Geology Reference
In-Depth Information
because the additional weight of overlying sediment was needed to squeeze water from the
mud. Similar studies documented comparable results for limestone and sandstone. If sedi-
mentary rocks now exposed at the surface all formed during the Flood, then where did the
mile of sediment that must have covered them go if there was only a few thousand years to
erode it all off?
Even more damning was Kulp's discussion of the problem of how to warp layers of sed-
imentary rock into broad regional folds like those that characterized Appalachian geology.
Creationists attributed such deformation to the slumping of Flood-deposited mud and sand,
before these layers hardened into rock. Kulp described how this was physically impossible.
Shell Oil Company geologists had shown that in order to reproduce geologic conditions in a
laboratory setting, one had to scale all the dimensions in the model—including the material
properties. Using modeling clay to experimentally investigate the deformation of rocks at
temperatures and pressures equivalent to about five to ten miles down within Earth's crust,
one could easily reproduce the folding seen in sedimentary rocks. While turning loose sed-
iment into solid rock required burial to considerable depth, folding rocks required even
deeper burial and higher temperatures. Flood geology simply could not explain the world's
great expanses of folded sedimentary rock.
Kulp also described how radiometric ages of rocks determined by measuring uranium-
lead ratios agree with the stratigraphic order worked out by field geologists on the basis
of Steno's principles for interpreting structure and stratigraphy. Radiometric dating con-
firmed the basic order to the stratigraphic record independently from the fossils sediment-
ary rocks contained. Price's argument that geologists used the idea of fossil succession (and
thus evolution) to impose an artificial order on the geologic record showed how little Price
understood geology.
Kulp asked how if sedimentary rocks really were deposited by great waves moving at
speeds up to a thousand miles an hour it would be possible to preserve the kind of ecolo-
gical zonation creationists called upon to explain fossil assemblages—the idea that the dif-
ferent fossils that characterized different rock formations simply reflected the animal com-
munities in different ecological zones on the pre-Flood Earth. Such a violent current would
mix and remix anything ripped up from Earth's surface. The ecological zonation that cre-
