THE LAYING DOWN OF MARINE SEDIMENTS: A REVOLUTIONARY NEW PERSPECTIVE

adapted from articles by

Guy Berthault

Used with the kind permission of the Creation Science Movement, 50 Brecon Avenue, Cosham, Portsmouth, England, P06 2AW.

Sedimentary rocks are often stratified, with the strata looking like carpets spread out on top of one another. If rock strata were indeed built up in carpet- stacking fashion, then any given layer would always be younger than all of the layers beneath it. Another feature of many sedimentary rocks is the horizontal joints between strata. These stratification joints are conventionally attributed to the hardening of the uppermost layer during periods when the supply of sediment was temporarily interrupted.

For many people, the progression of fossils in sedimentary rock is confirmation that depositional layers represent periods of time. The fossils of deep-sea creatures are often found near the bottom of a sedimentary deposit. As one moves higher, it is common to find fossilized fish, followed by reptiles. If the sequence of fossils reflects the progress of biological evolution, then it seems reasonable to say that the layers of rock represent periods of time; this is the basis for the geological column. Up to now, only the complete absence of any intermediate forms mars the credibility of this interpretation of sedimentary layering.

But new laboratory experiments with crushed rock and recent borings in the sea bed suggest that stacked rock strata can form simultaneously. The joints between rock strata may not indicate breaks in the sedimentation process after all; instead, they may simply be the result of the strata drying out once the water responsible for their deposition recedes or evaporates. These findings undermine the credence of conventional uniformitarian geology and strengthen the case for creation, which takes into account the catastrophic effects of the Flood.

The Birth of Stratigraphy

If the conventional view is correct, and sedimentary layers really are deposited one upon another over time, then how long does it take for each new sedimentary “carpet” to be laid down on the sea floor? Assuming that the very slow rates of modern-day natural processes (such as erosion) have always prevailed, solicitor Charles Lyell (1830) produced a geological timescale of eras, periods, and stages representing the passage of hundreds of millions of years. Soon this interpretation displaced the Flood geology of earlier scholars, paving the way for Darwin's ideas on evolution by providing the vast aeons of time needed for his hypothesized evolutionary changes to occur.

Thus, because of fossil dating, today it is claimed that the Kimmeridgian stage - a black marl found in Kimmeridge on the south coast of England - was formed in the Jurassic period (named after the Jura Mountains of Europe), in turn said to be part of the Mesozoic era (the middle [Meso] of the evolution of life [zoic]). Kimmeridge sediments are dated from 151 to 146 million years B.P. (before present). Yet, in reality, fossils of the same kind of organism are often found in more than one so-called geologic period. For instance, the ammonite is found anywhere from the Permian period (named after Perm', a city in Russia) to the Cretaceous (chalk-like) period, although variations of the shell fish may appear at different elevations, as if succeeding one another in an evolutionary progression.

New Evidence

Is the evolutionary interpretation of stratigraphy correct? Nobody was there to record what actually happened on the sea bed. What we can all agree upon is that these sedimentary layers are worldwide and that they were almost certainly laid down in water. What can we discover from modern-day sedimentation events and existing deposits that would help us solve the interpretive dilemma? Can experimental models shed light on how rapidly and in what manner strata are constructed? In the remainder of this article we will look at evidence from a recent local flood, from core samples of the sea floor, and from laboratory flume tank experiments. Most of this empirical evidence, only having become available within the last few years, renders obsolete the nineteenth century theoretical model of Lyell. And with the death of the geological time scale, evolution theory is orphaned.

Bijou Creek Flood

In 1965, after forty-eight hours of constant rain, the Bijou Creek in Colorado flooded.¹ The flood waters quickly managed to deposit sentiments up to twelve feet thick. After the water receded, sedimentologists McKee, Crosby, and Berryhill visited the site, digging trenches in the new deposits in order to examine their structure and texture. Over ninety percent of the sediment consisted of horizontal, laminated strata. Where the deposits had dried out, horizontal fissures appeared, looking just like rock stratification joints. But the fissures at Bijou Creek formed only after the entire deposit was laid down. This field evidence casts doubt upon the conventional interpretation of stratigraphy by demonstrating that laminated layers can appear rapidly and the formation of fissures need not involve a time gap between the deposition of individual layers.

Glomar Challenger

In 1975, the Deep Sea Drilling Project (DSDP) survey vessel, Glomar Challenger, began drilling ocean sediment cores all around the globe. The DSDP is managed for the U.S.A. National Science Foundation by the University of California in San Diego. The first of a new generation of heavy drilling ships, Glomar Challenger is capable of conducting drilling operations in the open ocean using dynamic positioning. Workmen are able to change drill bits during a drilling operation and re-enter the same borehole with minimal delay.

Undersea core samples from the survey ship show that sediments down to a depth of 1,000 feet are generally unconsolidated; that is, they have not hardened off. Therefore, the old theory of the formation of stratification joints must be incorrect, since underwater surfaces do not harden. This, along with the observations from Bijou Creek, indicates that horizontal stratification joints in sedimentary rocks only form as the mass of sediment dries out.

Furthermore, seismic profiles of the sea bed have shown that stratification follows the contours of the sea floor. This is contrary to what was anticipated by scientists using conventional geological theory. Sloping parallel strata were always thought to be sediments laid down in successive horizontal layers that were then gradually tilted by upthrusting or subsidence (diastrophism). But DSDP research tends to support the idea that sloped strata originally formed on a slope - no post-depositional tilting need have taken place to produce the slope.

Laboratory Research

During the latter half of the 1980s, the present author carried out laboratory tests on sedimentation in both static and moving water. If Charles Lyell had been able to conduct these trials, instead of just hypothesizing about the present being the key to the past, he would have had to abandon his thoughts about hundreds of millions of years. Experimental results have provided empirical, scientific refutation of the layer-by-layer-superposition-of-strata-over-eons-of-time hypothesis applied by Lyell to the geological column.

An initial program of research by the writer was followed up with work by hydraulic engineers at the Institut de Mecanique des Fluides at Marseilles, France. The objective of the experiments was to study the lamination and internal structure of strata in continuous sedimentation processes, both in still and in flowing water.

Samples of laminated rock were crumbled to reduce them to their variously-sized, constituent particles. These were sorted to allow the larger grains to be microscopically inspected, calibrated, and coloured. Then all of the rock material was mixed together again and allowed to flow into a 2-litre test tube filled with water. The original laminations reformed once the sediments settled, taking on the same stratified appearance as the original rock.

The laminae were not reproduced by successive deposition events, but by the segregation of particles as they dropped through the water. (A similar segregation process was previously observed in moving heterogranular powders² - it can even be observed on sandy tidal beaches.) The thickness of each lamina was found to be independent of the rate of sedimentation, indicating we cannot deduce the duration of natural sedimentation events simply by looking at the thicknesses of rock strata.³

Other experiments showed that in calm water laminae followed the dip of the underlying slope, in accordance with the findings of the DSDP project.

From December, 1988 to April, 1990, another set of experiments was undertaken in collaboration with the staff at Colorado State University, making use of the large channels in the hydraulics laboratory of their Engineering Research Center. The object was to investigate the causes of lamination and stratification fissures under laboratory conditions, where variable factors could be controlled. The experimenters modelled the Bijou Creek flood by passing a continuous flow of water through a channel with transparent sides and an adjustable slope. A mixture of coarse black sand and fine white sand was used to simulate sediments being transported by the river.

As the water with its burden of coarse and fine sand moved down the laboratory channel, laminated layers began to build up. The laminations were found to result from the current slowing down at the leading edge of the deposit, where the depth of water increased. The lower fluid velocity immediately ahead of the advancing deposit caused the coarser material to drop out of suspension first, to be overlaid by the finer sands as they settled in the lower-velocity water. Thus, laminae build-up progressed along the channel, in the direction of flow. The layers were not built up in carpet-stacking fashion, as envisioned in the evolutionary model of deposition. On the contrary, the higher laminae upstream formed slightly before the lower laminae formed downstream.⁴

When the slope of the channel was varied, laminations always formed parallel to the slope of the channel bottom, the same way bedding is known to occur in the Bay of Naples and in line with DSDP findings. Therefore, sloping, parallel strata do not have to be the result of diastrophism.

Furthermore, when the laboratory sediments dried out, fissures developed at the stratification boundaries between the laminae of coarse and fine grains, like those seen at Bijou Creek; even cross-bedding and juxtaposed lamination were observed.

Our empirical findings show that the standard explanation of such fissures over the past 150 years - viz., that the top of the lower layer hardened off during a hiatus in sedimentation, before the upper layer was deposited - is not necessarily, and probably is not, the way it happens in nature. Sedimentation layers can form simultaneously; there is no need to invoke intermittency. And fissures open up once the (flood) waters recede and the deposits dry out.

The research done in Colorado has only recently been submitted to a geological journal, but when it was reported at the Third National Congress of Sedimentologists at Brest, France (November 1991), it was applauded by the 350 sedimentologists present and received no adverse criticism. In fact, one of those in attendance remarked how refreshing it was to hear about hard, experimental evidence after listening all week to speculative interpretations of field data.

These experiments confute the idea that sediments always build up slowly, one layer on top of another, and they badly damage the hiatus theory of fissure formation. At time scale of hundreds of millions of years for such deposits is utterly unnecessary to explain the origin of stratified sedimentary rock deposits, and indeed may well be erroneous. The correct explanation is likely that one or more cataclysms produced the majority of existing rock laminae, and did so almost instantaneously.

These laboratory findings are also reinforced by field studies at Mount St. Helens in the United States, where huge amounts of laminated deposits in and around a nearby lake formed very quickly following the 1980 volcanic eruption.⁵

But what of the succession of fossils in such a rapidly formed geological column? It seems reasonable to suppose that a massive sedimentation event would quickly engulf creatures in sito. Therefore, any succession of life forms in the fossil record would more likely represent different ecospheres, not biological eras. Deep-sea trilobites, fish, land animals - they all could have been entombed at virtually the same time in a catastrophic world-wide flood.

In conclusion, there seems good reason to believe that this new approach to stratigraphy will enable greater progress to be made in understanding the history of the natural world.

Endnotes

1. E. McKee, Journal of Sedimentary Petrology, 37,3. 1967, pp. 329-57.
2. M. Campbell and W.C. Bauer, Chemical Engineering, 73, 1966, pp. 179-85.
3. G. Berthault, Comptes-Rendus Academie de Science, Paris, t303, Serie II, no 17 (Dec. 3, 1986 ), pp 1569-74. Idem, ibid t306, Serie II, no 11(Feb. 16, 1988) pp. 717-24.
4. A video presentation entitled, Evolution: Fact or Belief? includes close-up sequences of these formations and comments from Guy Berthault. It also shows interviews conducted by Peter Wilders with a number of European professors who say why, from the perspectives of their respective disciplines, they reject evolution theory.
5. S. A. Austin, “Mount St. Helens and Catastrophism,” CSM Pamphlet 252, and references therein.