Tree Standing in Different Sediment Layers

[danmoore80]

"If you look at the world, you will see fossilized wood, petrified wood, standing up running through multiple layers."

 

"Sometimes petrified trees are found standing upside down running through many rock layers. They certainly didn’t grow upside down and the layers cannot be different ages. "

 

Dr. Kent Hovind

 

 

 

http://www.johnankerberg.org/Articles/science/SC1100W1.htm

 

 

 

What do you think?

[JaKiri]

I've spent too much time arguing with creationists.

 

It gets depressing after a while.

[danmoore80]

I'm not asking for an argument. I would just like an evolutionist view on the subject. Last I checked this was a "Science" forum.

[mossoi]

For a start the article that you have linked to is so badly written and ill-educated that I would dismiss it almost immediately - but I'll give him the benfit of the doubt and do it scientifically.

"Sometimes petrified trees are found standing upside down running through many rock layers. They certainly didn’t grow upside down and the layers cannot be different ages. "

The layers cannot be different ages - well that's speculative at best and almost certainly wrong as his reasoning that all strata are formed by floods is entirely misinformed.

 

Organic matter does not need to be fossilised to be preserved, lack of oxygen can do the same thing even in a wet environment.

 

How can a tree be found upside down traversing several strata? I don't trust the validity of any of the assertions in the article but let's suppose it's true.

 

A tree blows over due to a storm and falls into a stagnant lake. This lake has high concentrations of sulphur, methane and CO2 but no oxygen. The tree will float for a while and become waterlogged at which point it will sink to the bottom of the lake and lodge upside down. It can remain in this submerged state for a long period of time without decomposing even if it isn't buried (the Mary Rose is an example) while events above the surface of the lake cause layers of sediment to be deposit gradually building the lakebed up and over the tree.

 

Now it's sealed and won't decompose even if the lake ceases to be. Over time the fossilisation process will preserve it for evermore and the result is a fossilised, inverted tree.

 

Like I say, I don't trust Dr. Kent Hovind's scientific reasoning, sources or objectivity so he may well have elevated a rare event into something that can be found everywhere. Maybe he would offer his sources so that the trees can be carbon dated to see if they all died at the same time regardless of where they were in the world.

 

I suspect he won't but that would help him to prove his great flood theory.

[Radical Edward]

polystrate fossils are well understood. They have been for over a hundred years, I suggest you go and look up the literature on them.

 

ok, so let us analyse some claims made by Hovind:

 

"The "ancient horse" (hyracotherium) is not a horse, but is just like the hyrax still alive in turkey and east africa today" (do a google search)

 

"[…..] a change of only three [DNA] nucleotides is fatal to an animal. There is no possibility of change." blatantly false.

 

"I did not even know what being a humanist meant. I was only sixteen, and the brain doesn't even start developing until about twenty. " apparently his still hasn't.

 

"Therefore, there may not be any other stars in the solar system that have planets around them. " no shit sherlock.

 

(about pangaea)"In order to make that map you saw in the textbook, Africa was shrunk by 40% to make it fit. Didn't tell you about that did they? They took Mexico and central America out to make it fit. " heh, wrong. I guess he was using a big square map.

 

"Mammoths do not have any sweat glands. They were not designed for cold climates." wtf?

 

"We see a red shift from quite a few of the stars. That is interpreted to be the star is moving away. It may be true, I don't know. It could be the star is moving sideways. I don't think you can tell the angle of the stars movement - or even if the star is moving from the red shift." wtf?

 

"If you are traveling down the highway at sixty miles an hour, and turn your headlights on, how fast is the light going from your headlights? Compared to you, it is going at the speed of light. Compared to someone on the sidewalk it is going at the speed of light plus sixty miles an hour." wrong.

 

"I have a Ph.d." HAHAHA, have you heard about his thesis?

 

"Well, in 1972 after they had been to the moon several times, they revised the calculation of how much dust there should be so that it would fit the evolution theory." wrong.

 

"I think it would be difficult to prove that vaccines have cured any diseases. I think you will find that cleaning up sanitation laws, inspection of cattle and stuff like that, getting rid of diseased creatures and diseased crops is really what has done the job. Now there may be a coincidence they happened at the same time. Like when they started, you know, vaccinating for one thing and at the same time had better sanitation laws and inspections. It may look like the vaccine cured the disease when actually something else cured the disease."

 

"Clams don't climb mountains very good." (referring to the seashells found in the rock on mountains.)

 

 

"One example of technology is the UPC, or bar code. IBM developed the bar code in 1972. The black and white lines stand for numbers and letters in binary code. By the way, the two skinny lines at the beginning, middle, and end of every barcode are the same as "6" in binary code: 666."

 

oh, and my favourite:

 

"This is call the Conservation of Angular Momentum. One of the laws says in a frictionless environment, if pieces fly off a spinning object they tend to spin the same direction, because the outer part is already spinning faster than the inner part."

[Radical Edward]

for more on Kent Hovind, his website is http://www.drdino.com

 

for a good analysis of his seminars:

 

http://www.geocities.com/SouthBeach/Pier/1766/hovindlies/index.html

[mossoi]

LMAO - This guys is great - does he do standup!

[YT2095]

danmoore80 said in post #1 :

"If you look at the world, you will see fossilized wood, petrified wood, standing up running through multiple layers."

 

"Sometimes petrified trees are found standing upside down running through many rock layers. They certainly didn’t grow upside down and the layers cannot be different ages. "

 

Dr. Kent Hovind

 

 

 

http://www.johnankerberg.org/Articles/science/SC1100W1.htm

 

 

 

What do you think?

 

isn`t it possible that these trees were broken over, fell that way and THEN became fossilised? (think swamps and mud etc,,,).

or perhaps they were encapsulated in ice (as many forests did back then) got broken up into chunks and deposited in an inverted position due to glacial activity?

just a thought

[Radical Edward]

YT2095 said in post #8 :

 

isn`t it possible that these trees were broken over, fell that way and THEN became fossilised? (think swamps and mud etc,,,).

or perhaps they were encapsulated in ice (as many forests did back then) got broken up into chunks and deposited in an inverted position due to glacial activity?

just a thought

 

nope. There are whole forests like this, even multilayered ones, such as the forests of upright fossils found in yellowstone that do indeed sometimes extand through multiple layers. The thing is, that the creationists simply assume that geologists think it takes millions of years to form a layer, when it does not. many layers form very rapidly, for example think about how quickly a slab on the beach is covered by windblown sand. Also trees can remain partially buried and continue to grow, and there are many examples of these in areas after earthquakes, and in lakes and so on, where part of the trunk has been buried. Another example is in marshes, where the tree sinks, or the marsh rises, and the tree is slowly buried, while still remaining alive. Other possibilities are petrification, where calcites dissolved in the water enter and crystallise in the cells of the organism. these effectively form a rock, which can stand for some time. Many of these polystrate fossils, such as the one outlined above are actually rooted in, so you can see clearly that the roots descend into a lower strata. The Yellowstone example is a particularly fine one, since the numerous layers have overlapping rooted in trees, and there is no explanation for these other than the whole system took a long time to form. IIRC, there are 30 layers of trees, all rooted in. so give a growth tome of 20 years for each tree, and assume the shortest possible growth period for this structure, and you get 600 years. There are many other mechanisms by which these structures can form, but I am not going into them here for brevity, but suffice as to say, they are all well understood, and in fact contradict all known creationist hypotheses, such as fossil deposition in a global catastrophic flood.

[YT2095]

all fair and good, and some of that I was not aware of, it doesn`t prove creationalism though (my point).

Nature herself does some pretty wild and crazy things that defy explaination at times, but it all HAS an explaination

maybe my ideas don`t fit sure, and there maybe instances where they do and have. case in point, it`s still just Nature, and certainly nothing else

[Cap'n Refsmmat]

"I think it would be difficult to prove that vaccines have cured any diseases. I think you will find that cleaning up sanitation laws, inspection of cattle and stuff like that, getting rid of diseased creatures and diseased crops is really what has done the job. Now there may be a coincidence they happened at the same time. Like when they started, you know, vaccinating for one thing and at the same time had better sanitation laws and inspections. It may look like the vaccine cured the disease when actually something else cured the disease."

Who came up with that idea? I know it is wrong. For example, the early smallpox vaccine was based on cowpox. He gave it to someone, and exposed them to smallpox. The test subject did not get smallpox.

[danmoore80]

Radical Edward said in post # :

 

The thing is, that the creationists simply assume that geologists think it takes millions of years to form a layer, when it does not.

 

Wouldn't this be contradictory to the Geologic Table?

[Cap'n Refsmmat]

Course it doesn't take millions of years. What happens if a volcano goes off and makes the layer? Poof! A layer right there!

[danmoore80]

Cap'n Refsmmat said in post # :

Course it doesn't take millions of years. What happens if a volcano goes off and makes the layer? Poof! A layer right there!

 

How far would that level extend from the center of the volcano? I don't think it would be far enough to constitute a "layer"

[Cap'n Refsmmat]

Once a volcano erupted and the dust was visible EVERYWHERE on the planet, causing tempuratures to fall. I believe it was in the 1800's. I may be mistaken. Think Pompeii! It was miles away from Vesuvius and yet it was doused in ash. Many many feet of it.

[danmoore80]

I will agree that you may in fact get multiple layers of ash in an area of close proximity to the volcano itself, but that's about it. It is not going to be seen throught the earth. Can you support that any of the subperiod's were made of volcanic ash?

[Radical Edward]

danmoore80 said in post # :

 

Wouldn't this be contradictory to the Geologic Table?

 

geological column you mean, and no it isn't. the geological column simply points out that some layers are millions of years old. i.e. the set of layers took millions of years to form. This does not mean that geologists think that each layer was formed a fraction of an inch per year. That sort of deposition results in varves, which are very thin layers of sediment deposited each year in lakes and so on, when the organisms such as algae and so on die in the winter, or the layered nature of ice cores, where the summer melts the top layer of ice slightly and winter deposits more snow greating a light dark striped pattern. As has been explained elsewhere most geological layers can be formed quite quickly, for example in a sandstorm, mudslide, volcano and so on.

[Radical Edward]

danmoore80 said in post # :

 

How far would that level extend from the center of the volcano? I don't think it would be far enough to constitute a "layer"

 

of course it would constitute a layer, however that layer does not have to be a layer all over the earth. The only sorts of those layers are the likes of the Cretaceous-Tertiary (KT) boundary, which is a layer deposited in a global cataclysm caused by a cometary impact and has a high concentration of iridium in the layer (demonstrating it's off-world origins). Other layers are not like this, since for deposition to be occuring in one place, erosion must be occuring somewhere else.

[JaKiri]

Cap'n Refsmmat said in post # :

Once a volcano erupted and the dust was visible EVERYWHERE on the planet, causing tempuratures to fall. I believe it was in the 1800's. I may be mistaken. Think Pompeii! It was miles away from Vesuvius and yet it was doused in ash. Many many feet of it.

It was called Krakatoa, and if memory serves erupted in 1872.

[YT2095]

Vesuveus and pompei were pretty radical occurances too, hell, Mt,St.Helens wasn`t too bad either, and that was in OUR lifetimes

[Bose DeNage]

"Dr. Kent Hovind"? Hoooooo-haaaaaa-haaaaaahb! <Chuckle> <Snort> <Guffaw.>

He's about as reliable as a Porky Pig comic book.

>>

[iNow]

Well, since it's been four and a half years since this thread has been posted to, one would guess the OP has since started and completed high school, or college, or had kids, or won the lottery and become an atheist... who knows.

 

 

That said, I quite enjoyed your comment about Porky Pig, but I'm not sure he did comics.

Edited August 16, 2008 by iNow

[swansont]

That said, I quite enjoyed your comment about Porky Pig, but I'm not sure he did comics.

 

And could anything be less reliable than that which does not exist?

 

Whoa. Zen rush.

[iNow]

Whoa. Zen rush.

 

Nice.

[Bose DeNage]

Porky starred in comic books as well as Warner Bros [Thaaaaaaaaat's all ffolks!" animated caroons.

 

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