each other and find millions of years worth of sediment completely missing in one place and present in another. It’s as if nature neatly carved away millions of years of accumulated rock in one small section and missed the same sediment formation just a few miles away.
The Grand Canyon is a great example of this. There is about 250 millions years worth of sediment completely missing from where it should be, according to the Geological Column. The layers of earth are stacked up one on top of the other and yet in the very middle of this, expected layers simply aren’t there. Evolutionists and uniformitarianists (people who believe the earth is billions of years old and that all these layers of rock represent ages of the earth and hundreds of millions of years of time) blame this on erosion. It might be better to call it “selective erosion” because it had to have wiped out millions of years worth of sediment in some locations and left it entirely untouched in others. This is extremely inconvenient and also not very likely, especially across short distances where this phenomenon is very clearly noticeable.
Making matters that much worse for geologists is that many of the rock layers they study have extremely smooth lines between them, as if someone piled the different sediments up and neatly flattened them together without any erosion at all taking place between them. All across the planet, layers of sediment can be found neatly laid down with a clean straight line between them. This should NOT be the case if you believe in millions of years of time having laid these sediments down. Erosion and time should have made the tops of each layer very messy and wavy, not clean and straight like they are.
In geology, there are names for how the layers of rock meet up with each other. Think of these lines in the layers of earth like a border between one rock layer and another one. Some of these lines are messy, indicating that erosion ate away at the top layer of rock before another layer covered it, and some are very clean, indicating that no erosion took place before it was covered by the next layer of sediment. When the top of a rock layer (which has since been covered by another layer of rock) has been noticeably eroded, the border between the rock layers is called an Unconformity.
If you look at the graph of the Grand Canyon rock layers at the start of this write up, you’ll see that some borders between layers are messy and wavy while many others are not. Those messy borders are Unconformities. Many of the rock layers at the Grand Canyon, however, are NOT messy but instead show no signs of erosion at all. This is true all over the planet where many layers of sediment have a border line between them that is neatly horizontal and does not show signs of age or erosion.
When there are no signs of erosion between layers of sediment, it causes a major problem for geologists who adhere to the official Geological Column found in textbooks (but not found on earth). Millions of years of time is supposed to have passed as each layer of sediment was laid down, and yet there are tons of layers all over the earth that show absolutely no sign of erosion taking place between these rock layers, something that should be very easily noticeable!
Making matters worse is when geologists find very neat border lines in areas where entire layers of the Geological Column are completely missing! To explain these situations, geologists have to assume that erosion must have entirely stripped the missing layers away and left behind little or no sign of it having happened. To explain this, geologists call on the term “Paraconformity”. A Paraconformity is when two layers of sediment rock show no signs of erosion between them, but where geologists assume there must have been MAJOR erosion despite the lack of evidence, because rock layers that SHOULD be there are not. Paraconformities are also called Unconformities, NOT because the layers themselves show evidence of erosion (which an Unconformity is), but because layers of rock that are supposed to be there are not.
Geologists who believe in the Biblical Genesis flood that covered the whole earth with water can mostly easily explain these mysterious layers of sediment without having to invent “Paraconformities” in order to explain away the lack of erosion evidence. Geologists who believe in the global flood attribute most layers of sediment to the work of ocean currents and massive scale erosion as water rose, covered the land, mixed it up and laid down tons and tons of soft sediment all across the planet before the water finally receded into the ocean basins we have today. The processes of the water rising then subsiding would have moved vast quantities of sediment very large distances, resulting in layers of sediment that can be found covering large swaths of land. To see this sort of thing in action, just look at examples of massive floods in our world today, and you’ll see that they can very quickly lay down thick layers of fresh sediment, even multiple layers, depending on the types of sediment the flood waters ripped up and how the flood moved through an area.
So when a geologist who believes in the flood looks at the layers of sediment, he doesn’t see millions of years of time, he sees a stage of the cataclysmic flood described in the Bible book of Genesis. And when a geologist who believes in the Biblical flood sees a “Paraconformity”, it doesn’t baffle him at all. Instead, the geologist sees such Paraconformities as being evidence that these layers of sediment were laid down very fast one on top of the other. There are no signs of erosion because there WAS no erosion or millions of years between sediment layers. In the places where there are REAL Unconformities (erosion between layers), that simply shows that there WAS erosion between one layer and the next, just like the evidence shows.
Flood geologists do not have to have an invented “Paraconformity” that has little or no evidence of existing, because they believe exactly what the signs and evidence show us, without having to make up excuses for why the layers of sediment don’t fit a preconceived idea of geological time.
UPDATE: At the start of this write up I state that the Geological Column does not actually exist anywhere on the earth and only exists in text books and in the minds of geologists. However upon further research there ARE a FEW locations on earth where most of the major layers found in the Geologic Column are present or appear to be present. These are still not 100% complete, but they contain most of the major layers.
ReplyDeleteHowever that still doesn't say much because the issue isn't weather or not all these layers actually exist in one or more small spots on the planet. The issue with the Geological Column is that secular science views each layer as representing hundreds of millions of years of history and very slow sedimentary build up. This is not accurate, or else these layers would be seen everywhere with far more regularity. Also, the only thing that ultimately says whether or not one layer of sediment is "the same layer" as in another location on the planet are the geologists that look at them. If the strata is similar, or contains certain fossils, no matter how it's positioned, to them, it's a match.
People who believe in the flood believe much of this strata was laid down during and shortly after the flood. The flood was a global event and as such, the layers of strata it left behind are global as well.