Printable PDF File: Post-flood Noah to Abraham
When YEC authors give their interpretations of Noah’s flood vs. geology and are willing to state which rocks were involved, their interpretations become testable around the world. I have pointed out before that YEC have difficulty identifying the deposits from Noah’s flood. It is interesting to see how much they disagree. Non-geologists do not appreciate how different these predictions actually are. Hopefully the attached figures will help. The predictions differ by miles both in terms of thickness and in terms of how far the coastline has moved since the top of their interpreted flood deposits. Figure 1 includes three cross-sections. The lowest is a 2000-mile-long cross-section that I created across Texas and the Western Gulf of Mexico. Using other nearby profiles available from the literature, we can then show the comparison to the deposition that has taken place in the last 4000 years, that is, since the time of Abraham. Notice that on the lower figures, this youngest wedge would be thinner in width than a pencil width. This is despite the fact that the lowest cross-section is highly vertically exaggerated, roughly 50:1, in order to show on a page with a useful height. The point is that 4000 years of sedimentation is trivial at these scales. The post-flood interval is really problematic for YEC models. If someone believes that Abraham lived while rocks were deposited deeper in the section, I would be happy to examine their data. The interpretation shown is consistent with data from the Middle East and Mesopotamia where he lived.gs and even apply custom CSS to this text in the module Advanced settings.
Figure 2 shows how various YEC authors would interpret the long cross-section. In the top profile, the flood deposits basically go from the “Great Unconformity” at the base of the Cambrian to the top of the Mesozoic, the age of the dinosaurs.
This means that they must have had huge amounts of rock to have been deposited during the 3-500 years after the flood and before Abraham with the formation of m
any deltas, reefs and periods of structural deformation. Depositional rates that were vastly faster than modern rates would have meant much larger rivers and river systems. However, the river systems are recognized and they are not anomalously large. In fact, on modern 3-D seismic, we can often image the ancient river systems very clearly and they were very similar to today’s rivers. Texas river systems, for instance, have always been much smaller than the Mississippi River. A lot of the Texas examples aren’t in the literature, but a good example of the ancient Frio River system is shown in Figure 3. (El-Mowafy and Marfurt, 2016. “Quantitative seismic geomorphology of the middle Frio fluvial systems, south Texas, United States.” AAPG Bulletin). It is really hard to support the proposal that the early post-flood period had radically different rates than we observe today.
Some of the documented ancient deltas in the Texas Gulf region are shown in Figure 4. The figure shows delta systems that developed at nine different stratigraphic levels ranging from the oldest at the top left to the youngest at the bottom right.
The middle cross-section in Figure 2 shows the proposal by other authors extending the flood deposits from the “Great Unconformity” to the Pliocene, far later in the section. I suppose this is to make the post-flood interval a bit more palatable, but this proposal still has all of the same problems for the post-flood interval, though at a reduced scale and increases the problems for the flood interval itself. All of the reefs, river deltas, paleosols, etc. in the post-flood interval in this interpretation continue to be problematic. The Pliocene and Pleistocene units just don’t fit into a 300 – 500-year period.
The bottom cross-section in Figure 2 shows the recent proposal by YEC author, Ken Coulson. (2021, “Using Stromatolites to Rethink the Precambrian-Cambrian Pre-Flood/Flood Boundary”, www.answersingenesis.org/arj/v14/stromatolites_precambrian_cambrian.pdf ) Based on his good work on ancient stromatolite reefs extending from the Proterozoic to the Devonian, he recognizes that these were actual reef deposits and wholly incompatible with formation during Noah’s flood. Thus, he proposes lifting the base of the flood units up to at least base of the Devonian period. I applaud his good geologic work and recognition that ancient reefs are found in the rock record and could not have formed in the flood. A key problem is that ancient reef deposits are found throughout the rock record, calling into serious problem the whole flood geology interpretation.
The next two figures show the ancient deltas that are documented in the subsurface. These have been major targets for oil and gas exploration for many years. I have examined most of them with seismic and well log data. We have seismic data, well log data and rock cores that show that these deltas looked very much like those that are forming today. There is no support for the idea that they would have formed dramatically faster than modern deltas, such as during a period of instability following Noah’s flood.
The Figure 5 shows how YEC predictions would look on the Gulf coast. The real delta positions have gone back and forth, depending on how high sea level was. Even the proposal by Whitcomb and Morris required major deltas to develop forward of their end of the flood. These had to form in just 3-500 years, depending on the date for Abraham. The post-Abraham sliver was then deposited. It is really hard for me to stop describing this area because I worked it for several years, but hopefully, this will show a bit of the challenge for the models proposed so far by flood geologists. Some YEC like to say that the flood was totally a miracle and we just could never understand its deposits. Such an excuse cannot be applied to the post-flood package.
(Cross-sections and maps adapted from Mitchell, SM, 2018, A Texas-Sized Challenge to Young Earth Creation and Flood Geology, Meadville, PA, Christian Faith Publishing, Inc)
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