TRUTH MATTERS

“The entire [Biblical] account plainly yields the inference that tremendous quantities of earth and rock must have been excavated by the waters of the Flood … and the materials that were eroded must eventually have been redeposited somewhere, and necessarily in stratified layers, such as we find everywhere around the world today in the great sedimentary rock systems.” –Henry Morris & John Whitcomb, The Genesis Flood, 1961, p. 123.

“Many ancient shale units, once examined carefully, may thus reveal that they accumulated in the manner illustrated here, [in moving water] rather than having largely settled from slow-moving or still suspensions. This, in turn, will most likely necessitate the reevaluation of the sedimentary history of large portions of the geologic record. Elucidating the mechanisms of mudstone deposition not only helps to better understand the rock record but also benefits hydrocarbon exploration, hydrogeology, and coastal and shelf engineering.” — Schieber et al., December 2007

Wow. How did a hydraulic engineer and a theologian know that mudstone was deposited in moving water 46 years ago, but mainstream geologists are just now realizing it? Simple. They realized that the Genesis Record is an accurate record of history after all. And they realized that the reasons people reject the account of the Genesis Flood are often philosophical, not scientific.  So Morris & Whitcomb studied the evidence and wrote a book explaining scientifically how the account of the Flood is true. Now, after much educational effort on the part of organizations like ICR and AIG, mainstream geologists are slowly coming back around to catastrophism as an explanation for the geologic record. Also, critics like Glenn Morton who say that “ICR theories on oil formation were useless to actual oil exploration” are mistaken. Creationist theories could actually enhance oil exploration and provide new ideas about where to find it as this recent article from the leading journal Science makes clear. Just think how advanced our geologic knowledge would be if all geologists would have read The Genesis Flood as part of their graduate programs!

Science 14 December 2007:
Vol. 318. no. 5857, pp. 1760 – 1763

Accretion of Mudstone Beds from Migrating Floccule Ripples

Juergen Schieber,1* John Southard,2 Kevin Thaisen1

Mudstones make up the majority of the geological record. However, it is difficult to reconstruct the complex processes of mud deposition in the laboratory, such as the clumping of particles into floccules. Using flume experiments, we have investigated the bedload transport and deposition of clay floccules and find that this occurs at flow velocities that transport and deposit sand. Deposition-prone floccules form over a wide range of experimental conditions, which suggests an underlying universal process. Floccule ripples develop into low-angle foresets and mud beds that appear laminated after postdepositional compaction, but the layers retain signs of floccule ripple bedding that would be detectable in the rock record. Because mudstones were long thought to record low-energy conditions of offshore and deeper water environments, our results call for reevaluation of published interpretations of ancient mudstone successions and derived paleoceanographic conditions. Read more »