N.Wells
Posts: 1836
Joined: Oct. 2005
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Salvador hits new lows of geological understanding, even for him, in a recent post:
| Quote | Let us also, for the sake of argument, say the Earth is Old. Why then over 100,000,000 years is 600 some meters of continent not fully eroded into the sea? 6 centimeters of erosion per 10,000 years would do the trick, and even with tectonic crustal recycling, we ought not to have geological strata with 300,000,000 year old fossils. Something of basic geo-paleontology is amiss. This is a very BASIC question. It does not immediately argue for a young earth, but it puts into doubt why there should be a geological column strata in the first place. The answers offered have been almost as bad as the defense of OOL and Darwinian evolution.
If there were enough money, I would say antartica would have some very interesting fossils preserved there. I wonder what we would find?
We have found evidence of lush fossil forests in Antartica. Why is that??? Was antartica a warm place once upon a time and then we had global cooling? What sort of fossils will we find? Furthermore, these fossils, being possibly frozen may give us soft-tissue samples and not just decayed bones! |
Over time the continents have grown in volume and area. This has mostly happened via differentiation of mantle-derived magma and oceanic crust, and by cycling of material from basalts via weathering to clays and other silicates, thence being turned into sedimentary rocks, and finally being added to crystalline cores of continents during regional metamorphism resulting from plate collisions.
The average erosion of continents is about 0.03 mm/yr, but that’s only an average. Over time, parts of continents are going up, and other parts are subsiding. Generally, the subsiding parts end up accumulating sedimentary strata (i.e. forming basins, in a general sense), whereas the uplifting parts experience erosion. (However, there are complications such as intermontane basins like the “Vale of Kashmir”, and former thick basins that are now eroding, like Ohio and Michigan.)
If Salvador looks at geological maps of continents he will see large areas of exposed Precambrian crystalline rock (cratons or shields), which are areas of substantial long term erosion that balance out the areas of long term accumulation. Even more useful to clearing Salvador’s misunderstandings would be a map showing the depth of formation of metamorphic rocks currently exposed at the surface, because that tells how much erosion has happened in order to get those rocks exposed on the surface. For example, the rocks exposed on Nanga Parbat were buried 5 km down only 400,000 years ago. The Sierra Nevadas have experienced 8-16 km of uplift and erosion. The Appalachians, 8 km; the Adirondacks, 24 km; the New Zealand Alps, 16-24 km; and the European Alps, 30 km.
We have of course been looking for fossils in Antarctica. It was indeed once much warmer, partly because it was once not over the South Pole (e.g. during the Paleozoic and Mesozoic), and secondly because even some of the time it was over the south pole, the earth overall was much warmer (e.g., during the Eocene). Since freezing was not rapid, there’s not much chance of frozen soft-tissue fossils except locally in the second half of the Cenozoic (e.g. some diatomites interbedded with tillites of Miocene and Pliocene age, indicating some episodes of extensive deglaciation and reglaciation at those times).
It is also worth pointing out that Sal's continued insistence on having successfully browbeaten various geologists with respect to plumes and convection is delusional.
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