Claim CH580:

All geological features are consistent with a global flood, including plateaus, overthrusts, canyons, submarine trenches, and geosynclines.

Source:

Brown, Walt, 1995. In the beginning: Compelling evidence for creation and the Flood. Phoenix, AZ: Center for Scientific Creation. http://www.creationscience.com/onlinebook/
Whitcomb, John C. Jr. and Henry M. Morris, 1961. The Genesis Flood. Philadelphia, PA: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Co..

Response:

  1. A major flood leaves distinctive features, including:
    • a wide, relatively shallow bed, not a deep sinuous river channel.
    • anastamosing channels (i.e., a braided river system), not a single, well-developed channel.
    • coarse-grained poorly sorted sediments, including boulders and gravel, on the floor of the canyon.
    • giant ripple marks.
    • streamlined relict islands.
    Such features are observed on a local scale in the Channeled Scablands (McMullen 1998; Parfit 1995) and on Mars (NASA Quest n.d.). They are far from global, though.

  2. Almost all features of the earth can be explained by conventional geology, including processes such as plate tectonics and glaciation. A global flood does not help to explain any of the exceptions.

References:

  1. McMullen, E. T., 1998. The death of the dinosaurs, superfloods and other megacatastrophes: Catastrophes and scientific change. http://www.georgiasouthern.edu/~etmcmull/DINO.htm
  2. Parfit, Michael, 1995. The floods that carved the West. Smithsonian 26(1) (Apr.): 48-59.

    See also other pictures of Dry Falls (http://www.parks.wa.gov/dryfalls.htm ) and Palouse Falls (http://www.kidscosmos.org/kid-stuff/mars-trip-13.html , http://www.palouse.net/llamas/palousefalls.htm , http://www.rmdt.com/virtualtour/palousefalls.htm )
  3. NASA Quest, n.d. Mars Team online photo gallery. http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/mars/photos/pathfinder.html; see especially http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/mars/photos/images/marspfsite.gif

Further Reading:

Harding, Ken, 1999. What would we expect to find if the world had flooded? http://www.creationism.ws/what_if_flood.htm [or Harding, Ken, 1999 http://www.geocities.com/Tokyo/Temple/9917/flood.html via http://www.archive.org . The text is white so you may have to reset your browser's colors.]
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created 2003-6-9, modified 2004-4-15