Chalk, Limestone, and the Flood

Snelling, Andrew A.  “Can Flood geology explain thick chalk beds?”  CEN Tech. J. (now Journal of Creation) 8(1):11–15.  Apr 1994.  A 1994 article by Andrew Snelling, a geologist who writes for Answers in Genesis, on whether Flood geology can explain thick chalk beds.  It is the young-earth treatment of thick chalk that popular articles still cite, and the article calls it a serious paper that states the problem fairly.  Snelling concedes that Roth's and Woodmorappe's calculations do not show how the chalk beds could form during the Flood itself. ↩

1. 1a.

   Snelling's 1994 paper on whether a Flood could lay down thick chalk beds in a few blooms of plankton.  It bases its conclusion of "two or three blooms" on a packing density taken from Woodmorappe, and the article uses it because that borrowed density is the input the whole conclusion depends on.  Cited here as in Journal of Creation (TJ).  Section The Final Answer:  The underlying calculation is Woodmorappe's, from 1986, and Snelling reports it rather than deriving it.  He wrote:  “Woodmorappe has calculated that in chalk there could be as many as 3 x 10¹³ coccoliths per cubic metre if densely packed (which usually isn't the case), yet in the known bloom just mentioned, 10 billion microorganisms per litre of ocean water equates to 10¹³ microorganisms per cubic metre.” ↩

2. 1b.

   Section The Final Answer:  “Adapting some of Woodmorappe's calculations, if the 10% of the earth's surface that now contains chalk beds was covered in water, as it still was near the end of the Flood, and if that water explosively bloomed with coccolithophores and foraminifera with up to 10¹³ microorganisms per cubic metre of water down to a depth of less than 500 metres from the surface, then it would have only taken two or three such blooms to produce the required quantity of microorganisms to be fossilised in the chalk beds.  Lest it be argued that a concentration of 10¹³ microorganisms per cubic metre would extinguish all light within a few metres of the surface, it should be noted that phytoflagellates such as these are able to feed on bacteria, that is, planktonic species are capable of heterotrophism (they are 'mixotrophic').”.  “Since, for example, in southern England there are three main chalk beds stacked on top of one another, then this scenario of three successive, explosive, massive blooms coincides with the rock record.  Given that the turnover rate for coccoliths is up to two days, then these chalk beds could thus have been produced in as little as six days, totally conceivable within the time framework of the flood.”.  Derived: 405 m in 6 days = 67.5 m/day = 2.8 m/hr. ↩ ↩ ↩

3. 1c.

   Section The 'Problems' For Flood Geology:  Snelling is accurate in stating the conventional case:  “Now the chalk beds of southern England are estimated to be around 405 metres (about 1,329 feet) thick and are said to span the complete duration of the so-called Late Cretaceous geological period, estimated by evolutionists to account for between 30 and 35 million years of evolutionary time.  A simple calculation reveals that the average rate of chalk accumulation therefore over this time period is between 1.16 and 1.35cm per l,000 years, right at the lower end of today's accumulation rates quoted above.  Thus the evolutionary geologists feel vindicated, and the critics insist that there is too much chalk to have been originally deposited as calcareous ooze by the Flood.”  The thickness is sourced to House, M., Geology of the Dorset Coast, pp. 4-10, and the modern ooze rates of 1-8 and 2-10 cm per 1,000 years to Kukal 1990.  Section Creationist Responses:  The concession reads:  “As helpful as they are, these calculations overlook one major relevant issue — these chalk beds were deposited during the Flood. … Similarly, Roth's calculations of the required quantities potentially being produced in up to 1,000 years may well show that the quantities of calcareous oozes on today's ocean floors are easily producible in the time-span since the Flood, but these calculations are insufficient to show how these chalk beds could be produced during the Flood itself.”. ↩

4. 1d.

   A 1994 technical article by Snelling on whether Flood geology can explain thick chalk beds.  It answers Morton's carbon objection in a single sentence, proposing volcanic CO₂ as the source of the carbon.  The article uses it because it is the supply of carbon that Snelling proposes for the chalk.  Section 'Blooms' During The Flood:  “Even today the volcanic output of CO₂ has been estimated at about 6.6 million tonnes per year, while calculations based on past eruptions and the most recent volcanic deposits in the rock record suggest as much as a staggering 44 billion tonnes of CO₂ have been added to the atmosphere and oceans in the recent past (that is, in the most recent part of the post-Flood era).”  The reference 25 for the figure is Leavitt 1982, Environmental Geology 4:15-21.  The arithmetic: 44 × 10⁹ t CO₂ = 4.4 × 10¹⁶ g ÷ 44.0095 g mol⁻¹ = 1.0 × 10¹⁵ mol CO₂. ↩

Johns, Warren H.  “Coccolithophores and chalk layers.”  CEN Tech. J. 9(1):29–33.  1995.  Page 30:  His method is the forest analogy: divide the standing crop by average longevity, not by doubling time.  He compares a concentration of 13 × 10⁶ coccolithophores per litre to a stand of trees, and a 50-day longevity to tree longevity, in these words:  “comparable to 80 tons of trees per acre”.  “parallel to the figure of 80 years for average tree longevity”.  Pages 30–31:  A second, independent estimate, from Westbroek's coccolith production rate:  “Instead of a 200-year interval for the production of the ocean's post-Cretaceous oozes, a more accurate figure as a minimum would be 5,400 years (or 27 × 200), if we assume maximum productivity without interruption during the entire interval.”  Page 32:  On Roth, Johns writes:  “While he demonstrates that coccolith oozes can be formed in much less time than what conventional geology estimates, his research can no longer serve as proof that coccolith production can be compressed into a time-frame of 6,000 to 10,000 years.”.  A 1995 letter replying to Snelling's article in the same creationist journal, by Warren Johns of Berrien Springs, Michigan, home of Andrews University, an Adventist university.  Johns describes his own coccolith laboratory work and argues that coccolith turnover is much slower than Roth's data imply.  The article uses it for Johns's claim that the Cretaceous chalk would take at least 80,000 years to form, and for his statement that a one-year Flood cannot produce it.

1. 2a.

   Page 29:  “The turnover rate for coccolithophores in a state of equilibrium should be set at 50 days minimum, not 12 hours as in all creationist studies relying on Roth's data. … Thus, the actual turnover rate should be 100 times longer than what has been proposed (that is, 50 divided by 0.5), which makes all calculations for chalk production rates in error by two orders of magnitude.  One hundred metres of coccolith ooze can be formed in a minimum of 20,000 years instead of the 200 years presently proposed.  This also means that the 400 metres of Cretaceous chalk from England, dealt with in your article, would have taken a minimum of 80,000 years to form, provided that present-day rates are valid for past periods.  However, if Cretaceous waters were warmer, as all isotopic studies seem to indicate, the production time for Cretaceous coccoliths could have been much faster than today's rates.”  The printed sentence begins "which makes all calculations…", so an epigraph that opens the quotation at that point should read "[W]hich" or carry a bracketed "This." ↩ ↩

2. 2b.

   Page 32:  “Your well-written CEN Technical Journal article asks a critical question in its title, 'Can Flood geology explain thick chalk layers?'  The answer is no longer 'Yes' unless one wishes to ignore the biblical data for a one-year Flood (Genesis 7:11; 8:13-14) and propose that the Flood extended over a period of decades if not centuries in time.”. ↩

3. 2c.

   The same 1995 letter by Warren Johns as the one above, quoted here for how slowly coccoliths sink through the water.  The article uses it for Johns's own conclusion that a one-year Flood cannot produce thick coccolith ooze, and for the roughly century that a coccolith takes to fall through the deep ocean.  Page 31:  “The extremely slow descent rate for all coccoliths rules out the production of vast thicknesses of coccolith ooze during a one-year event, such as the Flood.  Flood geologists estimate that if all the surface water on earth were spread smoothly over the earth, it would form a layer just under 3000 metres deep.  To have a coccolith bloom in 3000 metres of water implies that it would take 60 years minimum for a chalk layer to form on the ocean floor, even if all 400 metres of coccolith ooze could be cultured in the one year of the Flood.”  The rate of 0.57 cm/hr, implying about 100 years to fall 3,000-5,000 m, is partly taken from Haq 1978, p. 100, and partly from Johns's own laboratory vial test, his reference 17. ↩

Tyler, David J.  “A post-Flood solution to the chalk problem.”  CEN Tech. J. 10(1):107–113.  1996.  Page 107:  The abstract, in full:  “The mode of formation of thick chalk beds in the Cretaceous Period of Earth history has provided numerous challenges for both uniformitarian and catastrophist geology.  The field evidences present particularly acute problems for diluvialists, who over the years have made very little progress in understanding these rocks.  Although the Chalk provides powerful evidences for catastrophic conditions during its formation, diluvialist interpretations have been hindered by a prior conviction that it was laid down during the one-year Flood itself.  Such an interpretation is untenable, as internal evidences point to a timescale significantly longer than days, weeks or even months.  By contrast, if the Chalk is understood as laid down during the unstable conditions which persisted after the Flood, as the Earth recovered from that cataclysm, it becomes possible to interpret the evidences for catastrophic deposition without strain.”  Pages 110–112:  The four lines of evidence, on pp. 110–112, are the ones named above, in that order.  Page 111:  The paper also states that the Chalk hardgrounds.  “must be understood, chronologically, in relation to this overarching pattern of the Phanerozoic record — a pattern which suggests that the Flood/post-Flood boundary be placed before the Mesozoic.”.  A paper by David Tyler, a young-earth creationist who was then Secretary of the Biblical Creation Society (UK).  It argues from four lines of field evidence (hardgrounds, the specialised soft-substrate macrofauna against the hardground-encrusting community, the Micraster speciation lineage, and the Niobrara bentonites) that the Upper Cretaceous chalk formed over decades after the Flood, not in days or weeks.  The article uses it because a creationist geologist rejects Snelling's model, under which the chalk formed in six days.

1. 3a.

   Page 107:  “The beds are of particular interest to diluvialist geologists, as many put the Mesozoic within the Flood year and regard the chalk as forming in only a few days or weeks.  In this article, I present arguments which suggest that all of the Upper Cretaceous chalk is post-Flood, formed over a timescale measured in decades.”. ↩ ↩

2. 3b.

   Page 110:  “Snelling suggests that a succession of three algal blooms could have produced 'the three main chalk beds' of southern England in as little as six days.  One purpose of this paper is to dispel the notion that there are three main 'beds'.  There are three divisions of the English Chalk, but each division is composed of many beds, as indicated previously.  These beds have a variety of characteristics which must be addressed in any discussion of depositional environments and timescales: marly horizons and evidences of cyclicity in deposition, bioturbation, hardgrounds, distinctive marker beds, and so on.  To reduce the problem of chalk deposition to one of explosive productivity is liable to result in error.  In relation to timescales measured in days, Johns' pertinent comments on longevity and the maturation of blooms serve to turn a highly speculative argument into an indefensible one.”.  Page 107:  The paper's own subdivision thicknesses: Lower Chalk 76 m, Middle 70 m, Upper 210 m. ↩

3. 3c.

   Pages 110–112:  In the fourth of the four lines of evidence, the paper says:  “Like hardgrounds in the European chalks, bentonites in the Niobrara Chalk identify stationary surfaces. … the bentonites provide evidence for over 100 stationary surfaces within the Niobara Chalk which, in turn, is evidence against catastrophic scenarios involving turbulent waters and few cycles of deposition.  If Snelling's six-day model for the three units of European Chalk is indefensible in Europe; it is equally deficient in the United States.  The evidences, however, are consistent with catastrophic post-Flood chalk formation over a period measured in decades.”  The paper spells the formation "Niobara", as it appears in the quotation.  Its Niobrara figures, citing Hattin 1982, are about 200 m on average; the Smoky Hill Member is 122 to more than 198 m thick, with about 180 m representative; and there are more than 100 bentonite seams, from paper-thin to 113 mm. ↩

4. 3d.

   Page 112:  “It is suggested here that field evidences of hardgrounds, macrofaunal variations, speciation trends and bentonites limit the extent to which timescales can be shortened.  Periods measured in decades are suggested to be realistic, rather than periods of days.  This conclusion has a bearing on the location of the Flood/post-Flood boundary, for the longer timescales require the Chalk to be interpreted as a post-Flood phenomenon.”. ↩

Walker, F.M. et al.  “Assessing sampling of the fossil record in a geographically and stratigraphically constrained dataset: the Chalk Group of Hampshire, southern UK.”  Journal of the Geological Society 174(3):509–521.  2017.  Table 1, page 510:  The thicknesses are "approximate and averaged over the study area", sourced to the BGS Lexicon of Named Rock Units.  A study of the fossil record of the Chalk Group in Hampshire, southern England, which lists nine formations summing to 374 m.  The article's column mass is derived from that thickness by its own calculation, not a figure printed in the paper.  The calculation multiplies 374 m by 100 cm/m and by a dry bulk density of 1.626 g per cubic centimetre (grain density 2.71 g per cubic centimetre at 40% porosity), giving 60,812 g of calcium carbonate per square centimetre, or 608 tonnes per square metre.  Dividing by a Cretaceous coccolith mass of 11-31 pg gives roughly 2 × 10¹⁵ to 6 × 10¹⁵ coccoliths over every square centimetre (precisely 1.96 × 10¹⁵ at 31 pg and 5.53 × 10¹⁵ at 11 pg).  This article uses the Cretaceous mass throughout. ↩

1. 4a.

   A study of how completely fossils are sampled in the Chalk Group of Hampshire, which tabulates the thickness of each formation there.  Three sources, one per figure, are given in this footnote; this is the first.  The article uses it for the 374 m thickness of the Hampshire Chalk, summed from nine formations.  Table 1, page 510:  Nine formations sum to 374 m for the Cenomanian–Campanian of Hampshire: West Melbury Marly Chalk 18, Zig Zag 59, Holywell Nodular 53, New Pit 65, Lewes Nodular 49, Seaford 31, Newhaven 25, Culver 49, Portsdown 25.  The thicknesses are taken from the BGS Lexicon of Named Rock Units, and the authors describe them as.  “approximate and averaged over the study area”.  The 560 m figure is from Hopson (2005), A stratigraphical framework for the Upper Cretaceous Chalk of England and Scotland, with statements on the Chalk of Northern Ireland and the UK Offshore Sector, British Geological Survey Research Report RR/05/001, section 2.1 "Chalk Group", page 15, which says:  “The thickness of the whole group is variable depending on the degree of post-Cretaceous erosion and the relative development of its constituent formations.  Onshore the thickest development is within the Hampshire/Sussex area of the Southern Province, where up to about 560 m of strata are preserved; the most chronostratigraphically complete succession is in Norfolk but it is thought to be only some 400 m thick there; within the Northern Province up to 530 m are preserved but the thickest succession is within the North Sea area where about 1000 to 1300 m are preserved.”  The 2,500 m offshore figure is from van der Molen (2004), Sedimentary development, seismic stratigraphy and burial compaction of the Chalk Group in the Netherlands North Sea area, PhD thesis, Utrecht University, chapter 1, page 2, which says:  “In the North Sea Basin, the present-day thickness of the Chalk exceeds 2500 m in the Central Graben (Fig. 1.2) and maximum burial depth is more than 3000 m in the centre of the basin (Fig. 1.3; Ziegler, 1990).”  That offshore figure is read off Ziegler's (1990) isopach map, a map compilation and not a thickness measured at a point. ↩

2. 4b.

   Derived.  The 266 m is the sum of the British Geological Survey's "typical thickness in East Kent" values for the seven Chalk Group units present: West Melbury Marly Chalk 34 m + Zig Zag Chalk 42 + Holywell Nodular Chalk 18 + New Pit Chalk 36 + Lewes Nodular Chalk 60 + Seaford Chalk 52 + Margate Chalk Member up to 24.  The source is Aldiss, D. T.; Bloomfield, J. P.; Buckley, D. K.; Doran, S. K.; Evans, D. J.; Hopson, P. M.; Royse, K. R.; and Woods, M. A. (2004), A geological model of the Chalk of East Kent, British Geological Survey Commissioned Report CR/04/092N, vol. 1, sections 3.2.1–3.3.5, pages 7–14.  Two internal cross-checks in that report agree with the sum.  Aldiss et al. (2004), section 3.2, page 6, give the Grey Chalk as.  “about 65 m near the Great Stour to 80 m at Dover”.  against a sum of 76 m for its two formations.  Section 3.3, page 8, of the same report reads:  “In the Ramsgate and Dover district, the Middle Chalk is reckoned to be about 72 m thick, and the Upper Chalk up to about 128 m (Shephard-Thorn, 1988)”.  Together these are said to give 280 m.  A caution the report itself forces: the Margate Chalk at Dover reaches only the early Campanian Offaster pilula Zone, so the 266 m spans roughly the Cenomanian to the early Campanian, and everything above it was removed by erosion before the Palaeogene.  The figure must not be divided by 34.5 million years.  The 560 m Hampshire/Sussex maximum is from Hopson (2005). ↩

Accumulation rate of the English Chalk, from its thickness and age.  n.d.  Porosities are from van der Molen (2004, sections 5.1–5.2, pages 109 and 116), who writes, after Scholle (1977) and Mallon and Swarbrick (2002):  “compaction of chalk is largely mechanical during the first stages of burial, decreasing porosity from 70 % at the sea floor to about 35 % at one kilometre depth”.  The article's sentence needs one correction.  No radiometric age has been published on a bentonite inside the English Chalk.  The English Chalk's numerical timescale is transferred by biostratigraphy and chemostratigraphy from ⁴⁰Ar/³⁹Ar-dated ash beds in the North American Western Interior.  The standard British reference volume says so.  In Mortimore, Wood and Gallois (2001), GCR 23, chapter 1, page 4, the figure 1.2 caption, reading in full, says:  “Age picks (Ma = million years) based on Obradovitch (1993) and Gradstein et al. (1999).  (Dates obtained using 40Ar/39Ar laser fusion on 50-500 µg samples of sanidine from bentonites (volcanic ash/marls) interbedded with precisely dated fossiliferous marine sediments.)”  Ash beds are dated inside the American chalks, not inside the English one.  The independent check on the English Chalk's duration, one that does not use radiometric dating at all, is the cyclostratigraphy of the Cenomanian chalk rhythms and of the North Sea wells described elsewhere in this article.  A calculation derived for this article, done two ways with every input shown.  The compacted chalk is 374 m over 25.5–28.5 million years (base of the Cenomanian at 100.5 Ma, and the top of the preserved Hampshire Chalk taken as 72–75 Ma in the Campanian), which gives 1.31–1.47 cm per thousand years.  560 m over 34.5 million years gives 1.62 cm per thousand years.  The thicknesses are those of the 374 m Hampshire Chalk and the 560 m onshore maximum.  Decompacting with f = (1 − φ_final) ÷ (1 − φ_initial), for chalk porosity falling from about 70% at the sea floor to 30–45% in shallowly buried onshore chalk, gives factors of 1.8 to 2.6 and original-ooze rates of 2.6–4.6 cm per thousand years.  The stage ages are those of the Geologic Time Scale 2020.  The article uses this as the measured accumulation rate of the English Chalk. ↩

Ratio of a one-year Flood deposit to the measured English Chalk rate.  n.d.  A calculation derived for this article.  374 m of chalk deposited in one year is 37,400 cm per year, against a measured 1.31–1.47 cm per thousand years, a ratio of 2.5–2.9 × 10⁷.  The article quotes the lower end, about 2.5 × 10⁷.  The decompaction correction leaves the ratio unchanged, because it scales numerator and denominator together.  Against the 560 m onshore maximum and its 1.62 cm per thousand years the ratio is 3.5 × 10⁷.  Against the 2,500 m Central Graben section it is 1.1 × 10⁸, but that last figure should not be used, because a large and unquantified part of the Central Graben section is allochthonous, made of slides, slumps, debris flows and turbidites shed off the graben flanks, so 2,500 m over 34.5 million years is not a pelagic production rate.  The article uses it to show that depositing the column in one year requires about 25 million times the measured rate. ↩

1. 6a.

   Derived.  The two columns of the table are the same rock divided by two different denominators: 374 m ÷ 25.5–28.5 million years against 374 m ÷ 1 year.  The quotient is 2.5–2.9 × 10⁷.  The inputs are the English Chalk thickness and its accumulation rate, as derived in this article. ↩

2. 6b.

   Derived.  374 m per year, set against the fastest pelagic carbonate accumulation on record, is a factor of 6.2 × 10⁶.  That record is the latest Miocene (Tortonian–Messinian) peak on the Ontong Java Plateau, of more than 50 and locally more than 60 m per million years, which is 6 cm per thousand years.  The inputs are the 374 m thickness and that Ontong Java rate. ↩

Berger, W.H. et al.  “Neogene carbonate sedimentation on Ontong Java Plateau: highlights and open questions.”  Proceedings of the Ocean Drilling Program, Scientific Results 130:711–744.  1993.  Section Abstract, page 711:  “…the outstanding feature of the carbonate record, the Tortonian-Messinian accumulation rate peak centered in the latest Miocene (maximum sedimentation rate >60 m/m.y.), is the product of a complex interplay of a general late Miocene to early Pliocene productivity maximum combined with increased mechanical and chemical erosion before and after the peak.”  Page 717:  “The interval centered near 7 Ma displays some of the highest rates (>50 m/m.y.) yet recorded in open-ocean pelagic sediments.  (Similarly high rates are seen in the central equatorial Pacific [DSDP Site 572, Theyer et al., 1989], and even higher ones have now been reported for this period from the eastern equatorial Pacific [ODP Site 849, Leg 138, Mayer et al., 1992].)”  A review of Neogene carbonate sedimentation on the Ontong Java Plateau, drawn from ocean drilling.  The article uses it for the record accumulation peak in the latest Miocene, with rates above 50 and locally above 60 metres per million years.  Berger et al.'s own text attributes part of the peak to increased erosion and to winnowing and redeposition on the plateau flanks, so some of it is lateral focusing rather than primary rain. ↩

1. 7a.

   A units warning changes the number, and it is important.  Berger et al.'s "m/m.y." values are not raw thicknesses.  Derived: >60 m per million years equals 60 × 0.15 = 9 g cm⁻² kyr⁻¹, and >50 m per million years equals 7.5 g cm⁻² kyr⁻¹.  As a thickness of chalk, that is about 6 cm per thousand years.  These are the highest pelagic carbonate accumulation rates found anywhere in the deep-sea literature consulted for this article.  The honest bound is that nothing in the pelagic carbonate record exceeds about 10 cm kyr⁻¹, and the well-documented maxima are 5-6.  Figure 8, page 729:  The Figure 8 caption says, verbatim:  “Sedimentation rates have been corrected for compaction, that is, they were expanded to the density of Pleistocene sediments (1.5 g/cm3).”  In the text they say:  “we have reconverted mass flux units to sedimentation rate units, standardizing to a density of 1.5 g/cm3… The units (m/m.y.) are really mass flux units, which emerge when multiplying by 0.15.” ↩

This article.  Chalk thickness from the calcite of one record coccolithophore bloom, derived for this article.  n.d.  A calculation made for this article, not a measurement.  Its inputs are particulate inorganic carbon of 10-20 µmol C L⁻¹, which is 1.0-2.0 g CaCO₃ per cubic metre (Balch et al. 2014, p. 1716, after Holligan et al. 1993); a mixed layer of 20 m (Tyrrell and Merico 2004, pp. 82-83, "usually ~10-20 m, and is always ≤30 m"); and a chalk bulk density of 1.5-2.0 g cm⁻³.  The standing stock is 20-40 g CaCO₃ per square metre, which at 1.5-2.0 × 10⁶ g per cubic metre is a layer 0.010-0.027 mm thick.  Over the whole 250,000 km² of the 1991 Iceland bloom the same figure is 5-10 million tonnes of calcium carbonate, The article calls it an impressive tonnage spread into a film thinner than a sheet of paper.  Derived, the chalk layer is 10 to 27 micrometres thick. ↩

1. 8a.

   Building 400 m of chalk at that yield requires 1.5-4 × 10⁷ such blooms, deposited on the same spot with zero dissolution, zero grazing loss and zero lateral dispersal. ↩

This article's own calculation.  Energy needed to fix the carbon in the northwest European Chalk Group in one year.  n.d.  Inputs: the northwest European Chalk Group volume is 3.755 × 10⁵ km³ at 2000 kg m⁻³ with a carbonate fraction of 0.97, giving 7.278 × 10¹⁸ mol CaCO₃ = 8.75 × 10⁴ Gt C; energy per mole of carbon photosynthesised is about 4.78 × 10⁵ J (the standard enthalpy of CO₂ + H₂O → CH₂O + O₂); and the annual solar energy intercepted by Earth is 1361 W m⁻² × π × (6.371 × 10⁶ m)² × 3.156 × 10⁷ s = 5.48 × 10²⁴ J.  Two caveats.  The inorganic-to-organic carbon ratio is taken as PIC:POC = 1, the order-of-magnitude value for cultured Emiliania huxleyi and for blooms, but it is not tied to a specific paper; the result scales linearly with it, so at PIC:POC = 0.1 the requirement falls from 833 × global primary production to 83 × — still fatal, and the sensitivity should be quoted.  The figure of a real ocean photosynthetic efficiency of about 0.1 % is given without a citation.  Mixotrophy, which Snelling offers as an answer to the light problem, does not touch this argument: a coccolithophore that eats bacteria is eating carbon that something else had to fix, so the demand is relocated, not removed.  A calculation for this article that uses no rate, core or radiometric date.  It takes the Chalk Group's 7.278 × 10¹⁸ mol of CaCO₃ (8.75 × 10⁴ Gt C), at 4.78 × 10⁵ J stored per mole of carbon photosynthesised, against 5.48 × 10²⁴ J of solar energy that the Earth intercepts in a year; the article uses it as its central quantitative argument.  The step that makes it work is that chalk is not a chemical precipitate: since Black 1953 the finest particles in chalk, down to 0.5 µm, have been known to be coccolith debris, so every carbonate molecule in the White Cliffs passed through a photosynthesising cell. ↩

1. 9a.

   In physics units: E = 7.278 × 10¹⁸ mol × 4.78 × 10⁵ J mol⁻¹ = 3.48 × 10²⁴ J, against an annual solar interception of 5.48 × 10²⁴ J, a ratio of 0.64.  So building the northwest European Chalk in one year requires 64 % of the planet's entire annual solar budget at 100 % conversion of sunlight to fixed carbon.  At a realistic gross ocean photosynthetic efficiency of order 0.1 % the requirement is several hundred times the total solar input to the earth, before accounting for the roughly 43 % of sunlight that is photosynthetically active, and before any loss to respiration, grazing or dissolution. ↩

2. 9b.

   In biological units: 8.75 × 10¹⁹ g C to be fixed in one year ÷ a global net primary production of 1.049 × 10¹⁷ g C yr⁻¹ = 833 × the entire present biosphere's annual output, sustained for twelve months, in one European basin.  For Woodmorappe's global Upper-Cretaceous-plus-Tertiary volume of 17.5 × 10⁶ km³ the figure is 38,800 ×.  A third form of the same result, per square metre of the 374 m Hampshire column: 6.08 × 10⁵ kg m⁻² of rock is 7.08 × 10⁷ g C m⁻², or 1.94 × 10⁵ g C m⁻² d⁻¹ across a Flood year, against the highest total marine primary production rate anywhere measured, a ratio of 6.5 × 10⁴.  Paragraph [19]:  “Ptot occasionally reaches 3 g C m⁻² d⁻¹”.  in major coastal upwelling systems (Uitz, Claustre, Gentili & Stramski 2010, "Phytoplankton class-specific primary production in the world's oceans: Seasonal and interannual variability from satellite observations," Global Biogeochemical Cycles 24, GB3016).  Grant a hostile reader every nutrient, temperature and burial-efficiency factor the reader asks for, a speed-up of 10⁴, and the reader is still six orders of magnitude short on energy. ↩

This article's own calculation.  Ocean calcium needed to precipitate the world's carbonate rock.  n.d.  Two points a critic will raise, answered in advance.  First, this is a one-year constraint and is not an argument against an old earth: total modern calcium input refreshes 0.00013 % of the ocean's calcium per year, but over 4.5 billion years, at a residence time of about 0.9 Myr, the ocean's calcium turns over roughly 5,000 times, seven to twenty-five times more than the 200-690 required.  Deep time has no difficulty here; a single year has all of it.  Second, calcium is not even the tightest constraint: on alkalinity the requirement is 1,800-6,100 complete turnovers.  For scale in the other direction, 5 × 10²¹ mol of carbonate carbon divided by the modern global carbonate-burial flux of 18-34 Tmol C yr⁻¹ (Middelburg et al. 2020, p. 18 of 28) is 1.5 to 2.8 × 10⁸ years of ordinary burial.  A calculation for this article.  The five published carbonate inventories give 200, 382, 416, 464 and 686 ocean calcium inventories, that is 200 to 690, and about 357 on the central estimate of 5.0 × 10²¹ mol.  The article uses this to show that precipitating the world's carbonate rock would strip the ocean of every dissolved calcium ion between 200 and 690 times over. ↩

1. 10a.

   The central figure was also worked out from different seawater sources, and the two agree.  357 comes from the ocean mass in Charette & Smith 2010 times the calcium in Pawlowicz 2010 Table 3, giving 1.407 × 10¹⁹ mol Ca.  360 comes from 1.39 × 10¹⁹ mol Ca taken from the TEOS-10 Manual, Table D.3, p. 144 (Ca²⁺ mass fraction 0.0117186 of the 35.16504 g kg⁻¹ reference salinity, giving 10.28 mmol kg⁻¹), times an ocean mass of 1.35 × 10²¹ kg.  The 1 % difference is the assumed ocean mass, not the chemistry. ↩

This article's own calculation.  Calcium and carbon needed to precipitate the Upper Cretaceous and Tertiary limestone.  n.d.  1.75 × 10⁷ km³ × 10¹⁵ cm³ km⁻³ × 2.0 g cm⁻³ = 3.50 × 10²² g CaCO₃ = 3.50 × 10²⁰ mol CaCO₃.  The volume is Woodmorappe's own figure.  A calculation for this article using nothing but creationist inputs and measured seawater chemistry: the rock volume that Woodmorappe gives, a density of 2.0 g per cm³ (the one Roth and Woodmorappe themselves use), and the seawater chemistry.  It gives 3.50 × 10²⁰ mol of CaCO₃; against the ocean inventories this is 24.9 complete ocean calcium inventories, 111 dissolved-inorganic-carbon inventories and 222 complete alkalinity budgets (two moles of alkalinity are consumed per mole of CaCO₃), and if that carbon had been atmospheric CO₂ it is 2.96 bar, about 7,000 times present pCO₂.  This is only the Upper Cretaceous and Tertiary, and the article uses it as the strongest number in the mass-balance case for a debate setting, because it imports no mainstream stratigraphy: only the rock volume, the density and the measured composition of seawater. ↩

1. 11a.

   The same derivation, itemised: 3.50 × 10²⁰ mol CaCO₃ ÷ 1.407 × 10¹⁹ mol Ca = 24.9 ocean calcium inventories; ÷ 3.16 × 10¹⁸ mol DIC = 111; × 2 ÷ 3.15 × 10¹⁸ mol total alkalinity = 222; and p = nMg/A with M(CO₂) = 0.0440095 kg mol⁻¹, g = 9.80665 m s⁻² and Earth's surface area 5.101 × 10¹⁴ m² gives 2.96 bar.  Page 300:  On the chemistry, Ridgwell & Zeebe 2005 give the reaction as.  “Ca²⁺ + 2HCO₃⁻ → CaCO₃ + CO₂(aq) + H₂O”.  Page 146:  but Zeebe 2012 warns that the naive "one CO₂ released per CaCO₃" reading is wrong as instantaneous chemistry, because of buffering, and says.  “at surface-seawater conditions … [CO₂] increases by only ∼0.03 μmol per μmol CaCO₃ precipitated”.  The correct framing, and the one used here, is a carbon-inventory bookkeeping argument, not an instantaneous degassing argument. ↩

Coccolith packing in chalk, recomputed on Snelling's own model.  n.d.  A recalculation of Snelling's own model with his own inputs, derived for this article as the project's own arithmetic.  First, his conclusion reproduces exactly if the packing figure is read as cells per cubic metre of finished chalk: one bloom covers 10% of the earth's surface (5.101 × 10¹³ m²) to a depth of 500 m at 10¹³ cells per cubic metre, which is 2.55 × 10²⁹ cells, and the chalk required is 17.5 × 10⁶ km³ at 3 × 10¹³ cells per cubic metre, which is 5.25 × 10²⁹ cells, so the blooms number 2.06, his "two or three."  That reproduces his headline to two significant figures and establishes that the packing density is the hidden load-bearing input, on which his headline rests entirely.  Second, that density describes a rock that is 99.5% pore space.  At 3 × 10¹³ cells per cubic metre with 20 coccoliths each at 8.3 µm³, coccolith calcite occupies half of one percent of the rock's volume, where chalk is 50–73% solid calcite.  Third, correcting it destroys "six days", as the corrected calculations in this note show.  Every input to the correction is a quantity neither side disputes: chalk porosity, the carbonate fraction, the nannofossil fraction of that carbonate, coccolith volume, and coccoliths per cell.  No modern accumulation rate, no radiometric date and no uniformitarian assumption enters anywhere. ↩

1. 12a.

   Derived: 5.5 × 10¹⁴ to 1.6 × 10¹⁶ coccolithophore cells per cubic metre of chalk, central 2.9 × 10¹⁵.  Cells per cubic metre = (1 − φ) × f_c ÷ (n_liths × V_lith).  Low case (φ = 0.50, f_c = 0.60, 50 liths per cell, 11 µm³ each): 5.46 × 10¹⁴.  Central case (φ = 0.40, f_c = 0.80, 20 liths, 8.3 µm³): 2.89 × 10¹⁵.  High case (φ = 0.27, f_c = 0.90, 10 liths, 4 µm³): 1.64 × 10¹⁶.  Against those, Woodmorappe's 3 × 10¹³ is too low by 18×, 96× and 548× respectively.  Porosity is from Descamps et al. (2017) and Fabricius (2007).  The carbonate and nannofossil fractions are from Mortimore (1990) and the Chalk Symposium's grain-size review.  The coccolith volume comes from the separate Cretaceous coccolith mass calculation in this article.  Coccoliths per cell come from Sheward et al. (2024), whose SEM counts on 1,074 intact coccospheres give 10 to 50 for Emiliania huxleyi. ↩

2. 12b.

   Derived.  Rerunning Snelling's own model per unit area of chalk is the honest way to do it, because his bloom covers about 74 times more area than the chalk itself does.  For a mean northwest European column of 544 m, at his own bloom concentration of 10¹³ cells per cubic metre through 500 m and his own two-day turnover: low packing case, 2.97 × 10¹⁷ cells per square metre of column, 59 blooms, 119 days; central case, 1.57 × 10¹⁸ cells per square metre, 315 blooms, 629 days; high case, 8.94 × 10¹⁸ cells per square metre, 1,788 blooms, 3,575 days.  For comparison, at the highest cell concentration ever actually measured (115 × 10⁶ cells per litre) the same three cases need 5,161, 27,361 and 155,442 blooms.  Six days becomes 119 days at the most generous end and about 629 days centrally, which does not fit inside a Flood year at all. ↩

Robie, Richard A., and Bruce S. Hemingway.  “Thermodynamic Properties of Minerals and Related Substances at 298.15 K and 1 Bar (10⁵ Pascals) Pressure and at Higher Temperatures.”  U.S. Geological Survey Bulletin 2131.  1995.  Page 6:  Ca²⁺ enthalpy of formation −543.0, printed p. 6.  Page 15:  CO₃²⁻ −675.2 ± 0.1.  Page 25:  Calcite −1207.4 ± 1.3.  Derived from these tabulated enthalpies, Ca²⁺(aq) + CO₃²⁻(aq) → CaCO₃(calcite) has ΔH° = +10.8 kJ/mol.  Section Calcite block of the USGS PHREEQC thermodynamic database:  The same reaction in that database, whose -delta_h -3.15 kcal entry is attributed in the file to.  “Ellis, 1959, Plummer and Busenberg, 1982”.  gives +13.2 kJ/mol, and its own -analytic coefficients reproduce that value to three significant figures under a van 't Hoff differentiation.  Positive means the reaction absorbs heat.  The physical reason is one every carbonate geologist already knows: calcite has retrograde solubility, dissolving less readily as water warms, and by van 't Hoff that makes dissolution exothermic and therefore precipitation endothermic.  The irony is that creationist authors invoke retrograde solubility by name as their own Flood-carbonate mechanism without noticing what it implies.  Section Austin et al. (1994), p. 6 of the separately paginated 12-page ICR reprint:  Austin, Steven A.; Baumgardner, John R.; Humphreys, D. Russell; Snelling, Andrew A.; Vardiman, Larry; and Wise, Kurt P., "Catastrophic Plate Tectonics: A Global Flood Model of Earth History," Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Creationism (1994), pp. 609–621, list among their carbonate sources:  “dissolved pre-Flood bicarbonate precipitated as ocean temperatures rose during the Flood (given that carbonate dissolution rates are inversely related to temperature)”.  A U.S. Geological Survey table of thermodynamic data for minerals and related substances at 298.15 K and 1 bar, with calculated values at higher temperatures up to 1800 K.  The article takes its tabulated enthalpies of formation to work out the heat of calcite precipitation, and the sign of that heat is the point it makes. ↩

1. 13a.

   The USGS table that supplies the enthalpy values; the USGS PHREEQC database gives a second value for the same reaction.  The article uses them to show that precipitating calcite from seawater absorbs heat.  Section Printed pp. 6, 15, 25; PHREEQC Calcite and CO₂(g) blocks:  Derived from the tabulated values and the PHREEQC entries.  Range for Ca²⁺(aq) + CO₃²⁻(aq) → CaCO₃(calcite): +10.8 to +13.2 kJ/mol, endothermic, a spread of 22%, on which nothing in the argument turns.  Aragonite is thermally indistinguishable.  Robie & Hemingway print the same ΔfH° of −1207.4 for both polymorphs, with uncertainties (±1.3 and ±1.4) larger than the difference, while PHREEQC makes aragonite precipitation 2.35 kJ/mol less endothermic than calcite.  Written with bicarbonate as the carbon source the reaction is more endothermic still: Ca²⁺ + 2HCO₃⁻ → CaCO₃ + CO₂(aq) + H₂O is +15.7 kJ/mol and Ca²⁺ + 2HCO₃⁻ → CaCO₃ + CO₂(g) + H₂O is +36.1 kJ/mol, both from the same table (HCO₃⁻ −689.9 ± 0.2, p. 15; CO₂ gas −393.5 ± 0.1, p. 15; H₂O liquid −285.8 ± 0.1, p. 16).  Two caveats: these are standard-state values at infinite dilution, and the seawater-medium correction was not computed.  Precipitation becomes more endothermic as the ocean warms (about −13 to −15 kJ/mol of dissolution enthalpy at 30 °C, about −39 at 90 °C), so a hot Flood ocean makes the heat sink bigger, not smaller. ↩

2. 13b.

   The same USGS enthalpy table, here used for reactions that take calcium out of silicate rock.  The article uses it to show that the one strongly exothermic route is slow rock weathering, which cannot happen in a single Flood year.  Section Printed pp. 15, 18, 25, 34, and 36 and 39 for the plagioclase variant:  CaSiO₃(wollastonite, −1634.8 ± 1.4, p. 34) + CO₂(g) (−393.5, p. 15) → CaCO₃(calcite, −1207.4, p. 25) + SiO₂(quartz, −910.7, p. 18) gives ΔH° = −89.8 kJ/mol, exothermic.  The more realistic version for a basalt-dominated ocean, because calcium in basalt lives in plagioclase, is CaAl₂Si₂O₈(anorthite, −4234.0, p. 36) + CO₂(g) + 2H₂O → CaCO₃ + kaolinite (−4119.0, p. 39), at −127.3 kJ/mol.  These are the net of silicate weathering plus carbonate burial over geological time.  They are also the routes a Flood model is forced onto, because the ocean does not hold enough dissolved calcium, which is the point of the article's calcium discussion and the reason the heat sign flips when the accounting boundary is drawn around rock rather than around seawater.  The three routes are alternative accounting boundaries around the same physical process, not additive terms. ↩

Paasche, E.  “A review of the coccolithophorid Emiliania huxleyi (Prymnesiophyceae), with particular reference to growth, coccolith formation, and calcification-photosynthesis interactions.”  Phycologia 40(6):503–529.  2001.  A review of the coccolithophore Emiliania huxleyi covering its growth, how it forms its calcite plates (coccoliths), and how calcification relates to photosynthesis.  The publisher dates the issue November 2001, and some later papers cite it as 2002.  The article uses it for the rate at which one cell builds plates, about one coccolith per cell per hour, or roughly 24 a day, for Emiliania huxleyi and its relatives.  Monteiro, F.M. et al., "Why marine phytoplankton calcify," Science Advances 2:e1501822 (2016), p. 5 of 14, quote it for that rate: "Assuming coccolith production rates of 1 and 1/3 coccolith per hour for the Isochrysidales group (19) and C. braarudii (27), respectively, and net carbon fixation rates of 0.69, 0.58, and 6.18 pg of POC (particulate organic carbon) per hour for E. huxleyi, G. oceanica (36), and C. braarudii (37), respectively, we find much smaller metabolic costs in these species."  Reference (19) in Monteiro is this review, which Monteiro's reference list dates 2001.  The cell diameter of about 5 micrometres in the article is from Tyrrell and Merico, "Emiliania huxleyi: bloom observations and the conditions that induce them," in Thierstein and Young (eds), Coccolithophores: From Molecular Processes to Global Impact, Springer (2004), p. 75: "because of the rather small size of the cells (circa 5 µm in diameter)." ↩

Linge Johnsen, Simen Alexander, and Jörg Bollmann.  “Coccolith mass and morphology of different Emiliania huxleyi morphotypes: A critical examination using Canary Islands material.”  PLoS ONE 15(3):e0230569.  2020.  Section Abstract:  “coccolith mass varied from a maximum of 2.9pg at the open ocean station in January to a minimum of 1.7pg in September at both stations.”  Table 3, page 10:  Table 3, p. 10 of 29, gives sample-mean lengths of 3.1–3.4 µm, mean thicknesses of 0.093–0.150 µm, and masses of 1.7–2.9 pg.  The lower bound of 1.3 pg comes from a second, independent study, Valença, Celina Rebeca; Beaufort, Luc; Hallegraeff, Gustaaf Marinus; and Müller, Marius Nils, "Technical note: A comparison of methods for estimating coccolith mass," Biogeosciences 21(6):1601-1611 (2024), doi:10.5194/bg-21-1601-2024, which compared electron microscopy, Coulter multisizer and bidirectional circular polarisation on two Southern Ocean E. huxleyi ecotypes in controlled culture and got 1.31-2.36 pg CaCO₃ (Abstract and §3, p. 1604).  The working thickness of 0.13 µm is from Sheward et al., "Cellular morphological trait dataset for extant coccolithophores from the Atlantic Ocean," Scientific Data 11:720 (2024), doi:10.1038/s41597-024-03544-1, p. 6.  A study that works out the mass of individual Emiliania huxleyi coccoliths using Canary Islands material.  The mass is computed from directly measured length, width and birefringence-derived thickness on 1,091 individual coccoliths.  The article uses its mass range of 1.7 to 2.9 picograms for the commonest modern species. ↩

Linnert, C. et al.  “Biometry of Upper Cretaceous (Cenomanian-Maastrichtian) coccoliths — a record of long-term stability and interspecies size shifts.”  Revue de Micropaléontologie 57(4):125–140.  2014.  The results say:  “ranges (~3 – 9µm) and mean lengths (5.3 – 5.8µm; Fig. 7, Tab. 1)”.  For Retecapsa and Watznaueria, and.  “approximately 85% of all Prediscosphaera specimens (Fig. 6).  With a mean length of 5.8µm (Fig. 7, Tab. 1) this species plexus is slightly larger than the less common P. spinosa group (4.6µm)”.  On Arkhangelskiella cymbiformis the paper says:  “The very broad range in coccolith sizes (6-14 µm) within this taxon, however, is a feature.”  The abstract says:  “Within the Broinsonia/Arkhangelskiella group there was more pronounced variation, with a mean size increase from ~6µm in the Cenomanian to ~10µm in the Campanian.”  A biometric study that measured coccolith sizes on 36 samples spanning 100.5 to 66 million years ago, from DSDP Site 549 off Goban Spur in the northeast Atlantic.  The article uses it for the size of the dominant Cretaceous chalk-making species, which were about 5 to 6 micrometres long.  The site is a deep-sea Atlantic section, not the onshore English Chalk, and it is not Dover; it does hold the same Boreal nannoflora of the same age. ↩

This article.  Mass of one Cretaceous coccolith, derived from its length and shape.  n.d.  Gerotto et al. (2023), §3.3, p. 1729, say:  Section 3.3, page 1729:  “The length-shape factor of each coccolith, kₛ, was calculated using the formula by Young and Ziveri (2000) based on the coccolith mass and length obtained from C-Calcita: kₛ = mass / (2.7 × length³).”  Their range for kₛ, in §4.1–4.2, pp. 1729–1730, reads:  Section 4.1–4.2, pages 1729–1730:  “The mean kₛ varied between 0.03 and 0.07.”  A calculation made for this article, not a measurement.  It uses the mass-size formula of Young and Ziveri, reproduced verbatim by Gerotto, A.; Zhang, H.; Nagai, R.H.; Stoll, H.M.; Figueira, R.C.L.; Liu, C.; and Hernández-Almeida, I., "Fossil coccolith morphological attributes as a new proxy for deep ocean carbonate chemistry," Biogeosciences 20:1725-1739 (2023), doi:10.5194/bg-20-1725-2023, with the coccolith length of 5.3 to 5.8 micrometres from Linnert et al. (2014) and a shape factor of 0.03 to 0.07.  The formula is mass = kₛ × 2.7 × L³ (mass in pg, L in µm, 2.7 pg µm⁻³ being the density of calcite).  The result is 11 to 31 picograms of calcite.  The corresponding calcite volume is 4 to 11 cubic micrometres, central 8.3 cubic micrometres.  The shape factor is Gerotto et al.'s measurement on fossil, partly dissolved core-top assemblages.  The article states the weakness plainly: no published shape factor exists for any Mesozoic coccolith taxon, so every Cretaceous mass is an extrapolation from modern and Quaternary analogues.  For scale only, Walker, C.E.; Heath, S.E.; Salmon, D.L. et al., "X-ray nanotomography of coccolithophores reveals that coccolith mass and segment number correlate with grid size," Nature Communications 10:751 (2019), doi:10.1038/s41467-019-08635-x, p. 2, found that the directly measured modern range is 1-30 pg for the Noëlaerhabdaceae, with no coccolith of any species exceeding 400 pg. ↩

van der Molen, A.S.  Sedimentary development, seismic stratigraphy and burial compaction of the Chalk Group in the Netherlands North Sea area.  Utrecht University.  2004.  Table 1.1, page 12:  The table is titled "Chemical composition of chalk, UK mainland", after Hancock 1990.  Its CaCO₃ mean is 98.17%, its maximum 99.09% and its minimum 96.77%.  The other means are SiO₂ 0.63% (max 2.12), Al₂O₃ 0.33%, Fe₂O₃ 0.08%, MnO 0.04%, MgO 0.30%, and CO₂ 43.54%.  A PhD thesis on the Chalk Group under the Dutch North Sea.  The article uses its table of the chemical composition of chalk from mainland UK, which the thesis takes from Hancock (1990).  The table is for pure white chalk and not for the whole Chalk Group, which runs 55-99% carbonate; the article discusses that purity range in its section "where the creationists are right". ↩

1. 18a.

   A PhD thesis on the Chalk Group under the Netherlands sector of the North Sea.  The 5–7 cm per thousand years comes from spectral analysis of 43 wells, with the cycle identification made from the ratio between simultaneously present wavelengths (5–7 m and 2–3 m, read as the 100 kyr eccentricity and 40 kyr obliquity cycles) rather than from any assumed period.  The article uses it for the 5 to 7 cm per thousand years that the basin-centre wells give, set against about 2.5 cm per thousand years from the outcrops and the Dan Field.  Section 4.5–4.6, pages 104–105:  “From the above follows that the average net accumulation rate, i.e. not corrected for compaction, is about 5 to 7 cm/ky, at least during the Campanian to early Maastrichtian.  This estimate is similar to that of Niebuhr & Prokoph (1997), who describe net accumulation rates of 6 to 12 cm/ky in the North German Basin (Section 4.2).  The accumulation rate of about 2.5 cm/ky estimated for the Turonian to Maastrichtian of the Dan field (Herrington et al., 1991; Stage, 1999, 2001b) concurs with sedimentation rates estimated from outcrop studies throughout Europe, which are backed up by extensive biostratigraphical data (Hart, 1987; Ditchfield & Marshall, 1989; Gale, 1989; Gale et al., 1999; Wendler et al., 2002).”  Page 105:  “In the aforementioned studies of outcrops in the UK and France, accumulation rates of about 2.5 cm/ky, with 2 m periodicity usually identified as the 100 ky E1, are typically determined for the Cenomanian and Turonian.”  The two acknowledged weaknesses are these.  The author flags that his basin-centre rate is higher than the outcrop rates, and that this may reflect greater accommodation or bottom-current sediment supply.  Page 83:  The author flags.  “a marked discrepancy in interpreted Milankovitch cycle modes”.  between well-log and outcrop studies that.  “might suggest a bias in interpretation caused by the difference in scale”. ↩

Hattin, D.E., and D.A. Darko.  “Technique for Determining Coccolith Abundance in Shaly Chalk of Greenhorn Limestone (Upper Cretaceous) of Kansas.”  Bulletin (Kansas Geological Survey) 202(Part 2):1–11.  1971.  Section Abstract, page 3:  “Shaly chalk samples from a Mitchell County locality contain from 5 x 10⁸ to 6 x 10⁹ coccoliths per cubic centimeter.  The lowest values are for samples adjacent to bentonite seams.”  Section Conclusion (2), page 10:  “The number of coccoliths in various samples studied ranges from 5.34 x 10⁸ to 6.09 x 10⁹ per cubic centimeter.”  Method: they cut a 1 cm cube, dry and weigh it, disaggregate it ultrasonically for 45 minutes, suspend it in 2,000 ml, draw a 0.001 ml aliquot, and count at 860× on a polarising microscope.  Their rule for fragments:  “Any specimen at least three-fourths intact was counted as one coccolith.  Any coccolith that was from one-third to three-fourths complete was counted as half a coccolith.”  Page 10:  The volume audit says:  “The volume of one coccolith was calculated as if the structure were a solid disc.  That volume was multiplied by 6 x 10⁹, the largest number of coccoliths counted in any sample.  By this method it was calculated that the space occupied by coccoliths is on the order of 20 percent or less of the total volume of rock.  This conclusion is based on a small number of micrographs suitable for measurement, however, and must be regarded as tentative.”  The shaly residue is large:  “The last comprises anywhere from 5.8 to 50 percent of shaly chalk residues studied by the senior author”.  The authors also say that the matrix is not free of fragments:  “much of the fine-grained matrix consists of calcite grains representing disarticulated coccoliths.”  They estimate more than 50% compaction, and that pre-compaction abundance.  Page 9:  “was apparently less by approximately half the numbers given in Table 1”.  A method paper that counts whole coccoliths in a cube of shaly chalk under a polarising microscope.  The article uses its counts from Kansas Greenhorn chalk, which is shaly and not the White Cliffs.  The count excludes fragments by construction. ↩

This article.  Coccolith-equivalents per cubic centimetre of pure white chalk, derived for this article.  n.d.  The porosity values are from Descamps, F.; Faÿ-Gomord, O.; Vandycke, S.; Schroeder, C.; Swennen, R.; and Tshibangu, J.-P., "Relationships between geomechanical properties and lithotypes in NW European chalks," Geological Society, London, Special Publications 458:227-244 (2017), doi:10.1144/SP458.9, Table 2: Newhaven 26.7-28.5%, Birling Gap 37.8%, Seven Sisters 40.2%, Ramsgate 45.9%.  Fabricius, I.L., "Chalk: composition, diagenesis and physical properties," Bulletin of the Geological Society of Denmark 55:97-128 (2007), doi:10.37570/bgsd-2007-55-08, Fig. 3 caption p. 100, gives Stevns chalk at 50%.  The coccolith fraction comes from Mortimore's description of pure white chalk as ">95% carbonate derived largely from nannofossils", and from the 70-80% of soft chalk that is finer than 4 µm and is coccolith debris, with the remainder allowed to forams, calcispheres, Inoceramus, bryozoan and echinoderm debris.  A coccolith-equivalent calculation made for this article, not a measurement of intact plates.  It counts the calcite in pure white chalk and divides it by the calcite of one Cretaceous coccolith.  The inputs, each measured and cited, are the chalk's porosity (27 to 50%), the fraction of its solid volume that is coccolith-derived (0.6 to 0.9), and the calcite volume of one coccolith (4 to 11 cubic micrometres, central 8.3).  The results are 2.7 × 10¹⁰ per cubic centimetre at the low end (porosity 0.50, coccolith fraction 0.6, calcite volume 11 µm³), 5.8 × 10¹⁰ centrally, and 1.6 × 10¹¹ at the high end (porosity 0.27, coccolith fraction 0.9, calcite volume 4 µm³).  Dividing by dry bulk density gives 2.0 × 10¹⁰ to 8.3 × 10¹⁰ per gram, central 3.6 × 10¹⁰.  The per-gram figure is the more robust, because porosity cancels out of it.  An independent route from mass: at porosity 0.40, 1 cm³ of chalk holds 1.62 g of solid, of which ~0.97 g is CaCO₃ and ~0.8 g is coccolith-derived, giving 1.26 g of coccolith calcite, or 6.3 × 10¹⁰ liths at 20 pg each.  Against the least favourable inputs a hostile reader could impose, heavier, more robustly built Cretaceous coccoliths (kₛ = 0.10, 45 pg) or a much lower coccolith fraction (f_c = 0.40), the answer is still 2.9 × 10¹⁰ per cubic centimetre.  It is 10¹⁰-10¹¹ per cubic centimetre under every assumption tried; it cannot be argued down to 10⁹ and should not be quoted as 10¹¹ alone. ↩

Higginbottom, I.E.  “Engineering behaviour of Chalk: a British historical perspective.”  Chalk: Proceedings of the International Chalk Symposium held at Brighton Polytechnic, 4-7 September 1989.  Thomas Telford, London.  1990.  Page 5:  Higginbottom writes that Black (1953) was the first brief account of electron microscopy applied to British chalks:  “Black (1953) published the first brief account of electron microscopy applied to British chalks, and showed that the finest constituent particles (down to 0.5 micron) were coccolith debris and thus calcite of organic origin.  Previously, the fraction finer than about 4 micron (which accounts for some 70 to 80 per cent of soft chalks) had been regarded by many as a chemical precipitate.”  A keynote address on how engineers have understood chalk, from the 1989 symposium.  The article uses its statement that the finest particles in chalk are coccolith debris, not chemical precipitate, which answers whether any of chalk is inorganic mud.  The passage fixes the grain-size distribution and the lower particle-size limit of 0.5 micron. ↩

1. 21a.

   Diagenetic calcite in chalk is real but subordinate, and is graded as a diagenesis criterion rather than a primary component.  Descamps et al. (2017) describe authigenic euhedral crystals "of apparently non-biogenic origin, usually measuring 1-5 [µm]", and say of the micritic chalks that are the White Cliffs facies that they show "a micro-rhombic matrix texture, with rare authigenic calcite crystals." ↩

May, V. J.  “Kingsdown – Dover.”  Coastal Geomorphology of Great Britain, Geological Conservation Review Series vol. 28.  Joint Nature Conservation Committee.  n.d.  Section Introduction, page 1:  “The cliffs between Kingsdown and Dover … rise to between 30 m and 110 m OD.  Retreat of the cliffs has been about 0.2 m a–1, but this takes place mainly as large slides affecting the whole cliff face.”  Section Description, page 2:  “they are generally a simple near-vertical face up to 110 m in height … falling gradually to a height of about 30 m at Kingsdown.”  The GCR site account 213, "Dover to Kingsdown Cliffs", in British Upper Cretaceous Stratigraphy (GCR series vol. 23), says in its introduction, page 1:  “The 7 km of sea cliffs from Dover–Kingsdown (Part 2), are the classic 'White Cliffs of Dover'”.  The same account, in its description, page 4, says:  “The inaccessible parts of the cliff expose the upper beds of the Lewes Nodular Chalk Formation and the Seaford Chalk Formation with its conspicuous marker flint bands.  The highest points in these cliffs are capped by a small thickness of Margate Chalk Member”.  The Margate Chalk Member is the north-east Kent facies of the Newhaven Chalk Formation.  Aldiss et al. (2004), section 3.3.5, page 14, say of it:  “It is composed mainly of smooth white chalk without marl seams and with a few, generally inconspicuous, flints”.  Two things that popular accounts get wrong, and this one does not.  There is no BGS formation called St Margaret's Chalk; it is a member in Robinson's 1986 rival scheme, roughly the upper Lewes Nodular Chalk.  And Dover is not the tallest chalk cliff in Britain; the same GCR account contrasts it with the higher cliffs at Beachy Head.  A Geological Conservation Review site account of the cliffs between Kingsdown and Dover.  The article uses it for the height of the cliffs and for the rock exposed in the white face. ↩

Pearce, Martin A.  “Additional new organic-walled dinoflagellate cysts from two onshore UK Chalk boreholes.”  Journal of Micropalaeontology 37(1):73–86.  2018.  Section 1 Introduction, page 73:  The Trunch Borehole in Norfolk holds 468 m of Cenomanian to lower Maastrichtian Chalk, of which 246 m is Campanian, and is the most complete cored onshore Chalk succession in Britain.  Derived: at 468 m over roughly 29.5 million years the implied compacted accumulation rate is 1.59 cm per thousand years, indistinguishable from the Hampshire figure elsewhere in this article.  A paper describing new fossil dinoflagellate cysts, which are the microscopic cases of plankton, from two boreholes in the onshore UK Chalk.  The article uses its introduction for the thickness and completeness of the Trunch Borehole. ↩

Geologic TimeScale Foundation.  “Chalk Group (UK Sector) — Thickness.”  NW European Stratigraphic Lexicon (Geologic TimeScale Foundation online edition).  n.d.  The lexicon says:  “The group varies greatly in thickness, locally reaching over 1200m in rim synclines adjacent to major salt diapir developments east of the Sole Pit Inversion … It thins northwards over the Mid North Sea High …, before thickening into the Erskine Basin of the Central Graben, where it is up to 1500m thick (Johnson & Lott, 1993, Gatliff et al., 1994).  It also thins southwards across the London-Brabant High into the eastern English Channel (Cameron et al., 1992).  It reaches over 1000m thick in the Outer Moray Firth (Andrews et al., 1990).”  For the 2,500 m figure, the cited source is van der Molen (2004), PhD thesis, Utrecht University, chapter 1, page 2.  The published version is van der Molen, A. S. and Wong, Th. E. (2007), "Towards an improved lithostratigraphic subdivision of the Chalk Group in the Netherlands North Sea area — A seismic stratigraphic approach", Netherlands Journal of Geosciences 86(2):131–143, page 131, which gives a companion statement:  “the Upper Cretaceous to Lower Cenozoic Chalk Group forms an almost purely calcitic succession, reaching a maximum thickness of over 2000 m in the Central Graben and the Münsterland Basin.”  Both offshore numbers derive from Ziegler's (1990) isopach map and are compilations, not point measurements.  The largest single-well thickness found is the Tor Formation alone, at 472 m in Norwegian well 1/3-8.  The lexicon warns:  “the thickness variations in the study wells are however not representative of the North Sea Basin Chalk/Tor Formation distribution as most wells are drilled on structural highs.”  The thickness of the Chalk Group in the UK sector of the North Sea, from the NW European Stratigraphic Lexicon, which is updated to follow Gradstein and Waters (2016, Newsletter on Stratigraphy 49/1:71–280).  The article uses it for the 1,500 m thickness in the Erskine Basin and for the offshore total of 2,500 m. ↩

Surlyk, Finn et al.  “Stevns Klint, Denmark: Uppermost Maastrichtian chalk, Cretaceous–Tertiary boundary, and lower Danian bryozoan mound complex.”  Bulletin of the Geological Society of Denmark 54:1–48.  2006.  Section Geological setting, page 1:  “The 14.5 km long and up to 41 m high coastal cliff, Stevns Klint is situated about 45 km south of Copenhagen … The succession exposed in Stevns Klint belongs to the top part of the Chalk Group which is about 1 km thick as seen in seismic sections obtained immediately onshore and offshore of the cliff.”  Stevns Klint sits over the eastern end of the Ringkøbing–Fyn High, so its chalk is thinner and shallower-water than in the Danish Basin proper.  A field paper on the coastal cliff at Stevns Klint in Denmark, describing its uppermost Maastrichtian chalk, the Cretaceous–Tertiary boundary, and a Danian bryozoan mound complex.  The article uses it for the thickness of chalk beneath the cliff, which seismic sections show to be about a kilometre. ↩

1. 25a.

   A monograph on the Stevns Klint cliff in Denmark that erected the formal lithostratigraphy (the naming of rock layers) everyone now uses.  It measures the layers around the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary, from the Fiskeler Member, generally 5 to 10 cm thick, up to bryozoan limestone preserved to 20 metres.  The article uses it as the source for every thickness in its table.  Section Geological setting, page 1:  “The 14.5 km long and up to 41 m high coastal cliff, Stevns Klint is situated about 45 km south of Copenhagen… The succession exposed in Stevns Klint belongs to the top part of the Chalk Group which is about 1 km thick as seen in seismic sections.”  Section Abstract, page 1:  “is generally about 5-10 cm thick and passes gradually upwards into the strongly burrowed new Cerithium Limestone Member (Pα-P1a Zones), which is up to 60 cm thick.  The Fiskeler and Cerithium Limestone Members form the new Rødvig Formation.  An erosional hardground surface truncates the top of the Cerithium Limestone Member and the intervening crests of the uppermost Maastrichtian mounds of the Højerup Member.  The surface is overlain by lower Danian bryozoan packstone-rudstone mound complexes… Up to 20 m of bryozoan limestone are preserved beneath the Quaternary deposits.”  Maxima: Fiskeler about 30 cm at Kulstirenden and 45 cm per Hart et al. 2004/2005; Cerithium Limestone 80 cm at Korsnæb and 120 cm at Kulstirenden.  The Sigerslev Member is about 25 m exposed.  Section Sigerslev Member, S1 and S2 cores, page 30:  The authors say it exceeds 70 m in thickness in the S1 and S2 cores:  “exceeds 70 m in thickness”.  Pages 9, 33:  Danian mounds are 50 to 100 m long, with 5 to 9 m of sea-floor relief.  Page 8:  Two complications the article should not conceal are stated by the authors.  The Fiskeler is not a continuous sheet: it fills small basins between bryozoan mound crests, wedging out to a bedding plane at the basin margins.  The second is the diachronous Cerithium Limestone.  “the Cerithium Limestone is diachronous being younger from south to north along the cliff.  There is a hiatus including all of the P. eugubina Zone in the northern part”.  In fairness to the pre-1980 workers:  “It is remarkable, that metal enrichments with anomalously high Ni-values, were found already by Christensen et al. (1973), heralding the discovery of the famous iridium-anomaly by Alvarez et al. (1980)”. ↩

Geologic TimeScale Foundation.  Geologic Time Scale 2020 chart.  2020.  The standard chart of stage ages, which puts the base of the Cenomanian at 100.5 million years and the base of the Danian, the K–Pg boundary, at 66.0 million years.  The article uses these two ages to set the span of the Chalk Group at 34.5 million years, which is derived by subtraction.  Two sub-durations used elsewhere in the article come from the same chart: Cenomanian base to base Campanian, 16.85 million years, and Cenomanian base to base Maastrichtian, 28.3 million years.  The offshore Chalk Group, as defined by Lott and Knox (1994), includes the Danian Ekofisk Formation and so runs up to about 4.4 million years longer. ↩

Accumulation and daily deposition rates for each chalk section in the table.  n.d.  A row-by-row calculation derived for this article.  English Chalk, 374 m: the thickness is from Walker et al. (2017); the 1.3–1.5 cm per thousand years is derived as in the chalk-rate calculation; 374 m ÷ 365 days = 102 cm per day.  English Chalk, 560 m maximum: the thickness is from Hopson (2005); 560 m ÷ 34.5 million years = 1.62 cm per thousand years; 560 m ÷ 365 days = 153 cm per day.  Central Graben, 2,500 m: the thickness is from van der Molen (2004); 2,500 m ÷ 34.5 million years = 7.25 cm per thousand years; ÷ 365 days = 685 cm per day.  This row carries a caveat that the rest of the article states and the table does not: a large and unquantified fraction of the Central Graben section is allochthonous, made of slides, slumps, debris flows and turbidites shed off the graben flanks, so 2,500 m ÷ 34.5 million years is not a pelagic production rate and should not be quoted as one.  Smoky Hill Chalk, Kansas, 182 m: Hattin's (1982) composite reference section, 181.8 m (596.3 ft), and his own long-term average of 0.036 mm per year, which is 3.6 cm per thousand years; 181.8 m ÷ 365 days = 50 cm per day.  Snelling's "six days", 405 m: Snelling's own thickness for the English Chalk and his own conclusion; 405 m ÷ 6 days = 67.5 m per day = 6,750 cm per day = 2.8 m per hour.  Every Flood-year figure and three of the four conventional rates are derived; the only published rate in the table is Hattin's 3.6 cm per thousand years. ↩

Smoky Hill chalk deposited in one 365-day year, compared with Hattin's measured rate.  n.d.  A calculation derived for this article.  Depositing Hattin's 181.8 m composite Smoky Hill section within a 365-day Flood requires 498 mm of chalk per day, against the 0.036 mm per year he measured, a factor of 5.0 × 10⁶.  The inputs are Hattin's (1982) thickness and rate.  The article uses it for the Kansas chalk, where the ratio is about 5 × 10⁶. ↩

Tyrrell, T., and A. Merico.  “Emiliania huxleyi: bloom observations and the conditions that induce them.”  Thierstein and Young (eds), Coccolithophores: From Molecular Processes to Global Impact, 75–97.  Springer.  2004.  Page 76:  “'Bloom', as generally used, is a rather imprecise term, but in this paper it is defined, arbitrarily, to refer only to E. huxleyi cell concentrations of at least 1,000,000 per liter.  Blooms can cover very large areas, for instance at least 200,000 km2 in the Eastern Bering Sea and Bering Straits in 1997 (Sukhanova and Flint 1998), and 250,000 km2 in the North Atlantic south of Iceland in 1991 (Holligan et al. 1993a).”  A chapter reviewing observations of Emiliania huxleyi blooms and the conditions that produce them, in a multi-author book on coccolithophores.  The article uses its two bloom areas, at least 200,000 km² in the eastern Bering Sea in 1997 and 250,000 km² south of Iceland in 1991.  The chapter attributes both figures to earlier work, Sukhanova and Flint (1998) and Holligan et al. (1993a). ↩

1. 29a.

   A chapter with a table that compiles thirteen named field studies of Emiliania huxleyi cell counts in blooms, in units of 10⁶ cells per litre.  The article uses it for the range of bloom concentrations: 0 to 10 million cells per litre in the North Atlantic in 1991, 2.1 to 2.8 million per litre in the Bering Sea, and a record of 115 million cells per litre in a Norwegian fjord in 1955.  Table 1, page 76:  “Field evidence verifying that many areas of bright waters in satellite images correspond to areas where very high Emiliania huxleyi cell numbers are observed”.  The table's values, in 10⁶ cells per litre, are: Norwegian fjords 10-100 (1950s, Birkenes & Braarud 1952) and up to 115 (1955, Berge 1962); North Sea 1-6 (1994, Head et al. 1998); western English Channel up to 8.5 (1980s, Holligan et al. 1983); North Atlantic 0-10 (1991, Holligan et al. 1993a); Gulf of Maine <0.5 to >2 (1988-89, Balch et al. 1991); Black Sea 4.7 and 31 (1990, 1993, Mihnea 1997); Bering Sea 2.1-2.8 (1997, Sukhanova & Flint 1998).  Page 77:  “The highest concentration ever reported is 115,000,000 cells per liter, from a Norwegian fjord in 1955 (Berge 1962) (Table 1).” ↩

2. 29b.

   A chapter that reviews Emiliania huxleyi blooms and the conditions that produce them.  Here it is reporting a literature survey, by Nanninga and Tyrrell (1996), of natural blooms and the water they grew in.  The article uses it to show that blooms need a shallow, stratified, brightly lit surface layer.  Pages 82–83:  Reporting Nanninga and Tyrrell's 1996 literature survey, verbatim:  “A literature search of reports of natural blooms of E. huxleyi (and the associated measured water conditions) reveals that they all occur in highly stratified water where the mixed layer depth is usually ~10-20 m, and is always ≤30 m (Nanninga and Tyrrell 1996).”  Page 84:  This is not incidental.  The same chapter records that E. huxleyi outcompetes other phytoplankton specifically at high light intensity, because it is not prone to photoinhibition.  Quoting Iglesias-Rodriguez et al. (2002), it says that blooms are:  “confined primarily to nutrient-depleted, temperate, and high-latitude oceans with relatively high critical irradiances”.  A shallow, stratified, brilliantly lit surface layer is a requirement, not a coincidence. ↩

Balch, W.M. et al.  “Factors regulating the Great Calcite Belt in the Southern Ocean and its biogeochemical significance.”  Global Biogeochemical Cycles 30(8):1124–1144.  2016.  Verbatim, on p. 3 of the WHOI-hosted open copy, the paper says:  “with an area of ~52 × 10⁶ km2”.  “Satellite estimates indicate that 26% of global suspended PIC is found in the GCB, which represents 16% of”.  A study of the Great Calcite Belt in the Southern Ocean.  The article uses its area of about 52 million km², which holds 26% of the world's suspended particulate inorganic carbon.  Worth holding next to the bloom concentration figures: an area a hundred times the largest single mesoscale bloom still carries only 0.7-2 µmol C L⁻¹ of particulate inorganic carbon, which is 70-200 milligrams of calcium carbonate in a cubic metre of seawater. ↩

Balch, W.M. et al.  “Surface biological, chemical, and optical properties of the Patagonian Shelf coccolithophore bloom, the brightest waters of the Great Calcite Belt.”  Limnology and Oceanography 59(5):1715–1732.  2014.  Section Abstract, page 1715:  “We report surface observations of a mesoscale coccolithophore bloom at the shelf break of the Patagonian Shelf during December 2008, representing the densest coccolithophore population in the Southern Ocean.”  Page 1719:  “Results of the microscope counts of detached coccoliths showed similar patterns (Fig. 4B), with peak concentrations of >250,000 coccoliths per milliliter northeast of the FIs… Maximum concentrations of plated coccolithophore cells were <1000 cells mL⁻¹ … The ratio of detached coccoliths to plated cells reached 350 northeast of the FIs.”  A field study of a coccolithophore bloom at the shelf break of the Patagonian Shelf in December 2008.  The article uses it for the peak count of detached coccoliths, above 250,000 per millilitre, in what the abstract calls the densest coccolithophore population in the Southern Ocean. ↩

1. 31a.

   The same field study as the Patagonian Shelf source, here quoted for particulate inorganic carbon (PIC), the calcite carried by coccolithophores, in a North Atlantic bloom and in the Great Calcite Belt.  The authors' North Atlantic values come from Holligan et al. (1993), Global Biogeochemical Cycles 7:879-900.  The article uses these figures to turn bloom concentrations into weights of calcium carbonate.  Page 1716:  The authors quote Holligan et al. (1993):  “coccolithophore blooms (10-20 [µ]mol C L⁻¹; Holligan et al. 1993).  Instead, PIC concentrations are <10× less in the GCB, 0.7-2 [µ]mol C L⁻¹.”  Page 1719:  Peak Patagonian values are:  “>4 [µ]mol C L⁻¹”.  The article's conversion, at 100.09 µg per µmol of CaCO₃: 10-20 µmol C L⁻¹ = 1.0-2.0 g CaCO₃ m⁻³; the Great Calcite Belt's 0.7-2 µmol C L⁻¹ = 0.070-0.200 g m⁻³; the Patagonian peak = 0.40 g m⁻³. ↩

This article.  Annual carbonate fluxes at five deep-water sediment-trap sites.  n.d.  Figure 1, page 144:  The article keeps a caveat that cuts both ways.  Even at a classic open-ocean site, the largest single flux events are resedimented platform debris.  Conte and Weber (2014), Fig. 1 caption, p. 144, attribute the September 2003 and September 2010 spikes to:  “plumes of detrital carbonate sediments from the Bermuda platform that were advected offshore by Hurricanes Fabian (2003) and Igor (2010).”  Five sediment-trap records, each from collecting cups moored in the water column, with annual carbonate flux computed for this article from the archived data.  Sargasso Sea, 3,200 m: Deuser, W.G.; Jickells, T.D.; King, P.; and Commeau, J.A. (1995), "Decadal and annual changes in biogenic opal and carbonate fluxes to the deep Sargasso Sea," Deep-Sea Research I 42(11-12):1923-1932, doi:10.1016/0967-0637(95)00093-3; site 31°40′N 64°10′W, seafloor 4,200 m; 82 cups over 3,757 trap-days from 1978-04-06 to 1991-09-21.  The duration-weighted means over the whole series are a total mass flux of 40.58 mg m⁻² d⁻¹ (14.81 g m⁻² yr⁻¹) and a CaCO₃ flux of 19.17 mg m⁻² d⁻¹, or 7.00 g CaCO₃ m⁻² yr⁻¹, with carbonate at 47% of the mass.  Bermuda Oceanic Flux Program, 3,200 m, 2000-2015: data with Maureen Conte as principal investigator; the mean of 313 samples gives 38.1 mg m⁻² d⁻¹ of mass flux and 60.6% carbonate in the fraction under 125 µm, hence about 8.4 g CaCO₃ m⁻² yr⁻¹.  This is an order-of-magnitude cross-check on Deuser rather than an independent precise value, because the carbonate percentage is for the fine fraction only while the mass flux is total.  The article leans on Deuser (1995) and on Conte and Weber, Oceanography 27(1):142-147 (2014), for this site.  JGOFS North Atlantic Bloom Experiment, 48°N 21°W: Honjo, S. and Manganini, S.J. (2003), from Biogenic particle flux to the interior of the North Atlantic Ocean at the 34°N and 48°N stations, 1989/1990, WHOI Technical Report WHOI-92-15.  Combining the two deployment phases at the deepest trap (3,718 and 3,749 m) over 358 trap-days gives 42.27 mg m⁻² d⁻¹, or 15.4 g CaCO₃ m⁻² yr⁻¹.  Cariaco Basin, 1,205 m, at 10.50°N 64.67°W: Thunell, R.C. and Tappa, E. (2013); 308 cups over 4,087 trap-days give 35.4 mg m⁻² d⁻¹, or 12.9 g CaCO₃ m⁻² yr⁻¹, but only 11% of a total mass flux of 115.6 g m⁻² yr⁻¹, because Cariaco is a silled, anoxic, coastal-upwelling basin fed by terrigenous mud.  Fast sedimentation is easy; fast carbonate sedimentation is not.  Cape Blanc, NW Africa, 1,214 m: Guerreiro et al. (2022), 21.63°N 20.18°W, October 2012 to November 2013, 22 sixteen-day cups, 92.2 mg m⁻² d⁻¹, or 33.7 g CaCO₃ m⁻² yr⁻¹, the highest single-site annual carbonate flux in the project's source set. ↩

Guerreiro, Catarina V. et al.  “Carbonate fluxes by coccolithophore species between NW Africa and the Caribbean: Implications for the biological carbon pump.”  Limnology and Oceanography 66(8):3190–3208.  2021.  Section Abstract:  “Total coccolith-CaCO₃ fluxes of 371 mg m⁻² yr⁻¹ at M4,”.  Pages 3196, 3204:  “16 mg m⁻² d⁻¹”.  The abstract's annual figure is inconsistent by a factor of about 23 with the paper's own daily figure, so the abstract's annual numbers are about 23 times too small.  The correct annual coccolith-carbonate fluxes are 5.88 (M4), 2.73 (Cape Blanc), 1.98 (M1) and 1.81 (M2) g CaCO₃ per square metre per year.  A study of the coccolithophore carbonate caught in sediment traps moored between NW Africa and the Caribbean, with samples collected every 16 days from October 2012 to November 2013.  The article uses its count at the most productive tropical Atlantic site, mooring M4 at 12.06°N 49.19°W, with the trap at 1,130 m, which is 23 sixteen-day cups.  The time-weighted mean is 2,186 × 10⁶ = 2.19 × 10⁹ coccoliths per square metre per day, with per-cup values of 1,172-4,226 × 10⁶, which is 8.0 × 10¹¹ coccoliths per square metre per year.  The neighbouring mooring M2 (13.81°N 37.82°W, 1,235 m) gives 2.86 × 10⁸ per square metre per day, an order of magnitude less.  Derived conversion to rock: 8.0 × 10¹¹ coccoliths per square metre per year at 2 pg each is 1.6 g CaCO₃ per square metre per year, which at a chalk bulk density of 1.5 g cm⁻³ is about 1.1 micrometres of chalk per year.  At 2.6 pg it is 1.3 m per million years, and at a Cretaceous-sized 20 pg it is 9.9 m per million years. ↩

White, M.M. et al.  “Coccolith dissolution within copepod guts affects fecal pellet density and sinking rate.”  Scientific Reports 8:9758.  2018.  Section Abstract:  “The surface waters of the ocean are supersaturated with respect to calcium carbonate.  As a result, particulate inorganic carbon (PIC), such as calcite coccoliths, is not expected thermodynamically to dissolve in waters above the lysocline (~4500-6000 m).  However, observations indicate that up to 60-80% of calcium carbonate is lost in the upper 500-1000 m of the ocean.  This is hypothesized to occur in microenvironments with reduced saturation states, such as zooplankton guts.  Using a new application of the highly precise 14C microdiffusion technique, we show that following a period of starvation, up to 38% of ingested calcite dissolves in copepod guts.  After continued feeding, our data show the gut becomes increasingly buffered, which limits further dissolution; this has been termed the Tums hypothesis (after the drugstore remedy for stomach acid).  As less calcite dissolves in the gut and is instead egested in fecal pellets, the fecal pellet sinking rates double, with corresponding increases in pellet density.”  The 60-80% figure originates with Milliman et al. (1999), Deep-Sea Research I 46:1653-1669.  A more recent partition of where the loss happens is in Wu, Yiwei; Huang, Yuefei; DeVries, Timothy; Liang, Hengdi; Wang, Guangqian; and Zhang, Shuo, "The dominant sink of oceanic calcium carbonate occurs in undersaturated seawater," PNAS 122(43):e2507771122 (2025), doi:10.1073/pnas.2507771122.  It puts 16.5 ± 5.5% of dissolution above the aragonite saturation horizon (excluding the upper 114 m of the euphotic zone), 39.8 ± 4.5% between the aragonite and calcite saturation horizons, and 43.7 ± 3.8% in undersaturated deep water below the calcite horizon.  The article notes that the field genuinely disagrees about the depth of the loss while agreeing about the total.  A laboratory study of copepods, a kind of zooplankton, that measured how much ingested coccolith calcite dissolves in their guts and how that changes their fecal pellets.  The article uses its abstract for the statement that up to 60-80% of calcium carbonate is lost in the upper 500 to 1,000 metres of the ocean.  The authors' own experiment found up to 38% of ingested calcite dissolving in copepod guts after starvation, and the fecal pellets sinking twice as fast once the gut is buffered. ↩

Daniels, C.J. et al.  “A global compilation of coccolithophore calcification rates.”  Earth System Science Data 10:1859–1876.  2018.  Pages 1866–1867:  Verbatim:  “global marine PP is estimated to be ∼ 50 Gt C yr−1 (Field et al., 1998) while global CP by coccolithophores is poorly constrained, with estimates ranging from 0.4 to 1.6 Gt C yr−1 (Balch et al., 2007; Berelson et al., 2007; Smith and Mackenzie, 2016).  A first-order approximation of global CP, using the average CP : PP of 0.02 from the database, gives an estimate of ∼ 1 Gt C yr−1.  This value is only slightly lower than a recent estimate, based on coccolithophore ecophysiology, of 1.42 Gt C yr−1 by Hopkins and Balch (2018).”  Battaglia et al. (2016), in their text on p. 2830 and in Table 3, say of burial:  Table 3:  “These simulations with sediments yield a mean global burial flux of 0.12 Gt C yr−1 (see Table 3: 0.011 Gt C yr−1 in the Atlantic, 0.062 Gt C yr−1 in the Pacific, and 0.042 Gt C yr−1 in the Indian Ocean).  This is within the estimate by Feely et al. (2004) of 0.1-0.14 Gt C yr−1.”  Table 3's global figure is 0.117 Gt C yr⁻¹.  A database of coccolithophore calcification measurements, here used for the global production of calcite.  The article gives a production range of 0.4 to 1.6 Gt C per year, with a first-order estimate near 1 Gt C per year.  The burial figure of 0.117 Gt C per year comes from a model study by Battaglia, G.; Steinacher, M.; and Joos, F., "A probabilistic assessment of calcium carbonate export and dissolution in the modern ocean," Biogeosciences 13:2823-2848 (2016), doi:10.5194/bg-13-2823-2016.  None of these is a measured global number.  The 0.4-1.8 Gt C yr⁻¹ spread is a set of model outputs, mostly satellite algorithms extrapolated over the global ocean, and Battaglia's 0.90 Gt C yr⁻¹ export is a model constrained by an excess-alkalinity tracer field.  Daniels et al.'s 2,765 ¹⁴C incubations are measurements, but they are point measurements that cannot be integrated globally without a model. ↩

1. 35a.

   A database of 2,765 coccolithophore calcification measurements from over 30 studies between 1991 and 2015, across the Atlantic, Pacific, Indian, Arctic and Southern oceans.  Most were made by incorporating radioactive carbon over 12 to 24 hours.  The article uses its global geometric-mean calcification rate for the upper euphotic zone, 1.19 mmol C m⁻² d⁻¹.  Section Abstract:  “To aid future areal estimations and validate future modelling efforts we have constructed a database of 2765 CP measurements, the majority of which were measured using 12 to 24 h incorporation of radioactive carbon (14C) into acid-labile inorganic carbon (CaCO3).  We present data collated from over 30 studies covering the period from 1991 to 2015, sampling the Atlantic, Pacific, Indian, Arctic and Southern oceans.  Globally, CP in surface waters (< 20 m) ranged from 0.01 to 8398 µmol C m−3 d−1 (with a geometric mean of 16.1 µmol C m−3 d−1).  An integral value for the upper euphotic zone (herein surface to the depth of 1 % surface irradiance) ranged from < 0.1 to 6 mmol C m−2 d−1 (geometric mean 1.19 mmol C m−2 d−1).” ↩

2. 35b.

   A database of 2,765 measurements of how fast coccolithophores (calcifying plankton) build calcium carbonate in the upper sunlit ocean.  The article uses its maximum and geometric mean to test how much ocean surface a Flood-year deposit would need.  Section Abstract:  The upper euphotic zone, the layer down to 1 % surface irradiance, gave values from below 0.1 up to 6 mmol C m⁻² d⁻¹, with a geometric mean of 1.19 mmol C m⁻² d⁻¹.  “we have constructed a database of 2765 CP measurements … An integral value for the upper euphotic zone (herein surface to the depth of 1 % surface irradiance) ranged from < 0.1 to 6 mmol C m⁻² d⁻¹ (geometric mean 1.19 mmol C m⁻² d⁻¹).”  Six mmol C m⁻² d⁻¹ is 26.3 g C m⁻² yr⁻¹, so supplying the northwest European Chalk's 8.75 × 10¹⁹ g C in one year at that measured maximum needs 3.33 × 10¹⁸ m² of calcifying sea, 9,192 times the whole ocean's area; at the global geometric mean, 46,347 times.  There is not enough planet. ↩

This article.  Share of coccolith carbonate that is buried, derived for this article.  n.d.  Page 144:  Conte and Weber, Oceanography 27(1):142-147 (2014), say:  “Globally, the fraction of surface production that is buried in deep ocean sediments is < 1% for organic carbon, ~ 3% for biogenic silica, and ~ 10% for carbonate (Nelson et al., 1995; Berelson et al., 2007).”  A calculation made for this article: 0.117 ÷ (1.0 to 1.6) Gt C per year = 7-12%.  Three published statements bracket it.  The article takes 6-26%, centred near 10-15%.  Berelson et al. (2007) give 0.1 Gt PIC per year buried out of 0.4-1.8 exported, which is 6-25%.  Wu et al. (2025), PNAS 122(43):e2507771122, give 21.2 buried out of 82.1 Tmol C per year exported, which is 26% globally but 13.5% for pelagic burial alone.  The article's point is that this cuts both ways.  It means the mainstream must manufacture roughly ten times the carbonate it buries, which is a real inefficiency.  It also means a Flood model gets no help, because the losses tax any mechanism, and a catastrophic model that stirs the ocean and lowers its pH makes dissolution worse. ↩

Renaudie, Johan, and David B. Lazarus.  “Cenozoic pelagic accumulation rates and biased sampling of the deep-sea record.”  Biogeosciences 22(8):1929–1946.  2025.  The by-section rates.  Section 4.2, page 1938:  “vary dramatically (< 0.5 to > 30 cm kyr⁻¹ range; interquartile ratio of 4.43)”.  Hiatuses longer than 0.5 Myr have a median of 0 per section and a mean of 0.93, and sections are.  Section 4.1, page 1938:  “on average > 85 % complete”.  The corrected rate says:  Section 4.4, page 1939:  “from an estimated 4 g cm⁻² kyr⁻¹ in the Paleocene to ca. 2 in the Pleistocene”.  A paper in which linear sedimentation rates are computed every 10 kyr from 66 to 0 million years ago across 479 sites in the Neptune Sandbox Berlin database, converted to mass accumulation rates with each site's own measured sediment density.  Its central result is a correction.  The apparent sixfold Cenozoic rise in sedimentation rate, from less than 0.7 cm kyr⁻¹ at 64-65 Ma to about 3.9 cm kyr⁻¹ at 0-1 Ma, is a drilling artefact, and once corrected the true rates fall by about a factor of two across the Cenozoic.  The article uses it for the spread of rates between sections and for the completeness question.  This is a mainstream paper demonstrating that deep-sea sedimentation-rate compilations carried a systematic bias for decades, a fair warning against treating any single compilation as gospel, though the correction makes rates more uniform through time, not less. ↩

Curry, W.B., and J.L. Cullen.  “Carbonate production and dissolution in the western equatorial Atlantic during the last 1 m.y.”  Proceedings of the Ocean Drilling Program, Scientific Results 154:189–199.  1997.  Page 190:  “Sedimentation rates vary in these sites (Table 2) from a low of about 2.85 cm/k.y. in the lower part of Site 926 (433−1010 ka) to a high of about 4.92 cm/k.y. in the upper section of Site 927 (0−433 ka).”  Table 3, page 197:  Carbonate mass accumulation rates across five sites at 3,041-4,356 m water depth are 0.57-1.32 g cm⁻² kyr⁻¹, against non-carbonate accumulation of 1.58-2.98.  A study of carbonate production and dissolution in the western equatorial Atlantic over the last million years, at sites on the Ceara Rise.  The article uses its sedimentation rates and carbonate accumulation rates.  At the Ceara Rise the terrigenous fraction outweighs the carbonate, because the site sits under the Amazon plume, so it is not a chalk analogue.  Its value here is that a fully orbitally tuned 1-Myr age model gives carbonate accumulation of the same order as everything else measured. ↩

This article.  Chalk thickness from zero-loss coccolith calcification, derived for this article.  n.d.  A calculation made for this article, not a measurement.  It takes the global geometric-mean euphotic-zone integral of Daniels et al. (2018), 1.19 mmol C m⁻² d⁻¹, converts it to mass at 100.09 mg per mmol of CaCO₃ over 365 days, giving 43.5 g CaCO₃ m⁻² yr⁻¹, and divides by a chalk bulk density of 1.5 g cm⁻³.  The result is 0.029 mm per year, or 29 m per million years, assuming zero dissolution, zero grazing loss and perfect burial.  The same arithmetic at the low end of the measured range (0.1 mmol C m⁻² d⁻¹) gives 2.4 m per million years, and at the highest euphotic integral ever measured (6 mmol C m⁻² d⁻¹) gives 146 m per million years.  A year of continuous, planet-wide, maximum-rate, zero-loss coccolithophore calcification builds 0.146 mm of chalk, and Dover's ~400 m would take 2.7 million years of it.  The figure to set against it is the English Chalk's own accumulation rate: 13.1 to 14.7 m per million years of compacted chalk (374 m over 25.5-28.5 Myr), and 26 to 38 m per million years of original ooze once decompacted by the recommended factor of 2.0-2.6.  Two independent routes, one from shipboard measurements of living plankton with no geology in it and one from rock thickness divided by radiometric age, land within a factor of about two of each other.  Real chalk rates should be lower than the zero-loss figure once you allow for the 60-90% that dissolves or is exported elsewhere.  The balance is made up by Cretaceous coccoliths being heavier, by higher Cretaceous cell densities, and by a much shallower carbonate compensation depth in an epicontinental sea. ↩

Whitcomb, John C. Jr., and Henry M. Morris.  The Genesis Flood: The Biblical Record and Its Scientific Implications.  Presbyterian and Reformed, Philadelphia.  1961.  The word coccolith does not appear in the book.  The word limestone appears seventeen times, on pages 161, 173, 183, 185, 187, 189, 190, 193, 195, 205, 208, 211, 244, 408, 417, 418 and 428.  All seventeen concern overthrusts, paraconformities, the Agate Springs bone bed, the Green River Formation or cave travertine, and none concerns how carbonate mud or carbonate rock accumulates.  The contents page shows that the slow-deposition problem is addressed under.  “Coral Reefs 408 / Deep-Sea Sediments 409”.  but never by way of chalk and never with a rate calculation for carbonate.  Page 203:  The book's one use of chalk is a photograph caption about a Cretaceous chalk raft in glacial till, which reads:  “The strata in this section of England are interpreted as Cretaceous (the Chalk) and Pleistocene glacial till.  It is thought that the glacial action plucked great segments of the earlier Cretaceous strata and transported them as a great boulder, lifting them some 60 feet vertically, depositing them finally as a part of the till deposits of the glacial moraines.  Note, however, the undisturbed condition of the chalk, with its horizontal lenses of flints.  To all outward appearances, these strata were deposited normally, in vertical sequence.”  A 1961 book by John C. Whitcomb Jr. and Henry M. Morris, whose contents include coral reefs and deep-sea sediments.  The article uses it because it is the book that launched modern flood geology, and it does not address chalk. ↩

1. 40a.

   Page 408:  On reefs:  “Other types of sedimentary deposits which have been conceived as long-time accumulations can also be otherwise explained.  For example, the great coral reefs, which appear to represent the accumulations of the calcium carbonate remains of the coral organisms over aeons of time could just as well have been formed in relatively short periods.  The total mass of material in a reef is a function not only of time but also of numbers of the multiplying reef-building corals.”.  Page 409:  “Particularly during the Flood, the extensive reefs formed in the warm waters of the antediluvian seas would have been eroded and re-deposited, often giving the appearance now of an ancient reef of great extent.  In any case, it is evident that it is possible to explain coral reef formation, whether ancient or modern, in terms of Biblical geochronology.”  On deep-sea sediments, p. 409:  “…evidence is recently indicating both that these thicknesses are not as great as imagined and that the ocean bottom is subject to too many disturbances to permit any kind of gradual undisturbed accumulation.” ↩

Roth, Ariel A.  “Are millions of years required to produce biogenic sediments in the deep ocean?”  Origins (Geoscience Research Institute) 12(1):48–56.  1985.  Roth's paper is about deep-sea ooze, not about the Cretaceous chalk.  He never applies the calculation to the Chalk, and he places the production after the Flood or in the time since, so he is not a source for a Flood-year chalk.  Pages 52–53:  “Coccolithophores may reproduce faster than foraminifera and are 'among the fastest growing plankton algae' (Paasche 1968), sometimes multiplying at the rate of 2.25 divisions per day.  If one assumes that an average coccolith has a volume of 22×10⁻¹² cm³ (Honjo 1976), an average weight of 60×10⁻¹² g per coccolith […], 20 coccoliths per coccolithophore, 13×10⁶ coccolithophores per liter as reported for Oslo Fjord (Black and Bukry 1979), a dividing rate of 2 times per day and a density of 2 g per cm³ for the sediments produced, one gets a potential production rate of 54 cm of CaCO₃ per year from the top 100 m of the ocean.  In other words it is possible to produce the average 100 m thickness of coccoliths proposed for the sea floor in less than 200 years.”  A 1985 note in Origins, the journal of the Geoscience Research Institute, by Ariel Roth, a Seventh-day Adventist geologist at that institute.  Roth asks whether deep-sea shell deposits need millions of years to form.  He argues that the layers are not kilometres thick as reported, but probably at best an average of 0.2 km, and that the organisms could produce such a quantity in much less than 2,000 years.  The article uses it for the coccolith calculation that gives 54 centimetres per year, and for Roth's own warning that measured rates are far slower. ↩

1. 41a.

   Page 53:  Roth's own warning, immediately after the 54 cm per year result:  “It must be emphasized that the high rates given above are optimum and do not appear at all to represent average present-day rates.  The figures given represent the biological potential of these organisms.  There is a great deal of variation in the number of organisms present at different localities, and various methods of analyses yield highly differing results.  Some recent studies using sediment traps (Honjo et al. 1982; oral reports, GSA annual meeting 1984) suggest that at present in a number of localities the carbonate flux to the floor of the ocean is in the order of 25 to 250 mg m⁻² day⁻¹ which is several thousand times slower than the potential figures given above.  Such figures would appear to challenge Scripture; however, lack of precise information regarding the quantity of shells, much higher potential production rates and the nutritional enhancement of catastrophes must be given due consideration.”  A check on Roth's own numbers: 25–250 mg m⁻² d⁻¹ = 9.1–91 g m⁻² yr⁻¹, which at his own 2 g cm⁻³ is 0.46–4.6 cm per 1,000 years.  So his 54 cm per year is about 1.2 × 10⁴ to 1.2 × 10⁵ times the measured flux, not several thousand.  Roth understated his own discrepancy by roughly an order of magnitude.  Tyler 1996 states it as.  “some 10⁴”.  which is closer. ↩

2. 41b.

   The same 1985 Origins note as the calculation above, quoted here for Roth's bracketed remark on the mass of one coccolith.  The article uses it because Roth himself records that the published value was 8 picograms, and that he took it to be in error and used 60 picograms instead, seven and a half times larger.  The underlying paper, Honjo, S., "Coccoliths: production, transportation and sedimentation," Marine Micropaleontology 1:65-79 (1976), is the source of the 8 pg figure and of the 22 µm³ volume.  Both are known here only through Roth's report of them.  Snelling's 1994 restatement carries the footnote:  “Honjo, S., 1976.  Coccoliths: production, transportation and sedimentation.  Marine Micropaleontology 1:65-79; and personal communication to A.A. Roth”.  Snelling's restatement is preserving the personal-communication caveat and dropping Roth's admission that the published value was 8 pg.  Roth's bracketed note, inside the passage quoted in the calculation above, reads verbatim:  “[Honjo's 1976 figure of 8×10⁻¹² g is in error; he believes it is more like 80×10⁻¹² g (personal communication)]”.  Roth then adopts 60 pg, which is 7.5 times the published 8 pg. ↩

This article's own calculation.  Roth's coccolith calculation reproduced from his own stated inputs.  n.d.  The arithmetic: 13 × 10⁶ × 20 × 2 = 5.20 × 10⁸ coccoliths per litre per day; × 60 pg = 3.12 × 10⁻² g per litre per day; a 100 m column over 1 cm² is 10 L, so 0.312 g per cm² per day = 113.9 g per cm² per year; ÷ 2 g per cm³ = 56.9 cm per year.  Roth may have used a 350-day year, or 2.0 versus 2.25 divisions inconsistently.  Because coccolith mass enters linearly, the whole result is a straight multiple of it.  60 pg (Roth's adopted value) gives 56.9 cm per year and 100 m in 176 years.  22.5 pg (the central value for the chalk assemblage) gives 21.4 cm per year and 468 years.  8 pg (Honjo's published value, as reported by Roth himself) gives 7.6 cm per year and 1,317 years.  2.4 pg (measured mid-range Emiliania huxleyi, Walker et al. 2019: 1.5-5.1 pg) gives 2.3 cm per year and 4,391 years.  A calculation made for this article, not a measurement.  It rebuilds Roth's arithmetic from his own inputs: 13 × 10⁶ coccolithophores per litre, 20 coccoliths per cell, 2 divisions per day, 60 pg per coccolith, the top 100 m, and a sediment density of 2 g per cm³.  This reconstruction gives 56.9 cm per year against Roth's published 54, a 5% discrepancy, so the reconstruction is sound and the input is the problem.  The article uses it to show what the result becomes with other coccolith masses. ↩

Bloom concentration in Snelling's model compared with the highest one measured.  n.d.  Section The Final Answer:  Snelling's own stated basis for the figure is a coastal pollution event.  He wrote, in his 1994 paper:  “The situation has been known where pollution in coastal areas has contributed to the explosive multiplication of microorganisms in the ocean waters to peak concentrations of more than 10 billion per litre”.  Ten billion per litre is 10¹³ per cubic metre.  So the concentration he applies uniformly through 500 m of open ocean over a tenth of the earth's surface is a peak value from an inshore pollution bloom, two orders of magnitude above the open-ocean bloom concentrations of 0-10 × 10⁶ cells L⁻¹ that Tyrrell and Merico's Table 1 compiles from thirteen field campaigns.  A calculation derived for this article.  It divides the 10¹³ cells per cubic metre that Snelling assumes for a bloom by 1.15 × 10¹¹ cells per cubic metre, which is 115 × 10⁶ cells per litre, the highest concentration of the coccolithophore Emiliania huxleyi ever reported, recorded in a Norwegian fjord in 1955.  The result is a factor of 87.  The article uses it to show that the bloom Snelling needs is far denser than any bloom ever measured.  The 1955 figure is Berge's (1962), as reported by Tyrrell and Merico (2004, Table 1, p. 76, and text, p. 77). ↩

Light depth through a bloom at Snelling's assumed concentration.  n.d.  Snelling's answer to the light objection was mixotrophy.  He wrote:  “Lest it be argued that a concentration of 10¹³ microorganisms per cubic metre would extinguish all light within a few metres of the surface, it should be noted that phytoflagellates such as these are able to feed on bacteria, that is, planktonic species are capable of heterotrophism (they are 'mixotrophic').”  That is true of some species.  It does not solve the problem, because mixotrophy does not create carbon; it relocates the demand.  The coccolithophore eats bacteria, the bacteria ate dissolved organic carbon, and that carbon was fixed photosynthetically somewhere.  The energy shortfall is unchanged, and the ocean must now be stocked with the organic carbon in advance.  Run the other way, the same derivation gives the single-bloom version: making the mean northwest European column in one bloom through 500 m of water requires 3.15 × 10¹² cells per litre, at which density, roughly 100 µm³ per cell, the water is 31% cells by volume.  A calculation derived for this article.  At 10¹³ cells per cubic metre, with 5 µm cells of 1.96 × 10⁻¹¹ m² geometric cross-section, the light attenuation coefficient is 196 per metre, and the depth at which 1% of the light remains is 2.3 centimetres, not the few metres that Snelling's rebuttal assumes.  The article uses it because Snelling's answer to the light objection, mixotrophy, has to carry much of the weight of the argument, and cannot. ↩

Snelling, Andrew A.  “Coccolithophores and chalk layers: the author replies.”  CEN Tech. J. 9(1):33–35.  1995.  Page 35:  “While this Flood model for deposition of thick chalk layers is of course speculative because we are dealing with past catastrophic processes that today are not still operative, the evidence, including that discussed in my original paper, is far more consistent with it than with the slow-and-gradual scenario…”  “So 'can Flood geology explain thick chalk layers?'  The answer, I believe from the evidence on balance, is still 'yes'.  Since most ancient thick chalk layers were deposited in 100-600 m deep water, vast algal blooms almost filling the entire water column would have been feasible.”  The reply never answers Johns's central quantitative point, the longevity-versus-turnover correction.  It argues that the correction cannot be extrapolated to extinct Cretaceous species, which is a plea of ignorance, and its concrete counter-arguments address the transport of coccoliths, not their production.  Snelling's reply to Johns in the same creationist journal, defending his Flood model of thick chalk layers.  The article uses it for Snelling's own admissions about Johns's calculations, and for his rejection on scriptural grounds of the two options that remain.

1. 45a.

   Page 33:  In the reply, Snelling writes:  “We could therefore concede that calculation of turnover rates for coccolithophores needs to take into account their longevity, life cycle, productivity and timing of maturity, plus the descent rate of the coccoliths to the ocean floor.  Furthermore, if we were to follow Warren's line of reasoning and accept his calculations as they are, then we would have to concede the conclusions he has reached, which are of course damning to the case I presented in my paper.”. ↩

2. 45b.

   Page 33:  “However, neither of his two concluding options are workable within the biblical framework with its limited time-scale.  There is absolutely no room within the chronological framework of Scripture to push the Flood back to 20,000-80,000 years bp so as to accommodate the formation of the chalk layers after the Flood.  Likewise, to fit 20,000-80,000 or more years into the pre-Flood world so that the chalk layers may have been deposited then equally does violence to the scriptural record.  Besides, if the chalk layers were pre-Flood, then the bulk of the fossil record would also be pre-Flood, and the geological record of the Flood must then only be found somewhere in the Tertiary and/or Quaternary deposits.  Because those deposits are only minor by comparison to the vast bulk of the geological record, that option greatly reduces the scale and scope of the Flood geologically.  Thus I reject both options, in the first instance because they are untenable scripturally, and I feel sure that Warren Johns has the same misgivings.” ↩

3. 45c.

   Pages 33–34:  On species, Snelling names Emiliania huxleyi and Coccolithus pelagicus, the species Johns's life-cycle data come from, which.  “are not found in the thick Cretaceous chalks”.  so.  “such results cannot be automatically implied to represent the same parameters for different coccolithophores in the past.”  Page 34:  On depth, quoting Hancock 1975, p. 519:  “'Therefore the intrinsic evidence is that white-chalk was deposited between about 100 and 600m', that is, deposited in relatively shallow water depths of between about 100 and 600 metres, not the 3,000-5,000 metres referred to by Johns.  He adds that deep-sea chalks are a different animal (citing Ekdale & Bromley 1984), concluding that”.  “these modern chalks on today's deep ocean floors are definitely not comparable to the white-chalk layers that were deposited in only relatively shallow water (100-600m) in the past but today are exposed on land.  Thus the present is not the key to the past.” ↩

Woodmorappe, John.  “Woodmorappe Comments . . .”  CEN Tech. J. 9(1):35–36.  1995.  Page 35:  “The 'amazing-purity' argument of chalk deposits is also false, because, as pointed out in my work, most chalk deposits are not all that pure.  Moreover, if chalky sediment covered vast areas of the antediluvian seafloor, it must have been washed together into large thicknesses before there had come any significant influx of clastics to contaminate it.”  The same letter defends the 1986 model against Johns by quoting its own paper, also on p. 35:  “This means one such bloom, on average, every 2.8 years in antediluvian times.  Of course, these calculations are conservative even in that they assume that each massive bloom spawns only one generation of coccoliths.”  The position is pre-Flood production of the coccoliths and Flood-time redeposition of them, which is not the Answers in Genesis line.  Snelling rejects it on the ground that chalk appears in the Cretaceous and essentially nowhere below it.  A letter by John Woodmorappe, written under a pen name, in the 1995 exchange "Coccolithophores and chalk layers", where it follows Johns's letter and Snelling's reply.  The article uses it because Woodmorappe himself rejected the "amazing-purity" argument that AiG and CMI still lead with, saying most chalk deposits are not all that pure. ↩

Woodmorappe, John.  “Hardgrounds and the Flood: the need for a re-evaluation.”  Journal of Creation 20(3):104–110.  2006.  Section Abstract:  “Hardgrounds are claimed to be a challenge to Flood geology because of the long time alleged necessary for their formation.  However, I show that this challenge is not valid because some hardgrounds have been misidentified, and that for others, the recycling of the constituents of antediluvian hardgrounds accounts for hardground cobbles, some 'in situ' fossils, as well as entire 'in situ' hardgrounds. … The development of hardgrounds in time and space needs more research within creationist geoscience and to be properly reviewed and formalised.”.  Page 107:  The paper also sets out the strongest creationist case on how fast encrusters grow: Steginoporella grows laterally "up to 11 cm/yr", some smaller bryozoans grow "up to 0.5 cm per day", and a mutually overgrowing epibiont community on pelagic plastics forms "in only 10 months" (citing Jackson & Hughes 1985, McKinney 1993 and Winston et al. 1997).  A technical paper in Journal of Creation, a creationist journal, by an author writing as John Woodmorappe, which is a pen name.  It re-examines hardgrounds, lithified seafloor layers that carry borings and encrusting organisms, and reports fieldwork at the Caesar Creek site in August 2005; it argues that some hardgrounds have been misidentified and that others could have formed during the Flood by normal processes.  The article uses it for the author's own concession that hardgrounds formed in months, and that post-Flood hardgrounds still need to be explained. ↩

1. 47a.

   Page 104, column 2:  “The focus, from a creationist perspective, should be on the processes that created hardgrounds during the Flood year itself.  These include actual in situ hardgrounds formed in a matter of months during lulls in Flood action, as well as 'hardgrounds' that are actually the accumulations of allochthonous organisms.  The development of post-Flood hardgrounds is also an issue that needs to be fully considered.”.  The internal tension inside the movement is that "a matter of months during lulls in Flood action" is not compatible with Snelling's hardgrounds hardening and being re-eroded "within a few hours" (Earth's Catastrophic Past, vol. 2, p. 921). ↩

Brown, Walt.  In the Beginning: Compelling Evidence for Creation and the Flood.  Mission Imperative, Inc., Lebanon, Pennsylvania.  9th edition draft.  2019.  Chapter The Origin of Limestone, pages 259–265.  Page 261:  The mechanism is out-salting from supercritical water in a pre-Flood subterranean chamber.  Page 262:  The conclusion is that.  “Earth's vast limestone layers are overwhelmingly inorganic”.  and that.  “organic limestone is a result of the presence of inorganic limestone, not its cause.”  On chalk specifically:  “Apparently, the flood waters escaping from under the northeastern edge of the Americas hydroplate dumped limestone at the Bahamas Bank.  Similarly, waters escaping from under the northwestern edge of the European-Asian-African hydroplate dumped limestone in and around what is now the English Channel.  Later, in warm surface waters, rich in dissolved limestone, vast algae blooms—perhaps daily—produced the soft, fine-grained type of limestone known as chalk.  As long as nutrients and sunlight are plentiful (as was the case following the flood) algae blooms will expand exponentially.”.  Table 8, page 262:  Table 8 puts sediments (primarily limestone) at more than 60,000,000 × 10¹⁵ g C against oceans 37,400 and atmosphere 720, and Brown uses that ratio as an argument against an organic origin:  “That amount of carbon in the atmosphere and seas would have made them fatally toxic hundreds of times over.  Life would have ceased.”  Brown is a genuine outlier on both points: unlike Roth, Snelling, Woodmorappe, Tyler, Matthews and all of AiG and CMI, Brown denies that most limestone is biogenic and places the chalk-forming blooms after the Flood.  A creationist book by Walt Brown, whose earlier editions were issued by the Center for Scientific Creation.  It argues that most limestone is inorganic and that the chalk was laid down after the Flood by algae blooms in warm surface waters.  The article cites it as the outlier that denies most limestone is biogenic at all and places the chalk after the Flood. ↩

Matthews, J.D.  “Chalk and 'Upper Cretaceous' Deposits are Part of the Noachian Flood.”  Answers Research Journal 2:29–51.  2009.  Matthews openly states that the decision procedure is.  “multi-utility attribute analysis (MUA)”.  a pros-and-cons scoring table, rather than a physical calculation.  Page 36:  “Tyler's objections to Snelling's ideas are not challenged, but we show that factors not taken into account by Snelling or Tyler allow us to explain chalk deposition within a short period.”  The substituted mechanism, also on p. 36:  “To allow coccoliths to form a sediment, we have to move away from the concept of an open ocean environment where nothing is perfectly still and propose a dramatic alternative. … We need a closing ocean environment whereby existing coccoliths are trapped, and the remaining water drains away by Darcy flow through lower strata … It may be compared to a cook using a kitchen colander to strain boiled vegetables.”.  Pages 42–43:  The timescale, forced by North Sea reservoir overpressure:  “This requires a very short space of time, perhaps hours rather than years. … So not only must the chalk have been deposited in a matter of hours, but significant thicknesses of overburden must have arrived soon after.”  Page 49:  The verdict on age:  “The other data in the paper show that the age of the chalk is less than 10,000 years.”  A paper in Answers Research Journal, the journal of Answers in Genesis, by J.D. Matthews.  It accepts the Flood-year timing for the chalk but drops Snelling's mechanism for a closing ocean in which the remaining water drains away by Darcy flow through lower strata.  The article uses it because AiG's own journal lets Tyler's objections to Snelling stand. ↩

Morton, Glenn R.  “The Carbon Problem.”  Creation Research Society Quarterly 20(4):212–219.  1984.  Received 11 July 1983; the affiliation footnote reads:  Page 212:  “Mr. Glenn R. Morton is a physicist, concerned especially with exploration for oil”.  Table 1, page 212:  Table 1, "Distribution of Carbon in the Earth's Crust (× 10¹⁸ grams)", sourced to Hunt 1972, gives petroleum 201, coal 15, limestone 64,200, present biosphere 0.3 and pre-Flood biosphere 1.45, so the limestone reservoir holds about 44,300 times the carbon of the maximal pre-Flood biosphere.  Page 212:  “Thus the problem for the creationist lies in the view that the Genesis Flood accomplished all of its geological work in one year and thus only one preflood biosphere could have been buried.”  Page 218:  The concession:  “These problems with limestone are real.  One explanation which would fit the facts and retain a young earth is that the geologic work of the Flood lasted over some period of time considerably longer than one year.  Noah, indeed, was only on the ark for approximately one year; but Noah, his immediate descendants and the animals could have lived in some secluded highland location while the effects and work of the Flood raged on at lower altitudes.”  Snelling 1994 cites this paper by name as a source of the problem:  “Even creationist Glenn Morton has posed similar problems”.  Snelling's own footnote 9 reads:  “Morton, G.R., 1984.  The carbon problem.  Creation Research Society Quarterly 20(4):212-219 (pp. 217-218).”  A separate 1998 web essay by Morton on flood-basalt CO₂ is sometimes mistaken for this paper; it is about volcanic degassing, not carbonate, and it is internally inconsistent.  A paper in the Creation Research Society Quarterly, the flagship young-earth creationist journal, by Glenn R. Morton, a young-earth creationist who was then working in oil exploration as a geophysicist.  It sets the carbon held in limestone, 64,200 × 10¹⁸ g according to Hunt 1972, against the carbon in a maximal pre-Flood biosphere, and it concedes that the limestone problem needs more than one year of Flood work.  The article uses it because it raised the problem in 1984, Snelling cited it in 1994, and Morton later left the young-earth position entirely. ↩

1. 50a.

   Pages 217–218:  Morton quotes Gold & Soter 1982 in full:  “Estimates have been given for the total amount of CO₂ that would have been required to produce all the sedimentary carbonates, ranging from about 15 to 80 Kg/cm² over the surface of the Earth.  We adopt a value of 50 Kg/cm², equivalent to some 50 atmospheres.  There was probably never a very large amount of CO₂ in the atmosphere at any one time, but rather it seems to have been put away into limestone more or less as fast as it was supplied.  In contrast, Venus, the sister planet of the Earth (with comparable size and density), has outgassed about 95 atmospheres of CO₂, all of which remains in its atmosphere to this day, as there is no ocean to precipitate it.”  Morton introduces it with:  “However, even apart from the organic problem is the quantity of CO₂ necessary to have deposited the observed amount of limestone.” ↩

Snelling, Andrew A.  Earth's Catastrophic Past.  Volume 2.  Master Books.  2009.  Chapter 115, pages 925–930:  The chapter is titled "Chalk and Diatomite Beds, and Deep-Sea Sediments."  Pages 925–926:  The book repeats the 1994 chain of figures: 405 m, 30-35 Myr, and 1.16-1.35 cm per 1,000 yr.  Page 928:  The acknowledgement:  “In spite of well-argued claims that the deposition and formation of the chalk beds required a longer period than a few weeks toward the end of the Flood year, it is the extreme purity of the chalk beds that argues for their rapid deposition and formation.”  Footnote 20 to "well-argued claims" names exactly the two papers:  “W. H. Johns, 1995, Coccolithophores and chalk layers, Creation Ex Nihilo Technical Journal, 9(1): 29-33; D. J. Tyler, 1996, A post-Flood solution to the chalk problem, Creation Ex Nihilo Technical Journal, 10(1): 107-113.”  Page 927:  The 1994 concession, repeated verbatim:  “However, while these calculations certainly show that the quantities of calcareous oozes on today's ocean floors are easily producible in the timespan since the Flood, they are insufficient to show how these chalk beds were produced during the Flood itself.”.  Roth's rate has drifted to 55 cm/yr.  A creationist book by Andrew Snelling, volume 2 of Earth's Catastrophic Past.  It restates the 1994 chalk calculations, and it acknowledges well-argued claims that the chalk took longer than a few weeks, while arguing that the extreme purity of the chalk favours rapid formation.  The article uses it because the 2009 book still calls the objections well-argued. ↩

Snelling, Andrew A.  “Chalk It Up to a Global Flood.”  Answers.  2016.  The issue is dated July-September 2016.  The article quotes:  “Evolutionary geologists claim that the ooze has accumulated one grain at a time, at a rate of between 0.008 and 0.08 inches (0.2-2 mm) per year. … So it would take 100,000 to 1 million years to accumulate the 650-foot (200 m) thickness needed for the homogenous ooze to be converted into chalk.  Evolutionists claim the process of depositing chalk lasted for 40 million years.”  Its reference 2 for the rate is Blatt, Sedimentary Petrology, 2nd ed., p. 259.  The internal contradiction: 0.2-2 mm per year is 20-200 cm per 1,000 years, whereas Snelling's own 1994 and 2009 technical writing gives 2-10 cm per 1,000 years for the same modern coccolith ooze, citing mainstream sedimentology texts in both cases.  The two figures differ by roughly a hundredfold; the 2016 version conveniently reduces the uniformitarian requirement from tens of millions of years to 100,000-1,000,000; and the disagreement is never acknowledged.  The 2016 article says.  “the chalk beds are not found under the ocean floor where the limey ooze is today”.  , while Snelling's 1995 reply cited Ekdale & Bromley 1984 on deep-sea chalks.  “well-documented in the deep-sea (DSDP) cores.”  A popular article in Answers magazine, the magazine of Answers in Genesis, by Andrew Snelling.  It gives a modern accumulation rate for chalk ooze of 0.2 to 2 mm per year, which makes 200 metres of chalk take 100,000 to 1,000,000 years, and it does not acknowledge that this differs from the author's own 1994 paper.  The article uses it for that contrast. ↩

Han, Yuye et al.  “Coccolithophore abundance and production and their impacts on particulate inorganic carbon cycling in the western North Pacific.”  Biogeosciences 22(14):3681–3697.  2025.  Section §2.3, page 3684:  “the coccolithophore turnover time, which is 0.7-10 d with growth rates ranging from 0.1 to 1.5 cell divisions d⁻¹ (Krumhardt et al., 2017; Ziveri et al., 2023).”  A field study of coccolithophore abundance and production in the western North Pacific.  The article uses its field growth rates to show how far below the culture maximum real populations run.  The culture maximum is from Brand and Guillard (1981), quoted by Tyrrell and Merico (2004), p. 91: "up to 2.8 doublings per day (Brand and Guillard 1981)."  Dividing the culture maximum by the field range gives a factor of 3 to 28 of unused physiological headroom.  The productivity claim in the same paragraph is Snelling's, from "Can Flood geology explain thick chalk beds?", Journal of Creation (TJ) 8(1):11-15 (1994), who writes: "It has been reported that oceanic productivity 5-10 times greater than the present could be supported by the available sunlight, and it is nutrient availability (especially nitrogen) that is the limiting factor."  Stacking the physiological headroom (3-28), the nutrient headroom (5-10) and the burial-efficiency headroom (8-14) gives 10² to 10⁴, and every factor in it is real.  The article makes its decisive arguments in joules and moles rather than in rates. ↩

Field, Christopher B. et al.  “Primary Production of the Biosphere: Integrating Terrestrial and Oceanic Components.”  Science 281(5374):237–240.  1998.  Page 237:  The figure is in the abstract.  Page 238:  104.9 Pg C yr⁻¹ = 1.049 × 10¹⁷ g C yr⁻¹.  “we obtained an annual global NPP of 104.9 Pg of C (Table 1), with similar contributions from the terrestrial [56.4 Pg of C (53.8%)] and oceanic [48.5 Pg of C (46.2%)] components”.  A modelling study that joined two existing satellite-based models, one for land and one for the oceans, into one estimate for the whole biosphere. It gives global net primary production, the carbon that living things fix by photosynthesis after their own respiration is subtracted, as 104.9 petagrams of carbon (Pg C) per year, with similar amounts from land and ocean.  The article uses that total as the yardstick for the whole biosphere's annual output. ↩

This article.  Estimated volume of the northwest European Chalk Group.  n.d.  A calculation in the article, not a published source: four regional boxes of area and thickness give about 3.755 × 10⁵ km³ over about 6.9 × 10⁵ km², at a mean thickness of about 540 m, with an error of roughly a factor of two either way.  The boxes are southern England and the Anglo-Paris Basin; the Southern and Central North Sea; the Danish Basin and North German Basin; and the eastern extension.  Each uses published thicknesses from the Chalk and North Sea thickness sources cited elsewhere in the article, but an eyeballed area.  The energy-ceiling result (833 x global primary production) and the Chalk-alone ocean-inventory figures (0.52 Ca, 2.30 DIC, 4.62 alkalinity) both scale linearly with it.  The PIC:POC ratio of 1 used in the energy calculation is likewise not sourced to a specific paper; it is the order-of-magnitude value for blooms in the general culture literature.  A reader who wants to discount both inputs by an order of magnitude each still arrives at 8 x global primary production for the White Cliffs' province in a single year, which remains impossible.  The argument would need both inputs to be wrong by a combined five orders of magnitude before it stopped biting.  The article uses it because two headline results, the energy ceiling and the Chalk's ocean inventory, scale directly with this volume. ↩

Charette, Matthew A., and Walter H.F. Smith.  “The Volume of Earth's Ocean.”  Oceanography 23(2):112–114.  2010.  Table 1, page 112:  The row labelled.  “This study”.  gives mean depth 3682.2 m, area 361.84 × 10⁶ km², and volume 1.3324 × 10⁹ km³, from SRTM30_PLUS V5 satellite-derived bathymetry.  Table 1 lists every historical estimate back to Murray (1888, 1.349 × 10⁹ km³) and Kossinna (1921, 1.370); the total spread across a century is about 2 %, so ocean volume is not a place where anyone can hide a factor of hundreds.  The ocean mass used throughout is 1.3324 × 10¹⁸ m³ × 1027 kg m⁻³ = 1.368 × 10²¹ kg.  The in-situ mean density is nearer 1035 kg m⁻³, which would raise the calcium inventory by 0.8 %; the lower figure is used so that the answer is conservative in the Flood model's favour.  A short 2010 paper in Oceanography, the journal of The Oceanography Society, by Matthew A. Charette of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and Walter H.F. Smith, a geophysicist at NOAA.  It recomputes the world ocean's volume from satellite-derived seafloor depths, the first recomputation in twenty-five years.  The article uses it for the world ocean's volume, which sets the size of the calcium inventory. ↩

Pawlowicz, R.  “A model for predicting changes in the electrical conductivity, practical salinity, and absolute salinity of seawater due to variations in relative chemical composition.”  Ocean Science 6(1):361–378.  2010.  Table 3, page 365:  The model composition named.  “SSW76”.  has Ca²⁺ = 10.28205 mmol kg⁻¹ = 412.0838 mg kg⁻¹ at reference salinity S_A = 35.17124 g kg⁻¹.  An independent check is Kiro 2025, Nature Communications 16:7082, Table 2, which uses 10.5 mmol L⁻¹ in its global budget model.  CMI's Gavin Cox quotes.  “about 410 ppm”.  and is right about the concentration; the error lies in the inference drawn from it.  A 2010 model paper in Ocean Science by R. Pawlowicz on how seawater's electrical conductivity and salinity change with its chemical makeup.  Its Table 3 gives the calcium content of a model seawater composition, and the article uses it as the calcium concentration of seawater.  The table reproduces the internationally adopted Reference Composition of Standard Seawater of Millero, Feistel, Wright & McDougall 2008, Deep-Sea Research I 55:50-72. ↩

This article's own calculation.  Calcium and carbonate inventories of the world ocean.  n.d.  Calculated from the ocean mass in Charette & Smith 2010 and the seawater calcium figure in Pawlowicz 2010: 1.368 × 10²¹ kg × 10.28205 × 10⁻³ mol kg⁻¹ = 1.407 × 10¹⁹ mol Ca.  Volumetric cross-check with the 10.5 mol m⁻³ used by Kiro 2025: 1.3324 × 10¹⁸ m³ × 10.5 = 1.399 × 10¹⁹ mol; the two routes agree to 0.6 %, and 1.40 × 10¹⁹ mol is used throughout.  As calcium metal that is 5.64 × 10²⁰ g = 5.64 × 10¹⁴ tonnes.  Page 147:  The companion inventories used elsewhere in this section: dissolved inorganic carbon 3.16 × 10¹⁸ mol, from Zeebe 2012, which gives.  “modern whole-ocean inventory, TCO₂ ∼ 38,000 Pg C”.  A volumetric cross-check at 2.26 mol m⁻³ gives 3.01 × 10¹⁸ mol.  Page 18:  The total alkalinity, 3.15 × 10¹⁸ mol, is from Middelburg, Soetaert & Hagens 2020, Reviews of Geophysics 58:e2019RG000681, page 18 of 28, which says.  “The inventory of alkalinity in the ocean is about 3.15 10¹⁸ mol, based on a total ocean volume of 1.34 10¹⁸ m³ and a mean ocean alkalinity of about 2.35 mol m⁻³”.  Because.  “calcium carbonate formation involves the consumption of two moles of alkalinity per mole of carbon”.  (Middelburg et al., same page), the alkalinity budget permits at most 1.575 × 10¹⁸ mol of CaCO₃ per complete stripping, a factor of 8.9 less than the calcium allows, which makes alkalinity, not calcium, the binding constraint.  A calculation for this article.  It multiplies the ocean's mass by seawater's calcium concentration to give 1.407 × 10¹⁹ mol of calcium, and then the carbonate that calcium could make if all of it were precipitated: 1.41 × 10¹⁵ tonnes, or about 5.2 × 10⁵ km³ of rock at 2.7 g cm⁻³.  That last figure is the ceiling on how much limestone one complete, instantaneous, 100 %-efficient stripping of the world ocean could produce. ↩

This article's comparison of four published inventories.  Carbonate carbon in the earth's sedimentary crust.  n.d.  (1) Hunt 1972, "Distribution of carbon in crust of earth," AAPG Bulletin 56(11):2273-2277, as tabulated by Morton 1984 Table 1: limestone 64,200 × 10¹⁸ g C = 6.42 × 10²² g C = 5.35 × 10²¹ mol C.  Pages 936–937:  (2) Hayes & Waldbauer 2006, "The carbon cycle and associated redox processes through time," Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 361(1470):931-950, doi:10.1098/rstb.2006.1840, say:  “Total quantities of carbonate carbon in the crust, estimated from stratigraphic inventories … commonly range from 2800 to 6500 Emol (Emol = examole = 10¹⁸ mol).”  Page 937:  (3) Wilkinson & Walker 1989, "Phanerozoic cycling of sedimentary carbonate," American Journal of Science 289:525-548, as reported by Hayes & Waldbauer at p. 937: a mass-age fit including 9600 Emol of carbonate carbon, with an alternative fit at 7900.  Page 148:  (4) Zeebe 2012, "History of Seawater Carbonate Chemistry, Atmospheric CO₂, and Ocean Acidification," Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences 40:141-165, doi:10.1146/annurev-earth-042711-105521, says:  “A large amount of carbon is locked up in Earth's crust as carbonate carbon (∼70 × 10⁶ Pg C)”.  = 7.0 × 10²² g C = 5.83 × 10²¹ mol C.  All four cluster on about 5 × 10²¹ mol of carbonate carbon, with a defensible full spread of 2.8-9.6 × 10²¹ mol.  A comparison, made for this article, of four published inventories of the carbonate carbon in the earth's sedimentary crust, all of which cluster on about 5 × 10²¹ mol.  The article quotes every figure derived from them across the full defensible spread, 2.8 to 9.6 × 10²¹ mol. ↩

This article's own calculation.  Ocean calcium, carbon and alkalinity needed for each carbonate estimate.  n.d.  Hayes low (2,800 Emol): 200 Ca, 886 DIC, 1,778 TA/2.  Hunt 1972 (5.35 × 10²¹ mol): 382, 1,691, 3,394.  Working central value (5.0 × 10²¹ mol): 357, 1,582, 3,175.  Zeebe 2012 (5.83 × 10²¹ mol): 416, 1,844, 3,700.  Hayes high / Wilkinson & Walker (9,600 Emol): 686, 3,038, 6,095.  A calculation for this article, by carbonate-carbon estimate.  The three columns are ocean calcium, dissolved inorganic carbon, and total alkalinity divided by two, since two moles of alkalinity are consumed per mole of CaCO₃. ↩

This article's own calculation.  Calcium and carbonate in the northwest European Chalk Group.  n.d.  Two caveats belong with the number.  The volume is not a published figure: it is an estimate, labelled as good only to a factor of about two.  Halving it takes the calcium requirement to 0.26 ocean-fulls and the CO₂ to 0.031 bar, changing no conclusion.  The number is probably a lower bound, since it omits the Chalk of the English Channel and Western Approaches and the Upper Cretaceous chalk of the East European Platform.  The 200-690 figure applies to the world's carbonate rock and is not a figure for the Chalk.  A calculation for this article, stated here because it is the honest limit on the previous argument.  The northwest European Chalk Group contains about 7.278 × 10¹⁸ mol CaCO₃ (an in-house volume estimate of 3.755 × 10⁵ km³ at an in-situ bulk density of 2000 kg m⁻³ and a carbonate fraction of 0.97).  Against the ocean calcium inventory that is 0.52 ocean calcium inventories, 2.30 DIC inventories, 4.62 alkalinity inventories, and a CO₂ equivalent of 0.062 bar, about 150 times present pCO₂; so for the Chalk alone the calcium constraint is order-unity and does not by itself forbid a Flood-year Chalk, and the binding constraints at this scale are alkalinity and DIC, which are factor-of-a-few problems. ↩

Wilkinson, and Algeo.  “Sedimentary carbonate record of calcium-magnesium cycling.”  American Journal of Science 289(10):1158–1194.  1989.  Page 1160:  Riverine calcium flux 13.2 × 10¹⁸ mol Myr⁻¹ = 13.2 Tmol yr⁻¹.  Wilkinson & Algeo 1989 say:  “the present river Ca flux is about 13.2 x 10¹⁸ m/my (moles per million years) derived from the weathering of carbonate (67 percent), silicate (26 percent), and evaporite (7 percent) minerals (Meybeck, 1987)”.  Page 1161:  Mid-ocean ridges are credited, with the full Ca-for-Mg exchange stoichiometry, with 5.1-5.2 Tmol yr⁻¹ of hydrothermal calcium.  Kiro 2025, Nature Communications 16:7082, Table 2, gives 13.2 ± 1.32 Tmol yr⁻¹ independently, so the two compilations agree exactly.  Kiro's high-temperature hydrothermal term is 1.3 ± 0.5 Tmol yr⁻¹.  Adding sediment exchange (1.0 ± 0.1), fresh submarine groundwater discharge (0.2 ± 0.02) and large-scale groundwater flow (0.6 ± 0.5) from Kiro's Table 2 gives a total input of 1.57-2.01 × 10¹³ mol yr⁻¹, which is 1.1-1.4 × 10⁻⁶ of the standing inventory per year, one part in about seven hundred thousand.  An honest concession that belongs with these numbers: the modern budget does not balance.  Milliman 1993, "Production and accumulation of calcium carbonate in the ocean: Budget of a nonsteady state," Global Biogeochemical Cycles 7(4):927-957, doi:10.1029/93GB02524, says in its abstract:  Section Abstract:  “Twice as much calcium is removed from the oceans by present-day carbonate accumulation as is estimated to be brought in by rivers and hydrothermal activity (1.6 bt), suggesting that outputs have been overestimated or inputs underestimated, that one or more other inputs have not been identified, and/or that the oceans are not presently in steady state.”  Mainstream geochemistry is out by a factor of about two here and says so; the Flood model needs a factor of about 3 × 10⁸.  A 1989 paper in the American Journal of Science on how calcium and magnesium cycle through the ocean, read from the sedimentary carbonate record.  It gives the present river calcium flux and the hydrothermal calcium input from mid-ocean ridges.  The article uses it for the input side of its calcium budget. ↩

Kiro.  “[title not given in the old footnote].”  Nature Communications 16:7082.  2025.  Table 2:  The "Residence time (Ma)" row gives Ca = 0.9 Ma (0.5 Ma if submarine groundwater discharge is counted as a source), against Mg 14 Ma, Na 71 Ma, K 5 Ma and Sr 1.3 Ma.  Independently, Lebrato et al. 2020, "Global variability in seawater Mg:Ca and Sr:Ca ratios in the modern ocean," PNAS 117(36):22281-22292, doi:10.1073/pnas.1918943117, says:  Page 2, column 1:  “The residence times of Mg, Ca, and Sr are ∼13, 1, and 4 My, respectively.”  Cross-check: 1.407 × 10¹⁹ mol ÷ 23.7 Tmol yr⁻¹ (Wilkinson & Algeo's carbonate sink) = 5.9 × 10⁵ yr, and ÷ 32 Tmol yr⁻¹ (Kiro's sink) = 4.4 × 10⁵ yr, bracketing the published ~1 Myr at the same order of magnitude.  A 2025 paper in Nature Communications that builds a global budget for seawater's dissolved elements and gives the residence time of each one, including calcium.  The article uses its figure of about 0.9 million years for calcium's residence time in seawater. ↩

Woodmorappe, John.  “The antediluvian biosphere and its capability of supplying the entire fossil record.”  Proceedings of the First International Conference on Creationism 2:205–218.  Creation Science Fellowship.  1986.  Reprinted in Studies in Flood Geology (Institute for Creation Research, 1993/1999).  The paper's own text gives 17.5 million km³ (17.5 × 10⁶ km³) of Late Cretaceous and Tertiary limestones, and says its calculations rest on the assumption that they are all chalks.  Snelling 1994, in the section "Creationist Responses", summarises the paper:  “Assuming that all limestones in the Upper Cretaceous and Tertiary divisions of the geological column are all chalks, he found that these accounted for 17.5 million cubic kilometres of rock.  (Of course, not all these limestones are chalks, but he used this figure to make the 'problem' more difficult, so as to get the most conservative calculation results.)  Then using Roth's calculation of a 100 metre thickness of coccoliths produced every 200 years, Woodmorappe found that one would only need 21.1 million square kilometres or 4.1% of the earth's surface to be coccolith-producing seas to supply the 17.5 million cubic kilometres of coccoliths in 1,600-1,700 years…”  The volume is a global one, spanning the Upper Cretaceous and the whole Tertiary, and is deliberately inflated by its author to be conservative.  A conference paper by John Woodmorappe, a pen name, that estimates how large the pre-Flood biosphere would have had to be, in the 1656 years from Creation to the Flood, to have produced coal and oil, crinoidal limestones, Meso-Cenozoic chalks, Karroo Formation vertebrates and biogenic carbonates.  The article uses it as the source of the 17.5 million km³ limestone volume that Snelling adopts for the carbon problem. ↩

Gold, Thomas, and Steven Soter.  “Abiogenic Methane and the Origin of Petroleum.”  Energy Exploration & Exploitation 1(2):89–104.  1982.  Page 98:  Their 15-80 kg cm⁻² range is 14.7-78.5 bar, since 1 kg cm⁻² = 0.9807 bar.  This 1982 estimate is worth noting because an entirely independent recomputation for this article, from modern published carbonate inventories, molar mass and Earth's surface area, with p = nMg/A, lands at 23.7 to 81.2 bar, central 42.3 bar.  That is 24-82 times the mass of the whole present atmosphere and about 10⁵ times present pCO₂.  The 1982 figure and the 2026 recomputation, from different data, agree.  For comparison, Venus carries about 92 bar.  A 1982 paper by Thomas Gold and Steven Soter on the origin of petroleum, which estimated the carbon dioxide needed to make all the sedimentary carbonate rock and adopted 50 kg/cm², equivalent to some 50 atmospheres.  The article uses that estimate, which Morton quoted in 1984, for the amount of CO₂ the carbonate would need. ↩

This article's own calculation.  The shortfall in Snelling's volcanic carbon source.  n.d.  A calculation for this article.  The chalk volume Snelling adopts from Woodmorappe needs 3.50 × 10²⁰ mol of carbon, and the volcanic source Snelling proposes supplies 1.0 × 10¹⁵ mol; 3.50 × 10²⁰ ÷ 1.0 × 10¹⁵ = 3.5 × 10⁵, so the "staggering" carbon source covers about 0.0003 % of that chalk.  Measured against all crustal carbonate at 5 × 10²¹ mol, the shortfall is 5 × 10⁶, and both figures use only the two inputs and a molar mass. ↩

Nooraiepour, Mohammad et al.  “Carbon Mineralization in CO₂–Seawater–Basalt Systems: Reactive Transport Dynamics and Vesicular Pore Architecture Controls.”  Langmuir 42(16):11435–11456.  2026.  Page 11441:  “The elevated CaO content (11.44 wt %)”.  This is for Stapafell basaltic glass, with CaO + MgO + Fe₂O₃ totalling 23.8 wt %.  A 2026 study in Langmuir of how carbon dioxide, seawater and basalt react to form carbonate minerals, which reports the composition of Stapafell basaltic glass.  The article uses its CaO figure as the working calcium content of basalt.  The 10-12 % range spans normal basalt, so 11.4 wt % is a fair working figure rather than a cherry-picked maximum. ↩

Shipboard Scientific Party.  “Leg 192 Summary.”  Proceedings of the Ocean Drilling Program, Initial Reports 192.  Edited by J.J. Mahoney et al.  2001.  Section Abstract, page 1:  “With a surface area of 1.6 × 10⁶ km² and a crustal volume of 4–5 × 10⁷ km³, the Ontong Java Plateau is the world's largest volcanic oceanic plateau”.  Counting the lavas that spilled into the neighbouring basins, the Leg 192 synthesis by Fitton, J.G.; Mahoney, J.J.; Wallace, P.J.; and Saunders, A.D., "Leg 192 Synthesis: Origin and Evolution of the Ontong Java Plateau," Proceedings of the Ocean Drilling Program, Scientific Results 192 (2004), doi:10.2973/odp.proc.sr.192.101.2004, says on p. 2:  Page 2:  “the volume of igneous rock forming the plateau and filling the adjacent basins could be as high as 6 × 10⁷ km³ (e.g., Coffin and Eldholm, 1994)”.  The sourced range is therefore 40 to 60 × 10⁶ km³.  To release 5 × 10²¹ mol of calcium you must dissolve rock containing 5 × 10²¹ × 56.077 = 2.80 × 10²³ g of CaO; at 11.44 wt % CaO and ρ = 2.9 g cm⁻³ that is 2.45 × 10²⁴ g, about 8.5 × 10⁸ km³ of basalt leached completely dry.  The range quoted in the article, 8.1-9.7 × 10⁸ km³, corresponds to the middle of the published carbonate inventories.  A hostile reader who recomputes across the full span of the carbonate inventories gets 4.7 × 10⁸ to 1.6 × 10⁹ km³.  For Woodmorappe's Upper-Cretaceous-plus-Tertiary volume alone the requirement is 5.6-6.8 × 10⁷ km³; for the northwest European Chalk alone, 1.23 × 10⁶ km³, approximately the entire erupted volume of the Deccan Traps.  Since real basalt-seawater reaction extracts a few per cent of the rock's calcium rather than all of it, the honest multiple is twenty to a hundred Deccans.  For scale, the entire oceanic crust of the earth is roughly 3.0 × 10⁸ km² × 7 km ≈ 2.1 × 10⁹ km³, so the global requirement is about 40 % of all the oceanic crust on earth leached to completion in one year.  Against the largest volcanic plateau on earth, the global requirement of 8.1-9.7 × 10⁸ km³ is 14 to 24 Ontong Java Plateaus leached completely dry, and Woodmorappe's chalk volume alone is one to two of them.  Morton's tally of every large igneous province on the planet is 98 × 10⁶ km³: the global carbonate requirement is about nine times that, and Woodmorappe's chalk volume alone about 60 % of it.  A drilling-leg report of the Ocean Drilling Program, which cored igneous rock and sediment at five widely separated sites on the Ontong Java Plateau in the western Pacific.  It gives the plateau's surface area and crustal volume, and the article uses those figures as the measure of the largest volcanic plateau on Earth, against which the calcium requirement is compared. ↩

Berean Archive content plan.  Topic plan, section 2c, The heat problem.  n.d.  Section §2c:  “2c. The heat problem — flagship article: accelerated decay, CPT, magma latent heat, limestone precipitation, and impact energy together.  RATE conceded this; so should we.”  The taxonomy carries no verdict flags by design; listing a topic is a note that it should be examined, not a claim that it works.  Having examined it, this article withdraws the limestone-precipitation component.  The project's own content plan, which lists the topics the site intends to examine.  A listing there is a note that a topic should be examined, not a claim that it works.  The article uses this entry to show where the limestone-precipitation point came from before withdrawing it. ↩

Berner, Robert A.  “A New Look at the Long-term Carbon Cycle.”  GSA Today 9(11):1–6.  1999.  Section p. 6:  “the very small masses of carbon in these surficial reservoirs (total of 50 × 10¹⁸ g C, most in the ocean) as compared to the carbon in carbonate rocks (60 000 × 10¹⁸ g C) and in shales and coals (15 000 × 10¹⁸ g C)”.  The second inventory is Zeebe, Richard E.; and Wolf-Gladrow, Dieter, "Carbon Dioxide, Dissolved (Ocean)," in Gornitz, V. (ed.), Encyclopedia of Paleoclimatology and Ancient Environments (Springer), author manuscript p. 5, which states:  “A large amount of carbon is locked up in the Earth's crust as carbonate carbon (~70×10⁶ Pg C).”  The two inventories give 6.0 × 10²² g C and about 7 × 10²² g C of carbonate carbon in the crust.  Those convert to 5.0–5.8 × 10²¹ mol CaCO₃.  Multiplying: the ion-pairing route gives 5.4–6.3 × 10²⁵ J absorbed; the bicarbonate-plus-degassing route gives 1.8–2.1 × 10²⁶ J absorbed; the rock-to-rock route gives 4.5–7.4 × 10²⁶ J released.  The low end of the ion-pairing band uses only the +10.8 kJ/mol endpoint of the enthalpy range; the fully consistent absorbed band is 4.8 × 10²⁵ to 7.7 × 10²⁵ J.  This correction, from the project's own red-team pass, is recorded here rather than buried.  The direction of that error is to understate, and it changes nothing.  Per-mass conversion factors, so anyone can rescale: +0.108 MJ/kg CaCO₃ absorbed on the ion route, +0.361 MJ/kg on the bicarbonate-plus-degassing route, −0.897 MJ/kg on the wollastonite route, −1.272 MJ/kg on the anorthite route.  The inventories are compilations descending from Ronov-style volumetric surveys of the sedimentary shell; treat ±30% as the floor on their uncertainty.  A GSA Today article of November 1999 on the long-term carbon cycle that gives the mass of carbon held in carbonate rocks.  Derived from the enthalpies of the Robie & Hemingway table and from two independent published inventories of crustal carbonate carbon, of which this is one.  The article uses it to bound how much heat all the carbonate reactions together could move. ↩

Baumgardner, John R.  “Numerical Simulation of the Large-Scale Tectonic Changes Accompanying the Flood.”  Proceedings of the First International Conference on Creationism, 17–28.  1986.  Section Reprint p. 3, in both papers:  The 1986 paper gives 3 × 10²⁸ J and the 1990 paper 3.4 × 10²⁸ J of gravitational potential energy released by subducting pre-Flood lithosphere.  The 1990 paper is Baumgardner, John R., "3-D Finite Element Simulation of the Global Tectonic Changes Accompanying Noah's Flood," Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Creationism, pp. 35–44 (1990).  Section Worraker and Ward (2018), p. 673:  Worraker, William J.; and Ward, Richard, "Modeling of Flood and Post-Flood Ocean Floor Cooling," Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Creationism, pp. 673–682 (2018), p. 673, and Worraker, William, "Heat Problems Associated with Genesis Flood Models," Part 4, Answers Research Journal 16 (2023), give 1.4 × 10²⁹ J of sensible plus latent heat in the newly formed ocean floor.  The largest carbonate figure available, 7.4 × 10²⁶ J on the anorthite route at the Zeebe mass, is 0.53% of the 1.4 × 10²⁹ J; the endothermic routes are 0.04% of it.  For scale on the other side, the same 7.4 × 10²⁶ J is 138 K of ocean warming, and it is 3.6 to 5.9 times the entire heat budget of Oard's post-Flood ice-age model (1.26 × 10²⁶ J to cool the ocean 20 °C).  So the term is not negligible everywhere, only where the article uses it.  A creationist computer model of the Flood's tectonics, written by a PhD at Los Alamos who was then at the Institute for Creation Research.  Its energy source is the gravitational potential energy of cold, dense pre-Flood lithosphere sinking into the warmer mantle, and it puts a figure on that energy.  Derived by dividing the carbonate totals into two heat budgets already published in the creationist literature.  The article sets its carbonate heat figures against the creationist energy budgets, including this one. ↩

Mortimore, R. N. et al.  “British Upper Cretaceous Stratigraphy.”  Geological Conservation Review Series No. 23.  Joint Nature Conservation Committee.  2001.  Chapter 4, page 305:  “The Chalk Rock is a complex of hardgrounds and condensed successions that varies stratigraphically from place to place.  Its type locality is in the Marlborough Downs at Ogbourne Maizey, Wiltshire (SU 180 716) on the southern margin of the Transitional Province.  Here the Chalk Rock comprises three groups of named hardgrounds, the so-called Bottom, Middle and Top suites (Bromley and Gale, 1982, fig. 3; Figure 4.4…).”  The five named surfaces, bottom to top, are the Ogbourne, Pewsey, Fognam Farm, Leigh Hill and Hitch Wood hardgrounds (figure 4.4, after Bromley and Gale, 1982, figure 3).  The next clause comes from the description of Fognam Quarry, Berkshire (SU 298 800), the GCR site chosen for the Chalk Rock, not from the Ogbourne Maizey type locality (p. 313).  “There are also several unnamed glauconitized hardgrounds”.  The same volume names fifteen or more further hardground horizons through the English Chalk, among them the Navigation, Cliffe, Hope Gap, Beeding, Glyndebourne, Strahan's, Light Point and Clandon hardgrounds, the Top Rock, and Hardgrounds I–III at Calton Grove in Norfolk.  The reference volume on the Upper Cretaceous stratigraphy of Britain in the Geological Conservation Review series.  The article uses its chapter 4, pages 305–307 and 313, for the named hardground suites of the Chalk Rock. ↩

1. 72a.

   The same reference volume as the chalk-rock source, used here for how much the Chalk Rock thins where it is most condensed, and for the chalk that is missing from it.  The article uses it for the claim that where the Chalk Rock is most condensed, the whole layer is about a metre thick and stands for 20 to 40 metres of chalk accumulated elsewhere.  Chapter 3, pages 153, 156:  The Chalk Rock is 5 m thick at White Sheet Hill, 2 m at Hindon Tunnel and 1 m at Charnage Down, as chapter 3, pages 153 and 156, and chapter 4, page 306, give it.  Where it is most condensed, at Cley Hill near Warminster, the book describes.  “a complex unit of chalkstones less than 1 m thick”.  Chapter 4, page 314:  The book summarises Gale (1996):  “The corollary of Gale's interpretation is that an interval (20-40 m thick) in the basinal succession, from just above the Round Down Marl (Mailing Street Marl) in the New Pit Chalk, to a level at or above the base of the Lewes Nodular Chalk Formation, may be missing at the Ogbourne Hardground surface at Fognam and correlative localities.”  The same page adds:  “an additional 16 couplets above F20 can be identified beneath the Ogbourne Hardground at Ballard Head, the hardground itself representing the lithification of the chalk component of couplet F36,”.  Chapter 3, page 175:  The parallel count at another site, in chapter 3, page 175:  “eight more marl—chalk couplets of the New Pit Chalk Formation were preserved here beneath the base of the Spurious Chalk Rock … than at the Compton Bay GCR site.”  This is a correlation-based inference, a model and not a direct measurement.  Its strength is that it does not depend on cementation kinetics at all: a section that exists elsewhere is absent here, at a lithified, bored and mineralised surface. ↩

2. 72b.

   The same reference volume as the chalk-rock source, here for its chapter 2 on how the Chalk's hardgrounds were formed and then colonised.  The article uses it for the claim that a single chalk hardground's burrow fills preserve at least sixteen phases of sediment.  Chapter 2, page 78:  The book says, in part:  “Some surfaces on the seabed progressed from soft- to firm- to hard-grounds (Figures 2.46 and 2.47).  These early diagenetic changes provided the niche for boring sponges and algae and for encrusting oysters and bryozoa.  Bromley (1975a) found at least sixteen phases of sediment in the burrow-fills of one hardground.  Voigt (1959, 1974; Bromley, 1990) found beautifully preserved bryozoans in Thalassinoides burrow-fills that were not present outside these burrows.”  Each phase is a separate episode of sediment entering an open, maintained burrow network on one surface. ↩

3. 72c.

   The same reference volume, here for its chapter 3 on Bromley's 1967 work at Charnage Down Chalk Pit in Wiltshire.  The article uses it for the claim that burrow fills make up over half of the Chalk Rock at Charnage Down.  Chapter 3, pages 153–154:  Charnage Down Chalk Pit is a locality.  “famous as an example of extreme condensation of the Turonian Chalk Rock”.  The book says:  “Bromley (1967) investigated the Chalk Rock section and discussed burrow-fills associated with one of the hardgrounds, which were so closely spaced that they made up over 50% of the rock.  He also produced an elegant block diagram (Bromley, 1975a, fig. 18.7) to show the detailed architecture of two of the hardgrounds, the higher one with a hummocky surface and the lower with a planar surface.  This figure also demonstrates the effect of 'imposed horizontality' on the Thalassinoides burrow systems, i.e. the burrows extending down from the higher surface are unable to penetrate the hardened lower surface and divert to run along the top of it.”  The sharper datum is the second half.  Burrows that descend from an upper surface are deflected sideways by a lower one, which requires the lower surface to have been rock while the sediment just above it was still soft enough for a crustacean to dig. ↩

4. 72d.

   The reference volume on the Upper Cretaceous stratigraphy of Britain in the Geological Conservation Review series.  The article uses its figure of the zones of the Upper Cretaceous Chalk, which sets the macrofossil zones and the benthic foraminiferal zones side by side.  Chapter 1, figure 1.5, page 8:  “Zones of the Upper Cretaceous Chalk”.  The figure has nineteen traditional macrofossil zones, from Mantelliceras mantelli at the base to Belemnella lanceolata s.l. in the lower Maastrichtian.  Twenty-one benthic foraminiferal zones, UKB1 to UKB21, are mapped one-to-one against them on the same chart and grouped into six larger units, B1–B6.  About thirty-two further modern zones and subzones are listed alongside, from Mortoniceras (M.) rostratum at the base to Belemnella sumensis at the top.  The figure's own note says:  “These macrofossil zones are now subdivided using substage concepts based largely on ammonites and inoceramid bivalves.  Concentrations of fossils producing marker beds are also widely used.” ↩

Chen, Chao et al.  “Recent marine carbonate hardgrounds at Abu Dhabi: towards a better understanding of 'hidden hardgrounds' in the geological past.”  Frontiers in Marine Science 12:1552576.  2025.  Table 3, page 9:  Table 3, "Cementation rates of modern-Holocene marine hardgrounds", lists: less than 20 years by observation (Shinn 1969, Arabian Gulf); less than 4,500 years by ¹⁴C (Taylor & Illing 1969, Arabian Gulf); "several months" by observation (Dravis 1979, Bahamas); less than 130–140 years by ¹⁴C (Pigott & Land 1986, Jamaica); less than 1 year by observation (Friedman 1998, Bahamas); less than 1 year (Grammer et al. 1999, deeper Bahamian platform); and less than 900 years by ¹⁴C for the authors' own Abu Dhabi hardgrounds.  The authors' own summary, on page 9, says:  “The compilations above clearly show that marine hardground formation can happen quickly (<1 kyr) in an Aragonite Sea, with active carbonate deposition.”  The paper supplies two qualifications.  Every fast case is a shallow, warm, high-energy, aragonite-supersaturated setting, driven by.  “the pumping of supersaturated seawater thought [sic] the sediment by tides and waves”.  whereas chalk hardgrounds formed in a quiet outer-shelf sea at 50–300 m.  The fast hardgrounds also lack the features that make chalk hardgrounds interesting as evidence, namely borings and encrustations.  A 2025 paper on modern hardgrounds forming on the Abu Dhabi seafloor, with a table that compiles how fast marine hardgrounds have cemented elsewhere.  The article uses it as the honest counter-datum: modern marine hardgrounds can cement fast, so the cement carries no stopwatch. ↩

1. 73a.

   The same 2025 Abu Dhabi paper, here for its abstract and its discussion of what the surface of a hardground looks like.  The article uses it for the point that fast cementation makes a hard, flat crust with no borings, and does not make the riddled surface that later burrowers dig into.  Section Abstract:  “the studied hardground layer can be divided into lower and upper parts, characterized by planar upper surface and no borings nor encrustations.”  The authors state the contrast themselves in section 5.1.  Boring, bio-encrustation and Fe-Mn encrustation are, in their words,  Section 5.1:  “boring, bio-encrustation and Fe-Mn encrustation are often diagnostic features of typical ancient marine hardgrounds,”.  against their own Holocene examples'.  “flat upper surface with few borings and/or encrustation.”  Section 5.2:  ¹⁴C dates on their hardgrounds give 200–600 cal yr BP for the lower part and 30–400 cal yr BP for the upper part. ↩

Wilson, Mark A.  Letter to Creation Ministries International, in an exchange with Tas Walker.  2006.  “Forming a hardground probably takes years, but we do not yet have any direct way to estimate the duration of the process.”  Mark A. Wilson of the College of Wooster, writing a letter to Creation Ministries International, published verbatim in an exchange with the creationist geologist Tas Walker.  The sentence is worth quoting because it concedes that the hardground itself carries no stopwatch, which is why the argument has to be carried by superposition, colonisation and missing stratigraphy rather than by cementation kinetics.  The article uses his sentence for that concession. ↩

Walker, Tas.  Exchange with Mark A. Wilson on hardgrounds.  2006.  Section The problem is not the hardground:  “an accumulation of concentrated biotic debris, mostly adults, incorporated into a quickly forming, degassing (and consequently very mobile) carbonate body.”  In the same piece Walker offers two further mechanisms.  First, the hardgrounds are reworked pre-Flood seafloor material:  “the partly-bored shells and lithified carbonate were eroded and transported … others were concentrated as lag deposits.  It is these lag deposits which are misinterpreted by uniformitarians as the remnants of in situ hardground communities”.  Second, the borings are dewatering artefacts:  “As the sediment was dewatered, the hardground squeezed the original hole, a mould rather that a burrow, and pushed the organism out like a stone from a squeezed plum.”  He also makes a directly testable factual claim:  “the burrows and holes in the hardgrounds have not disturbed the substrate much.  The sedimentary structures are still clearly distinguishable”.  The ichnofabric evidence of Ekdale and Bromley (1983), described in this article, contradicts that claim.  A creationist's reply in the exchange with Mark A. Wilson.  The article treats it as the most serious creationist alternative, because it proposes a real mechanism for the cement.  The article notes that it does not explain the borings, the encrusters in growth position, or the sixteen cross-cutting generations of burrow fill in a single surface. ↩

Ekdale, A. A., and R. G. Bromley.  “Trace fossils and ichnofabric in the Kjølby Gaard Marl, uppermost Cretaceous, Denmark.”  Bulletin of the Geological Society of Denmark 31:107–119.  1983.  “a 30 cm-thick, grayish brown, clay-rich, pelagic carbonate unit (75 to 85% CaCO3) exposed in the Limfjord region of northern Jylland, Denmark”.  Pages 112–113:  On the count, the paper says:  “so many successive bioturbation events have occurred in this sediment that it is impossible to count them accurately.”  Page 115:  On the surviving lamination, the paper says:  “The Kjølby Gaard specimen is the only clear evidence of undisturbed primary stratification that we discovered in the entire marl unit, and it is significant that it occurs inside a relatively large burrow.”  Page 116:  The paper also establishes the tiering order: a shallow Planolites suite, then Thalassinoides at intermediate depth, then Zoophycos and Chondrites deepest.  Page 110:  The paper gives the spreiten of Zoophycos as.  “generally … about 2 mm thick and … spaced about 1 cm apart”.  What the ichnofabric establishes rigorously is ordering and repetition, not a duration.  Nobody has measured how long a Chondrites tier takes to develop in a chalk substrate.  The years come from the cyclostratigraphy and the radiometric ages, not from the burrows.  A study of the trace fossils, the burrows left by animals, in a 30 cm chalk marl in Denmark, which records how many times the sea floor there was reworked.  The article uses it for the claim that the chalk was burrowed over and over, and that the order of the burrowing can be read from the cross-cutting. ↩

Song, Shasha et al.  “A global assessment of the mixed layer in coastal sediments and implications for carbon storage.”  Nature Communications 13:4903.  2022.  Page 2:  The paper revises the 1990s global figure of "9.8 ± 4.5 cm" to a range of.  “8.0 ~ 9.5 cm, with a mean value of 8.5 ± 0.6 cm”.  The 1,780 observations come from a different dataset: Solan, Martin; Ward, Ellie R.; White, Ellen L.; Hibberd, Elizabeth E.; Cassidy, Camilla; Schuster, Jasmin M.; Hale, Rachel; and Godbold, Jasmin A., "Worldwide measurements of bioturbation intensity, ventilation rate, and the mixing depth of marine sediments," Scientific Data 6:58 (2019), doi:10.1038/s41597-019-0069-7, abstract, page 1, compiling the 1,780 observations, which are.  “the sediment mixing depth (L, n = 1780) of marine soft sediments compiled from the scientific literature (1864–2018)”.  The honest statement is that the global compilation of mixing-depth measurements runs to 1,780 observations spanning 1864–2018, and the best current mean mixed-layer depth for coastal sediments is 8.5 ± 0.6 cm, against a 1990s global figure of 9.8 ± 4.5 cm.  Either figure is of order ten centimetres, which is all the argument needs.  Two separate sources, which the article's sentence merges, are given here.  This first is a 2022 global assessment of how deep the animals mix coastal sediments.  It revises the older global figure, and the article uses it for the depth to which the animals reach, of the order of ten centimetres.  The revised value is for coastal sediments, not for the global ocean. ↩

Burrowing through the whole chalk column.  n.d.  “that it is impossible to count them accurately”.  The observations behind the article's claim that the chalk was burrowed all the way down, and that the burrowing is cross-cutting and so happened in sequence.  The chalk therefore cannot have been both thoroughly burrowed and rapidly deposited.  The evidence is the directly observed ichnofabric of chalk: the tiering; the sixteen cross-cutting sediment generations in a single hardground's burrow fills; the burrow fills that make up over 50% of the Chalk Rock at Charnage Down; and Ekdale and Bromley's finding that a 30 cm chalk marl contains so many successive bioturbation events. ↩

Keutgen, Norbert.  “A bioclast-based astronomical timescale for the Maastrichtian in the type area (southeast Netherlands, northeast Belgium) and stratigraphic implications: the legacy of P.J. Felder.”  Netherlands Journal of Geosciences 97(4):229–260.  2018.  Page 237:  Summarising Zijlstra (1994):  “Zijlstra (1994) concluded that the chalk with flint contained 75 flint layers, with individual members containing 55 and 20 flint layers, respectively, and that flint layers formed bundles of five, suggesting that precession cycles controlled flint appearance – each flint layer representing 20 kyr – in addition to eccentricity cycles, i.e. each flint bundle of five representing 100 kyr.  Consequently, the 55 flint layers of the Lixhe 1–3 members indicate that the deposition of these units took 1.1 Ma, whereas the 20 flint layers of the Lanaye Member would indicate a time frame of 400 kyr.”  Page 240:  Keutgen's caveat is that flint may not record the original bands:  “flint layers may potentially represent a secondary development and do not need to conform to primary deposition.  This kind of silica migration would also easily allow the fusion of 'silica levels' such as proposed for the Lanaye Member, especially when depositional rates were relatively low”.  His independent bioclast cycles give the Lanaye Member 600–700 kyr against Zijlstra's flint-derived 400 kyr, a difference.  “indicative of hiatuses”.  What survives the caveat is the bundled five-to-one hierarchy, and the fact that the flint bands are casts of burrow networks.  Mortimore, Wood and Gallois (2001), GCR 23, chapter 1, page 15, record that Bromley dissolved chalk blocks in acid and was left with.  “a branching network similar to the structure of modern crustacean (thalassinid) burrow systems”.  A 2018 study that builds a time scale for the Maastrichtian type area from bioclasts, the shell and skeleton fragments of marine animals, and that reviews the flint bands counted there by Zijlstra.  The article uses it for the claim that the flint bands come in bundles of five, read as precession cycles bundled into eccentricity cycles, with one layer about 20,000 years and one bundle about 100,000 years. ↩

1. 79a.

   The same 2018 study of the Maastrichtian type area, here for its count of twelve 400-thousand-year eccentricity cycles and for the gaps the method finds.  The article uses it for the claim that twelve 400-thousand-year eccentricity cycles have been counted through the Maastrichtian type area.  Section Abstract, page 229:  The abstract, and figure 2, report that the bioclast record.  “enabled the detection of twelve 400 kyr eccentricity cycles of Milankovitch cyclicity in the area.”  The same abstract reports the gaps the method finds rather than smoothing them away:  “the section is not continuous; there is a hiatus of c.700 kyr between the Gulpen and Maastricht formations at the ENCI-HeidelbergCement Group quarry.  In addition, smaller hiatuses, usually in the range of several 20 kyr cycles, have been detected in the upper Maastricht Formation.” ↩

Gale, A. S. et al.  “Orbital tuning of Cenomanian marly chalk successions: towards a Milankovitch time-scale for the Late Cretaceous.”  Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A 357:1815–1829.  1999.  “Outcrops of Cenomanian mar[l]y chalks in the Crimea (Ukraine) and SE England (UK), 2600 km apart, display conspicuous decimetre-scale rhythmicity and can be correlated by using 12 biostratigraphical events.  Closely spaced samples from the two sections were used to generate long time-series of digitally captured grey-scale reflectance data.  Spectral analysis of these data demonstrates that if the rhythmicity is assumed to be driven by precession (bedding cycles; mode at 20 ka), it is seen to be modulated by the short eccentricity cycle (100 ka bundles).  The latter signal is expressed in the sediments by the occurrence of dark marls a[t] precession minima occurring at eccentricity maxima.  Although identified in the spectra, tilt (38 ka) and the long eccentricity cycle (400 ka) are not strongly expressed.  Comparison of age-modelled, unfiltered grey-scale data between the two sections reveals strikingly similar patterns, and enables the identification of an 80 ka hiatus in the UK chalks.”  The abstract's wording is conditional: the periods follow from assuming that precession drives the rhythms, so they are a tuning and not an independent clock.  What is not assumed is the 2,600 km correlation of decimetre-scale couplets, tied by twelve independent biostratigraphic events, and that is the part a Flood model has to explain.  The couplets are about 50 cm thick and carry a measured oxygen-isotope temperature difference of up to 4–4.5 °C between the marl (cooler) and chalk (warmer) halves, from Ditchfield and Marshall (1989), as cited in Mortimore, Wood and Gallois (2001), chapter 1, page 23, and in van der Molen (2004), section 4.2, page 81.  A 1999 paper that tunes the rhythmic bands of Cenomanian marly chalk in the Crimea and in southeast England to Milankovitch orbital cycles, using spectral analysis of grey-scale reflectance records.  The article uses it for the claim that the two sections, 2,600 km apart, correlate through twelve independent biostratigraphic events, with a precession mode of 20,000 years. ↩

Wray, D. S.  “Identification and long-range correlation of bentonites in Turonian–Coniacian (Upper Cretaceous) chalks of northwest Europe.”  Geological Magazine 136:361–371.  1999.  The publisher's abstract says:  “A geochemical and mineralogical study of thin (2–20 cm) clay-rich beds found in Turonian–Coniacian chalks from the Anglo-Paris Basin has been undertaken.  On the basis of their rare-earth element (REE) and mineralogical composition it is possible to subdivide beds into bentonites, characterized by a negative Eu anomaly and elevated smectite content, and detrital beds… Six beds are considered to be bentonites (Glynde 1, Southerham 1, Caburn, Bridgewick 1, Lewes and Shoreham 2).… Correlation of bentonites between the Anglo-Paris Basin, eastern England and northern Germany can be demonstrated and independently tested, establishing a tephro-event stratigraphy across northwest Europe for this period.”  The wider British picture is in GCR 23, chapter 1, pages 15 and 25, which says that marl seams of vulcanogenic origin are.  “traceable from Sussex northwards to Yorkshire, eastwards to Germany, and southwards through the Paris Basin”.  and that the vulcanogenic Barton Marl 1 of the Northern Province correlates with the Glynde Marl 1 of the Southern Province.  A geochemical and mineralogical study of thin clay-rich beds in the Turonian–Coniacian chalks of the Anglo-Paris Basin, which sorts them into bentonites and detrital beds by their rare-earth element and mineral content.  The article uses it for the count of six named bentonites in that chalk, and for the correlation of the same beds across northwest Europe. ↩

Hattin, Donald E.  “Stratigraphy and Depositional Environment of Smoky Hill Chalk Member, Niobrara Chalk (Upper Cretaceous) of the Type Area, Western Kansas.”  Kansas Geological Survey Bulletin 225:108.  1982.  Hattin formalised 23 numbered Marker Units through the composite section, most of them bentonite clusters.  He matched Marker Units 2, 3, 4, 10, 11, 18, 21 and 22 individually to numbered beds in Scott & Cobban's (1964) Pueblo, Colorado section, a lateral tie of about 500 km.  The total thickness of the composite section is 181.8 m (596.3 ft).  This matters against the popular claim that the Kansas chalk is undisturbed.  Hattin's Marker Unit 10,  “the main caprock-forming unit”.  that caps Monument Rocks and Castle Rock, is.  “Approximately 6.7 m (22 ft) of tough, poorly stratified, partly bioturbated, somewhat granular-looking chalk.”  Section Stratigraphy chapter, Bentonite:  “Bentonite seams are a characteristic feature of Smoky Hill stratigraphy, and are scattered throughout the section (Fig. 18).  The bentonites range in thickness from less than one mm to as much as 11.3 cm (0.37 ft)”.  “In the Smoky Hill composite section described below, more than 100 bentonite seams were identified.”  Section Summary, point 2:  “The Smoky Hill contains more than 100 bentonite seams, many of which are now represented only by concentrations of iron oxide and gypsum.”  A 1982 bulletin of the Kansas Geological Survey that describes the Smoky Hill Chalk Member of the Niobrara Chalk in western Kansas, the type area for that unit.  Hattin measured a composite section 181.8 m thick, formalised 23 numbered marker units through it, and counted more than 100 bentonite seams.  The article uses it for the bentonite count, the thickest bentonite, and the marker units it cites. ↩

1. 82a.

   A Kansas Geological Survey bulletin on the stratigraphy and depositional environment of the Smoky Hill Chalk, 108 pages long.  The article uses its sediment accumulation rate, 0.036 mm/yr, to show how long a background chalk layer takes to bury a carcass.  Cited here as in Kansas Geological Survey Bulletin 225.  Section Paleoecology chapter:  “The duration of Smoky Hill deposition was approximately five million years (Obradovich and Cobban, 1975, p. 50), and total thickness of my composite section is approximately 180 m.  This equates to an average depositional rate of approximately 0.036 mm/yr for Smoky Hill deposition, which is very close to the figure (0.038 mm/yr) calculated by Fischer (1980, p. 100) for the same unit at Pueblo, Colorado.”  Hattin's own mechanism is that dense objects sank into an ooze that.  “initially consisted mostly of water”.  so that the thick lower valves of adult Volviceramus grandis.  “apparently lay deeply buried in the soft carbonate mud”.  while the animal was still alive and being encrusted.  This is why nobody in the mainstream literature proposes burial by falling chalk alone.  Burial depth is not a proxy for elapsed time on that sea floor.  Derived: 300-500 mm ÷ 0.036 mm/yr = 8,300-13,900 years. ↩

Singer, Bradley S. et al.  “A ⁴⁰Ar/³⁹Ar and U–Pb timescale for the Cretaceous Western Interior Basin, North America.”  Geological Society, London, Special Publications 544:367–391.  2023.  Table 1:  Sample 91-O-08 (Cody Shale, Scaphites depressus Zone, Billings, Montana) gives ⁴⁰Ar/³⁹Ar 87.13 ± 0.07 Ma internal, ± 0.18 total, with a paired U–Pb age on MT-08-01 from the same locality of 87.11 ± 0.08 Ma.  Sample MT-08-04 (Desmoscaphites bassleri Zone) gives ⁴⁰Ar/³⁹Ar 84.41 ± 0.13 Ma and U–Pb 84.43 ± 0.09 Ma.  Sample 78-O-05 (Telegraph Creek Formation, Scaphites hippocrepis II Zone) gives ⁴⁰Ar/³⁹Ar 81.84 ± 0.07 Ma.  Both paired Ar–Ar and U–Pb comparisons differ by 0.02 Myr.  The abstract says:  “Six bentonites that occur within the Vascoceras diartianum, Neocardiocerus juddi, Prionocylus macombi, Scaphites preventricosus, Scaphites depressus and Desmoscaphites bassleri ammonite zones, dated using both ⁴⁰Ar/³⁹Ar and U–Pb methods, yield ages in agreement to within 150 ka and form the backbone of the Western Interior Basin timescale.”  How the ages attach to Kansas, stated honestly: the dated ash beds are in Montana.  The base of the Kansas Smoky Hill sits just above the Scaphites depressus level, and its top approaches the Scaphites hippocrepis II level, by ammonite and inoceramid zonation (Hattin 1982, Summary, point 4).  The bracketing is therefore a biostratigraphic correlation, not a date measured on a Kansas outcrop.  The one exception is the Austin Chalk bentonite cited separately, which is dated in the chalk itself.  A 2023 paper that dates volcanic ash beds (bentonites) in the Cretaceous Western Interior Basin of North America by two radiometric methods, argon–argon (⁴⁰Ar/³⁹Ar) and uranium–lead (U–Pb), and uses the dates to build the basin's timescale.  The article uses it for the ages that bracket the Smoky Hill Chalk of Kansas. ↩

1. 83a.

   The 2023 paper on the Western Interior Basin timescale, cited here for one of its dated bentonites, which comes from Texas.  The article uses it because this is one of the few radiometric ages in the article measured on an ash bed lying within a chalk formation, rather than correlated into one.  Table 1:  Sample 92-O-14, a bentonite in the Austin Chalk of Grayson County, Texas, in the Cladoceramus undulatoplicatus inoceramid zone, gives ⁴⁰Ar/³⁹Ar 85.84 ± 0.23 Ma internal, ± 0.27 total. ↩

This article's own calculation.  Smoky Hill accumulation rate recomputed from the dated bentonites.  n.d.  Hattin's own figure, computed forty years earlier from a coarser clock, is within 6% of it.  Section Paleoecology chapter:  “The duration of Smoky Hill deposition was approximately five million years (Obradovich and Cobban, 1975, p. 50), and total thickness of my composite section is approximately 180 m.  This equates to an average depositional rate of approximately 0.036 mm/yr for Smoky Hill deposition, which is very close to the figure (0.038 mm/yr) calculated by Fischer (1980, p. 100) for the same unit at Pueblo, Colorado.  These figures confirm that rates of Smoky Hill deposition were slow, and help to account for the multiple generations of small oysters that encrust large inoceramids through most of the member”.  Both numbers are long-term averages of compacted thickness over duration, not measured fluxes.  Decompaction raises the implied sediment supply somewhat, and hiatuses make the depositional intervals faster while leaving total elapsed time unchanged or longer.  Neither correction is remotely of the size needed to compress five million years into one year.  A calculation made for this article, not a measurement.  It divides the 181.8 m composite thickness of the Smoky Hill by the 5.29 million years between the bentonite ages of 87.13 ± 0.07 and 81.84 ± 0.07 Ma, which gives 0.034 mm per year, or 3.4 cm per thousand years.  The article uses it to check Hattin's 1982 rate against the dated clock. ↩

Sageman, Bradley B. et al.  “Integrating ⁴⁰Ar/³⁹Ar, U-Pb, and astronomical clocks in the Cretaceous Niobrara Formation, Western Interior Basin, USA.”  GSA Bulletin 126:956–973.  2014.  Page 971, column 1:  “To directly compare astrochronologic and radioisotope estimates of duration for the combined stages consider the interval between the S. preventricosus and D. bassleri ash beds.  The ²⁰⁶Pb/²³⁸U (4.94 ± 0.11 Ma), ⁴⁰Ar/³⁹Ar (4.91 ± 0.18 Ma), and ATS values (5.00 ± 0.38 Ma) overlap within uncertainty, providing additional confirmation of agreement between the three methods.”  The 1.8% figure quoted in the article is derived: a spread of 0.09 Myr across a duration of about 5.0 Myr.  The same paper supplies the stage boundaries used throughout the North American chalks: Turonian–Coniacian 89.75 ± 0.38 Ma, Coniacian–Santonian 86.49 ± 0.44 Ma, and Santonian–Campanian 84.19 ± 0.38 Ma.  A 2014 paper that dates the Niobrara Formation of the Western Interior Basin three ways: argon–argon, uranium–lead, and astronomical clocks, which are the orbital cycles recorded in the rock.  The article uses it for the agreement between the three clocks over an interval of about 5 million years. ↩

Meyers, Stephen R. et al.  “Intercalibration of radioisotopic and astrochronologic time scales for the Cenomanian-Turonian boundary interval, Western Interior Basin, USA.”  Geology 40(1):7–10.  2012.  The abstract states that the work.  “supports an astronomically calibrated Fish Canyon sanidine standard age of 28.201 Ma”.  That is, the neutron-fluence standard on which every ⁴⁰Ar/³⁹Ar age here depends is itself tied to astronomical tuning.  The standard's calibration is Kuiper, K. F.; Deino, A.; Hilgen, F. J.; Krijgsman, W.; Renne, P. R.; and Wijbrans, J. R., "Synchronizing Rock Clocks of Earth History," Science 320(5875):500–504 (2008), doi:10.1126/science.1154339.  It gives Fish Canyon sanidine an age of 28.201 ± 0.046 Ma, and notes that before that work the astronomical and Ar/Ar scales.  “yield discrepancies of ~1.0% or more”.  Durations are insensitive to the anchor, because changing the standard age rescales all the Ar/Ar ages together.  That is why the article's argument is built on durations rather than on absolute ages.  The same paper reports the Cenomanian–Turonian boundary at 93.89 ± 0.14 Ma by simple integration and 93.90 ± 0.15 Ma by Bayesian intercalibration, and a Cenomanian–Turonian to K–Pg duration of 27.94 ± 0.16 Ma,  “with an uncertainty of less than one half of a long eccentricity cycle”.  The mitigating clause, from page 9, column 1, reads:  Page 9, column 1:  “Regardless of which Fish Canyon sanidine age is used, the weighted mean ⁴⁰Ar/³⁹Ar ages of the five bentonites obey stratigraphic superposition, and the relative time differences between samples are consistent with the astrochronologic age model.”  A 2012 paper that compares radioisotopic ages (argon–argon and uranium–lead) with astronomical ages for the Cenomanian–Turonian boundary in the Western Interior Basin.  The article uses it for the point that its argon–argon ages rest on a standard that was itself tied to astronomical calibration. ↩

1. 86a.

   The authors exclude three of 47 U–Pb ages for suspected lead loss, and conclude that the entire zircon populations of two bentonites (AZLP-08-04 and AZLP-08-05) are inherited or recycled.  The largest single inconsistency they report is that the two Neocardioceras juddii U–Pb ages.  “differ by at least 320 k.y. at the 2σ level”.  against an astrochronologic zone duration of 300 kyr.  This is normal behaviour for inherited and detrital zircon, and the authors handle it in the open.  Anyone quoting the 1.8% agreement of the three clocks should know that the data behind it required interpretive judgement.  Page 9, column 2–3:  “In contrast, the ²⁰⁶Pb/²³⁸U data are more complex, with intrasample variation in zircon ages and defiance of stratigraphic superposition.” ↩

This article's own calculation.  Largest disagreement among the Cretaceous clocks, as a share of the elapsed time.  n.d.  The largest internal disagreement anywhere in Meyers et al. 2012 and Sageman et al. 2014 is about 0.4 Myr: the roughly 320 kyr U–Pb discrepancy among the bentonite ages, and the 0.09 Myr spread among the three clocks.  The comparison the number is for: a young-earth chronology needs the Chalk's duration to be wrong by a factor of about 2.5 × 10⁷.  Granting the whole circularity charge, every U–Pb outlier, and the diagenetic-rhythm objection to cyclostratigraphy in full, still leaves radioisotopic bentonite ages bracketing the Smoky Hill Chalk at 87.13 ± 0.07 and 81.84 ± 0.07 Ma by two methods on two minerals.  The circularity objection is a 0.4% objection deployed against a 10⁷ discrepancy.  A calculation made for this article, not a measurement.  The largest internal disagreement in the two papers, about 0.4 million years, is set against the roughly 94 million years from the Cenomanian–Turonian boundary (93.89 ± 0.14 Ma) to the present that their timescale spans; 0.4 ÷ 94 = 0.4%.  The article uses it to show how small the internal disagreement is against the age of the chalk. ↩

This article's own calculation.  Interval between Smoky Hill ash falls, in conventional and Flood time.  n.d.  Hattin's Marker Unit 1 sharpens the point at the finest scale he describes:  “Three bentonite seams in a 22 cm (0.72 ft) interval, separated by 5.2 cm (0.17 ft) and 12.8 cm (0.42 ft) beds of chalk (Fig. 21).  Lowest bentonite 1.6 cm (0.05 ft), central bentonite 1.9 cm (0.06 ft), upper bentonite 0.6 cm (0.02 ft) thick… This marker lies 1.6 m (5.3 ft) above the base of the composite section.”  At Hattin's measured rate those two intervening chalk beds represent 1,444 and 3,556 years.  In a Flood year they represent 2.5 and 6.2 hours.  Hattin also records that the laminated chalks.  “could not have undergone much bioturbation because the process would have destroyed much or all of the lamination and stratified grain fabric, as well as the very thin, widely traceable bentonite seams that occur in most well-stratified units”.  In other words, the ash layers survive because the water above them was quiet.  A calculation made for this article, not a measurement.  It divides the 181.8 m of the composite section by 100 bentonites, which gives about 1.8 m of chalk between successive ash falls.  Dividing 5.0 million years by 100 gives about 50,000 years per ash fall in the conventional account, and dividing 365 days by 100 gives one ash fall every 3.6 days in a Flood year.  The inputs are Hattin's section thickness and his count of more than 100 bentonites.  The article uses it to show what a one-year Flood would ask of these ash layers. ↩

Kanungo, Sudeep et al.  “Cretaceous (Albian-Turonian) calcareous nannofossil biostratigraphy of the onshore Cauvery Basin, southeastern India.”  Cretaceous Research 118:104644.  2021.  Lines 460–467:  “The UC zonation scheme of Burnett (1998) was developed in order to improve Upper Cretaceous biostratigraphic resolution by replacing problematic markers from the earlier CC and NC zonation schemes of Sissingh (1977) and Roth (1978).  Biogeographic differences are accommodated through the provision of separate information for two regions, Europe and the Indian Ocean, with the Indian Ocean region sub-divided into the Tethyan-Intermediate and Austral provinces.”  The article gives no count of the UC scheme's zones.  The commonly repeated range is UC0 to UC20, and the secondary literature is consistent with it.  The primary source is Burnett, J.A., "Upper Cretaceous," in Bown, P.R. (ed.), Calcareous Nannofossil Biostratigraphy, Chapman & Hall (1998), pp. 132–199.  Commercial use is documented by GEUS Report 2012/37, Nannofossil biostratigraphy of the M-10X well, Danish Central Graben, which zones an oil-industry chalk well using UC19–UC20d.  Academic use in the same rocks comes from the Campanian GSSP paper (Gale et al. 2023, Episodes 46(3):451-490, doi:10.18814/epiiugs/2022/022048), which fixes the base of UC14a at the first occurrence of Aspidolithus parcus parcus at 224.60 m at Bottaccione.  A 2021 study that dates the Albian to Turonian rocks of the onshore Cauvery Basin in southeastern India by their calcareous nannofossils, which are microscopic calcite plates of marine algae.  The article uses it for the point that nannofossils have their own zonation, the UC scheme, which replaced the earlier CC and NC schemes. ↩

Jarvis, Ian et al.  “Secular variation in Late Cretaceous carbon isotopes: a new δ¹³C carbonate reference curve for the Cenomanian–Campanian (99.6–70.6 Ma).”  Geological Magazine 143:561–608.  2006.  Individual named events are used as correlation datums worldwide.  The Campanian GSSP paper uses Santonian–Campanian excursions at Seaford Head, Bottaccione, Bocieniec, Postalm and Smoky Hill in exactly this way, and GCR 23, chapter 3, page 281, ties the Pewsey isotope event at Dover to the Pewsey Hardground in the Chalk Rock's bottom hardground suite.  The abstract says:  “Carbon stable-isotope variation through the Cenomanian-Santonian stages is characterized using data for 1769 bulk pelagic carbonate samples collected from seven Chalk successions in England.  The sections show consistent stratigraphic trends and δ13C values that provide a basis for high-resolution correlation.  Positive and negative δ13C excursions and inflection points on the isotope profiles are used to define 72 isotope events.  Key markers are provided by positive δ13C excursions of up to +2…”  A 2006 paper that builds a reference curve of carbon isotopes (two forms of carbon, whose proportions are recorded in the chalk's carbonate) from 1,769 bulk carbonate samples taken across seven Chalk successions in England.  The article uses it for the 72 named isotope events that the curve defines between 99.6 and 70.6 Ma. ↩

McArthur, J. M. et al.  “Strontium isotope stratigraphy: LOWESS version 3: best fit to the marine Sr-isotope curve for 0–509 Ma and accompanying look-up table for deriving numerical age.”  Journal of Geology 109:155–170.  2001.  Page 161:  “From 0 to 7 Ma and from 65 to 90 Ma (Late Cretaceous), the half-width is about 0.000004, and it is nearly as low (0.000005) in the late Pliensbachian and early Toarcian due to the high density of data in these intervals.  From 7 Ma, it steadily worsens with age to be ±0.000012 in the early Paleocene, where data are sparse.  It is between 0.000007 and 0.000010 for much of the Jurassic and Cretaceous.”  The Late Cretaceous section of the curve was built on the English Chalk itself.  The paper's reference list includes McArthur, Thirlwall, Burnett, Kennedy, Gale, Mattey & Lord 1993b, "Strontium-isotope stratigraphy in the Late Cretaceous: a new curve, based on the English Chalk."  A caveat worth stating: the Sr curve is a relative clock calibrated against the radiometric timescale, so it is not independent evidence of absolute age.  It is independent evidence of ordered, progressive, monotonic chemical change in seawater during chalk deposition.  A 2001 paper that fits a smooth curve to the strontium-isotope ratio of seawater from 0 to 509 million years ago, and gives a look-up table for turning that ratio into an age.  The article uses it for the claim that the Late Cretaceous part of the curve is among the best-resolved intervals in the Phanerozoic. ↩

Everhart, Michael J.  “Xiphactinus audax Leidy 1870.”  Oceans of Kansas Paleontology.  n.d.  “The famous 'fish-within-a-fish' Xiphactinus audax specimen (FHSM VP-333) at the Sternberg Museum of Natural History… The stomach contents (a large Gillicus arcuatus) is curated as FHSM VP-334.  The Xiphactinus is just over 13 feet long.”  “this famous fossil of a 'fish-within-a-fish' excavated by George F. Sternberg in 1952… The six foot long, 'last meal' is a related species of ichthyodectid fish called Gillicus arcuatus.”  The specimen was collected in Gove County, Kansas.  Two further fish-within-a-fish specimens are on record: a 1926 Sternberg Xiphactinus sold to the University of Nebraska State Museum (UNSM 1495), also containing a Gillicus; and Hawkins & Everhart, "Another Sternberg 'Fish-within-a-Fish' Discovery: First Report of Ichthyodectes ctenodon (Teleostei; Ichthyodectiformes) with Stomach Contents," Transactions of the Kansas Academy of Science 113(3/4), doi:10.1660/062.113.0306.  The next quotation is from Everhart's own book, and it sets the denominator beside the showpiece:  “most specimens of Gillicus are represented by only a detached caudal fin.”  A web page by the author of Oceans of Kansas (Indiana University Press), who also wrote the modern mosasaur biostratigraphy of the chalk member.  It describes the Sternberg "fish-within-a-fish" specimens and gives their museum numbers, but it is a web page rather than a peer-reviewed description.  The article uses it for the showpiece specimen. ↩

Hone, David W. E. et al.  “Evidence for the Cretaceous shark Cretoxyrhina mantelli feeding on the pterosaur Pteranodon from the Niobrara Formation.”  PeerJ 6:e6031.  2018.  “embedded Cretoxyrhina teeth and feeding traces are known from numerous Smoky Hill vertebrate fossils, and are widely interpreted as related to feeding behaviour”.  “may have floated for sustained periods”.  “marker units 14-19 of Hattin's (1982) Smoky Hill Chalk stratigraphy”.  The paper locates the specimen by those marker units. Modern vertebrate papers locate their specimens by Hattin's bentonite markers, which is itself evidence that those markers are real, traceable time-lines.  A paper describing a Pteranodon pterosaur fossil with evidence that the shark Cretoxyrhina mantelli fed on it, from the Niobrara Formation.  The article uses it for the count of more than 1,100 Pteranodon specimens and for how rare the feeding and gut associations are among them.  The >1,100 figure is the authors' own, in the Discussion. ↩

1. 93a.

   Section Discussion, penultimate paragraph:  “However, such finds are still relatively rare occurrences — these seven associations are less than 1% of the >1,100 specimens of Pteranodon on record.” ↩

Bell, Alyssa, and Luis M. Chiappe.  “Anatomy of Parahesperornis.”  Life 10(5):62.  2020.  Section Introduction:  “typical hesperornithiform fossil specimens… are often highly fragmentary, isolated elements.  Of the over twenty hesperornithiform species that have been described, only four have assigned specimens consisting of more than three elements.  Of these four species, only two have any specimens that are over 50% complete.”  Even the best specimen, KUVP 2287, was.  “originally preserved partially disarticulated”.  The same paper gives the member's duration as.  “approximately five million years, from 82-87 Ma (late Coniacian to early Campanian)”.  An anatomy study of Parahesperornis, a species of hesperornithiform bird.  It shows how fragmentary the hesperornithiform fossil record is, and the article uses it to show that most of these fossils are not exceptionally preserved.  The sentence quoted is about hesperornithiform species as described, not only about Niobrara material. ↩

Anderson, Gail S., and Lynne S. Bell.  “Deep coastal marine taphonomy: investigation into carcass decomposition in the Saanich Inlet, British Columbia using a baited camera.”  PLoS ONE 9(10):e110710.  2014.  Section Carcass 3, at 0.2-0.4 mL/L dissolved oxygen:  “By Day 31 a thick filamentous sulphur bacterial mat was forming over the carcass… By Day 84, the bacterial mat was very thick and little external change could be seen in the carcass”.  “by late December (Day 92), oxygen levels began to rise… Over the subsequent 30 days, the carcass was rapidly skeletonized.”  Section Conclusions:  “When Carcass 3 was deployed during extreme hypoxia which excluded the larger crustaceans, the carcass remained intact for months.”  Section Carcass 2, at 0.4-1.4 mL/L dissolved oxygen, the oxygenated comparison:  “By Day 25 almost all the skin had been pulled off, revealing cleanly skeletonized yet mostly articulated bones and cartilage… By Day 31 the ribs were disarticulated.”  Honest limits: three pigs, one fjord, 135 days, one depth.  What it establishes is that the residence time of an intact carcass on a low-oxygen sea floor is set by oxygen and scavengers, not by sedimentation rate, which cuts both ways and is why the soupy-substrate mechanism does the real work in the Niobrara.  A field study that placed three pig carcasses at 100 m depth in the Saanich Inlet, a fjord whose deep water is seasonally anoxic, and watched them with a baited camera.  The article uses it to show how long a carcass stays intact on a low-oxygen sea floor, and why oxygen and scavengers set that time rather than how fast sediment falls. ↩

Ladd, Harry S., and Seymour O. Schlanger.  “Drilling operations on Eniwetok Atoll.”  U.S. Geological Survey Professional Paper 260-Y, 863–905.  1960.  Section Abstract, p. 863:  “In F-1, hard basement rock was struck at 4,610 feet, but no sample was recovered.  In E-1, unweathered basalt cuttings were obtained at 4,158 feet and solid basalt core from 4,208 to 4,222 feet.”  Conversions: 4,610 ft = 1,405.1 m; 4,158 ft = 1,267.4 m; 4,208–4,222 ft = 1,282.6–1,286.9 m.  The 1953 preliminary report (Ladd, Ingerson, Townsend, Russell & Stephenson, AAPG Bulletin 37(10):2257-2280) gives 4,154 ft rather than 4,158 ft for the first E-1 basalt cuttings; the four-foot discrepancy is recorded rather than hidden, and the Professional Paper value is used.  Two honest qualifications the creationist literature is entitled to press, which Ladd and Schlanger state themselves.  The three deep holes were sited near the lagoon shore, 1,320-4,600 ft from the seaward reef edge, so the column is dominantly lagoonal and back-reef sediment rather than reef-crest framestone (p. 863, p. 900).  Page 900:  The authors state this doubt themselves.  “It is doubtful, however, if such masses of unconsolidated materials could have accumulated and maintained themselves on a slowly subsiding foundation without some sort of a rigid containing framework”.  Section Hole F-1 at 2,003-2,028 ft (611-618 m):  “an unaltered piece of massive Porites, apparently in position of growth”.  The cores also contain Lithophaga borings, which require a hard substrate that stayed put long enough to be colonised.  Page 899:  On Darwin.  “The deep drilling on Eniwetok, however, firmly established the fact that the foundation of that atoll is a basaltic volcano that rises 2 miles above the floor of the ocean.  It thus confirmed one of the most important features of Darwin's subsidence theory.”  A U.S. Geological Survey account of the drilling on Enewetak Atoll, giving the depths reached in its three deep holes, with the cores and cuttings recovered.  The article uses its basement depth of 1,405 m to size the carbonate cap on the atoll. ↩

1. 96a.

   The source of the 1,405 m basement depth of hole F-1, which the article divides by candidate growth rates to see how long the atoll would take to grow.  The arithmetic is the article's own.  At Enewetak's own maximum measured rate, 10 mm/yr: 140,500 years.  At Montaggioni's fastest sustainable class, 20 mm/yr (itself sustainable for only about 500 years): 70,300 years.  At the highest single value anywhere in Montaggioni's compilation, 67 mm/yr from an inshore fringing reef: 21,000 years.  For comparison, the same division at Enewetak's mean reef-flat rate of 5 mm/yr gives 281,000 years, and at Verstelle's 414 mm/yr gives 3,394 years, which is where the creationist "less than 3,400 years" comes from.  The mainstream does not in fact claim the atoll grew at any of these rates: the long-term average from a late Eocene base (~34-40 Ma) to the present is 0.035-0.041 mm/yr, because reefs over geological time are limited not by how fast they can accrete but by how fast accommodation space arrives, which is a statement about tectonics. ↩

Saller, Arthur H., and Richard B. Koepnick.  “Eocene to early Miocene growth of Enewetak Atoll: Insight from strontium-isotope data.”  GSA Bulletin 102(3):381–390.  1990.  Page 381:  “The margin of Enewetak Atoll contains 1,260 to 1,405 m of Cenozoic carbonates above a volcanic basement.”  “relatively continuous carbonate sedimentation from late Eocene to early Miocene (23 Ma)”.  “The only distinct break in sedimentation from late Eocene to early Miocene was observed at ~850 m in the E1 well.  Here an unconformity formed by subaerial exposure separates backreef, upper Eocene grainstones from lower Oligocene carbonates.”  That the deepest carbonate is shallow-water Eocene limestone resting directly on basalt is from Ladd & Schlanger 1960 (PP 260-Y, p. 863) and from the AAPG 1953 abstract:  “Drilling on Eniwetok Atoll, Marshall Islands, revealed the presence of olivine basalt beneath shallow-water limestone of Eocene age at a depth of 4,154 feet.”  A GSA Bulletin paper on the growth history of Enewetak Atoll, dated with strontium-isotope data.  The article uses its abstract for the thickness of the carbonate cap and for the Eocene shallow-water limestone that rests on basalt. ↩

Montaggioni, Lucien F.  “History of Indo-Pacific coral reef systems since the last glaciation: development patterns and controlling factors.”  Earth-Science Reviews 71:1–75.  2005.  Page 43:  “In exposed settings, the mean aggradation rates range between 1.5 and 12 mm year⁻¹, with a mode of 5 mm year⁻¹ (Table 5).  In semi-exposed to sheltered reef margins, vertical accretion rates average 1 to 25 mm year⁻¹, with a mode of 9 mm year⁻¹ (Table 6).”  Page 45:  “based on maximum rates of vertical accretion, the Indo-Pacific reefs can be classified into three types: (1) fast-growing reefs, with rates up to 10 mm year⁻¹.  Such rates can be sustained for 3-5 ka and may reach up to 20 mm year⁻¹ for periods of about 500 years.”  The single highest value anywhere in Tables 5 and 6 is 67 mm/yr, for the Penrith inshore fringing reef flat (after Kleypas 1996), whose own mean is 10.3 mm/yr.  The "about eighty sites" description is the research dossier's characterisation of the two tables taken together, not a count printed in the paper.  Worth carrying: every atoll in the compilation, Enewetak, Tarawa, Funafuti, Mururoa and Bellona, has a mean Holocene accretion rate between 1.8 and 5.4 mm/yr, because a reef already at sea level cannot grow upward.  A re-examination of the published Indo-Pacific reef core dataset with recalibrated radiocarbon ages, so each entry inherits the dating of its own core.  The article uses its rates to show the fastest growth that a reef can sustain. ↩

1. 98a.

   The compilation's table of exposed reef margins, which gives the measured reef-flat growth at Enewetak.  The article uses it for Enewetak's own measured reef-flat accretion.  Table 5, page 40:  Row Enewetak, atoll, reef flat: minimum 0.3, maximum 10, mean 5 mm/yr, credited there to Tracey & Ladd 1974 and Szabo et al. 1985. ↩

Schlanger, Seymour O.  “Subsurface geology of Eniwetok Atoll.”  U.S. Geological Survey Professional Paper 260-BB, 991–1066.  1963.  Section Abstract, p. 991:  “Below both Eniwetok and Bikini Atolls, intervals characterized by fossil molds and solution channels alternate vertically with intervals marked by the presence of primary skeletal aragonite.  The leached intervals are directly and sharply overlain by unaltered unconsolidated sediments.  The tops of the leached zones are termed 'solution unconformities.'  These unconformities were formed during periods when the atolls were emergent, and they can be precisely correlated between Eniwetok Atoll and Bikini Atoll, 210 miles away.  Below both atolls there are well-defined unconformities at approximately 300 and 1,100 feet below sea level; at Eniwetok, another is present at 2,780 feet below sea level. … The atoll was emergent in early Miocene, in late Miocene, and again in Pleistocene time.  The thickness of the leached intervals indicates emergence of as much as 700 feet.”  Conversions: 300 ft = 91 m, 1,100 ft = 335 m, 2,780 ft = 847 m, 700 ft = 213 m.  Pages 994–996:  The hole-by-hole depths of the ~300 ft surface are 302, 330, 300, 294 and 290 ft across five holes on two atolls 210 miles apart; of the ~1,100 ft surface, 1,080, 1,070, 1,127 and 1,120 ft.  Section Midway Atoll paper, p. A1:  The same picture is replicated in a different ocean basin at Midway, in Ladd, Tracey & Gross, "Deep drilling on Midway Atoll," USGS Professional Paper 680-A (1970):  “Overall submergence was interrupted three or more times by emergence during the middle Miocene, at the end of the Miocene, and at least once during the Pleistocene… The altered limestones were covered by 200 feet of younger reef limestones.”  A U.S. Geological Survey study of the subsurface geology of Enewetak Atoll from its drill holes, compared with Bikini Atoll 210 miles away.  The article uses it for the solution unconformities, the old land surfaces that the cores preserve under the reef. ↩

Leopold, Estella B.  “Miocene pollen and spore flora of Eniwetok Atoll, Marshall Islands.”  U.S. Geological Survey Professional Paper 260-II, 1133–1185.  1969.  Section Abstract, p. 1133:  “Drill-hole sediments from depths of 670 to 2,500 feet beneath Eniwetok contain zones in which pollen, spores, and colonial blue-green algae are very abundant… The presence of high-island forms in the plant assemblage corroborates evidence from fossil land snails that at times during the Miocene, Eniwetok was a raised limestone island that stood well above the sea and supported upland forest communities.”  “Three deeply weathered zones, which show leaching and solution cavities and which contain no pollen and have unconformities at their tops, indicate at least three periods of prolonged emergence of Bikini and Eniwetok.”  Conversions: 670–2,500 ft = 204–762 m.  Fifty-seven kinds of plant; seventeen angiosperm genera identified; mangrove Rhizophora pollen up to 100,000 grains per gram,  “higher than my modern comparative material from Micronesia.”  Section Ladd & Schlanger 1960 (PP 260-Y), p. 900:  The land snails are reported separately:  “Both places have yielded 'high-island' land shells (Ptychodon)… These several types of evidence indicate that at both Eniwetok and Bikini the overall history of subsidence was interrupted by periods of emergence.”  Section K-1B core log, 790-831 ft:  The core log records one land snail directly:  “varied fauna of unaltered mollusks, including one land snail (Ptychodon).”  A study of the pollen, spores and algae in the Miocene drill-hole sediments of Enewetak Atoll.  It identifies fifty-seven kinds of plant and shows that the atoll was at times a raised island with upland forest, which is the evidence the article uses for land under the reef. ↩

Verstelle, J. Th.  “The growth rate at various depths of coral reefs in the Dutch East Indian Archipelago.”  Treubia 14(1):117–126.  1932.  Page 117:  The method, in his words:  “the depths of a number of reefs, as they were found during the first hydrographic survey, were compared with the depths found during the newest surveys”.  His own disclaimer, on the same page:  “As my inquiry was not made for scientific purposes, I cannot furnish these details.”  His comparison statistic is a minimum-of-samples:  “just the smallest depths found on each reef form my base of comparison”.  Verstelle's own listed role on the title line:  “1st Officer dutch Surveying Vessel 'Van Doorn'”.  Page 124:  The reef in the table on p. 124 whose smallest charted depth went from 18.00 m (1898) to 4.75 m (1930); derived, 13.25 m ÷ 32 yr = 41.4 cm/yr.  Pages 125–126:  The 41.4 cm/yr appears in the recapitulation table as the single maximum of the "rising" column of one of twelve area/depth sub-groups: Gulf of Tomini, second survey, reefs deeper than 5 m, whose own mean is 10.5 cm/yr and minimum 0.8 cm/yr.  The same table records reefs apparently sinking, with sub-group maxima of 9.4, 10.4, 13.0, 8.0 and 6.8 cm/yr.  Page 126:  The paper's own scientific editor, J. Verwey, in a postscript printed with it, reads the data as:  “These observations, then, show, that in the Gulf of Tomini reefs below 5 m on the average grow upward as much as from 9 to 14.6 cm per year.”  Verwey also flags that.  “The figures for reef growth here found are high compared with those found in some other reef areas, where upgrowth has been considered to amount to 2.5 cm per year.”  The creationist use of the maximum is Roth, Ariel A., "Coral reef growth," Origins 6(2):88–95 (1979), https://grisda.org/origins-06088, which says:  “Sewell (1935) reported 280 mm/year in the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal, and Verstelle (1932) reported a maximum rate of growth of 414 mm/year in the Celebes.  This latter figure would allow for the development of the 1405 m of the Enewetak reef in less than 3400 years.”  The reading that the extreme values are survey noise rather than biology is this project's analysis, not Verstelle's or Verwey's.  A 1932 paper in which a ship's officer, not a scientist, set out to compare charted soundings of reefs between hydrographic surveys in order to estimate how fast they grew.  Its highest figure, 41.4 cm/yr, is the one creationists cite.  The article uses the paper to show that the figure comes from one reef's chart comparison, not from a growth measurement. ↩

This article's arithmetic on the Enewetak carbonate column.  Subsidence needed for a 4,400-year Enewetak reef.  n.d.  1,405 m of carbonate over a post-Flood interval of about 4,400 years requires the volcanic foundation to sink 319 mm/yr, sustained, because reef-building corals cannot grow below about 50 m and the mainstream account has the reef growing at the rate the volcano sank.  Both sides agree on the subsidence requirement.  Section Roth 1979:  “The present explanation is that in the past, that portion of the floor of the Pacific Ocean on which Enewetak grew was at sea level and has gradually subsided as reef growth proceeded at or near the surface of the ocean.”  For comparison, Enewetak's own implied long-term subsidence rate, from 1,405 m of carbonate accumulated since a late Eocene base (~34-40 Ma), is 0.035-0.041 mm/yr, about four decimal orders slower than a 4,400-year atoll needs.  A measured rate for a mid-plate volcanic island sinking under the weight of volcanoes that are still growing is 2.4 mm/yr at Hilo, Hawaii.  The atoll model needs 133 times that rate.  No measured vertical tectonic rate on earth approaches 319 mm/yr sustained for four millennia.  None of the three published creationist models for Enewetak (Roth's fast reef growth, Whitmore's geothermal endo-upwelling, Oard's broken-carbonate-platform fragment) addresses this constraint, and the three contradict each other.  Page 90:  Moore, James G., "Subsidence of the Hawaiian Ridge," in Decker, Robert; Wright, Thomas L.; and Stauffer, Peter (eds), Volcanism in Hawaii, U.S. Geological Survey Professional Paper 1350, ch. 2, pp. 85–100 (1987), at p. 90, https://pubs.usgs.gov/pp/1987/1350/pdf/chapters/pp1350_ch2.pdf, says:  “The southeast end of the Hawaiian Ridge, including the Island of Hawaii, is currently undergoing the most rapid subsidence.  Tide gauge measurements indicate that Hilo has subsided at a rate of 2.4 mm/yr during the last 36 years”.  The arithmetic that shows what a young-earth atoll would need.  It divides the 1,405 m of carbonate by the roughly 4,400 years since the Flood, and sets the answer against measured subsidence rates.  The article uses it to show that no growth rate can fix the problem.  Roth 1979 states the same requirement himself. ↩

Miller, Kenneth G. et al.  “The Phanerozoic Record of Global Sea-Level Change.”  Science 310:1293–1298.  2005.  Page 1293:  “Long-term sea level peaked at 100 ± 50 meters during the Cretaceous, implying that ocean-crust production rates were much lower than previously inferred.”  Page 1296:  Miller's error discussion lists published Late Cretaceous estimates:  “≈110 m, 150 m, 250 m, and 80 to 200 m, and our best estimate of 100 ± 50 m”.  The 250 m figure is the Exxon/Haq curve that Miller's paper was written against.  And Müller, R. Dietmar; Sdrolias, Maria; Gaina, Carmen; Steinberger, Bernhard; and Heine, Christian.  "Long-Term Sea-Level Fluctuations Driven by Ocean Basin Dynamics."  Science 319:1357–1362 (2008).  Publisher abstract, verbatim:  “published estimates of the Late Cretaceous sea-level high differ by half an order of magnitude, from ∼40 to ∼250 meters above the present level… By assimilating marine geophysical data into reconstructions of ancient ocean basins, we model a Late Cretaceous sea level that is 170 (85 to 270) meters higher than it is today.”  The field genuinely does not agree, and the article should not pretend otherwise.  A Science paper by Kenneth G. Miller and colleagues on the global sea-level record through the Phanerozoic.  It gives a Cretaceous sea-level peak of 100 ± 50 m, and says that peak implies lower ocean-crust production than previously inferred.  The article uses it as one of two estimates of the Late Cretaceous highstand, and it reports the disagreement between published estimates. ↩

Heine, Christian et al.  “Evaluating global paleoshoreline models for the Cretaceous and Cenozoic.”  Australian Journal of Earth Sciences 62(3):275–287.  2015.  Section Online-first version, p. 4:  “we use the present-day total area of continental crust (2.22 × 10⁸ km²) as a base for our computations.”  Section Online-first version, p. 5:  Their Figure 3 plots exposed land as a percentage of that total for two independent palaeogeographic atlases: today ~68% (Smith et al. 1994) and ~71% (Golonka et al. 2006); at the ~80 Ma minimum ~49.5% (Smith) and ~56% (Golonka).  These values carry about ±1.5 percentage points of uncertainty.  Flooded continental crust ≈ 1.12 × 10⁸ km² at the Cretaceous minimum against ≈ 0.71 × 10⁸ km² today, an extra ≈ 4.1 × 10⁷ km² on the Smith atlas, roughly 4.5 times the area of the United States.  The Golonka atlas gives a smaller excess, about 3.3 × 10⁷ km².  The article quotes the larger, and the two atlases disagreeing by up to 7 percentage points of continental area at 80 Ma is exactly the sort of model spread a hostile reader is entitled to know about.  The mechanism, a retreating shoreline putting river mouths hundreds of kilometres away and shrinking the emergent source area by about 40%, is presented qualitatively rather than as a measured flux.  A 2015 paper that tests published Cretaceous and Cenozoic shoreline models against one another, and reads how much continental land was under water from two palaeogeographic atlases.  The article uses its figures to show that a retreating shoreline left the Chalk sea with far more shallow water than today. ↩

Ries, Justin B.  “Review: geological and experimental evidence for secular variation in seawater Mg/Ca (calcite-aragonite seas) and its effects on marine biocalcification.”  Biogeosciences 7:2795–2849.  2010.  Page 2796:  “Chemical analyses of fluid inclusions derived from ancient primary marine halite indicate that the Mg/Ca ratio of seawater has varied between 1.0 and 5.2 throughout the Phanerozoic Eon… During intervals of low seawater Mg/Ca (<2)… the predominant form of abiotically produced calcium carbonate (CaCO₃) produced in shallow seas was low Mg calcite (i.e., 'calcite seas').”  Page 2797:  Modern seawater Mg/Ca of 5.2 and the calcite/aragonite divide at 2.0 are from his Figure 1, on which the model curve (Hardie 1996 / Demicco et al. 2005) reaches a minimum of ≈0.6 at about 110 Ma and the fluid-inclusion points in the 90-120 Ma window cluster at ≈0.6-1.3.  One caveat cuts against a naive reading: Ries records that Cretaceous seawater saturation state was lower than today's, evidenced by a shallower carbonate compensation depth.  The Cretaceous ocean was not a supersaturated carbonate soup; what differed was the mineralogical preference and the ecology.  A review in Biogeosciences of how the magnesium-to-calcium ratio of seawater has changed through time, and how that changed which carbonate minerals marine life builds.  The article uses it to show that the Cretaceous ocean favoured calcite. ↩

1. 105a.

   A review that reports the 2005 culture experiments of Stanley, Steven M.; Ries, Justin B.; and Hardie, Lawrence A., "Seawater chemistry, coccolithophore population growth, and the origin of Cretaceous chalk," Geology 33(7):593–596 (2005), doi:10.1130/G21405.1.  That experiment grew three coccolithophore strains, the chalk-making plankton, in seawaters with different Mg/Ca ratios.  The article uses it to show that low Mg/Ca, which the Cretaceous ocean had, favoured chalk production.  Section §4.2 (p. 2812) and Figure 14 (p. 2814), reporting the experiments:  Three coccolithophore strains (Pleurochrysis carterae, Ochrosphaera neopolitana, Coccolithus neohelis) were grown for 15 days in seawaters formulated at Mg/Ca of 0.5, 1.0, 1.5, 2.5, 3.5 and 5.2.  Chalk production rose from about 12 to about 28 mg CaCO₃ per litre as Mg/Ca fell from 5.2 to 0.5.  The result, verbatim, in the experiment's words:  “Chalk production increased significantly as seawater Mg/Ca decreased (Fig. 14), resulting in the greatest amount of chalk being formed in the experimental calcite seawater treatment.  Significantly, the composition of this experimental calcite seawater treatment is believed to be representative of the oceans in Late Cretaceous time.”  “Backscatter electron images (Fig. 15) also reveal that individual coccoliths are more heavily calcified when grown in the low Mg/Ca seawater treatments.”  Section §4.4 (conclusions):  “the high Mg/Ca ratio and low Ca²⁺ concentration of modern seawater probably prevents chalk production by most extant species.”  Section §4.2:  Ries's own caveat, printed here because it is the honest part:  “the enhanced chalk production by coccolithophores that occurred in Late Cretaceous time (Hattin, 1988) was not perfectly synchronized with the seawater Mg/Ca minimum that occurred in mid-Late Cretaceous time (Fig. 1).  Thus, it is possible that other physicochemical factors… acted in concert with the low (yet not lowest) seawater Mg/Ca ratios.” ↩

O'Brien, Charlotte L.  “Cretaceous sea-surface temperature evolution: Constraints from TEX86 and planktonic foraminiferal oxygen isotopes.”  Earth-Science Reviews 172:224–247.  2017.  Section Abstract, p. 224:  “In the Cenomanian-Santonian, reconstructed latitudinal temperature contrasts are also small relative to modern (< 14 °C… compared with ~20 °C for the modern).”  Section §4.4.1, p. 238:  “the highest (> 35 °C) proxy data-based SST estimates… exceed maximum surface temperatures recorded in the modern ocean (~ 28-30 °C).  Maximum SSTs did not drop below 30 °C until the late Santonian (~ 84 Ma, δ¹⁸Opl) or early Campanian (~ 80 Ma, TEX86)… warmest Cretaceous surface-ocean palaeotemperatures (> 35 °C) occurred from the late Cenomanian to Turonian in the equatorial Atlantic.”  The calibration risk is real and the paper says so: TEX86 calibrations disagree above about 30 °C, with one variant predicting "exceptionally warm, > 40 °C" temperatures "to the extent these temperatures raise questions," and culture calibration data are "somewhat limited beyond a maximum of approximately 30 °C."  A study of Cretaceous sea-surface temperatures from two kinds of proxy, the TEX86 organic-molecule thermometer and oxygen isotopes in planktonic foraminifera.  The article uses it for the hot Cretaceous tropics and the small temperature contrast between poles and equator, and it is candid that the hottest estimates rest on a calibration that is uncertain above about 30 °C. ↩

Demangel, Ines et al.  “Development of early calcareous nannoplankton in the late Triassic (Northern Calcareous Alps, Austria).”  Global and Planetary Change 193:103254.  2020.  Section Discussion, "Lowest occurrences of coccolithophorids":  “we report the oldest occurrence of coccoliths sp. in the Alaunian 2 (mid-Norian) in SO/15 (around 220 Ma)… With caution, we propose a lowest occurrence of the coccolithophorids sp. at least in the middle Norian.”  The paper's abstract says Alaunian 3; both are mid-Norian, and the discussion is the primary statement of the observation.  Section "Evolution of early coccolithophorids":  “It is only during the late Cretaceous, 120 Ma after their apparition that coccolithophorids reach their maximum diversity (Bown et al., 1991).”  Rock-forming abundance follows shortly after their first appearance.  Preto, Nereo; Agnini, Claudia; Rigo, Manuel; Sprovieri, Mario; and Westphal, Hildegard, "The calcareous nannofossil Prinsiosphaera achieved rock-forming abundances in the latest Triassic of western Tethys," Biogeosciences 10:6053–6068 (2013), says in its abstract:  Section Abstract, p. 6053:  “Prinsiosphaera had become a significant component of lime mudstones since the late Norian, and was contributing up to ca. 60 % of the carbonate by the late Rhaetian in periplatform environments.”  This is a prediction the fossil record could have falsified: hydrodynamic sorting has no way to sort 2 µm particles by species, yet three independent studies agree on the order in which the earliest coccolith taxa appear.  A 2020 paper on the earliest calcareous nannoplankton (tiny chalk-making plankton) in the Late Triassic of Austria.  It reports what it calls the oldest occurrence of coccoliths, in the mid-Norian, and the article uses it to date the first coccolithophores to about 220 million years ago. ↩

Gajewska, Maria et al.  “Jurassic planktic foraminifera from the Polish Basin.”  Journal of Micropalaeontology 40:1–13.  2021.  Section Introduction, p. 1:  “It is suggested that planktic taxa appeared in the late Early Jurassic (Toarcian, ∼ 180 Ma) following work by Wernli (1988, 1995), Simmons et al. (1997), Hart et al. (2003), Hudson et al. (2009), Leckie (2009), Gradstein (2017), and Gradstein et al. (2017a, b).”  A 2021 study of Jurassic planktic foraminifera (shelled animals that drift in the sea) from the Polish Basin.  Its own material is Bathonian–Oxfordian, about 168–157 Ma.  The article uses its introduction to date the first planktic foraminifera to the Toarcian, about 180 Ma. ↩

Dutkiewicz, Adriana et al.  “Census of seafloor sediments in the world's ocean.”  Geology 43(9):795–798.  2015.  Section GSA Data Repository item 2015271, Appendix DR1, p. 3:  The class definition, verbatim, is what makes this decisive for a chalk article:  “Calcareous ooze: unconsolidated sediment containing > 30 % calcareous skeletons (foraminifera, pterapods, coccoliths); includes sediments described as chalk if biogenic content is > 30 %, calcareous marly ooze, foraminiferal marly ooze, foraminiferal chalk, chalk ooze, clayey nanno ooze, foraminiferal sand, foraminiferal marl and calcilutite if foraminifera > 30 %.”  The paper publishes per-ocean percentages but no global areas, so the square kilometres here are derived by integrating its published grid: calcareous ooze 93,825,758 km² = 26.52%, fine-grained calcareous sediment 45,075,758 km² = 12.74%, total mapped seafloor 353,737,000 km², sum 138,901,516 km² = 39.27%.  The authors state:  “Deep-sea lithologies that collectively compose >70 % of seafloor sediment have been predicted with very high accuracy (to 80 %).”  Two limits: "calcareous ooze" is not synonymous with coccolith ooze, since the >30% threshold admits skeletons of any kind, and no published global area exists for nannofossil ooze specifically; and 14,399 points over 354 million km² is one sample per ~24,600 km², heavily northern-hemisphere weighted.  A 2015 map of the world's seafloor sediments, built from 14,399 quality-controlled surface-sediment descriptions drawn from about 200,000 samples in the NOAA Index to Marine and Lacustrine Geological Samples, and interpolated to a 0.1° grid by a support-vector-machine classifier.  The article uses its published grid to estimate the area of calcareous ooze, the seafloor class that chalk belongs to. ↩

1. 109a.

   Derived by integrating the 2015 published seafloor lithology grid inside two ocean boxes of the article's own choosing, stated so the reader can redo them.  The grid and the integration method are the same as the article's global calculation, and the boxes are the article's own, not the authors'.  The article uses the results for the share of calcareous ooze in the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean.  Atlantic, 70°W–20°E and 40°S–65°N: 65.6 × 10⁶ km² mapped, of which calcareous ooze 24.9 × 10⁶ km² (38.0%) and fine-grained calcareous 15.9 × 10⁶ km² (24.2%), 40.8 × 10⁶ km², 62.2%.  Indian, 20–120°E and 40°S–25°N: 52.3 × 10⁶ km² mapped, calcareous ooze 19.0 × 10⁶ km² (36.3%), fine-grained calcareous 7.2 × 10⁶ km² (13.7%), 26.1 × 10⁶ km², 50.0%. ↩

Diesing, Markus.  “Deep-sea sediments of the global ocean.”  Earth System Science Data 12:3367–3381.  2020.  Page 3374:  “Based on the predicted distribution of lithology classes, calcareous sediments cover approximately 121 × 10⁶ km² of seabed below 500 m water depth, equivalent to 36.8 % of the total area (Table 4).”  Table 4, page 3375:  gives 1,211,063 pixels, 121.106 × 10⁶ km², 36.80% of 329.062 × 10⁶ km².  This is a random-forest classification of the same underlying sample database under a different class scheme and a different algorithm from Dutkiewicz et al. 2015.  That two independent mappings return 36.8% and 39.3% is why the number can be quoted with confidence.  A 2020 map of seafloor sediment types below 500 m water depth, made with the random-forest machine-learning method from a homogenised database of seafloor samples and global environmental variables.  Its sample database is the one Dutkiewicz and colleagues compiled in 2015.  The article uses its calcareous-sediment figure as an independent check on the Dutkiewicz map. ↩

Mancini, Alessandro, and Enrico Capezzuoli.  “Travertine depositional systems of Central Italy: Rapolano Terme and the Acque Albule Basin.”  Geological Field Trips and Maps 16(1.1).  2024.  Page 5:  “travertine deposits are able to influence the landscape evolution and to form morphological reliefs in a fast way, with an accumulation rate reaching 1000 mm/year (mean value: 200 mm/year; Pentecost, 2005).”  Page 11:  “maximum thickness: 90 m; Faccenna et al., 2008… covers an area of approximately 28 km²”.  The Lapis Tiburtinus at Tivoli is the thickest body the notes quote, and it marks the ceiling on what the process can build.  Ninety metres over 28 km² is not 374 m over a continent.  Travertine fabrics such as crystal crusts, shrubs, pisoids and diurnal lamination are not chalk's.  Pages 13–14:  The Rapolano Terme travertines cover 14 km².  “up to 40 m thick”.  Section Guo and Riding (1998), Sedimentology 45:163–180, abstract:  Guo and Riding independently confirmed the figure, and their abstract gives:  “Late Pleistocene travertines up to 40 m thick”.  and they note:  “High precipitation rates resulted in rapid slope aggradation and progradation.”  Excursion notes for two Italian travertine areas, written for geologists who visit them.  They quote the fastest travertine growth rates, a mean of 200 mm a year and a rate reaching 1000 mm a year, from a 2005 monograph by Pentecost.  The article uses them because they are nonetheless the most favourable carbonate rates to the creationist case anywhere in its evidence base, and one metre of travertine a year is real. ↩

De Boever, Eva et al.  “The fate of a travertine record: Impact of early diagenesis on the Y-10 core (Mammoth Hot Springs, Yellowstone National Park, USA).”  The Depositional Record 8:229–251.  2021.  “The maximum age found for the travertine sample at 44.3 m depth (YS28), that is, near the bottom of the continuous travertine section, varies between 13.4 ka ± 1.51 ka and 17.9 ka ± 0.95 ka.”  Page 245:  “Such rates are inferior to those measured in the active Mammoth springs by precipitation experiments, which are on the order of 0.2-1.0 mg/cm³h or ≤5 mm/day (Fouke, 2011; Kandianis et al., 2008).  … In situ measurements at Mammoth were taken over a couple of days in an active stream.”  Roughly 50 metres of terrace built over 13 to 18 thousand years works out to 2 to 20 mm a year, sustained, with local flow-path bursts a hundred times faster.  Section Slack (1967), USGS Professional Paper 549-A:  “Physical and chemical description of Birch Creek, a travertine depositing stream, Inyo County, California”.  Page A10:  Slack measured 5-10 mm/yr on plexiglass plates and reported "1 mm in 34 days" on a glass slide.  “1 mm in 34 days”.  Slack then watched one wet spring scour the whole crust away:  “from 4 to 8 inches (10-20 cm) of streambed material, including algae and ½-1½ inches of travertine crust, was scoured away by high flow… the eroded travertine may have represented 4-6 years accumulation.”  A study of a travertine core from Mammoth Hot Springs in Yellowstone, asking how chemical changes after deposition, called diagenesis, alter the core's age record.  It dates a sample at 44.3 metres depth to between 13.4 and 17.9 thousand years old.  The article uses it for the long-term growth rate of 2 to 20 mm a year, which is lower than the rates measured in the active springs. ↩

Wiles, Erin et al.  “Rapid beachrock cementation on a South African beach: Linking morphodynamics and cement style.”  Sedimentary Geology 378.  2018.  Section Abstract:  “Rapid cementation (<5 years) of beachrock is reported from the wave-dominated, microtidal coastline of Durban, South Africa.”  Section 4.1:  “The 2011 erosional event… removed a significant volume of sediment from the beach, causing it to retreat landward past the point where the beachrock is now encountered.  This means that both phases of beachrock cementation took place in the intervening 4-5 years between building of the new beach and uncovering of the outcrop on 3 February 2015.”  The paper also says the setting is unfavourable, which strengthens the finding:  “Rapid cementation is occurring at present, on a short timescale (four to five years), on Glenashley Beach and within a comparatively carbonate poor setting on an open, high-energy coastline.”  The 70-year-old human artefacts cemented into beachrock come from Cawthra and Uken (2012), cited in Wiles et al. section 1.1.  Page 2:  Turner (2005), in Schwartz, M.L. (ed.), Encyclopedia of Coastal Science (Kluwer), pp. 183–186, at p. 2, reports the Indian Ocean harvest and the earlier Magnetic Island observation:  “Hopley (1986) reported that beachrock formed within six months on Magnetic Island near Townsville, Australia, while Moresby (1835) wrote that Indian Ocean natives made an annual harvest of beachrock for building stone and within a year they had a new lithified crop.”  Turner's wording is "Indian Ocean natives", not "islanders".  Page 3:  On dating, Turner records the general age control, and says:  “the incorporation of modern man-made artifacts in beachrock formations rather than by ¹⁴C dates, as beachrock is poorly suited for radiocarbon dating.”  Frankel (1968) is the paper everyone cites for beachrock forming in months to years. The point that matters is that beachrock is 2 m thick on average and never more than about 5 m, and it cements sediment that already exists rather than manufacturing any.  A study of beachrock, beach sand cemented into rock, at Glenashley Beach in Durban, South Africa, which dates the cementation from the erosion events recorded in the beach.  It finds cementation in under five years on a carbonate-poor, high-energy coast.  The article uses it because its dating, from event stratigraphy, is as clean as this kind of evidence gets. ↩

Hanor, Jeffrey S.  “Precipitation of beachrock cements: mixing of marine and meteoric waters vs. CO₂-degassing.”  Journal of Sedimentary Petrology 48:489–501.  1978.  “a rate sufficient to indurate a beach sediment within a period of 12 hours”.  The maximum rate is producing low-Mg calcite crusts about 30 µm thick.  It is worth stating, for fairness, that Snelling cites Hanor in Earth's Catastrophic Past for beachrock forming "in a matter of hours", and his citation is substantially correct, because Hanor's abstract says exactly that.  A 30 µm cement rind does not show that new carbonate sediment can be made fast, because cementation, a diagenetic process (a change after deposition), operates on grains that already exist.  A paper on the chemistry of the cement that binds beach sand into beachrock, weighing two causes: seawater mixing with fresh groundwater, and loss of carbon dioxide.  Its maximum observed calcite precipitation rate, 10⁻⁹ mol cm⁻² s⁻¹, is fast enough to harden beach sediment in 12 hours.  The article uses it for that laboratory rate, which shows that the cement itself can form within hours. ↩

Wilber, R. Jude et al.  “Accumulation of bank-top sediment on the western slope of Great Bahama Bank: Rapid progradation of a carbonate megabank.”  Geology 18(10):970–974.  1990.  Section Abstract:  “Maximum rates of vertical accumulation and lateral progradation are 11-15 m/ka and 80-110 m/ka, respectively: 10 to 100 times greater than previously known for periplatform muds.”  The setting is the leeward slope of the Great Bahama Bank, and the mechanism is a slope apron of redeposited bank-top mud, so the process moves carbonate and does not manufacture it.  The production-limited number for the same system comes from Lopez-Gamundi et al. 2025, Geology, doi:10.1130/G52850.1.  Its abstract reports that Great Bahama Bank "produces 0.93-7.81 × 10¹³ g of sediment" annually and that "the sediment producers atop GBB must have produced at, or near, their maximum modern-day capacity," which is 90-760 g m⁻² yr⁻¹ over roughly 10⁵ km².  That is 10 to 100 times the best pelagic sediment-trap carbonate flux, and it still takes 0.8 to 6.7 million years to build 374 m.  The article volunteers these numbers rather than waiting for a critic to produce them.  A study of how fast mud builds up on the western slope of the Great Bahama Bank, a large shallow carbonate platform, and how far the bank edge advances sideways.  The mud is shed from the bank top onto the slope.  The article uses it for the fastest carbonate accumulation measured in the Holocene, the present geological epoch, which is 11 to 15 metres per thousand years vertically.  Mirror:  Pubs.usgs.gov ↩

This article.  Comparing the fastest Bahama Bank rate with the English Chalk and a Flood year.  n.d.  A calculation, not a published source, that sets the fastest Bahama Bank rate of 11 to 15 metres per thousand years against the English Chalk's measured rate of 13 to 15 metres per million years.  It finds the Bahama rate 750 to 1,150 times faster, and still about 25,000 times too slow to build 374 metres in one Flood year.  The article uses it to show that finding fast carbonate does not close the gap, because the chalk itself is not produced that fast anywhere.  The 11-15 m/kyr rate is 750 to 1,150 times the chalk rate.  Against a Flood year, 374 m ÷ 15 m/kyr = 24,900 years, so the fastest carbonate accumulation ever measured on earth, run continuously and without pause, is still about 2.5 × 10⁴ times too slow.  The production-limited version is worse: 374 m at 760 g m⁻² yr⁻¹ takes 799,000 years, and at 90 g m⁻² yr⁻¹, 6,710,000 years. ↩

Cloud, Preston E. Jr.  “Environment of Calcium Carbonate Deposition West of Andros Island, Bahamas.”  USGS Professional Paper 350.  1962.  Page 19:  The suspended load of a whiting is given as 11.5 mg/L, entirely aragonite needles.  Pages 20–21:  The report records the single whiting, roughly 4 km by 0.8 km, watched continuously for about 45 hours, from 12:30 pm on 11 June to 9:00 am on 13 June 1956, without dissipating.  No schooling fish were seen during about six hours of diving on it.  Later measurements by Shinn et al. (1989) give a mean of 10 mg/L and a maximum of 20 mg/L, against 1.5 mg/L in clear water.  A 1962 US Geological Survey report on calcium carbonate deposition west of Andros Island in the Bahamas, with measurements of the carbonate suspended in a whiting.  It records one whiting, about 4 km by 0.8 km, watched for about 45 hours without dissipating.  The article uses it because the size and duration of whitings are real. ↩

Broecker, Wallace S. et al.  “The origin of Bahamian whitings revisited.”  Geophysical Research Letters 27(22):3759–3760.  2000.  Page 3759, column 2:  “overgrowths of new CaCO₃ could contribute no more than 15 percent of the whiting material.”  Resuspending and redistributing mud is a real sedimentary process, so this does not make whitings unimportant.  It removes them as evidence for rapid inorganic precipitation of carbonate out of seawater.  A short letter that tests the carbon in whiting material with radiocarbon.  The ¹⁴C/C ratio of whiting material matches the underlying bottom sediment, not the dissolved carbon in the water it is suspended in, which is what resuspension predicts and direct precipitation from seawater does not.  The article uses it because it removes whitings as evidence for rapid precipitation of carbonate out of seawater. ↩

Lopez-Gamundi, Cecilia et al.  “The sediment budget of Great Bahama Bank — Earth's largest modern carbonate platform.”  Geology 53(9):748–752.  2025.  “must have produced at, or near, their maximum modern-day capacity”.  The authors' words about the platform's sediment producers.  A 2025 budget of the sediment that Great Bahama Bank produces each year, using a sediment volume constrained by seismic and core data.  The platform produces 0.93-7.81 x 10¹³ g of sediment a year over about 100,000 km², an areal rate of 98-826 g m^-2 yr^-1.  Whitings and ooids together account for only 3-38% of that production; the platform's sediment is 66-75% mud and 65-96% biologic in origin.  Holocene sediment on the bank top is 1-4 m thick and has accumulated since flooding at 6.7 ka, which is 15-60 cm per thousand years.  Recalculating the Robbins, Tao & Evans (1997) whiting budget, which had claimed whitings could supply 280% of Holocene mud production, against the actual seismically and core-constrained sediment volume converts that surplus into a deficit of 60% to 89%.  Purkis is the last author, not the first.  The article uses it for that recalculation of the whiting budget, and for the 3-38% share of the bank's sediment that whitings and ooids supply. ↩

NW European Stratigraphic Lexicon.  Chalk Group (UK Sector) — Lithology.  n.d.  No published percentage of the allochthonous share of the Central Graben chalk is given.  Van der Molen's own caveat is that seismic data cannot resolve redeposited bodies thinner than a few tens of metres, so any seismic-based fraction is a lower bound.  The entry says:  “The Central Graben primary pelagic chalks are interdigitated with large volumes of allochthonous chalk transported from the flanks of the graben by submarine slides, slumps, debris flows and turbidites during the Maastrichtian and Danian (Kennedy, 1987).  The primary chalks are bioturbated and typically have low porosity (Kennedy, 1987), whereas the allochthonous deposits have higher porosity (Taylor & Lapré, 1987).”  Of the Ekofisk Formation in the Norwegian sector, the entry says:  “In the area around the Ekofisk field, where the thickest and most complete section is found, reworked chalk dominates. … The unit consists mainly of massive, homogenous chalk and pebble floatstone interpreted as slides, slumps and debris flows, occasionally with thin pelagic layers in between.”  Of the Tor Formation, it says:  “The Tor Formation is composed of mixed pelagic and allochthonous chalks.  There is a gradual upward increase in the amount of allochthonous material.”  Valhall and Dan appear in the same literature.  The entry records that.  “in the Valhall Field on the Lindesnes Ridge, the Maastrichtian chalk was reworked through shallow-water shoaling and winnowing across the central crest, feeding coarser-grained debris flows down the flank (Elle Member; Bergen & Sikora, 1999)”.  and the Dan Field's Turonian–Maastrichtian section is one of the intervals from which the 2.5 cm per thousand years cyclostratigraphic rate comes.  Two limits on what the fact proves: redeposition moves already-accumulated chalk downslope rather than manufacturing coccoliths, since both mainstream statements above name pelagic chalk on the graben flanks as the source.  The reworked Ekofisk section contains.  “thick, heavily reworked Maastrichtian fossils”.  in a Danian unit, so.  “Dating is problematic due to the extensive reworking”.  which is a pattern a one-year model has no mechanism to produce.  The lithology entry, in the lexicon of stratigraphic units for northwest Europe, describes the rock types of the Chalk Group in the UK sector of the North Sea.  The article uses it for the fact that much of the thickest chalk, in the Central Graben, is redeposited rather than settled slowly in place. ↩

Chalk: Proceedings of the International Chalk Symposium held at Brighton Polytechnic, 4–7 September 1989.  Thomas Telford, London.  1990.  The creationist observation the article credits is Woodmorappe's, in CEN Tech. J. 9(1):37 (1995), which says:  “The 'amazing-purity' argument of chalk deposits is also false, because … most chalk deposits are not all that pure”.  Page 217:  The table of index properties for the English Chalk gives a calcium carbonate content of 55–99%, alongside an intact dry density of 1.29–2.46 Mg/m³ and a saturated moisture content of 4–40%.  Page 215:  “after the Cenomanian, during which time clay contents progressively reduced, the Chalk became (for all practical engineering purposes) a pure carbonate material.  Where its composition remains constant its plasticity also remains constant.  (Figure 2).  In the Cenomanian (Lower) Chalk CaCO₃ contents apparently vary between 45% and 95% (Destombes and Shephard-Thorn, 1971).”  For the pure white chalks specifically, R. N. Mortimore, in "Chalk or chalk?" in the same volume, says on page 17:  Page 17:  “Pure white chalks generally comprise >95% carbonate derived largely from nannofossils.”  A volume of papers from the International Chalk Symposium held at Brighton Polytechnic in 1989, on the engineering properties of chalk.  The article uses it because the English Chalk runs 55 to 99 per cent carbonate, and the Cenomanian Lower Chalk 45 to 95 per cent, so not all chalk is pure. ↩

Zhang, H. et al.  “A refinement of coccolith separation methods: Measuring the sinking characters of coccoliths.”  Biogeosciences Discussions.  2018.  Section Abstract:  “In this study, the sinking velocities of coccoliths belonging to different species were carefully measured in a series of settling experiments for the first time.  Settling velocities of modern coccoliths range from 0.154 to 10.67 cm h-1.”  Table 2:  Table 2 gives Florisphaera profunda at 0.154-0.158 cm h⁻¹, Emiliania huxleyi at 0.853, Gephyrocapsa spp. at 0.752, small Calcidiscus leptoporus at 3.351 and Cyclicargolithus floridanus at 4.174.  Derived from these velocities, a naked E. huxleyi coccolith sinks 0.205 m per day, so it needs 977 days to clear the top 200 m and 53.5 years to reach a 4,000 m seafloor.  F. profunda needs 296 years.  The same conclusion is already in the chalk literature.  Chalk: Proceedings of the International Chalk Symposium (1990), p. 632, says:  Page 632:  “Coccospheres and coccoliths are so light that they would never reach the seafloor by settlement alone (Bromley, 1979).  The sedimentation of chalk therefore commonly results from a slow submarine rain of faecal pellets of plankton feeders.”  A preprint, not a final paper.  Its header reads "Manuscript under review for journal Biogeosciences, Discussion started: 27 February 2018".  The article uses its settling experiments on individual coccoliths, which measured how fast each species sinks. ↩

This article.  Faecal-pellet transport of coccoliths, and the source of the 160 m/day figure.  n.d.  Page 38:  “Sinking-rate estimates for individual coccoliths are ≤ 0.15 metres/day, but are 160 m/day in a fecal pellet—over 1,000 times faster!”.  The mechanism is old and mainstream.  Chalk: Proceedings of the International Chalk Symposium (1990), p. 632, attributes chalk sedimentation to "a slow submarine rain of faecal pellets of plankton feeders", after Bromley (1979).  The modern experimental work on it is White et al., Scientific Reports 8:9758 (2018), which measured pellet sinking rates doubling as gut buffering reduces the fraction of ingested calcite that dissolves.  The specific figure of about 160 m/day, however, comes from a creationist source: Cox, Gavin, "Chalk challenges deep-time dogma," Creation 43(1):36-39 (January 2021), sidebar at p. 38, which cites Hüneke and Mulder, Deep-Sea Sediments (Developments in Sedimentology 63, 2011), p. 222.  The article uses it for the figure usually quoted for faecal pellets, about 160 m/day, which resolves the settling problem by packaging coccoliths into pellets that sink orders of magnitude faster.  Cox says: ↩

Cox, Gavin.  “Chalk challenges deep-time dogma.”  Creation 43(1):36–39.  Jan 2021.  Page 38:  The sidebar says:  “Sinking-rate estimates for individual coccoliths are ≤ 0.15 metres/day, but are 160 m/day in a fecal pellet—over 1,000 times faster!”  Cox's charge that pelagic rates are not measured is answered directly by the sediment-trap coccolith counts.  Cox writes:  “Importantly, these figures are not from counting sinking coccoliths.  They are based on radiometric dating from drill cores, so they completely depend upon assumptions about the unobserved past”.  The Ekman claim of "downward water velocities up to 1 m/s" is wrong by four to seven orders of magnitude.  The defence of 11 cm/yr for Southern Ocean ooze is a post-Flood rate over 4,500 years, while the chalk is a Flood rock formed in days.  The two numbers therefore differ by a factor of about 2 × 10⁵, yet are presented as if they supported each other.  A Creation Ministries International article from January 2021, the current line on chalk, and the first creationist chalk article to abandon the settling problem in favour of faecal-pellet transport.  That mechanism is real and drawn from the mainstream literature, and the article agrees with the sinking-rate point.  It is not right about everything in the piece. ↩

1. 124a.

   A magazine article, published in January 2021, in which Cox argues that the chalk's rates rest on assumptions about the unobserved past; his charge is quoted verbatim below.  The derived figures answer that charge directly, with its accuser's own preferred method: sediment traps, which count sinking coccoliths over time with no dating, giving 2.19 × 10⁹ coccoliths per square metre per day at the most productive site.  The article uses it because that converts to 1.3 to 9.9 metres per million years, slower than the English Chalk's 13 to 15 metres per million years, which makes the speed-up a Flood year requires larger.  “Importantly, these figures are not from counting sinking coccoliths.  They are based on radiometric dating from drill cores, so they completely depend upon assumptions about the unobserved past.”  Sediment traps do count sinking coccoliths, with a stopwatch and no radiometric input at all: 2.19 × 10⁹ coccoliths m⁻² d⁻¹ at mooring M4 (12.06°N, 49.19°W), trap depth 1,130 m, over 23 sixteen-day cups, with a per-cup range of 1.17-4.23 × 10⁹.  These data are from Guerreiro et al. 2017, supporting Guerreiro et al. 2021, Limnology and Oceanography 66:3190-3208.  Converting: 8.0 × 10¹¹ coccoliths m⁻² yr⁻¹, which at 2.6 pg per coccolith is 2.08 g CaCO₃ m⁻² yr⁻¹, and at 20 pg is 15.99 g m⁻² yr⁻¹.  That is 1.3 to 9.9 metres per million years of chalk.  The English Chalk's rate from thickness divided by radiometric duration is 13-15 m/Myr.  So the independent measurement is, if anything, slower than the geological one: Cox's own method, applied to real trap data, makes the chalk take longer, and enlarges the speed-up a Flood year requires. ↩

2. 124b.

   A magazine article whose sidebar on Ekman spiral currents claims that wind-driven spirals push water downwards at up to 1 metre per second.  Measured Ekman pumping velocities are of order 10⁻⁶ to 10⁻⁵ m s⁻¹, so the claim is wrong by four to seven orders of magnitude, depending on which end is taken.  The article cites it because the claim appears in Creation magazine.  Section sidebar, Ekman spiral currents:  “It is now known that surface wind velocity can cause a structure known as an Ekman spiral consisting of sinking, spiralling currents (figure 4).  This produces downward water velocities up to 1 m/s that have strong impacts on deep sea environments, to depths of thousands of metres.”  Measured Ekman pumping velocities are of order 10⁻⁶ to 10⁻⁵ m s⁻¹, which is tens of metres per year, and a few metres per day in the strongest upwelling systems.  Two things should be said in Cox's favour.  His cited source, Hüneke and Mulder, Deep-Sea Sediments (Developments in Sedimentology 63, 2011), p. 153, is largely about contourites and gravity flows, for which 1 m/s is a realistic horizontal velocity.  The most likely explanation is a horizontal current speed restated as a vertical one, which is a transcription error rather than an invention.  In the same article Cox gets a harder thing right: his faecal-pellet sinking figures, of 0.15 m/day or less for a loose coccolith against 160 m/day inside a pellet, are consistent with the mainstream literature.  They dispose of the old argument that coccoliths would take thirty years to sink, which earlier creationist writers leaned on. ↩

Alvarez, Luis W. et al.  “Extraterrestrial Cause for the Cretaceous-Tertiary Extinction.”  Science 208(4448):1095–1108.  1980.  Table 1, page 1100:  “Abundance of iridium in acid-insoluble residues in the Danish section”.  The boundary value is 41.6 ± 1.88 ppb, with an acid-insoluble residue of 44.5%, against +2.7 m <0.3, +1.2 m <0.3, +0.7 m 0.36 ± 0.06, −0.5 m 0.73 ± 0.08, −2.2 m 0.25 ± 0.08 and −5.4 m 0.30 ± 0.16 ppb.  The table's own footnote says:  “Some iridium dissolved in the nitric acid.  The whole-rock abundance was 28.6 ± 1.3 ppb.”  Page 1100:  The text says:  “the Ir in the boundary layer residue rises by about a factor of 160 over the background level (~0.26 ppb).  A 1-cm thickness of this layer would have about 72 × 10⁻⁹ gram of Ir per square centimeter.”  The paper's other statement of the same quantity, on the same page, is:  “The average Ir abundance is 29 ppb in the whole rock or 65 ppb based on the weight of acid-insoluble residue”.  The two are not in conflict.  28.6 ÷ 0.445 = 64.3 ppb, and the directly measured residue value is lower for the reason the table footnote gives.  Section Summary:  “Deep-sea limestones exposed in Italy, Denmark, and New Zealand show iridium increases of about 30, 160, and 20 times, respectively, above the background level”.  “Four different independent estimates of the diameter of the asteroid give values that lie in the range 10 ± 4 kilometers.”  Page 1099:  Alvarez's own description of the sandwich of layers:  “the Maastrichtian, or uppermost Cretaceous, is represented by white chalk containing black chert nodules… The C-T boundary is marked by the Fiskeler, or fish clay… Above the fish clay, the Cerithium limestone is present to a thickness of about 50 cm in the small basins… Above this is a thick bryozoan limestone.”  The 1980 paper that proposed an asteroid impact as the cause of the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction, and that reported iridium in the rock at three deep-sea sites.  At the Danish site, the acid-insoluble residue of the boundary layer holds 41.6 ppb of iridium, against a background of about 0.26 ppb.  The article uses it for its iridium figures at the boundary, including the roughly 160-fold enrichment, the highest of the three sites in the paper. ↩

Schulte, Peter et al.  “The Chicxulub Asteroid Impact and Mass Extinction at the Cretaceous-Paleogene Boundary.”  Science 327:1214–1218.  2010.  Table S1, section Supporting Online Material, pp. 24–26:  “Key locations that show a detailed and expanded record across the K-Pg boundary including evidence for the presence of impact ejecta”.  The count of 53 named localities or site-groups is the article's own count, made from that table.  Palaeodistances run from 300 km (Guayal, Tabasco) to 11,400 km (ODP Sites 1209-1212), on every continent and in every ocean.  The Stevns Klint and Nye Kløv row gives a palaeodistance of 10,200 km, impact ejecta of spherules, shocked quartz and Ni-rich spinel, a maximum iridium concentration of 48 ppb, and a neritic setting.  The table's section headings run:  “Very proximal … 10 to >80 m-thick”.  “Proximal … dm to 10 m-thick”.  “Intermediate … 1 to 10 cm-thick”.  “Distal … mm-thick”.  Two things in the table are worth stating, because they cut in different directions.  The event-deposit thickness scales cleanly with distance, which is what a single point source predicts.  The iridium concentration does not.  It is low near the crater (0.25 ppb at La Lajilla, 1.5 ppb at Demerara Rise) and high far away (48 at Stevns, 56 at Caravaca, 70 at Woodside Creek).  That inversion is real, it is the observation ICR's Clarey makes much of, and the mainstream explanation is that most of the vaporised iridium went into the global stratospheric plume rather than the local ejecta blanket, which Alvarez predicted in 1980.  A paper by 41 authors on the Chicxulub impact and the mass extinction at the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary.  Its supporting tables list the sites where the impact layer has been found, with each site's distance from the crater.  The article uses it for the number of sites and their distances from Chicxulub. ↩

This article.  Accumulation rate of the Rødvig Formation at the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary.  n.d.  Page 31:  Surlyk, Damholt and Bjerager (2006) describe the formation as "mainly 30-70 cm" thick:  “mainly 30-70 cm”.  30-70 cm ÷ 200 kyr = 0.15-0.35 cm/kyr.  The 150 cm Kulstirenden section gives 0.75 cm/kyr.  The erosional hardground at the top of the formation is estimated at about 200 kyr after the K-Pg boundary.  Section Machalski et al. (2025), Scientific Reports 15:45802:  “Ammonite survival across the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary confirmed by new data from Denmark”.  Page 11:  Machalski et al. (2025) say:  “Machalski and Heinberg tentatively estimated the hardground at the top of the Cerithium Limestone to have formed 200 kyr after the K-Pg boundary, following Smit.”  Compare the English Chalk beneath, at 1.3-1.6 cm/kyr compacted.  Two independent cross-checks show that the boundary interval really is slow, and neither comes from Denmark.  The Fiskeler, the Cerithium Limestone, the truncating hardground and the base of the Danian bryozoan mounds all sit inside the 328 ± 15 kyr Paleogene portion of magnetochron C29r, in Sprain, Courtney J.; et al., "Calibration of chron C29r: New high-precision geochronologic and paleomagnetic constraints from the Hell Creek region, Montana," GSA Bulletin 130:1615-1644 (2018), p. 1636.  The total chron duration is 587 ± 53 ka, p. 1639.  The Danian pelagic limestone filling the Chicxulub crater itself accumulated at 0.068 to 2.6 cm/kyr across seven planktic-foraminiferal biozones at IODP Site M0077.  The most catastrophic hour in the Phanerozoic left the thinnest and slowest-accumulating unit in the section, because the impact cut sediment supply rather than raising it.  A derived calculation, not a published rate.  It divides the 30 to 70 cm thickness of the Rødvig Formation, the two Danish layers at the boundary, by about 200,000 years, the time estimated for their deposition.  The article uses it to show that the boundary layer accumulated more slowly than the ordinary chalk beneath it, which a catastrophe would not produce. ↩

Sepúlveda, Julio et al.  “Rapid resurgence of marine productivity after the Cretaceous-Paleogene mass extinction.”  Science 326:129–132.  2009.  Section Abstract:  “Here we present a high-resolution record of geochemical variation in the remarkably thick Fiskeler (also known as the Fish Clay) boundary layer at Kulstirenden, Denmark.  Converging evidence from the stable isotopes of carbon and nitrogen and abundances of algal steranes and bacterial hopanes indicates that algal primary productivity was strongly reduced for only a brief period of possibly less than a century after the impact, followed by a rapid resurgence of carbon fixation and ecological reorganization.”  The study was done on the Fish Clay itself, at its thickest development.  It cuts against the older "Strangelove ocean" picture and in favour of a fast biological recovery, and the article uses it that way.  A longer recovery would only make the Flood-year problem worse.  A geochemistry study of the Fiskeler, or Fish Clay, the boundary layer at Kulstirenden in Denmark, using the isotopes of carbon and nitrogen and the fossil molecules of algae and bacteria.  It finds that ocean algae were strongly reduced for only a brief period, possibly less than a century, after the impact, followed by a rapid recovery.  The article uses it for the fast return of marine productivity after the impact. ↩

Sato, Honami et al.  “Prolonged ¹⁸⁷Os/¹⁸⁸Os excursion implies hydrothermal influence after the Chicxulub impact in the Gulf of Mexico.”  Nature Communications 16:2901.  2025.  Section Abstract, pages 2, 8, 12:  Against an ocean residence time of about 40 kyr for osmium and about 2 kyr for iridium, these recovery times are long.  The same paper supplies the crater-floor sedimentation rates quoted in the preceding note.  A study of osmium isotopes, a chemical record of seawater, after the Chicxulub impact in the Gulf of Mexico.  It finds that the seawater signal returns to background in about 200,000 years at distal pelagic (open-ocean) sites, and in about 700,000 years inside the Chicxulub basin.  The article uses it for the 200,000-year recovery at distal sites. ↩

Machalski, Marcin et al.  “Ammonite survival across the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary confirmed by new data from Denmark.”  Scientific Reports 15:45802.  2025.  Page 11:  “P. pseudobulloides (Plummer, 1927), which is dated at 68 kyr after the K-Pg boundary event.  Thus, this may be taken as the minimum duration of ammonite survival, at least in the Sigerslev area.”  Page 3:  On the zonation, the paper says:  “In terms of planktic foraminifer stratigraphy, the Fiskeler Member belongs to the P0 Zone, the Cerithium Limestone Member to zones Pα to P1a, and the overlying Korsnæb Member to zones P1b to P1c.”  A paleontology study of ammonites, extinct shelled sea animals, in the Danish boundary beds.  Its headline finding is that the ammonites in the Cerithium Limestone are autochthonous Danian survivors rather than reworked Maastrichtian material, with only one specimen judged reworked.  The article uses it for the 68,000-year interval before the first appearance of Parasubbotina pseudobulloides, a tiny planktic (floating) shelled organism, after the boundary. ↩

This article.  Five published positions on where the Chalk falls in the Flood.  n.d.  Section Position 1, Snelling / Answers in Genesis, page 302:  “in a matter of days to weeks toward the end of the Flood year”.  That is Snelling, Andrew A., "The Geology of Israel within the Biblical Creation-Flood Framework of History: 2. The Flood Rocks," Answers Research Journal 3:267-309 (2010).  In that Israel study he extends Flood chalk deposition continuously from the Upper Cretaceous into the Upper Eocene and concludes that.  Pages 304–305:  “rather than [placing the boundary] at the Cretaceous/Tertiary (K/T) boundary in the middle of where there was continuous chalk deposition, it makes more sense to place it between the Eocene and Miocene”.  Globally, Snelling's Earth's Catastrophic Past: Geology, Creation and the Flood, vol. 2, Institute for Creation Research, Dallas (2009), says at p. 761 that the boundary.  Page 761:  “must be above the Cretaceous/Tertiary boundary in the strata record”.  Section Position 2, Matthews, page 44:  Matthews, "Chalk and 'Upper Cretaceous' Deposits are Part of the Noachian Flood," Answers Research Journal 2:29-51 (2009), says:  “their deposition occurred around day 150 in the Noachian Flood”.  Section Position 3, Clarey and Werner:  Clarey, Timothy; and Werner, Davis, "A progressive global Flood model confirmed by rock data across five continents," Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Creationism 9:412-445 (2023), say at pp. 430-431:  Pages 430–431:  “We suspect the Zuni was deposited from about Day 90 of the Flood to Day 150 of the Flood”.  and that the Flood does not end until the top of the Neogene.  Section Position 4, Austin et al. 1994; Whitmore and Garner 2008:  The boundary sits at or just below the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary.  Whitmore, John H.; and Garner, Paul, "Using Suites of Criteria to Recognize Pre-Flood, Flood, and Post-Flood Strata in the Rock Record with Application to Wyoming (USA)," Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Creationism, pp. 425-448 (2008), says at p. 436:  Page 436:  “approximately during Lance to Fort Union Time (the Cretaceous/Tertiary boundary occurs after the Lance)”.  They flag this placement as.  “a significant modification of the position previously expressed by Garner (1996a, 1996b).”  Section Position 5, Tyler:  Tyler, David J., "A post-Flood solution to the chalk problem," CEN Tech. J. 10(1):107-113 (1996), says at p. 107:  Page 107:  “all of the Upper Cretaceous chalk is post-Flood, formed over a timescale measured in decades”.  The paper is at https://creation.com/images/pdfs/tj/j10_1/j10_1_107-113.pdf.  A survey of five positions on when the Chalk was laid down in the Flood, each with the document that states it.  In every position except Tyler's, the Chalk is a Flood deposit, so the article's arithmetic applies to all of them.  The boundary dispute is about the Cenozoic, not the Chalk. ↩

Clarey, and Werner.  “A progressive global Flood model confirmed by rock data across five continents.”  Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Creationism 9:412–445.  2023.  Table 1, page 422:  Zuni volumes by continent in km³: North America 16,446,210; South America 23,202,680; Africa 57,756,300; Europe 16,160,960; Asia 78,157,140.  The total is 191,723,290 km³, with an average thickness of 1.918 km and a surface area of 99,964,200 km².  Arithmetic: 191,723,290 km³ ÷ 60 days = 3.20 × 10⁶ km³/day.  Page 423:  Clarey's headline finding:  “the Zuni alone has 32.6 % of the global total Phanerozoic sediment volume (the Tejas has 32.5 %)”.  So on the ICR model the interval containing the Chalk is the fastest interval of the Flood, at twice the whole-Flood average.  Page 431:  “We suspect the Zuni was deposited from about Day 90 of the Flood to Day 150 of the Flood”.  “The deposits from these tsunami waves became the Zuni megasequence”.  The word "chalk" occurs twice in that 21,800-word paper, both times inside a paragraph summarising Snelling's Israel study.  The ICR programme has never addressed chalk accumulation rates.  A conference paper from the Institute for Creation Research (ICR) that gives sediment volumes for six large packages of rock layers, called megasequences, across five continents.  It is the only published output of ICR's 3,000-column database.  The article quotes its numbers because they are the most quantitative in the creationist case, and the Zuni megasequence holds 191.7 million km³ of sediment, which the model places between days 90 and 150 of the Flood. ↩

1. 132a.

   Derived arithmetic on the sediment totals in Clarey and Werner's Table 1, comparing the rate at which sediment accumulates in a 371-day Flood with the modern rate at which rivers carry sediment to the sea.  The article uses it because, taken at face value, the creationist numbers imply a rate about 95 million times the modern river flux.  Table 1, page 422:  Summing the six megasequence totals gives 588,370,880 km³ across five continents.  Over a 371-day Flood that is 1.586 × 10⁶ km³/day.  Against a modern global river solid-sediment flux of 15.2 Gt/yr, about 6.1 km³/yr at a density of 2.5 g/cm³, that is ≈ 9.5 × 10⁷ times the present rate.  The river flux figure is from Wittmann et al. 2020.  Section Holt (1996), CEN Tech. J. 10(1):128–167, p. 161:  The order of magnitude is independently corroborated from inside the creationist literature.  Holt, Roy D., "Evidence for a Late Cainozoic Flood/post-Flood Boundary," computes an average Flood sediment deposition rate that is:  “over 131 million times what all the Earth's rivers presently carry”.  Although his printed figure of.  “at least 7.3 × 10²³ g/day”.  is internally inconsistent with his own inputs by two orders of magnitude, the self-consistent value being 7.3 × 10²¹ g/day. ↩

2. 132b.

   An audit of the sediment-volume table in Clarey and Werner (2023), which checks the printed total against the sum of the six megasequence rows.  The printed total is 644,658,610 km³, which is 8.73% more than the six rows add to, 588,370,880 km³.  The article uses it to flag an internal inconsistency in the dataset, while noting that the percentages in the paper's own figure are sound.  Table 1, page 422:  The printed "Total" row across five continents, 644,658,610 km³, exceeds the sum of the same table's six megasequence rows, 588,370,880 km³, by 56,287,730 km³, which is 8.73%.  Per continent the shortfalls are North America 14,494,170; South America 2,225,150; Africa 16,375,580; Europe 3,348,640; and Asia 19,844,190 km³.  “Surface area totals and average thickness totals are affected by overlap and/or missing megasequences”.  The caption explains overlap effects for surface area and average thickness only, and says nothing about volume, which should simply be additive.  Possible causes include a separately computed total-sediment isopach, inclusion of Precambrian or unassignable strata, or a compilation error.  The paper does not say, and the database is not public.  A practical consequence, and a point in Clarey's favour: his Figure 14 percentages reproduce exactly when normalised to the 588.4 × 10⁶ km³ sum rather than to the printed Total, so the percentages are sound and it is the Total row that is anomalous. ↩

3. 132c.

   Arithmetic on the megasequence volumes in Clarey and Werner's Table 1, asking what share of the sediment falls after the Flood when the Flood/post-Flood boundary is placed at different geological boundaries.  The article uses it to show that the choice of boundary moves a large share of the column, and that this undercuts Tyler's post-Flood chalk.  Table 1, page 422:  The Tejas megasequence is 191,255,830 km³, which is 32.5% of the 588,370,880 km³ six-megasequence sum.  So a Flood/post-Flood boundary at the K-Pg, which falls at the Zuni/Tejas join, makes a third of Clarey's entire Phanerozoic sediment volume post-Flood.  A mid-Carboniferous boundary makes 83.6% of it post-Flood, a post-Flood-to-Flood ratio of 5.10 to 1.  This is a derived table, and the megasequences do not map exactly onto the systems that define the boundaries, so treat it as an order-of-magnitude quantification of a claim that both Clarey and Snelling make in words.  Section Snelling, Earth's Catastrophic Past vol. 2, p. 756:  Snelling says:  “if the Flood/post-Flood boundary were placed within middle or upper Carboniferous strata, then the volume of sediment deposited in the post-Flood period would have been more than twice as much the volume of sediments deposited in the Flood itself.  Therefore, the amount of catastrophism and rainfall in the post-Flood period would have had to eclipse the catastrophism and rainfall during the Flood!”  Clarey's own database makes that "more than twice" into five times, and it is the argument that undercuts Tyler's post-Flood chalk from the inside, without anyone ever discussing chalk. ↩

Garner, Paul et al.  “Flood models.”  TJ 14(3).  2000.  Section Closing paragraph:  “None of us is satisfied with the model that we proposed in 1996.  In the light of the problems encountered, our thinking has moved on, albeit not in a direction that McIntosh et al. would approve of.  On the other hand, we remain convinced that Genesis preserves a trustworthy historical record of a global Flood.”  Section Letter:  The same letter denies the chronological squeeze without saying what interval they would substitute:  “None of us subscribes to the idea (in our opinion untenable) that only 350 years separate the Flood from the end of the dinosaurs or that the dinosaurs perished just before Abraham's time.”  The petrological correction reads:  “The chalk deposits of the Cretaceous are not 'usually taken to be the crushed remains of marine shells'… whereas the dominant constituent is (intact) platelets of microscopic plankton.”  The three published answers to the model are McIntosh, Andy; Taylor, Steve; and Edmondson, Tom, "Flood models: the need for an integrated approach," CEN Tech. J. 14(1):52-59 (2000), whose description of chalk as crushed shells provoked the correction above; Snelling, Earth's Catastrophic Past, vol. 2, pp. 755-756 (2009); and Reed, John K.; Kulikovsky, Alexander; and Oard, Michael J., "Can Recolonization Explain the Rock Record?" CRSQ 46(1):27-39 (2009).  The word "chalk" occurs exactly once in the Reed paper, in the bibliography.  Its attack is on the model's use of the chronostratigraphic timescale, not on Tyler's field data, which remain unanswered.  The final blow was internal: Garner himself moved to a Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary in Whitmore and Garner (2008), "a significant modification of the position previously expressed by Garner (1996a, 1996b)."  A four-author letter, including Tyler, in which the authors say that none of them is satisfied with the model they proposed for the Chalk in 1996.  It also corrects a description of chalk as crushed shells, and the correction is right.  Fairness requires reporting it.  The article cites it because it is the strongest thing a defender of the standard model can say. ↩