Geology Reference
In-Depth Information
or upside down—like how the orientation of ripple marks in sand beds or mud cracks in
fine-grained rocks reveal the top and bottom of sedimentary rocks. In places where older
strata lie on top of younger strata one consistently finds evidence of either folding or thrust
faulting, such as upside-down beds, the fault plane itself, or a broken hash of sheared and
crushed rock along the fault zone. None of these relationships depends in the slightest on
the nature of the fossils that the rocks contain.
Additional ways to tell whether strata are right side up or upside down include the orient-
ation of raindrop craters, graded bedding that records the settling out of different grain sizes
(coarser material settles faster and ends up at the base of a deposit), and the orientation of
burrows, which obviously extend down from what was then the surface into a deposit be-
cause overlying strata did not yet exist.
The very existence of upside-down strata presents a fatal problem for flood geology.
How could sediments settle out upside down during a flood unless gravity were somehow
simultaneously switching back and forth during it? If nothing much happened since the
Flood, how did geological formations it laid down get flipped upside down? In contrast,
given enough time, geological deformation along faults could invert rocks or shuffle the
deck of rock formations as continents collided or ground past one another.
As if such concerns were not enough, fossilized coral reefs really provide the nail in the
coffin for flood geology. Whitcomb and Morris explain fossil reefs found in the geologic
record as ripped up and deposited along with everything else during the Flood. But if you
actually go out and look at ancient reefs, as I did at my undergraduate field camp, you find
that they are not composed of randomized chunks mixed up in the chaotic detritus of a
violent deluge. Instead you generally find a massive limestone core, sometimes with del-
icate corals still in growth position. Whole reefs are preserved along with the associated
lagoons, fore-reef and back-reef zones, and open-water marine environments right where
you'd expect to find them in relation to one another in a modern reef. Preserving the spatial
arrangement of different parts of a coral reef while ripping it to pieces and flinging them
around the globe presents a logical absurdity.
Ignoring the equally awkward question of how Noah could have accommodated a coral
reef on the ark, we can readily examine how long it must have taken to form modern reefs
after Whitcomb and Morris's hypothesized Flood, which would have killed off living cor-
