Rapid Deposition and Catastrophism

"To attempt to account for these vast graveyards in terms of present-day processes and events, except via the most extreme and unscientific extrapolation, is absolutely impossible!" — John Whitcomb and Henry Morris, The Genesis Flood, 1961¹

"Superposed strata are not necessarily identical to successive layers." — Pierre Julien, Yongqiang Lan and Guy Berthault, Bulletin de la Société Géologique de France, 1993²

"If the 1980 Mount St. Helens eruption had been followed by a series of volcanic breccia flows into Spirit Lake, spaced long enough apart to bury successive sets of logs and stumps as they sank, it would likely have produced a deposit very similar to the Yellowstone Fossil Forests." — Harold Coffin, Origins, 1997³

Summary

Rapid deposition is the young-earth movement's favourite kind of field evidence. A thick bed laid in a day, a canyon cut in an afternoon, a bed of thousands of skeletons, a cliff of upright stumps: each looks like the work of more water than any river carries. This section tests four such cases in four articles: Guy Berthault's flume experiments, the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens, the famous fossil graveyards, and the stacked petrified forests of Yellowstone. This overview asks two questions of all four. How much of what the young-earth writers point to does mainstream geology already read as rapid? And what can a local catastrophe establish about a global one?

Six conclusions, stated first.

Mainstream geology already reads every feature in these cases as rapid. Philip Kuenen made laminae from one steady flow in a flume in 1966, and Edwin McKee's team measured up to 12 feet of laminated flood sand at Bijou Creek, Colorado, laid down in June 1965.⁴ ⁵ Berthault's own 1993 paper lists twenty earlier published explanations for such laminae.² The USGS paper Steven Austin cites for the Mount St. Helens layers puts single beds inside single flows.⁶ The excavators of the great bonebeds explain each one by a catastrophe.⁷ And the first person to publish that mudflows carry stumps upright was a mainstream sedimentologist, William Fritz, in December 1980.⁸ On rate, the young-earth case is arguing against a view that mainstream geology does not hold.
Each case does establish something, and it should be granted. A laminated bed need not be a stack of slow events. A canyon 40 m deep can be cut in a day in loose debris, by about one volume of water for each volume of debris, a better ratio than Austin's own Grand Canyon model needs. Animals die by the hundred and are buried fast. Stumps float, sink and stand upright on a lake floor.
None of the four establishes a global flood, and the reason is the same in each: read in the rock, every case records many events with time between them, or a duration far longer than a year. The young-earth field workers ask for the time themselves. Harold Coffin says Spirit Lake would match Yellowstone only after a series of flows "spaced long enough apart".³ Leonard Brand, who led the creationist team that counted the Pisco whales of Peru, asks for "a few decades or a few hundred years".⁹ Andrew Snelling grants that fossil graveyards "are usually only of local to regional extent".¹⁰
Where the four articles price the time, it runs from years to millennia. Alexander Lalomov's paleohydraulic table, the one dating method Berthault's school has applied to a real formation, gives 2,919 years for 26 m of sandstone, and about 1,083 years even at perfect flow efficiency.¹¹ ¹¹ Spirit Lake buries a 20-foot stump in about 2,400 years at its cored rate.¹² ¹³ In one 45-m interval of the Karoo, weathered bones lay exposed 2 to 20 years, about seven to seventy times the 110 days Timothy Clarey's Flood model gives those rocks.⁷ ¹⁴ The 80 m of Pisco whale beds take 80 to 800 years at Brand's own rates.¹⁵
The young-earth side keeps real ground. Austin's Mount St. Helens numbers check out against the USGS. Brand's team published its whale count in Geology. The water-to-rock ratio of the Toutle canyon favours the catastrophist. And Coffin's data on the organic layers at Yellowstone still has no mainstream answer.¹⁶
Two of the four articles disagree about one number. Mount St. Helens leans on Austin's "about ten percent" of logs upright at Spirit Lake. Yellowstone's Petrified Forests prints Coffin's sonar count of 62 per cent. Part 6 shows that both come from the same survey with the same count of upright stumps, and differ only over how many logs lie flat. That part is settled; which total is right is not.

The four articles, one line each.

Berthault's Sedimentation Experiments: real, refereed flume work showing laminae form inside one flow; it claims only that strata are "not necessarily" successive layers, and its school's own dating method gives centuries to millennia.
Mount St. Helens: Austin's measurements stand, but the layers are flow units, the canyon was cut in loose debris, and Spirit Lake deposits upright stumps without burying them.
Fossil Graveyards: the famous beds were buried fast, each by a local cause written in its own rock, and many record months to years of exposure and are stacked by the dozen.
Yellowstone's Petrified Forests: the trees on Specimen Ridge grew where they stand, while Coffin's data on the organic layers stays unanswered.

Verdict. A local catastrophe can show that one bed, one canyon or one graveyard formed fast. Mainstream geology has granted that since the 1960s. It cannot show that the whole stack formed in one year, because at every site examined the rock records many catastrophes with time between them, or a duration far longer than a year, and that time is what a global Flood has to remove.

How the cases are judged

A local catastrophe can establish two kinds of thing. It can show that a feature once thought slow can form fast, which is a claim about rate. And it can show that a mechanism exists, such as grains sorting themselves into layers or stumps settling upright. It cannot by itself show how big the water was, or that the whole pile of rock around it formed in the same year.

The young-earth models make the second claim, not the first. They do not say that each bed took a year. They say that all of the beds, and the rock between them, formed within one year. In Timothy Clarey's model, for instance, the rock that holds the Karoo reptiles and the Alberta dinosaurs was laid down "between Days 40-150 of the Flood".¹⁷ So the test that decides each case is not how fast one bed formed. It is what lies between the beds: soils, weathered bone, regrown trees, burrows, and the plain thickness of rock that has to fit in the window.

Each article below gets the young-earth claim in its authors' own words first, then the article's verdict. Part 5 sets the four side by side, with every figure the articles computed.

Part 1: Berthault's sedimentation experiments

The claim. Answers in Genesis introduces Guy Berthault as a "French creation scientist" who "performed groundbreaking laboratory experiments demonstrating that multiple laminations can form spontaneously".¹⁸ Andrew Snelling wrote in 1997 that the result had been "applied to a creationist understanding of the Flood-deposition of thinly laminated shale strata of the Grand Canyon sequence."¹⁹ Berthault himself argued in 2004 that the Tonto Group of the Grand Canyon was laid down side by side, not in succession: "The simultaneous deposit of a particle of clay (Bright Angel) in zone 5 and sand (Tapeats) in zone 4 is therefore certain."²⁰

The verdict. The physics is right and was refereed, but the refereed paper claims only that "Superposed strata are not necessarily identical to successive layers," and never mentions the age of the earth or the Flood.² The flume was 0.15 m wide, 0.15 m deep and 2.40 m long.² The mechanism was in print by 1970 and was shown in a flume by Kuenen in 1966, and Berthault says in writing that he is not a creationist.²¹ The Tonto argument is McKee's own 1945 reading of a shoreline moving across the land.²² When Lalomov applied the school's paleohydraulic method to 26 m of sandstone near St Petersburg, it returned 2,919 years, and about 1,083 years with the efficiency set to perfect.¹¹ ¹¹ And Berthault's own erosion rig found that limestone and dolomite lost essentially nothing to clean water at up to 26 m/s.²³ The article concludes that the experiments removed one bad argument for an old earth, that every stratum is a separate slow event, and put nothing in its place. The full case is in Berthault's Sedimentation Experiments.

Part 2: Mount St. Helens

The claim. Steven Austin made three claims about rapid deposition and erosion at the volcano, and a fourth about dating. On the layers: "Conventionally, sedimentary laminae and beds are assumed to represent longer seasonal variations, or annual changes, as the layers accumulated very slowly. Mount St. Helens teaches us that stratification does form rapidly by flow processes."¹² On the canyon cut by the mudflow of 19 March 1982: "This canyon system is a one-fortieth scale model of the real Grand Canyon," and "Geologists should learn that the long time scale they have been trained to attach to landform development may be misleading."¹² Tas Walker of Creation Ministries International puts it more sharply: "So, the creek did not cause the canyon. The canyon caused the creek."²⁴ On the logs in Spirit Lake: "It would appear that about ten percent of the deposited logs were in an upright position," which Austin offers as a model for upright fossil stumps.²⁵

The verdict. Austin's measurements stand, and the USGS confirms almost every one. The layers are pyroclastic flow units. The USGS paper he cites says of them, "Each set is probably the result of a different flow, whereas individual beds within bedding sets may result from changing conditions within single flows that alternatively eroded and deposited as they swept by."⁶ The canyon was cut in debris measured at 1.85 grams per cubic centimetre against 2.31 for the mountain it came from.²⁶ Snelling concedes the point: "They are quite correct that the sediment layers at Mount St. Helens were still soft when the canyon system was carved into them".²⁷ Two of the canyon's numbers favour the catastrophist. The flood at the foot of the cone was "at least 13,800 m3/sec," and about 4 million cubic metres of water removed 3 to 10 million cubic metres of debris, a ratio near one to one that beats the three to one Austin needs for the Grand Canyon.²⁸ ²⁸ ²⁹ But the ratio measures a loose bed, the "scale model" is a slot about 8.5 times too narrow for its depth, and the drainage network took "nearly 3 years" to integrate, its largest single mapped step a rainstorm on 20 February 1982, a month before the flood that gets the credit.³⁰ ³¹ At Spirit Lake the stumps are deposited upright, but the lake buries them at "roughly 0.25 cm per year," so every stump actually buried standing at Mount St. Helens needed a lahar or a pyroclastic flow, a second catastrophe.¹³ The article's verdict is that the site teaches what mainstream geology has taught since the 1960s, that rates vary and catastrophes do much of the work, and that it does not show lithified rock behaving like fresh pumice. The full case, including the potassium-argon dates on the 1986 dacite, is in Mount St. Helens.

Part 3: Fossil graveyards

The claim. John Whitcomb and Henry Morris made the argument in 1961: "To attempt to account for these vast graveyards in terms of present-day processes and events, except via the most extreme and unscientific extrapolation, is absolutely impossible!"¹ Morris restated it as a challenge in 1974: "Similar dinosaur graveyards are found on every continent, all over the world. Again the uniformitarian is challenged to point to any such phenomena occurring anywhere in the world today."³²

The verdict. The argument is half right. Good skeletons do need rapid burial, and the famous beds do record catastrophes: Roger Smith calls the Karoo's burying floods "essentially catastrophic events," and the Tanis fish of North Dakota were buried within about an hour of the end-Cretaceous impact.⁷ ³³ But each burial is local, the largest single bed, Hilda in Alberta, covering about 2.3 square kilometres, and each records its own cause in its own rock: river and coastal floods, drought, a channel choked with carcasses, algal blooms, ash. Many record time on the surface. The Hilda mega-bonebed, the best case anywhere for a herd drowned in one flood, records "month-to-multiyear exposure times".³⁴ And the beds are stacked: Dinosaur Provincial Park has "many tens of bonebeds present in any 10-m-thick stratigraphic interval in the lowest 40 m," and the 346 Pisco whales "were not buried as an event, but were distributed uninterrupted through an 80-m-thick sedimentary section."³⁵ ³⁶ The young-earth literature is itself divided. John Whitmore and Paul Garner put the Green River fish beds after the Flood, Brand will not put the Pisco whales in the Flood year, and the Institute for Creation Research puts both inside it.³⁷ ⁹ Either way, the article concludes, the existence of a graveyard does not point to a global flood. The full case, including Robert Broom's estimate of 800 billion animals buried in the Karoo and how he reached it, is in Fossil Graveyards.

Part 4: Yellowstone's petrified forests

The claim. On Specimen Ridge and Amethyst Mountain, petrified stumps stand upright in the cliff, level above level. Erling Dorf counted 27 levels at one bluff and read them as 27 forests. The ministry versions say the trees never grew there. John Morris wrote that "the roots abruptly terminate at ground level, or in some cases with a 'root ball' — individual roots having been broken."³⁸ Jonathan Sarfati wrote that growing forests have soil, humus and rootlets, and "the petrified 'forests' lack all these."³⁹ Coffin's own careful version uses Spirit Lake: if the eruption "had been followed by a series of volcanic breccia flows into Spirit Lake, spaced long enough apart to bury successive sets of logs and stumps as they sank, it would likely have produced a deposit very similar to the Yellowstone Fossil Forests."³

The verdict. The trees on Specimen Ridge grew where they stand. Richard Yuretich examined stumps at eight levels and "found none that were contained entirely within conglomerate"; they are rooted in fine sandstone.⁴⁰ Karowe and Jefferson set a transport test in advance and wrote, "No evidence of transport in upright position was seen during our investigations at Yellowstone National Park."⁴¹ The stumps they saw rafted upright at Mount St. Helens were "less than 2 m high" with root mats "approximately 1.5 m across," while the Specimen Ridge trees are "relatively tall (4–9 m high)".⁴¹ ⁴¹ Fritz, who proposed transport, conceded in-place trees in print and wrote, "I never disagreed with Dorf (1964) on the amount of time represented in the sequence".⁴² In the Toutle River sediment flows "only 10%–13% of the transported trees remain upright," against 28 to 75 per cent upright in Coffin's own counts at Yellowstone.¹⁶ ³ Two things survive on the creationist side. The burial was catastrophic, which nobody disputes. And Coffin's data on the organic layers, with no animal fossils in a century of digging except termites in the wood, no Sequoia cones under Sequoia levels, and twelve of 120 thin sections with the organic matter at the bottom of a layer, has no published mainstream answer.⁴³ ⁴³ ¹⁶ ³ Even so, Coffin's own model needs flows "spaced long enough apart" for each level, so both sides need repeated burials with intervals, and the dispute is only over how long the intervals were. The full case is in Yellowstone's Petrified Forests.

Part 5: The cases side by side

The first table asks the section's two questions of each case. The young-earth claim is given in its authors' terms, and the verdict is each article's own.

Case	Young-earth claim	What mainstream geology already reads as rapid	What the case establishes	What it does not establish about a global Flood	The article's verdict
Berthault's flumes	Laminae form at once from mixed sand, so stacked strata need not be successive; the Tonto Group was laid side by side	Laminae inside one flow: Kuenen 1966, Middleton 1970, Bijou Creek 1965; side-by-side facies, McKee 1945	A laminated bed need not be many slow events	A duration for any real formation; the school's own method gives 2,919 years for 26 m	Sound experiments, unsound inference
Mount St. Helens layers	Layers formed in seconds to minutes, against what Austin calls the conventional view that layers are seasons or years	Single beds inside single pyroclastic flows; about 8 m in one pit on 12 June 1980	Volcanic flow deposits form fast	Anything about laminae read as years in other settings	True, and already held by volcanology
Toutle canyon	A one-fortieth scale Grand Canyon cut in a day; the canyon caused the creek	A canyon cut fast in loose debris; the Missoula floods, mainstream since Bretz	Shape alone does not date a landform; water to rock near 1 : 1	That lithified rock erodes like debris at 1.85 g/cm³; the drainage network took nearly 3 years	Splits: two numbers favour the catastrophist, the substrate decides it
Spirit Lake stumps	Stumps can be rafted upright, so upright fossil stumps need not have grown in place	Upright transport by mudflows, Fritz, December 1980	Stumps float, sink and stand upright	Burial: about 2,400 years for a 20-foot stump at the cored rate; each stump buried standing needed a second catastrophe	Genuine, published first by a mainstream geologist, stops short of burial
Fossil graveyards	No present process makes such graveyards, so they point to the Flood	Every bed studied is explained by a catastrophe: floods, drought, algal blooms, ash, an impact surge	Each bed was buried fast	Global scale: largest bed about 2.3 km²; months to years of exposure; beds stacked by the tens	Half right: rapid burial yes, a global flood no
Yellowstone forests	Stumps were rafted in and stood up; roots "abruptly terminate"; no soils	Burial by volcanic mudflows, at a rate Dorf put about 100 times a shallow-water rate	The burial was catastrophic; the organic layers are unexplained	That the standing trees were moved: rooted in sandstone, 4–9 m tall, 28 to 75 per cent upright	Trees grew in place; organic-layer data unanswered

The second table gathers every figure the four articles computed or carried, in their own numbers.

Article	What was computed	Result	Compared with
Berthault	Lalomov's Table 4, four members, 26 m of Cambrian and Ordovician sandstone near St Petersburg	2,919 years; about 1,083 years with the efficiency coefficient set to 1 in every row¹¹	A Flood year of 371 days
Berthault	The fastest single member, Sablino lower, at perfect efficiency	8 m × 100 km ÷ 38.62 m³/day/m = 20,715 days, or 57 years; the whole table still about 271 years after halving both thickness and flow path	371 days; the inputs would have to move by a factor of about 2,900 together
Berthault	MacAndrew's rate for Tapeats to Kaibab as one event	More than 4,000 feet at more than 35 feet a day over 110 days; 10.8 feet a day over 371 days⁴⁴	No published discharge or sediment load delivers either rate
Mount St. Helens	Water to rock in the Toutle canyon	4 × 10⁶ m³ of water against 2.9 to 9.7 × 10⁶ m³ of debris, 1.4 : 1 to 0.4 : 1²⁸	Austin's 3 : 1 for the Grand Canyon and 10 : 1 for Missoula; favours the catastrophist²⁹
Mount St. Helens	The "one-fortieth scale model"	Width to depth about 1.05 : 1 against 8.9 : 1, off by about 8.5 times; a true one-fortieth model removes 4,000 ÷ 40³ = 0.0625 km³, or 62.5 million m³	The Toutle canyon is six to twenty times too small
Mount St. Helens	Peak discharge at the foot of the cone	At least 13,800 m³/s, about 1,200 times below the Missoula flood's peak²⁸	The 960 m³/s often quoted was gauged 58 km downstream²⁸
Mount St. Helens	Burying a 20-foot stump in Spirit Lake	About 2,400 years at 0.25 cm a year; about 1,300 at the column average of 0.45 cm; about 200 at the early rate of about 3 cm¹² ¹³	Austin's 3 feet around some bases by 1985, 18 cm a year near the shore, seventy times the cored rate
Fossil Graveyards	Weathered Karoo bones in one 45-m interval	2 to 20 years is 730 to 7,300 days; ÷ 110 days = 6.6 to 66¹⁴	Clarey's Days 40 to 150 for the Absaroka and Zuni
Fossil Graveyards	The 80 m of Pisco whale beds	80 years at 1 m a year; 800 years at 0.10 m a year; in 164 days, 0.49 m a day, 1,780 times 0.10 m a year¹⁵	Clarey's receding phase, Day 150 to about Day 314; scale figures, since no young-earth source gives the 80 m a duration
Fossil Graveyards	Bonebeds stacked in Dinosaur Provincial Park	At least four drown-expose-bury cycles in sequence; four of a few weeks each fit inside 110 days, forty would not⁴⁵	Clarey's 110 days
Fossil Graveyards	Broom's 800 billion over his own 40 million years	20,000 burials a year across the basin⁴⁶	The real census of usable Beaufort specimens is 20,968⁴⁷
Yellowstone	Trees already standing, from the upright fraction	0.10 + 0.90x = 0.28 gives one tree in five; 75 per cent needs more than two in three	Coffin's sonar figure of 62 per cent at Spirit Lake would close the gap at Amethyst Mountain
Yellowstone	Dorf's "some 20,000 years"	27 levels × (200 years of regrowth + up to 500 rings) = 18,900 years for one 1,200-foot bluff⁴⁸	Three to four times a young-earth chronology, at three-quarters of an inch a year

Read across the first table and the pattern is the same in every row. The young-earth claim about rate is one that mainstream geology already accepts, and the claim about scale is the one the case cannot carry. Read down the second table and almost every interval the articles could price is longer than the window the Flood models give it. The exceptions are worth naming: the Toutle water-to-rock ratio favours the catastrophist, four Dinosaur Park cycles fit inside 110 days at the shortest exposure the young-earth field team allows, and the Yellowstone upright fraction depends on a Spirit Lake figure the creationist sources disagree about, which Part 6 takes up.

Part 6: Where two articles disagree

Mount St. Helens and Yellowstone's Petrified Forests give different upright fractions for the logs on the floor of Spirit Lake, and draw different conclusions from them.

Mount St. Helens uses Austin's figure: "It was estimated that 20,000 upright stumps existed on the floor of the lake in August 1985. It would appear that about ten percent of the deposited logs were in an upright position."²⁵ From it, the article concludes that a deposit formed the Spirit Lake way predicts the wrong upright fraction for a fossil forest, and it says that no stump count in this literature gives a survey area, a method or an uncertainty. Yellowstone prints Coffin's count: "Using side-scan sonar, transects covering slightly under 1% of the lake bottom yielded 154 vertical stumps and 95 prostrate logs. … Extrapolation to the entire lake bottom gave approximately 19,500 erect stumps and about 12,000 horizontal logs."³ That is 62 per cent upright, and Yellowstone keeps it in its Summary and Verdict as the one figure that could weaken its own argument.

Reading the two creationist sources side by side settles part of the disagreement.

It is one survey. Austin's 1986 paper reports the sonar work and extrapolates "from the small area of lake floor surveyed to the entire lake bottom".¹² Coffin thanks Austin for help with the same work: "Steve Austin gave assistance at Spirit Lake with the side-scan sonar research and underwater photography for which I am grateful."³
The upright counts agree. Austin gives more than 15,000 upright stumps in 1986 and 20,000 in 2010. Coffin's extrapolation gives about 19,500.
The disagreement is over the logs lying flat. Coffin's 62 per cent is 154 upright stumps out of the 249 objects his transects picked out on the floor. Austin's ten per cent is upright logs out of "the deposited logs," a total he never states. Twenty thousand upright at ten per cent implies about 200,000 deposited logs, against Coffin's 19,500 erect and 12,000 horizontal, or about 31,500 in all. Austin's figure needs about fifteen times as many flat logs on the floor as Coffin's sonar reported.⁴⁹
The method may see upright trunks more easily. Coffin describes how the sonar found them: "The vertical light streaks are sonar shadows cast by erect trees."³ A trunk standing several metres off the floor casts a longer shadow than a log lying on the mud. Neither author says how flat logs were counted, or whether any were missed. This is a possibility, not a finding.
Fritz's figure for the lake is not a separate count. His "10%–13%" is his own figure for the Toutle River sediment flows. For Spirit Lake he worked from Coffin's published figures, from which he "could not obtain exact counts," and judged that "maybe 10%–20%" stood upright.¹⁶

So one statement in the Mount St. Helens article is wrong as written: Coffin does give a method and a survey area, though nobody gives an uncertainty. That article's conclusion that the Spirit Lake analogue predicts the wrong upright fraction needs the same caveat Yellowstone already prints. Yellowstone has it right: the two figures stand unreconciled, and its upright-fraction argument is strong but not closed. What the sources do settle is narrower than either article says. The dispute is not between two measurements of the same thing. It is over how many logs lie flat on the lake floor, a number one new survey could count.

Objections and responses

"Mainstream geology only admits catastrophes now because creationists forced it to." The dates run the other way. Berthault's 1993 paper lists twenty earlier explanations for laminae, beginning with Kuenen and Menard in 1952.² Kuenen's flume ran in 1966, McKee's trenches at Bijou Creek were dug after the June 1965 flood, and the critic Kevin Henke notes that "In the 1960s and 1970s, long before Berthault's research, geologists knew that laminae … can form under a variety of conditions, which may include rapid deposition".⁵⁰ The USGS geologists who wrote up the 1982 Toutle flood cite Bretz's 1956 paper on the Missoula floods.²⁸ The upright-stump analogue was a mainstream sedimentologist's idea, published seven months after the eruption.⁸

"A thousand local catastrophes is just the Flood seen piece by piece." This is the strongest reply, and it is what the young-earth models actually say: all of the beds formed within one year, not each bed in a year.¹⁷ The difficulty is what lies between the pieces. Weathered bone on dry ground, regrown forests and soils take time that more water does not shorten, and Part 5 prices that time at years to millennia wherever it can be priced. The young-earth literature has also declined to hold the line itself: Whitmore and Garner place the Green River fish beds after the Flood, and if local catastrophes after the Flood can make one famous graveyard, a graveyard is not evidence of the Flood.³⁷

"The intervals could be minutes or days, pauses between pulses of the same Flood." Some could. Hilda's fourteen beds lie on one surface, and Lalomov says of his own durations that "real time of deposition could be less."¹¹ Where an interval is only a pause in the flow, it can be short. The intervals that decide these cases are of a different kind. A forest regrowing on fresh volcanic debris, a bone weathering in the sun, or a herd walking onto new ground cannot happen under water at all. Coffin's own model leaves the interval blank, saying only "spaced long enough apart".³ Brand, who measured the Pisco beds himself, fills it in with "a few decades or a few hundred years".⁹

"Present-day rates do not apply to a Flood." Granted where an article uses a modern rate, and the articles say so. The only bone-weathering calibration available comes from a dry basin in Kenya, and Fossil Graveyards names that as its main weakness. Spirit Lake's 0.25 cm a year is a lake rate, and a Flood would carry far more sediment. But the strongest figures here are not modern rates. Lalomov's table is the creationist school's own method. Brand's decades to centuries is a creationist estimate. Coffin's interval is his own requirement.

"These four cases were chosen because they are weak." They are the cases the young-earth literature itself puts forward: Austin's Mount St. Helens papers, Berthault's summary published by the Institute for Creation Research, The Genesis Flood on graveyards, and Coffin's Yellowstone fieldwork. The articles also print what favours the young-earth side. Mount St. Helens computes a water-to-rock ratio that beats Austin's own requirement for the Grand Canyon. Yellowstone calls Coffin's organic-layer data real, careful and unanswered. Berthault's experiments are called sound.

"If mainstream geology reads so much as rapid, the long ages must be hiding in the gaps, and gaps can be denied." The first half is what mainstream geology says. Peter Sadler's compilation of nearly 25,000 measured rates concluded that "all sedimentary stratigraphic sections must contain hiatuses at some scale."⁵¹ That moves the question rather than settling it, because a gap is a surface that has to be explained: soils, burrows, weathered bone and eroded tops are what the gaps hold. Those are tested in Flat Gaps, Buried Soils and Bioturbation and Trace Fossils.

Issues and unanswered questions

Turbidites and storm beds have no article of their own. This section's description names them, and none of the four articles takes them as a case. They appear only as background: Kuenen's flume was built to model "the lower part of a turbidity current," and Henke compares Berthault's laminae with the Bouma sequence of a turbidite.⁴ ⁵⁰ Whether deep-sea and shelf event beds show that the column formed fast is a question readers ask, and it is not answered here.
Nobody has measured how much of the column is event beds. The four articles show that mainstream geology reads each studied feature as rapid. They do not give the share of the column's thickness that mainstream geology reads as laid down in single events, or the share taken by soils, burrowed surfaces and gaps. No census of bonebeds by level and place exists either, on either side. Until someone counts, "how much of the rock record" has a qualitative answer only.
The Spirit Lake upright fraction is unresolved. Part 6 narrows the dispute to the number of logs lying flat on the lake floor. Coffin's 1987 Palaios note might say how they were counted; neither article obtained it.
The exposure clock has one calibration. Every bone-weathering argument in this section rests on Anna Behrensmeyer's work in a dry Kenyan basin. A calibration for bones in wet, muddy or humid settings would sharpen the graveyard argument in either direction.
Coffin's organic layers have no mainstream answer. The missing animals, the missing Sequoia cones and the reversed thin sections at Yellowstone are real data that no mainstream paper found for these articles explains. Winning the argument about the roots does not close it.
The paleohydraulic method has never been tested on a known case. Nobody has run Lalomov's calculation on a deposit of known short duration, such as the Bijou Creek flood sand, to see whether it returns about half a day.
The Toutle canyon has never been surveyed. Its length, and so its volume and the water-to-rock ratio, rest on maps rather than measurements. A longer canyon would strengthen the catastrophist's number; a shorter one would weaken it.

Verdict

The young-earth argument from rapid deposition is right about rates and wrong about scale. Mainstream geology already reads every feature in these four cases as fast: laminae inside one flow, a canyon in loose debris in a day, mass burials in hours to months, upright stumps carried by mudflows. It has done so since the 1950s and 1960s, and for the upright stumps a mainstream sedimentologist published the catastrophic reading before any creationist did. A local catastrophe therefore proves something nobody disputes.

What it cannot prove is a global flood. At every site the fast event sits in a stack of fast events, and the stack has time in it: regrowth between Yellowstone's forests, months to years of exposure in parts of the Karoo and at Hilda, decades to centuries for the Pisco whales by Brand's own estimate, one to three thousand years in Lalomov's own table. The young-earth workers who did the fieldwork, Coffin and Brand, ask for the intervals themselves. The case for a one-year Flood has to be made from what lies between the beds, and these four articles show that the catastrophes alone cannot make it.

Two questions remain open in the young-earth side's favour: Coffin's organic layers at Yellowstone, and the number of flat logs on the floor of Spirit Lake. Neither would turn a local catastrophe into a global one.

Sources

1.
Whitcomb, John C. Jr., and Henry M. Morris. The Genesis Flood: The Biblical Record and Its Scientific Implications. Presbyterian and Reformed, Philadelphia. 1961. The book that founded modern young-earth flood geology, by a theologian and a hydraulic engineer. Its chapter on modern geology and the Deluge offers fossil graveyards as phenomena present-day processes cannot explain, and gives the Karoo figure second-hand from Newell.
1. 1a.
  Page 161: “To attempt to account for these vast graveyards in terms of present-day processes and events, except via the most extreme and unscientific extrapolation, is absolutely impossible!” ↩ ↩
2.
Julien, Pierre Y. et al. “Experiments on stratification of heterogeneous sand mixtures.” Bulletin de la Société Géologique de France 164(5):649–660. 1993. A laboratory experiment on sand mixtures in a small recirculating flume that could be tilted, published in a French geology journal (received 26 October 1992, accepted 15 April 1993). It reports that stratification under a continuous supply of mixed sand grains results from segregation for lamination, non-uniform flow for graded beds, and desiccation for joints. The article uses it as the source for the claim that superposed strata need not be successive layers.
1. 2a.
  Section Abstract, page 649: “Rather than successive sedimentary layers, these experiments demonstrate that stratification under a continuous supply of heterogeneous sand particles results from : segregation for lamination, non-uniform flow for graded-beds, and desiccation for joints. Superposed strata are not necessarily identical to successive layers.” ↩ ↩
2. 2b.
  Table I, page 650: “Summary of hypotheses explaining the origin of horizontal lamination.” Twenty entries running from Kuenen & Menard 1952 to Paola, Wiele & Reinhart 1989. Entry 7, Moss 1963 and Kuenen 1966: “Grains of similar susceptibility to transport tend to deposit together, i.e. spatial & temporal selection of similar grains due to grain interaction under quasi-steady flow condition - the 'like-seek-like' principle.” Entry 13, Middleton 1970: “Smaller grains filter down between larger ones during flow, thus displacing the larger ones towards the free surface.” ↩ ↩
3. 2c.
  Page 654: The apparatus is a tilting plexiglas flume 0.15 m wide, 0.15 m deep and 2.40 m long, with a tailgate 0.15 m wide and 0.02 m high inserted at the downstream end to force deposition. Figure 5: “Small recirculating flume”. ↩
3.
Coffin, Harold G. “The Yellowstone Petrified 'Forests'.” Origins (Geoscience Research Institute) 24(1):5–44. 1997. A booklet-length special edition of Origins, the journal of the Geoscience Research Institute, by Harold G. Coffin, who studied these forests for much of his life. It counts the fossil forest levels and trees at each site, reports over 350 soil samples analyzed by X-ray and infrared methods, and argues that the trees were carried in and buried quickly rather than grown where they stand. The article uses it as the fullest statement of the creationist case and as the reference that the ministry summaries should be checked against.
1. 3a.
  Page 36: “Some have argued that Spirit Lake is not a good analog for the Yellowstone Fossil Forests, because the large number of logs accumulating on the bottom of Spirit Lake is very different from the more scattered fossil logs and stumps in Yellowstone. However, one important difference between the two deposits is that Spirit Lake has not had adequate sediment input to bury the sinking logs and stumps. If the 1980 Mount St. Helens eruption had been followed by a series of volcanic breccia flows into Spirit Lake, spaced long enough apart to bury successive sets of logs and stumps as they sank, it would likely have produced a deposit very similar to the Yellowstone Fossil Forests.” ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩
2. 3b.
  Page 9: “For three levels of the Fossil Forest (Amethyst Mountain) with 208 petrified trees, only 28% are upright. On the other hand, the Petrified Tree area near Roosevelt Lodge exhibits 30 upright out of a total of 40 visible petrified trees (75%). Individual levels may be even more variable — some with all trees horizontal or all upright. These figures are based upon trees revealed in the irregular cross-section exposed by the eroded cliff faces. If a surface view of the total fossil forest for any particular level were possible, the percentages for standing and fallen trees could be different.” Table 2: Erect and prone trees by site: Specimen Creek 50/20; Mt. Hornaday 157/173; Fossil Forest 58/150; Specimen Ridge 57/26; Petrified Tree 30/10; Mt. Norris 29/31. ↩
3. 3c.
  Page 25: “None of these have been found in the fossil forest organic levels during a century of research. … Only one exception is known. Remains of termites have been found in chambers within the petrified wood.” ↩
4. 3d.
  Page 33: “Using side-scan sonar, transects covering slightly under 1% of the lake bottom yielded 154 vertical stumps and 95 prostrate logs. … Extrapolation to the entire lake bottom gave approximately 19,500 erect stumps and about 12,000 horizontal logs.” Coffin's source note for these figures is Coffin 1987, Palaios 2:179–180. ↩ ↩
5. 3e.
  Section Acknowledgments, page 38: “Steve Austin gave assistance at Spirit Lake with the side-scan sonar research and underwater photography for which I am grateful.” ↩
6. 3f.
  Page 33: “A sonograph reveals light areas or reverse shadows when objects block sound transmission (Figure 26). The vertical light streaks are sonar shadows cast by erect trees.” The next sentence says the sonar results were confirmed by divers at specific sites and by sonograph records of vertical stumps whose tops protruded. Neither it nor the rest of the page says how the prostrate logs were counted. ↩
4.
Kuenen, Ph. H. “Experimental turbidite lamination in a circular flume.” The Journal of Geology 74(5, Part 1):523–545. Sep 1966. A laboratory experiment in which a perfectly steady, slowing current ran through a circular flume, a water channel shaped like a ring. It found that such a current still makes lamination, meaning fine layers, provided the deposit does not build up too quickly, and that pulses in the current are not needed. The article uses it as the 1966 flume demonstration of the mechanism that the 1993 flume paper also shows.
1. 4a.
  Section Abstract, page 523: “However, current pulsations are so numerous that they should produce ten to a hundred times more laminae than are present. It is shown experimentally that a perfectly steady, decelerating flow, comparable to the lower part of a turbidity current, produces grading, rippling, and convolution. But it also creates lamination, provided the accumulation is not too swift.” ↩ ↩
5.
McKee, Edwin D. et al. “Flood deposits, Bijou Creek, Colorado, June 1965.” Journal of Sedimentary Petrology 37(3):829–851. Sep 1967. A field study of the sand left by a flood on Bijou Creek, Colorado, in June 1965. The authors dug 75 trenches and ran 137 mechanical analyses of sand from four localities, and found sand laid down rapidly by fast, upper-flow-regime water, typically two to three feet thick and up to 12 feet in one place. The article uses it as the field record behind a flume study that opens with the same flood and takes its sand from the same creek bed.
1. 5a.
  Section Abstract, page 829: “These deposits consist of sand that was laid down in mid-June, 1965 during rapid movement of the upper flow regime. They are composed largely of horizontal or nearly horizontal layers that cover the channel and extend outward beyond the banks on each side of the stream commonly for distances of one-quarter to one-half mile or more. Typical thickness of these deposits ranges from two to three feet, but a maximum of 12 feet was measured at one place on West Bijou Creek.” Section Method, page 829: “mechanical analyses of 137 samples from the four localities studied”. Page 832: “At these sites a total of 75 trenches was dug.” ↩
6.
Rowley, Peter D. et al. “Proximal bedded deposits related to pyroclastic flows of May 18, 1980, Mount St. Helens, Washington.” Geological Society of America Bulletin 96(11):1373–1383. Nov 1985. A research article, published in November 1985, by four authors from the US Geological Survey on thin layers of pumice and ash that the May 18, 1980 pyroclastic flows (fast-moving clouds of hot gas and rock) left on the steep north flank of Mount St. Helens. The authors say the layers were laid down by high-velocity, partly turbulent flows. The article uses the paper because Austin cites it for his claim that the layers are laminae.
1. 6a.
  Page 1382: Quoted in full in the text. The same page calls chute-and-pool structures. “the products of the highest-flow regime known within pyroclastic deposits.” ↩ ↩
7.
Smith, Roger M. H. Fluvial facies, vertebrate taphonomy and palaeosols of the Teekloof Formation (Permian) near Beaufort West, Cape Province, South Africa. University of Cape Town. 1989. A doctoral thesis by the Karoo's leading taphonomist, logging 940 vertebrate fossils and the floodplain sediments, soils and burrows around them in a 450-metre section. It is the full study behind Smith's 1993 Palaios paper, and it reads each bone's weathering as a measure of how long it lay exposed.
1. 7a.
  Page 171: “Seasonal rainstorms in the basin and provenance areas caused the major meandering rivers to burst their banks and inundate the parched floodplains. These essentially catastrophic events accounted for the bulk of floodplain sedimentation.” ↩ ↩
2. 7b.
  Page 171: “Mammal-like reptile carcasses were thus allowed ample time to decompose, desiccate and disarticulate before being scattered by sheet floods. The increased proportion of weathered to unweathered fossil bone in these proximal floodplain deposits suggests that skeletal elements spent between 2 and 20 years on the floodplain surface before becoming completely buried.” Said of the 45-m Leeukloof interval, and based on Behrensmeyer's weathering stages calibrated in Kenya. ↩ ↩
8.
Fritz, William J. “Stumps transported and deposited upright by Mount St. Helens mud flows.” Geology 8(12):586–588. Dec 1980. A paper in Geology, published in December 1980, on stumps that mud flows from the 1980 eruption carried and left standing upright. The article uses it to show that this mainstream journal printed the upright-stump finding first, three years before Coffin's note.
1. 8a.
  Abstract. Fritz's affiliation is given as the Department of Geology, Georgia State University, on his 1983 Comment. “Mud flows resulting from the eruption on May 18, 1980, of Mount St. Helens, Washington, transported numerous stumps and logs. Some stumps remain vertical (upright) after transport and partial burial alongside living trees. Mount St. Helens mud-flow deposits serve as modern analogs for the depositional environment of Eocene 'fossil forests' in Yellowstone National Park.” ↩ ↩
9.
Brand, Leonard, and Arthur Chadwick. Faith, Reason, & Earth History: A Paradigm of Earth and Biological Origins by Intelligent Design. Andrews University Press, Berrien Springs. 3rd edition. 2016. A textbook by two young-earth scientists who have published taphonomic field work in secular journals, setting out what they think the evidence does and does not show for a short earth history. Brand led the Pisco whale study.
1. 9a.
  Chapter 18, section Rapid Geological Processes and the Radiometric Time Scale, pages 447–449: “sedimentary structures that indicate storms and other fairly rapid sedimentary processes that may not require more than a few hundred years, at most, for the Pisco Formation.” “The Bridger and the Pisco Formations both contain evidence that seems to require some time—a few decades or a few hundred years during the transition from catastrophe to more modern processes—but they do not seem compatible with millions of years.” The book does not say whether this transition lies inside the Flood year or after it. ↩ ↩ ↩
10.
Snelling, Andrew A. Earth's Catastrophic Past: Geology, Creation and the Flood. Institute for Creation Research, Dallas. 2009. The fullest technical statement of young-earth flood geology, in two volumes, by a geologist with a PhD from the University of Sydney. Chapters 69 to 72 survey fossil graveyards; chapter 115 treats diatomite and the Pisco whales.
1. 10a.
  Pages 575–576: “Thus, while fossil graveyards are usually only of local to regional extent, though still requiring catastrophic and rapid transport and burial of sediments and organisms, the recognition of “mass extinction” on a global scale in the geologic record extends the evidence for catastrophic transport and deposition of sediments and organisms to a global scale.” ↩
11.
Lalomov, A. V. et al. Research of paleohydraulic conditions and determination of actual time of sedimentation of Cambrian–Ordovician sandstones of St.-Petersburg region. 2006. A 24-page report of joint 2004–2005 research by the Geological Laboratory ARCTUR in Moscow and the Lithological Department of the Geological Faculty of St Petersburg State University. It applies an Einstein procedure, with the authors' additions, to four members of Cambrian and Ordovician sandstone near St Petersburg, and totals 2,919 years, which the authors say can give only the order of magnitude of the duration. The article uses it as the best-documented application of the paleohydraulic method, and as a case where the method's own arithmetic gives centuries against the 25 million years on the stratigraphic chart.
1. 11a.
  Table 4, page 16: Formula (3) in the report is Td = Hmax · Ce · L / (qT · Cf). The table's arithmetic reproduces from its own inputs: Sablino lower, 8 m × 100,000 m ÷ 38.62 m³/day/m ÷ 0.5 = 41,429 days against a printed 41,424; Sablino upper, 4 × 80,000 ÷ 8.52 ÷ 0.8 = 46,948 against 46,969; Ladoga, 9 × 100,000 ÷ 5.11 ÷ 0.4 = 440,313 against 439,907; Tosno, 5 × 120,000 ÷ 3.72 ÷ 0.3 = 537,634 against 537,012. The printed years are 114, 129, 1,205 and 1,471, summing to the printed total of 2,919. ↩ ↩
2. 11b.
  Table 4: Computed for this article from Table 4 by setting the efficiency coefficient Cf to 1 in every row and leaving all other inputs unchanged: Sablino lower, 8 × 100,000 ÷ 38.62 = 20,715 days; Sablino upper, 4 × 80,000 ÷ 8.52 = 37,559; Ladoga, 9 × 100,000 ÷ 5.11 = 176,125; Tosno, 5 × 120,000 ÷ 3.72 = 161,290. Total 395,689 days, or 1,083 years at 365.25 days. Cf is bounded above by 1 by its own definition as a coefficient of flow effectiveness, so this is the shortest duration the printed table can yield. ↩ ↩ ↩
3. 11c.
  Page 17: “We took into account alternation of direction of the flow by coefficient of effectiveness of the flow that allows eliminating influence of multiplying migration of the sediments in the point of observation. Also, we consider partial erosion of the strata. As we took into calculation maximal values of the parameters, so the calculation gives us maximal duration; real time of deposition could be less.” ↩
12.
Austin, Steven A. “Mount St. Helens and Catastrophism.” Proceedings of the First International Conference on Creationism 1:3–9. Creation Science Fellowship, Pittsburgh. Edited by R. S. Crowell. 1986. A paper that Steven A. Austin, a geologist with a PhD at the Institute for Creation Research, presented at the First International Conference on Creationism in August 1986. It describes erosion, layering and upright logs at the volcano, and the article tests its figures against the USGS record.
1. 12a.
  Pages 1–2: Quoted in full in the article's text. The sentence breaks across the page. No citation is given for the sentence beginning "Conventionally". “…each representing just”. “a few seconds to several minutes of accumulation. Conventionally, …” ↩
2. 12b.
  Page 1: “The canyon in Figure 3 might be assumed to have been eroded slowly by the creek flowing through it today, except for the fact that the erosion was observed to have occurred rapidly.” This is the intervening sentence, which the article's text does not quote. ↩
3. 12c.
  Page 3: “Extrapolating from the small area of lake floor surveyed to the entire lake bottom, we estimate more than 15,000 upright stumps existed on the floor of the lake in August 1985. The average height of an upright deposited stump is 20 feet.” No survey area, extrapolation method or uncertainty is given. ↩ ↩ ↩
13.
Shinneman, Avery Cook et al. “Contribution of Log Mat Periphyton to Benthic Productivity at Spirit Lake, Mount St. Helens National Volcanic Monument, WA, USA.” Northwest Science 97(3):216–229. 2024. A study by six researchers at the University of Washington Bothell and Tacoma and the University of Puget Sound. It looks at the floating mat of logs, felled by the blast and washed into the lake, that covers 20% of Spirit Lake's surface, and at the sediment record of how productive the lake bottom has been over 40 years. The article uses it for the rate at which sediment has built up on the lake bottom since the eruption.
1. 13a.
  Section Discussion: “Overall sedimentation rates were reasonable with this interpretation; if 1983 was marked at 8 cm it would indicate a sedimentation rate of roughly 0.25 cm per year.” Dating is by diatom-assemblage markers tied to Larson's 1983 and late-1980s plankton tows, not by an independent radiometric method, which is a real limitation on the rate. ↩ ↩ ↩
14.
Smith's 2 to 20 years is 730 to 7,300 days. 730 ÷ 110 = 6.6 and 7,300 ÷ 110 = 66. The 110 days are Days 40 to 150, which Clarey gives to the Absaroka and Zuni megasequences together.¹⁷ ⁷ ↩ ↩
15.
Brand's range is "centimeters to meters per year."³⁵ 80 m ÷ 1 m a year = 80 years; 80 m ÷ 0.10 m a year, the New England bay he cites, = 800 years. The receding phase in Clarey's model runs from Day 150 to about Day 314, 164 days at most.¹⁷ 80 m ÷ 164 days = 0.49 m a day = 178 m a year, which is 1,780 times 0.10 m a year. These are scale figures: no young-earth source assigns the 80 m a duration. ↩ ↩
16.
Fritz, William J., and Harold G. Coffin. “Erect floating stumps in Spirit Lake, Washington.” Geology 11(12):733–734. Dec 1983. A comment by William J. Fritz and a reply by Harold G. Coffin in the journal Geology, on Coffin's short report of upright stumps floating in Spirit Lake, Washington. Fritz agrees that Coffin's stumps floated upright, but argues that the mechanism does not apply significantly to Yellowstone, where most petrified wood lies in coarse conglomerate laid down by rivers and sediment flows rather than in fine lake sediment. The article uses it for Fritz's figure of 10%–13% of transported trees that stay upright, and for Coffin's question about what the organic layers are.
1. 16a.
  Page 734: Coffin's Reply. “Other areas have, instead of lenses, thin uniform bands of organic matter (leaves, needles, twigs, bark, etc. in sorted ash) that usually lie above coarse-grained high-energy deposits. These organic bands argue against the fluviatile origin of these sediments because they mantle a surface-like soil and rarely exhibit erosional breaks. They could well be called 'soil levels' except for many unsoil-like characteristics (Coffin, 1979b). If these organic levels are neither true soils nor fluvial sediments, what are they? The lacustrine origin of these layers is a distinct possibility that will need to be established by further research.” ↩ ↩
2. 16b.
  Page 734: Fritz's Comment. “Although I could not obtain exact counts from Coffin's figures, because of scale and oblique angle, only a small percentage (maybe 10%–20%) appear to remain upright. In Yellowstone, I found up to 40% vertical stumps (well over 50% in a few intervals on Specimen Ridge) in distal conglomerate. Because only 10%–13% of the transported trees remain upright in the Toutle River sediment flows, and a similar percentage in Spirit Lake, I conclude that Yellowstone remains best explained by a mixture of transported and in situ trees. The Spirit Lake analogy does not fit because, unlike at the edge of the Toutle River, no trees remain in place to increase the percentage of upright stumps.” ↩ ↩
17.
Clarey, Timothy L., and Davis J. 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. The Institute for Creation Research's megasequence model of the Flood, built on a database of rock columns from five continents. It assigns each of Sloss's six megasequences to a stage of the Flood year.
1. 17a.
  Page 433: “This process continued flooding higher and higher elevations and new ecological zones, depositing the Absaroka and Zuni megasequences between Days 40-150 of the Flood, until the water covered the highest hills (Fig. 24). The fossils of the Absaroka and Zuni mostly reflect lowland and wetland ecological zones.” ↩ ↩ ↩
2. 17b.
  Page 433: “Finally, the plants and animals living on the pre-Flood highest hills (many large mammals) were swept off and distributed on top of the dinosaur-bearing rocks. These became the fossils found in the Tejas megasequence deposits”. “By Day 314 or so (Gen 8:13), Noah looked out of the ark and saw that the whole Earth was dry.” ↩
18.
Hebert, Jake et al. “Do Varves, Tree-Rings, and Radiocarbon Measurements Prove an Old Earth?” Answers Research Journal 9:339–361. 2016. A rebuttal in the Answers Research Journal, a creationist journal, of a BioLogos essay by the old-earth geologists Gregg Davidson and Ken Wolgemuth, which used counts of Lake Suigetsu varves and radiocarbon dates to argue for an old earth. In its section on rapid lamination it says Berthault's laboratory experiments showed that multiple laminations can form spontaneously, and that Nature did not acknowledge his earlier work. The article uses it for its description of Berthault as a "French creation scientist" whose "groundbreaking" experiments showed rapid lamination.
1. 18a.
  In the section on rapid lamina formation: “Geologists have known for quite some time that multiple laminae may form very rapidly. French creation scientist Guy Berthault performed groundbreaking laboratory experiments demonstrating that multiple laminations can form spontaneously when sediment mixtures consisting of particles of different sizes are deposited in air, running water, or still water. This occurs because particles of different sizes have a tendency to spontaneously segregate and stratify themselves.” “Even uniformitarian geologists have acknowledged that stratification can occur quickly. Almost ten years later, the results of similar experiments were published in Nature (Makse et al. 1997), although Nature did not acknowledge Berthault's prior work (Snelling 1997).” ↩
19.
Snelling, Andrew. “Sedimentation experiments: Nature finally catches up!” Journal of Creation (then CEN Technical Journal) 11(2):125–126. Aug 1997. A short article in the creationist Journal of Creation by Andrew Snelling, which says that the 1997 Nature papers by Makse and colleagues, on grains of different sizes segregating as they are poured, confirm Berthault's flume results. It complains that Nature did not mention Berthault's work, and it says a laminated deposit of the kind Berthault made could form catastrophically. The article uses it as the origin of the claim that Nature confirmed Berthault.
1. 19a.
  “That such a laminated deposit could form catastrophically has been confirmed by Berthault's sedimentation experiments and applied to a creationist understanding of the Flood-deposition of thinly laminated shale strata of the Grand Canyon sequence.” ↩
20.
Berthault, Guy. “Sedimentological interpretation of the Tonto Group stratigraphy (Grand Canyon Colorado River).” Lithology and Mineral Resources 39(5):504–508. 2004. A 2004 paper by Berthault in Lithology and Mineral Resources. It argues that the Tonto Group layers, from the Tapeats sand to the Bright Angel clay, were laid down side by side in different zones of water, not one after another. The article uses it because its six-zone diagram is credited to Austin's 1994 ICR book rather than to Berthault, and because its central claim is asserted rather than computed.
1. 20a.
  Manuscript pp. 3–4: “Without going into the calculations, an answer can be obtained by examining the data. … The simultaneous deposit of a particle of clay (Bright Angel) in zone 5 and sand (Tapeats) in zone 4 is therefore certain.” Manuscript p. 4: “Bright Angel, therefore, progressively covers Tapeats from west to east in zones 5 and 6 and not successively as expressed by the principle of superposition.” ↩
21.
Berthault, Guy. Guy Berthault's response to Kevin Henke's article. Jul 31, 2003. Berthault's point-by-point reply, translated from the French, to Kevin Henke's web article on his stratigraphy work. Berthault answers Henke's headings in turn, defends his flume experiments, and says that he is not a creationist. The article uses it for that denial and for his statement that the contradictions between Genesis and geology motivated his research.
1. 21a.
  Berthault is replying to Kevin Henke, who had called him a 'young-Earth creationist'. “You qualify me as a 'young-Earth creationist'. This is incorrect. I am not a creationist. I do not use the Bible to construct geological models to accord, in particular, with the Deluge.” ↩
22.
Dehler, Carol et al. “The Cambrian of the Grand Canyon: refinement of a classic stratigraphic model.” GSA Today 34(11):4–11. Nov 2024. A 2024 review by seven authors in GSA Today, the membership publication of the Geological Society of America. It revisits Edwin McKee's 1945 model of the Cambrian Tonto Group in the Grand Canyon, and it argues that the group records at least five stratigraphic sequences rather than one transgression with only minor regressions. The article uses it to show that a shoreline moving across time was already part of the mainstream model in 1945.
1. 22a.
  Page 9: “In contrast, McKee's diagram (1945, Fig. 1) portrayed an interpretation of a time-transgressive eastward-migrating shoreline that deposited vertical sandstone-shale-carbonate stacking patterns as the shoreline moved landward.” ↩
23.
Berthault, Guy et al. “Research on erosion of consolidated and semi-consolidated soils by high speed water flow.” Izvestiya VNIIG 257:10–22. 2010. A laboratory study of how fast clear water must flow before it erodes rock, run at the Vedeneyev Russian National Research Institute of Hydraulic Engineering in St Petersburg in a closed high-pressure pipe loop that reaches 27 m/s. The pagination caution is this: the Russian original is Izvestiya VNIIG 257:10–22, and the English typescript carries its own printed footers 1–11, so every page number below is a typescript page. The samples were weighed on a "Shinko AJ-12KCE" balance reading to a 100 mg scale division (typescript p. 5), but the same page gives the absolute error of the wet-weighing method as ±5.0 g, so the effective resolution on a soaked monolith is grams, not milligrams. The article uses it as the strongest evidence in Berthault's own work against a rock-cutting Flood, though the rig used clean water only.
1. 23a.
  Section Conclusion 1, page 10: “Limestones (samples 2 and 3) and dolomitic monoliths are resistant to eroding action of water flow with velocities up to 26m/s. Taking into account variation of the velocity of 5%, it is possible to conclude that upper non-erosive velocity is about 27.5 m/s. Summary duration of the flow action was 22.5 hours for sample 2 in series 1 – 2; 18 hours for sample 3 in series 5 – 6 and 13 – 15; 36 hours for sample 3 in series 25 – 26; 15.5 hours for sample 5 in series 3 – 4.” ↩
24.
Walker, Tas. “Learning the lessons of Mount St Helens: How its eruption backs biblical history.” Creation 39(3):23–27. Jul 2017. A popular article by Dr Tas Walker, who visited the volcano, on what the 1980 eruption showed about canyons, layers and logs. The web version went online on 23 May 2017, and it is the current Creation Ministries International presentation of the case. Walker gets three things right that Answers in Genesis gets wrong: the 19 March 1982 date, "in part through" for the andesite in Loowit Canyon, and months rather than a day for the flank canyons.
1. 24a.
  Section Canyons carved quickly: The canyon is. “about 1/40th the size of Grand Canyon”. Its side walls go up to 40 m and its width up to 45 m. ↩
25.
Austin, Steven A. “Why is Mount St Helens Important to the Origins Controversy?” The New Answers Book 3, ch. 26, 253–262. Master Books. Edited by Ken Ham. 2010. A chapter by Austin in The New Answers Book 3, edited by Ken Ham. It is Austin's most recent long statement on the volcano, and the one that Answers in Genesis cites as its authority. The article quotes it for Austin's figure of about ten per cent upright logs, his claim that a 25-foot deposit built up within three hours, and his canyon depths.
1. 25a.
  “It was estimated that 20,000 upright stumps existed on the floor of the lake in August 1985. It would appear that about ten percent of the deposited logs were in an upright position.” ↩ ↩ ↩
26.
Glicken, Harry. “Rockslide-Debris Avalanche of May 18, 1980, Mount St. Helens Volcano, Washington.” U.S. Geological Survey Open-File Report 96-677. 1996. An open-file report of 90 pages, published in 1996 from the 1986 doctoral dissertation of Harry Glicken, who died in 1991. He was killed at Unzen in 1991, so the mapping is contemporaneous with the event. The article uses it for the density and porosity of the deposit and for its revised volume of 2.5 cubic kilometres.
1. 26a.
  Page 55: Measured by sand-cone test in the field. ↩
27.
Snelling, Andrew A. “Four Lessons from the Mount St. Helens Eruption.” Answers in Depth. Answers in Genesis. May 18, 2020. A 2020 article by Dr. Andrew A. Snelling for Answers in Genesis, written on the fortieth anniversary of the eruption, that presents four lessons from it: forests and coal, layered ash deposits, canyons, and a potassium-argon date. It is the current canonical Answers in Genesis presentation of the case and the page a reader will meet first, and its cited sources for the four lessons are Austin 1986 (ICC), Morris & Austin 2003, Austin 2010 and a 2012 DVD. The article quotes it for those four lessons and for Snelling's concession that the sediment layers were still soft when the canyon was carved.
1. 27a.
  Section Lesson Three: The sentence continues: “but that's exactly the point with respect to the sediment layers in the Kaibab plateau through which the Grand Canyon was carved.” Snelling's own footnote for that rescue is "Rock Layers Folded, Not Fractured." ↩
28.
Waitt, Richard B. Jr. et al. “Eruption-Triggered Avalanche, Flood, and Lahar at Mount St. Helens—Effects of Winter Snowpack.” Science 221(4618):1394–1397. Sep 30, 1983. A research article in Science on what the 19 March 1982 eruption did to the snow in the crater. Hot pumice and gas dislodged snow that avalanched down the north flank, and the snow that melted in the crater formed a temporary lake that broke out as a flood and a lahar (a volcanic mudflow) down the North Fork Toutle River. The article uses its figures for the flood's peak flow and the crater lake's volume to size the flood that cut the Toutle canyon.
1. 28a.
  Page 1396: The flood. “cascaded 400 m down the steep bedrock steps, partly over cataracts from which a muddy spray drifted 700 m eastward… It incorporated enough debris to emerge at the bottom as a viscous slurry of rock debris and water, having an estimated peak discharge of at least 13,800 m3/sec (about 4 m deep, 230 m wide, with a velocity of 15 to 20 m/sec).” ↩ ↩
2. 28b.
  Page 1395: The strandline benches (old shorelines) are. “as high as 15 m above the irregular crater floor, a level indicating that the maximum volume of the lake was about 4 x 10⁶ m³.” ↩ ↩
3. 28c.
  Page 1396: “sediment concentrations at stream-gauging stations 58, 73, and 81 km downstream from the crater were progressively more dilute [71, 67, and 61 percent (by weight) solids, respectively], and peak discharge decreased progressively (960, 650, and 450 m3/sec) even though flow velocities remained 4 to 6 m/sec.” ↩
4. 28d.
  Page 1397: Notes 8 and 9 on hydraulic ponding: “The outstanding geologic example of hydraulic ponding in Washington is due to enormous Pleistocene floods from glacial Lake Missoula, which became transiently hydraulically ponded by each successive constriction in the Channeled Scabland and Columbia River Valley [J H. Bretz et al., Geol. Soc. Am. Bull. 67, 957 (1956); V. R. Baker, Geol. Soc. Am. Spec. Pap. 144 (1973); R. B. Waitt, Jr., J. Geol. 88, 653 (1980)].” ↩
29.
Grand Canyon: Monument to Catastrophe. Institute for Creation Research. Edited by Steven A. Austin. 1994. A 1994 book on the Grand Canyon from the Institute for Creation Research, edited by Austin. It gives the canyon's size and its flood-volume ratios of water to rock, which the young-earth model needs for the canyon. The article uses its figures to compare the canyon with the 1982 Toutle flood.
1. 29a.
  In the breached-dam chapter, the Missoula flood is given about 500 cubic miles of water removing. “fifty cubic miles of sediment and bedrock”. a ratio of about 10 : 1. His own lakes about 3,000 cubic miles of water and the canyon about 1,000 cubic miles of rock, a ratio of about 3 : 1. ↩ ↩
30.
Rosenfeld, Charles L., and Gary L. Beach. “Evolution of a Drainage Network: Remote Sensing Analysis of the North Fork Toutle River, Mount St. Helens, Washington.” Oregon State University Water Resources Research Institute Report WRRI-88. Nov 1983. A 112-page final technical completion report, written under a Bureau of Reclamation grant by two Oregon State University geographers. It maps the upper North Fork Toutle River valley from aerial surveillance between October 1981 and January 1983, with six interpretative maps at a scale of 1:24,000. The article uses it to show that the new drainage network was built by winter storms, with its largest change in a February 1982 storm.
1. 30a.
  Section Abstract, page i: Both sentences are quoted in full in the article's text. ↩
31.
Major, Jon J. et al. “Sediment Erosion and Delivery from Toutle River Basin After the 1980 Eruption of Mount St. Helens: A 30-Year Perspective.” Ecological Responses at Mount St. Helens: Revisited 35 Years After the 1980 Eruption, 19–44. Springer. Edited by C. M. Crisafulli and V. H. Dale. 2018. A chapter in a 2018 book on the ecology of the volcano, written by three scientists of the U.S. Geological Survey's Cascades Volcano Observatory. It gives a multi-decade account of how the water and sediment of the Toutle River basin changed after the eruption. The article uses it for how long the drainage network took to form, how fast sediment delivery fell, and how the kind of erosion changed.
1. 31a.
  Page 25: “Breakouts of small lakes impounded at mouths of tributary channels, controlled releases of water from the largest impounded lakes, pumping of water from Spirit Lake across the deposit surface during tunnel construction, subsequent meltwater lahars and floods in later eruptions (e.g., Waitt et al. 1983), and rainfall runoff augmented drainage development. It took nearly 3 years to fully integrate a new drainage network across the deposit surface (Rosenfeld and Beach 1983; Meyer 1995; Simon 1999).” The same page dates the start of network development to the afternoon of 18 May 1980, when springs from melting ice and trapped groundwater began filling and breaching ponds on the deposit. ↩
32.
Scientific Creationism. Creation-Life Publishers, San Diego. Edited by Henry M. Morris. 1974. The Institute for Creation Research's textbook for schools, written by its staff under Morris's editorship. Its fossil chapter argues that every fossil needs rapid burial and that dinosaur graveyards have no modern counterpart, quoting Edwin Colbert on quarries in New Mexico, Wyoming, Alberta and Belgium.
1. 32a.
  Page 99: “Similar dinosaur graveyards are found on every continent, all over the world. Again the uniformitarian is challenged to point to any such phenomena occurring anywhere in the world today.” ↩
33.
DePalma, Robert A. et al. “A seismically induced onshore surge deposit at the KPg boundary, North Dakota.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 116(17):8190–8199. 2019. The first description of the Tanis site, a river-channel deposit at the very top of the Cretaceous packed with fish and capped by impact debris, which the authors date to within an hour of the Chicxulub impact.
1. 33a.
  Page 8190: “Acipenseriform fish, densely packed in the deposit, contain ejecta spherules in their gills and were buried by an inland-directed surge that inundated a deeply incised river channel before accretion of the fine-grained impactite. Although this deposit displays all of the physical characteristics of a tsunami runup, the timing (<1 hour postimpact) is instead consistent with the arrival of strong seismic waves”. ↩
34.
Eberth, David A. et al. “A centrosaurine mega-bonebed from the Upper Cretaceous of southern Alberta: implications for behavior and death events.” New Perspectives on Horned Dinosaurs: The Royal Tyrrell Museum Ceratopsian Symposium, 495–508. Indiana University Press, Bloomington. Edited by Michael J. Ryan, Brenda J. Chinnery-Allgeier and David A. Eberth. 2010. A field study of fourteen Centrosaurus bonebeds near Hilda, Alberta, which the authors trace in one mudstone layer and treat as a single drowning event, with estimates of area and head count and a reading of the bones' exposure history.
1. 34a.
  Page 495: “Exposed skeletons experienced large degrees of disarticulation and component elements were subject to breakage, varying amounts of abrasion, and rare tooth scarring as a result of month-to-multiyear exposure times, high rates of soft tissue rotting, and reworking due to scavenging and trampling.” ↩
35.
Brand, Leonard R. et al. “Fossil whale preservation implies high diatom accumulation rate in the Miocene–Pliocene Pisco Formation of Peru.” Geology 32(2):165–168. Feb 2004. A field survey by a Loma Linda University and Geoscience Research Institute team, young-earth creationists publishing original work in the Geological Society of America's flagship journal. They mapped 346 fossil whales on one hill at Cerro Blanco and argued from their preservation that each was buried within weeks to months, so the diatomite must have accumulated far faster than in modern seas.
1. 35a.
  Page 165: “The 346 whales within ∼1.5 km2 of surveyed surface were not buried as an event, but were distributed uninterrupted through an 80-m-thick sedimentary section.” ↩
2. 35b.
  Page 168: “very high diatom accumulation rates of centimeters to meters per year.” Page 165: “In a shallow bay on the New England coast, marine snow accumulated, largely by lateral advection, at a mean rate of 10 cm/yr”. ↩
36.
Eberth, David A., and Michael A. Getty. “Ceratopsian bonebeds: occurrence, origins, and significance.” Dinosaur Provincial Park: A Spectacular Ancient Ecosystem Revealed, 501–536. Indiana University Press, Bloomington. Edited by Philip J. Currie and Eva B. Koppelhus. 2005. The standard review of the Park's horned-dinosaur bonebeds by a Royal Tyrrell Museum sedimentologist and a field paleontologist, with mapped quarries, bone counts per square metre and a taphonomic history for each bed.
1. 36a.
  Page 508: “hundreds of bonebeds present throughout the Park”. “although there are many tens of bonebeds present in any 10-m-thick stratigraphic interval in the lowest 40 m of the DPF, occurrences of this taphonomic mode drop off by a factor of more than ten in the upper 30 m of formation.” The bonebed counts are from Eberth and Currie in the same volume. Bonebeds within about 10 m of each other cannot be told apart in level, because ancient channels cut up to 5 m down. ↩ ↩
37.
Whitmore, John H., and Paul Garner. “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, 425–448. Creation Science Fellowship, Pittsburgh. 2008. A young-earth method paper that scores rock units against criteria for Flood and post-Flood deposition, independent of radiometric dates, and applies it to the Wyoming column. It places the end of the Flood near the top of the Cretaceous there.
1. 37a.
  Page 436: “We do, however, believe that the extensive mammal radiations represented in the deposits of the Fort Union and succeeding formations, especially in the Green River Formation, must postdate Genesis 8:18 (see Whitmore & Wise, 2008).” “the Flood/post-Flood boundary falls approximately during Lance to Fort Union Time (the Cretaceous/ Tertiary boundary occurs after the Lance).” ↩ ↩
38.
Morris, John D. “The Yellowstone Petrified Forests.” Impact 268. Institute for Creation Research. Oct 1, 1995. An Impact article by John D. Morris for the Institute for Creation Research, built on Coffin's Origin by Design (1983), Arct 1991 and Fritz's Roadside Geology of the Yellowstone Country (1985). The article uses it as the source of two claims that Coffin contradicts, that the roots of the Specimen Ridge trees end abruptly and that the soil layers have no clay, and of the figure of 27 layers at Specimen Ridge.
1. 38a.
  Section Fossils and Soils: “In many growing trees, the root systems are larger than the tree itself. In the Specimen Ridge trees, however, the roots abruptly terminate at ground level, or in some cases with a 'root ball' — individual roots having been broken. … They have no bark or branches.” On clay: “Finally, the 'soil' layers possess no clay (Coffin, p. 145), the altered remnant of volcanic ash.” ↩
39.
Sarfati, Jonathan. “The Yellowstone petrified forests: Evidence of catastrophe.” Creation 21(2):18–21. Mar 1999. A 1999 article by Jonathan Sarfati in Creation, later put on the web, where the version is from 2010 and was updated in 2018. The article uses it for the claims that the petrified layers have no clay and that the forests lack soil, rootlets and animals, and for the fullest published account of Michael Arct's tree-ring match.
1. 39a.
  Section Problems with the long-age scenario: “Growing forests have definite soil and humus layers, with lots of rootlets as well as a thriving animal population. However, the petrified 'forests' lack all these.” On roots: “But the Yellowstone petrified trees have their large roots broken off, leaving 'root balls.'” ↩
40.
Yuretich, Richard F. “Yellowstone fossil forests: new evidence for burial in place.” Geology 12(3):159–162. Mar 1984. A research paper in Geology, reviewed by H. D. MacGinitie, with Erling Dorf thanked in its acknowledgements, in which Richard F. Yuretich examined the tree stumps at eight stratigraphic levels on Specimen Ridge. He found most stumps rooted in fine-grained sandstone, saw mudflow conglomerate flow around some of them, and saw no evidence that the upright stumps had been transported, while accepting Fritz's account of the mudflow setting. The article uses it as the field study for the claim that the Specimen Ridge trees grew where they stand.
1. 40a.
  Pages 159–160: The sentence runs across the page break. “after examining the tree stumps at eight separate stratigraphic levels on Specimen Ridge (ranging from about 10 to 100 m on the measured section of Fritz, 1980b), I found none that were contained entirely within conglomerate. More typically, the stumps are rooted in a fine-grained sandstone, with the lower part of the trunk projecting up into the conglomerate (Fig. 2). In some cases, I also observed that the conglomerates had flowed around the tree stumps, indicating that they were in place prior to the conglomeratic event (Fig. 3).” Page 159: Yuretich's statement of his disagreement with Fritz. “My conclusions are that the fluvial and mudflow depositional environments as outlined by Fritz (1980b) are essentially correct, but there is no evidence that the upright stumps have undergone transport.” ↩
41.
Karowe, A. L., and T. H. Jefferson. “Burial of trees by eruptions of Mount St Helens, Washington: implications for the interpretation of fossil forests.” Geological Magazine 124(3):191–204. May 1987. A 1987 paper in a geology journal on how eruptions bury trees and what that means for reading fossil forests. The article uses it as the paper whose test for transported trees was fixed before the fieldwork, and whose authors found no evidence of upright transport at Yellowstone.
1. 41a.
  Page 202: “Roots of standing trees are well developed and are consistently located in a finer-grained matrix which is laterally continuous over many metres. These finer-grained units, which show clear zonal differentiation very similar to that of modern soil profiles, were described by Retallack (1980) and interpreted as palaeosols. Yuretich (1984) reported petrographic evidence of soil formation around the roots of fossil stumps, and noted cases where fluvially-deposited conglomerates had flowed around in situ trees. No evidence of transport in upright position was seen during our investigations at Yellowstone National Park. In the few examples of this seen at Mount St Helens, root mats were roughly as wide as the stumps were high, thus transport in upright position would be expected, as it would provide the position of maximum hydrodynamic stability.” ↩
2. 41b.
  Page 197: “Few instances were noted of trees which clearly had been transported in upright position (Fig. 2c). Those that were seen measured less than 2 m high and had broad root mats, approximately 1.5 m across. Root systems often incorporated large boulders and were encased within a mudflow matrix.” ↩
3. 41c.
  Pages 200–202: “Our observations at Mount St Helens and at Specimen Ridge support a depositional model of in situ burial for the upright fossil trees of Yellowstone. All of the standing trees examined on Specimen Ridge are relatively tall (4–9 m high) and are preserved upright despite the large size of boulders transported by the mudflows. Branches appear to have been broken off and the tops of trunks coincide with the tops of the mudflow units in which they are buried.” ↩
42.
Yuretich, Richard F. “Comment on Reinterpretation of the depositional environment of the Yellowstone 'fossil forests' and Stumps transported and deposited upright by Mount St. Helens mud flows.” Geology 9(4):146–147. Apr 1981. A short comment in the journal Geology by Richard F. Yuretich, with William J. Fritz's reply printed after it. Yuretich argues that many vertical trees on Amethyst Mountain and Specimen Ridge have trunks too long to have been carried upright over long distances, and Fritz replies that the wood was preserved in a dynamic system with trees continuously buried and growing. The article uses it because Fritz wrote that he never disagreed with Dorf (1964) about the amount of time the sequence represents.
1. 42a.
  Page 147: Fritz's Reply. “I never disagreed with Dorf (1964) on the amount of time represented in the sequence, but I believe his method for determining it is open to question.” ↩
43.
Coffin, Harold G. “The Organic Levels of the Yellowstone Petrified Forests.” Origins (Geoscience Research Institute) 6(2):71–82. Jun 1979. A 1979 field survey of the organic levels, the thin layers of plant matter between the volcanic beds of the Yellowstone petrified forests. It measured sixty-three levels above Specimen Creek, found no organic matter in 24% of 130 tree-bearing levels, and checked 120 thin sections, 86 of which show the matter mixed with no order of density. The article calls it the best original creationist field data on this subject, and uses its findings on upside-down organic matter and missing forest animals.
1. 43a.
  Section Taxonomic Characteristics: “Although Sequoia cones are small and fragile, they do remain intact and visible for several months after falling. No petrified Sequoia cones have been found in Yellowstone despite the dominance of Sequoia trees. Cones of any type are rare in the petrified forests.” Of Roosevelt Lodge: “One would expect to find great numbers of Sequoia needles and some cones, since most of the upright trees are Sequoia. However, large numbers of broad leaves and only a few pine needles are seen in the organic levels. Sequoia needles were entirely absent.” ↩
2. 43b.
  Section Evidences of Reworking by Water: “Eighty-six (71.6%) of 120 vertical thin sections of organic levels studied have the organic matter mixed into the sediments with no prevailing order of density. Twelve of the sections (10%) have a reverse organic profile with the greatest accumulation of organic matter at the bottom.” ↩
44.
MacAndrew, Alec. “The Curious Case of the One-Man Band: The work of Guy Berthault: Revolutionary Geology or Extravagant Hubris?” evolutionpages.com. 2007. A critique of Berthault's flume work by Alec MacAndrew, writing on a personal site, not a peer-reviewed source. The author is a hostile critic, and his arguments are used here, not his authority. He accepts that Berthault's flumes sort sediment into layers, but argues that the results do not undermine the standard stratigraphy of the geological record. The article uses it for the arithmetic it supplies on a Flood-length deposit of the Grand Canyon sequence.
1. 44a.
  “If this were true, then the whole sequence from Tapeats to Kaibab would represent a deposition of considerably more than 4000 feet in a single event – if we associate this single event with the Noahic flood then this entire sequence must have been deposited at an average rate of more than 35 feet a day”. Arithmetic offered for this article: 4,000 ft ÷ 371 days = 10.8 ft/day; 4,000 ft ÷ 110 days = 36.4 ft/day. MacAndrew evidently uses the 110-day prevailing-waters window rather than the whole Flood year, which he does not state. MacAndrew also records that Berthault. “openly follows the flood geology of the Young Earth Creationist, Steve Austin”. and that Berthault. “is an adviser to the Kolbe Center”. and that the Tapeats carries. “water ripple marks, trilobite trails and brachiopod fossils”. ↩
45.
Eberth and Getty treat the 70-m Dinosaur Park Formation as fourteen overlapping 10-m slices, because ancient channels cut up to 5 m down and bonebeds closer than about 10 m cannot be told apart in level.³⁶ The lowest 40 m therefore contain at least four slices that do not overlap, each with "many tens" of bonebeds. At least one bonebed in each of the four lies above the bonebeds of the slice below, so at least four drown-expose-bury cycles happened one after another. The true number is almost certainly far higher, since tens of bonebeds per slice are unlikely all to lie on one surface. At Snyder's lower bound of a few weeks per cycle, four cycles need a few months, which fits inside a 110-day window; forty would not. ↩
46.
Broom's own inputs: 1,000 animals a square mile on each buried surface times 200,000 square miles is 2 × 10⁸ animals per surface. 800,000,000,000 ÷ 2 × 10⁸ = 4,000 surfaces. 2,000 feet is 24,000 inches, and 24,000 ÷ 4,000 = 6 inches between surfaces. Five skeletons a square mile is 5 ÷ 2.59 = 1.9 per square kilometre. Over Broom's 40,000,000 years, 800,000,000,000 ÷ 40,000,000 = 20,000 burials a year across the whole basin, which is Simpson's figure.⁵² ⁵³ ↩
47.
Nicolas, Merrill, and Bruce S. Rubidge. “Assessing content and bias in South African Permo-Triassic Karoo tetrapod fossil collections.” Palaeontologia africana 44:13–20. 2009. A database study that merged the catalogues of seven South African museums into one record of Beaufort Group fossils and tested it for collecting bias. It gives the only census of how many Karoo vertebrate fossils have actually been collected.
1. 47a.
  Page 13: “The original datasets provide 26 837 specimens that are theoretically usable for spatial mapping”. “the actual number of potentially useful vertebrate fossils from the Beaufort Group amounted to 20 968”. ↩
48.
Dorf, Erling. “The Petrified Forests of Yellowstone Park.” Scientific American 210(4):106–114. Apr 1964. A 1964 article in the magazine Scientific American. It describes a bluff on Amethyst Mountain where 27 buried forests are exposed, and it works out a 20,000-year span for the 1,200 feet of rock from growth-ring counts and from volcanic regrowth in Mexico. The article uses it as the source of the 27-forest count and of the 20,000-year figure, which it says is arithmetic rather than a measurement.
1. 48a.
  Page 108: “We observed that each of the 27 forests in these beds was buried by a single deposit of volcanic debris. We also knew from more recent volcanic eruptions in Mexico that a new forest begins to grow on top of a volcanic sediment about 200 years after the sediment has been deposited. By counting the number of annual growth rings in the buried stumps we were also able to estimate the age of each forest at the time of its burial. In some cases we found as many as 500 of these growth rings. From these data we were able to calculate that the entire 1,200-foot 'layer cake' of sediments exposed at this site must have been deposited over a period of some 20,000 years. This is equivalent to about three-quarters of an inch a year, a rate of deposition roughly 100 times more rapid than that estimated for shallow-water sand or mud sediments of a comparable age in the Gulf Coast region.” ↩
49.
Austin gives 20,000 upright stumps and about ten per cent of the deposited logs upright.²⁵ 20,000 ÷ 0.10 = 200,000 deposited logs, of which about 180,000 would lie flat. Coffin's extrapolation gives 19,500 erect and 12,000 horizontal, 31,500 in all, and his transects give 154 ÷ 249 = 62 per cent upright.³ 180,000 ÷ 12,000 = 15. Austin prints no total of deposited logs, so the 200,000 is implied by his two figures, not stated by him. ↩
50.
Henke, Kevin R. Berthault's Stratigraphy: Rediscovering What Geologists Already Know and Strawman Misrepresentations of Modern Applications of Steno's Principles. n.d. A critique of Berthault's stratigraphy by Kevin R. Henke, Ph.D., written outside peer review. Henke argues that Berthault attacks Steno's original 17th-century wording of the principles rather than the modern versions, and that Berthault's experiments repeat what geologists knew decades or more than a century ago. The article uses it for the claim that most of Berthault's discoveries are not new. Berthault's reply to it is dated 31 July 2003.
1. 50a.
  “The 'B subdivision' of the Bouma sequence consists of upper-flow regime laminae (Boggs, 1995, p. 72-73, 115), which strongly resemble Berthault's laboratory results.” On priority: “In the 1960s and 1970s, long before Berthault's research, geologists knew that laminae … can form under a variety of conditions, which may include rapid deposition (Boggs, 1995, p. 113-115; Harms and Fahnestock, 1965; Bouma, 1962).” ↩ ↩
51.
Sadler, Peter M. “Sediment accumulation rates and the completeness of stratigraphic sections.” The Journal of Geology 89(5):569–584. Sep 1981. A compilation of nearly 25,000 rates of sediment accumulation, which vary enormously and fall as the time span over which they are measured grows. Sadler attributes that fall mainly to unsteady, discontinuous sedimentation. The article uses it for his general conclusion that every sedimentary section must contain hiatuses, gaps in the record, at some scale.
1. 51a.
  Page 569: “it follows that all sedimentary stratigraphic sections must contain hiatuses at some scale.” Page 570: “since sedimentation is unsteady, its continuity can be meaningfully specified only in terms of some stated time scale.” ↩
52.
Woodmorappe, John. “The Karoo vertebrate non-problem: 800 billion fossils or not.” CEN Technical Journal 14(2):47–49. 2000. A short paper by a young-earth geologist who traced the 800-billion figure to its source, Broom's 1932 book, quoted Broom's derivation in full and judged it conjectural, while defending Whitcomb and Morris for citing the Karoo as rich.
1. 52a.
  Section Derivation of the 800-billion figure: “I estimate that there are lying today exposed to view the fossil remains of five animals on average in every square mile … In some areas there are 100; in some none. For every fossil that is exposed to view there must be a 1,000 hidden by dust and talus.” “at every few inches we have another page of the book, and another series of fossils to be revealed. I thus estimate that in the whole Karroo [Karoo] formation there are preserved the fossil remains of at least 800,000,000,000 animals.” Woodmorappe quoting Robert Broom, The Mammal-like Reptiles of South Africa and the Origin of Mammals (London: Witherby, 1932), p. 309. The square brackets are Woodmorappe's. Broom's outcrop is "about 200,000 square miles" and his average thickness 2,000 feet. ↩
53.
Simpson, George Gaylord. Tempo and Mode in Evolution. Columbia University Press, New York. 1947. The founding book of evolutionary paleontology's modern synthesis, first published in 1944, by the American Museum of Natural History's leading fossil-mammal specialist. Its chapter on population size uses Broom's Karoo figure, with a warning, to estimate breeding populations.
1. 53a.
  Page 71: “As regards fossils, very few numerical estimates have been attempted, and these are so uncertain that the use of numbers is more likely to be misleading than helpful. If only as a curiosity, an example may be derived from Broom’s discussions (1932) of fossil reptiles in the Karroo.” “he considers the time involved to be at least 40,000,000 years. As an average, about 20,000 animals per year are thus supposed to have been buried and preserved as fossils.” ↩