Liquefaction—associated with quicksand, earthquakes, and wave action—played a major role in rapidly sorting sediments, plants, and animals during the flood. Indeed, the worldwide presence of sorted fossils and sedimentary layers shows that a gigantic global flood occurred. Massive liquefaction also left other diagnostic features such as cross-bedded sandstone, plumes, and mounds.
Sedimentary rocks are distinguished by sharply-defined layers, called strata. Fossils almost always lie within such layers. Fossils and strata, seen globally, have many unusual characteristics. A little-known and poorly-understood phenomenon called liquefaction explains these characteristics. It also explains why we do not see fossils and strata forming on a large scale today.
We will first consider several common situations that cause liquefaction on a small scale. After understanding why liquefaction occurs, we will see that a global flood would produce liquefaction—and these vast, sharply defined layers—worldwide.The flooded earth had enormous, unimpeded waves—not just normal waves, but waves generated by undulating hydroplates.Also, the flooded earth had no coastlines, so friction did not destroy waves at the beach. Instead, waves traveled around the earth, often reinforcing other waves. When a liquefaction lens slowly collapsed for the last time, plants and small animals were trapped, flattened, and preserved between the lens' roof and floor. Even footprints, ripple marks, and worm burrows were preserved at the interface, if no further liquefaction occurred there. A particular lens might stay open through many wave cycles, long after the lens' floor last liquefied.Fossils, sandwiched between thin layers, were often spread over a wide surface which geologists call a horizon. Thousands of years later, these horizons gave some investigators the false impression those animals and plants died long after layers below were deposited and long before layers above were deposited. A layer with many fossils covering a vast area was misinterpreted as an extinction event or a boundary between geologic periods.
How can we compare and test the two conflicting explanations: liquefaction versus uniformitarianism and the principle of superposition over billions of years?
1. Many sedimentary layers span hundreds of thousands of square miles. (River deltas, where sediment buildups are greatest today, are only a tiny fraction of that area.) Liquefaction during a global flood would account for the vast expanse of these thick layers. Current processes and eons of time do not.
2. One thick, extensive sedimentary layer has remarkable purity. The St. Peter sandstone, spanning about 500,000 square miles in the central United States, is composed of almost pure quartz, similar to sand on a white beach. It is hard to imagine how any geologic process, other than global liquefaction, could achieve this degree of purity over such a wide area. Almost all other processes involve mixing, which destroys purity.
3. Today, sediments are usually deposited in and by rivers—along a narrow line. However, individual sedimentary rock layers are spread over large geographical areas, not along narrow, streamlike paths. Liquefaction during the flood acted on all sediments and sorted them over wide areas in weeks or months.
4. Sedimentary layers are usually sharply defined, parallel, and horizontal. They are often stacked vertically for thousands of feet. If layers had been laid down thousands of years apart, surface erosion would have destroyed this parallelism. Liquefaction, especially liquefaction lenses, explain this common observation.
5. Sometimes adjacent, parallel layers contain such different fossils that evolutionists conclude those layers were deposited millions of years apart, but the lack of erosion shows the layers were deposited rapidly. Liquefaction resolves this paradox.
6. Many communities around the world get their water from deep, permeable, water-filled, sedimentary layers called aquifers. When water drains from an aquifer, the layer collapses, unable to support the overlying rock layers. A collapsed aquifer cannot be replenished, so how were aquifers filled with water in the first place?
Almost all sorted sediments were deposited within water, so aquifers contained water when they first formed. Today, with aquifers steadily collapsing globally, one must question claims that they formed millions of year ago. As described in this chapter, liquefaction sorted sediments relatively recently.
7. Varves are extremely thin layers (typically 0.004 inch or 0.1 mm) which evolutionists claim are laid down annually in lakes. By counting varves, evolutionists believe time can be measured. The Green River Formation of Wyoming, Colorado, and Utah, a classic varve region, contains billions of flattened, paper-thin, fossilized fish, hundreds fossilized in the act of swallowing other fish. Obviously, burial was sudden. Fish, lying on the bottom of a lake for years, would decay or disintegrate long before enough varves could bury them. (Besides, dead fish typically float, deteriorate, and then sink.) Most fish fossilized in varves show exquisite detail and are pressed to the thinness of a piece of paper, as if they had been compressed in a collapsing liquefaction lens.
Also, varves are too uniform, show almost no erosion, and are deposited over wider areas than where streams enter lakes—where most deposits occur in lakes. Liquefaction best explains these varves.
8. In almost all cases, dead animals and plants quickly decay, are eaten, or are destroyed by the elements. Preservation as fossils requires rapid burial in sediments thick enough to preserve bodily forms. This rarely happens today. When it does, as in an avalanche or a volcanic eruption, the blanketing layers are not uniform in thickness, do not span tens of thousands of square miles, and rarely are water-deposited. (Water is needed if cementing is to occur.) Liquefaction provides a mechanism for rapid, but gentle, burial and preservation of trillions of fossils in water-saturated sedimentary layers—including fossilized footprints, worm burrows, ripple marks, and jellyfish.
Thousands of fossilized jellyfish have been found in central Wisconsin, sorted to some degree by size into at least seven layers (spanning 10 vertical feet) of coarse-grained sediments.Evolutionists admit that a fossilized jellyfish is exceptionally rare, so finding thousands of them in what was coarse, abrasive sand is almost unbelievable. Claiming that it occurred during storms at the same location on seven different occasions, but over a million years, is ridiculous.
What happened? Multiple liquefaction lenses, vertically aligned during the last liquefaction cycle, trapped delicate animals such as jellyfish and gently preserved them as the roof of each water lens settled onto its floor.
9. Many fossilized fish are flattened between extremely thin sedimentary layers. This requires squeezing the fish to the thinness of a sheet of paper without damaging the thin sedimentary layers immediately above and below. How could this happen?
Because dead fish usually float, something must have pressed the fish onto the seafloor. Even if tons of sediments were dumped through the water and on top of the fish, thin layers would not lie above and below the fish. Besides, it would take many thin layers, not one, to complete the burial. Today's processes seem inadequate.
However, liquefaction would sort sediments into thousands of thin layers. During each wave cycle, liquefaction lenses would simultaneously form at various depths in the sedimentary column. If a fish floated up into a water lens, it would soon be flattened when the lens finally drained.
10. Sediments, such as sand and clay, are produced by eroding crystalline rock, such as granite or basalt. Sedimentary rocks are cemented sediments. On the continents, they average more than a mile in thickness. Today, two-thirds of continental surface rocks are sedimentary; one-third is crystalline.
Was crystalline rock, eroded at the earth's surface, the source of the original sediments? If it was, the first eroded sediments would blanket crystalline rock and prevent that rock from producing additional sediments. The more sediments produced, the fewer the sediments that could be produced. Eventually, there would not be enough exposed crystalline rock at the earth's surface to produce all the earth's sediments and sedimentary rock. Transporting those new sediments, often great distances, is another difficulty. Clearly, most sediments did not come from the earth's surface. They must have come from powerful subsurface erosion, as explained by the hydroplate theory, when high-velocity waters escaped from the subterranean chamber.
11. Some limestone layers are hundreds of feet thick. The standard geological explanation is that those regions were covered by incredibly limy (alkaline) water for millions of years—a toxic condition not found anywhere on earth today. Liquefaction, on the other hand, would have quickly sorted limestone particles into vast sheets.
12. Conventional geology claims that coal layers, sometimes more than a 100 feet thick, formed from 1,000-foot-thick layers of undecayed vegetation. Nowhere do we see that happening today. However, liquefaction would have quickly gathered vegetation buried during the early stages of the flood into thick layers, which would become coal after the confined, oxygen-free heating of the compression event.
13. Coal layers lie above and below a specific sequence of sedimentary layers, called cyclothems. Some cyclothems extend over 100,000 square miles. If coal accumulated in peat bogs over millions of years (the standard explanation), why don't we see such vast swamps today? Why would a peat bog form a coal layer that was later buried by layers of sandstone, shale, limestone, and clay (generally in that ascending order)? Why would this sequence be found worldwide and sometimes be repeated vertically 50 or more times? To deposit a different sedimentary layer would require a change in environment and/or elevation—and, of course, millions of years. Liquefaction provides a simple, complete explanation.
14. Fossils are sorted vertically to some degree. Evolutionists attribute this to macroevolution. No known mechanism will cause macroevolution, and many evidences refute macroevolution. Liquefaction, an understood mechanism, would tend to sort animals and plants. If liquefaction occurred, one would expect some exceptions to this sorting order, but if macroevolution happened, no exceptions to the evolutionary order should be found. Many exceptions exist.
15. Animals are directly or indirectly dependent on plants for food. However, geological formations frequently contain fossilized animals without fossilized plants.How could the animals have survived? Evidently, liquefaction sorted and separated these animals and plants before fossilization occurred.
16. Meteorites are rarely found in deep sedimentary rock. This is consistent only with rapidly deposited sediments.
Learn more about the flood and its implications at www.creationscience.com
It's run by Dr. Walt Brown.
Learn more about the succesion of the animals during the flood, which had to do with the mobility of the animal, the position, density, etc:
Dr. John Woodmorappe: http://www.answersingenesis.org/tj/v14/i1/fossil.asp
