On a small scale, you can see the process that may have started the formation of coal deposits when a typhoon rips up mats of vegetation and floats them out to sea, but some coal seams run from Pennsylvania out across Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois into Iowa and down to Oklahoma! What kind of storm could be involved in the formation of that kind of coal seam? Answer: Catastrophic flooding on a scale like that described in the Bible for Noah's flood!
A new concept of coal formation has been developed by creationist geologists, led by Dr. Steven Austin. In his dissertation for the Ph.D. in coal geology from Penn State, Dr. Austin
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suggested that coal was formed from plant debris deposited under mats of vegetation floating in sea water. His model explained many features of coal that the swamp model could not explain. Even more importantly, his theory — a real scientific breakthrough — is the first ever to
predict
the location and quality of coal.
Dramatic confirmation of the processes postulated by Dr. Austin was provided by the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens. The volcano sent mud and debris hurtling down into Spirit Lake, sloshing a wave nearly 900 feet (275 m) up its initially tree-studded slopes. The wave sheared off a million trees, enough lumber to make all the houses in a large city! The trees were sheared off their roots and stripped of their leaves, branches, and bark. The "forest" of denuded logs floated out over the huge lake. As they became water-logged, many sank vertically down into and through several layers of mud, forming polystrates on the lake bottom. Many features of the lake-bottom deposits are reminiscent of coal deposits. A fantastic video describing both the eruption of Mount St. Helens and his original research has been prepared by Dr. Austin,
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and he and Dr. John Morris have the volcano's story in book form.
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Thanks to the eruption of Mount St. Helens, scientists have had a chance to observe, measure, and study catastrophic processes close up.
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The energy of the initial eruption was equivalent to that released by over 20,000 atomic bombs! It blew off the top 1,300 feet (ca. 400 m) of the mountain; produced a hot-blast cloud of 400°C moving at over 100 miles per hour (160 km/hr); generated mud flows tens of feet (several meters) thick, moving at 30 miles per hour (50 km/hr); and produced a wave that, as mentioned before, sheared off a million trees. My wife and I had the opportunity to fly up Mount St. Helens, down into the crater, and out over the denuded mountainside and logjam in Spirit Lake — still awesome ten years after the first eruption. Yet, Mount St. Helens was a "tiny" volcano that never even produced a lava flow!
What supplies the power for volcanic eruptions anyway? Water. Yes,
water — superheated
water found in the underground liquid rock called magma. If some crack develops to release pressure, the superheated water flashes into steam,
generating colossal power —
power to blow islands apart, power that dwarfs mankind's nuclear arsenal. About two-thirds of what comes out of the average volcano is water vapor, what geologists call "juvenile water." How much water could be released by volcanic processes? Most evolutionists believe all the earth's oceans were filled by outgassing of volcanic water!
According to the Bible, the water for Noah's flood was first released when the "fountains of the great deep burst forth" (Gen. 7: 11). Imagine volcanoes many times more powerful than Mount St. Helens, going off all over the world
at the same time.
That may help you begin to imagine catastrophe on a biblical scale! It's catastrophe on that biblical scale that science
needs
to explain many of the physical features of our earth.
Because of the deluge of objective evidence, a new group of evolutionary geologists has arisen. They call themselves
"neo-catastrophists."
Derek Ager,
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past president of the British Geologic Association, said, "I have already declared myself an unrepentant 'neo-catastrophist.' " He goes on to say that the geologic evidence reminds him of the life of a soldier, full of "long periods of boredom and short periods of terror." It seems to me that the "long periods of boredom" are the contact lines between the strata (the
absence
of deposits where,
presumably,
all the evolution has occurred). The "short periods of terror" formed the fossil-bearing deposits themselves. It is rapid, large-scale processes that form the fossil-bearing deposits we actually observe.
Although Stephen Gould was an anti-creationist, he said,
"Catastrophists
were as committed to science as any gradualist; in fact,
they adopted the more 'objective' view that one should believe what one sees
and not interpolate missing bits of gradual record into a literal tale of rapid change" (emphasis added).
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Catastrophism helps us to understand the patterns of extinction we see when we compare living forms with their fossil relatives. Evolutionists have even proposed a global catastrophe, an asteroid impact, to explain dinosaur extinction. A catastrophe would wipe out creatures regardless of their environmental fitness. Only those that happen to be in the right place at the right time when the catastrophe hit would survive. David Raup,
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well-known evolutionist, talked about this as "survival of the luckiest" in contrast to "survival of the fittest" (natural selection).
"Survival of the luckiest" would explain why present forms appear to be no more fit to survive than their fossil relatives. At best, only a few of each kind would survive, and these would possess less of the original created gene pool. Population genetics textbooks even refer to these consequences of a "genetic bottleneck" as the "Noah's ark effect." That would help to explain why most groups existed in greater variety in times past than they do now — the
opposite
of evolutionary expectations, a reflection instead of the biblical sequence: creation, corruption, catastrophe.
Giant forms seem to have been particularly hard hit by extinction. As fossils, we find giant dragonflies with wingspans over 2 feet (60 cm); giant fusilinids among the one-celled creatures (1/2 inch or 12 mm is giant for them); the giant reptiles, including some of the dinosaurs; even a giant beaver that reached 6 feet (2 m) in body length. (Imagine looking up into the face of a giant beaver. When he says, "I want that tree," you respond, "Take it. It's yours!") Perhaps the giant beavers were for cutting down the giant trees. As I mentioned earlier, plants such as the club mosses or ground pines (lycopods), which grow only a few inches (centimeters) tall today, are represented as fossils (with the same kind of stem and "leaf" anatomy and reproductive structures) by trees reaching 120 feet (35 m) in height (the lepidodendrons).
The decline in size and variety in so many groups may be related to a dramatic change in global climate. All scientists recognize both that the earth once had a mild climate pole to pole and that it experienced a recent "Ice Age." Although it's past maximum, we're still in the Ice Age. At its maximum, ice at higher latitudes and altitudes covered about 30 percent of the earth's surface; it still covers about 10 percent. What happened? The Genesis flood may hold the key.
Our present atmosphere is only 0.03 percent CO
2
, and plants are designed for much higher levels. Carbon dioxide is a "greenhouse gas" that acts like the glass in a greenhouse to bottle up the sun's heat and spread it around.
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At the time of the Flood, huge numbers of plants, animals, and microbes were buried and fossilized, so CO
2
from their decomposition was not returned to the atmosphere. Much CO
2
would have been consumed also in the formation of limestone, a calcium carbonate (CaCO
3
). The result would be like throwing off the earth's blanket on a cold night. Land loses heat much more quickly than water does. So, in the first few centuries after the Flood, the earth would have
warm oceans
and, at the higher latitudes and altitudes,
cold continents
— exactly the contrasting conditions required to produce an "Ice Age."
Development of ice sheets requires
warm oceans
to produce lots of evaporated moisture; it requires areas of
cold continents
so that evaporated moisture can fall as snow and ice. The North Slope of Alaska and much of northeastern Siberia were
not
covered by glacial ice, because these areas were
too cold
, lacking the copious precipitation to make abundant snowfall. That's why evolutionary theories all fail to explain the Ice Age. Old habits are hard to break, and for the past two centuries evolutionists have been trying to explain everything in earth history as the result of slooow and gradual processes. If the earth gets slooowly colder and colder, you just get a cold earth without ice sheets, like the North Slope and northeast Siberia. The paradoxical juxtaposition of warm oceans and cold continents requires a sudden global catastrophe — exactly like the Genesis flood! Once again, evolutionists cheat themselves out of a straightforward scientific explanation based on logic and observation, all because of their unscientific commitment to uniformitarian belief, a belief that continues to fail one scientific test after another.
In warmer latitudes, the clash of warm, moist air with cold, dry air masses would generate storms, including "super hurricanes," called
hypercanes
, perhaps ten times stronger than Hurricane Katrina. Such storms may have generated the "fossil hash" deposits in Florida, where a mixture of huge land and sea Ice Age fossils are entombed side-by-side in vast shell deposits. Two other books of mine include more information on storm deposits (
The Fossil Book
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) and on ecological differences between the pre- and post-Flood worlds (
Exploring the World Around You
121
).
Details on the Ice Age, on post-Flood migrations, and on the famous
frozen mammoths
are found in excellent books by meteorologist Michael Oard.
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Oard presents evidence and scientific logic to suggest ice sheets built up to the Ice Age maximum by about 500 years after the Flood, or about 4,000 years ago. According to paleontologists at the state museum in Florida, that's about the time the pre-Columbian peoples in Florida killed off the last of the large Ice Age mammals, many larger than the average dinosaur. The ice melted back over the next 200 years, as the difference between oceanic and continental temperatures lessened, and the scale and intensity of storms declined, but the earth never got back to its more idyllic pre-Flood climate and its ecological density and diversity.
Major environmental changes triggered by Noah's flood and the Ice Age that followed may help us understand some rare but special creatures. Scuba diving along Australia's Barrier Reef, I was startled and thrilled to find living crinoids ("sea lilies" or "feather stars"), sort of "upside-down starfish on stems." These graceful creatures (looking like plants, except that they can walk on their "roots"!) were once so abundant that the Mississippian System (Lower Carboniferous) is sometimes called the "Age (Zone) of Crinoids." I had found their fabulous fossils in Indiana, Iowa, and Nebraska, but evolutionary teaching had assured me this great group was an evolutionary dead end, unfit to survive except in a few out-of-the-way places! How stunningly untrue! Here were dozens, in a variety of brilliant colors, alive and doing very well in the richest (and most competitive) life zone on earth!
Forms like these feather stars that were once abundant but now nearly extinct are called
living fossils.
Lampshells (brachiopods) are called "living fossils" because only a few genera survive of a group once so abundant they are sometimes called "fossil weeds." The "oldest" continuously surviving animal (the one with the longest stratigraphic range) is the lampshell called
Lingula,
which, in an evolutionary sense, might be considered the world's most successful animal, remaining completely unchanged while trilobites, dinosaurs, saber-tooth tigers, and other great creatures came and went around it! Graptolites, once thought to be extinct for half a billion years, were found alive and unchanged off western Australia.
The pearly
nautilus
is called a living fossil because most members of its group, the squid-like cephalopod mollusks, have been eliminated by extinction. Why would evolution "do in" the nautiloids, the most complex (i.e., "most highly evolved") of all invertebrates, especially since the "first" nautiloids continue complete and complex — and unchanged, from the "beginning" of fossil abundance (lowest Cambrian rock)?
While it was known only from a few fossil bones presumed to be millions of years old, the coelacanth
(Latimeria)
was hailed as a "missing link," an animal caught in the act of evolving from fish to amphibian. Then they found coelacanths alive and well ("living fossils") off Madagascar — 100 percent fish in a totally deep-sea fish environment. Others of these big fish have been found off Indonesia. As regularly happens,
additional evidence disproved,
rather than supported,
evolutionary belief.
Joachin Scheven,
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one of Europe's leading creation scientists, has a museum with spectacular displays of these and many other "living fossils."
Evolutionists have always been perplexed by "living fossils." These creatures are clearly well-fit to survive; they were complete and complex from their first appearance, and they have remained unchanged throughout vast stretches of
presumed
evolutionary time.
Unquestioning belief in vast amounts of time conflicts with so much paleontological evidence that it may be time for scientists to question belief in evolutionary time.
Actually, there is a great deal of direct evidence that key fossils, and the rock layers in which they are found, are "only"
thousands
of years old,
not millions
.