The geologist says that the earth is billions of years old. The young earth creationist (YEC) says that it is 6-10,000 years old. Rocks don’t come with dates on them. How would we know? YEC and other “flood geology” (FG) proponents claim that most of the rocks on the earth result either Noah’s flood or the period after it. These are very different claims and they are testable. If many of rocks represent the record of Noah’s global flood, the we should see processes that fit in that. If the represent much longer than the FG prediction, then they should be consistent with a long history. We don’t have to have dates on the rocks to distinguish between the two proposed explanations. In this post, we will look at one area in West Texas that should be a clear test. The rocks in question are in the West Texas Permian Basin. We have plenty of data to use. Many thousands of oil and water wells have been drilled here. Large amounts of seismic data have been acquired here, imaging what is below the surface. Some of the rocks buried in the basin come up to the surface. A great example is in the Guadalupe Mountains in southeastern New Mexico and West Texas. If you are in the area, then I would recommend that you stop in. You can see great views from the visitor center and there are awesome hikes up the canyons. Early geologists and naturalists looked around the basin, saw the rocks all dipping down and wrote off the area for oil and gas. Some people didn’t listen and wildcat drillers drilled anyway and discovered a big feature in the subsurface that we know now as the Central Basin Platform. Several billion barrels of oil have come from this complex feature.
West Texas Depositional and Tectonic Features in Permian
Here you can see blue basins where the water was deep and brown areas where it was either exposed or under shallow water in Permian. The location for the cross-section is shown with the red line.
El Capitan Peak, an ancient reef and back-reef deposit in the Guadalupe Mountains.
I am going to describe a profile across this profile. It has actually been restored to what it looked like at the end of the Permian period. Conventional geology dates that to 260 million year ago. The YEC claim is that this all deposited during Noah’s flood a few thousand years ago. Some would say the top rocks here were in the mid-flood while others would put it late in the flood. On this profile, all of the colored units represent layered rock of different lithologies. They include the yellow sandstones, purple dolomites, and light blue limestone. The light green areas represent major oil fields. Each unit tells a story, but in this post, we look at just a few general points.
If we look at the portion of the cross-section below an erosional surface (known as an unconformity), we see what the profile would have looked like in the past. In this case, the conventional geologic age model would suggest that this was 300 million years ago. Each of the various layers were laid down horizontally. They were buried deeply and over the course of time, turned into hard rock. The rocks were folded and faulted and uplifted.
Here I have reconstructed the rock that was eroded way. Tall mountains of solid rock were eroded up. We find gravels from streams that developed on the erosional surface. The gravels include cherts and limestones that were hard rock before erosion wore them out of the mountains and streams rounded them into pebbles, just as we find in modern streams. How long does it take to wear away mountains?
After the mountains were eroded away, deposition continued and rocks were laid down in very different environments. Over much of the area, most of the deposits were deposited in dry arid settings, very similar to the Persian Gulf today. Along the western edge of the deserts was a deep basin
The light blue limestones on the left of the cross-section were deposited as reefs that grew through the Permian period. These reefs were different that modern reefs in terms of the organisms that formed them but in many ways just like those of today. We have desert deposits over the old eroded mountains with reefs along the edge.
The reefs grew and extended all the way around the ocean basin. The reef outcrops in several mountains here and is in the subsurface as shown by many well penetrations. The reef rock is typically porous and is an important fresh water aquifer.
These were not coral reefs. The reefs were held together by calcareous sponges and other platy plant and animal forms. Life was diverse and included echinoderms (such as crinoids and echinoids), bryozoans, brachiopods, mollusks, ostracods, scarce solitary corals and trilobites. A great article on the area is here: https://geoinfo.nmt.edu/staff/scholle/guadalupe.html
The FG model demands that that all of these rocks were laid down in a few days or months. Lime and sand and mud had to be deposited, buried and turned into rock. The rock was folded into mountains. The mountains were eroded away. Thick desert laid down sediments and reefs grew within a few months? Geologists find that impossible to believe. This cross-section does not even include the later deposits that buried the sands so that they could hold the “black gold” that we still produce today.
The geologist sees evidence for many depositional and deformation events that took time to develop. This fits well into the normal geologic timetable. Kevin Nelstead is known as “The GeoChristian” in a blog that he writes a blog and on a Facebook page. He often points out the YEC problem is “too many events, too little time”. This all fits that description well.
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