The Talk.Origins Archive
Problems with a Global Flood
Mark Isaak
(isaak@aurora.com)
Last updated: February 24, 1995
---
Creationist models are often criticized for being too vague to have
any predictive value. A literal interpretation of the Flood story in
Genesis, however, does imply certain physical consequences which can
be tested against what we actually observe. Most, if not all,
observations, discredit the flood hypothesis, as you can see from what
follows. (Most the the arguments below are based only on a literal
reading of Genesis, but some specifically refer to the flood model of
Whitcomb & Morris [1961].) Can any Creationists address even half of
the points in this list?
Before the flood:
* How did animals travel from all over the world?
+ Some, like the sloths, can't travel overland very well at
all.
+ Some, like koalas, require a special diet. How did they bring
it along?
+ Some, like the dodo, must have lived on islands. (If they
didn't, they would have been easy prey for other animals.)
If animals all lived fairly close to Noah before the flood
(as Whitcomb & Morris suggest), how were they all able to
survive the predation and competition pressures from all the
others, and why doesn't evidence of their living together
show up in fossil distributions?
* How was the ark loaded? The Bible says all the animals were all
loaded in seven days [Gen. 7:4]. Even if there were only 9 million
species to be loaded, there would have to be an average of 30
animals per second going through the ark's one door.
* How was the ark made seaworthy? The longest wooden ships in modern
seas are about 300 feet, and these require reinforcing with iron
straps and leak so badly they must be constantly pumped. The ark
was 450 feet long [Gen. 6:15].
Life on the ark:
* How did all the different species fit on the ark? 10 million
species is a reasonable estimate of species presently alive
(though estimates vary widely; see May, 1992). They all would have
had to fit in about 100,000 square feet of deck space [Gen.
6:15-16]. Since most animals are small, they probably could have
all fit, but only if you allow very little room around them. Caged
animals probably wouldn't all fit, nor would the animals have any
room to exercise. The dinosaurs, mastodons, and other now-extinct
animals would have been aboard the ark as well [Gen. 7:15; Morris,
1993], and they would take up a lot of room. Bracings, corridors,
bilges, etc. would have taken up a lot of room, too. If you
hypothesize significantly fewer species on the ark than now exist,
you must explain evolution rates faster than any evolutionists
propose to account for all the present species.
* How did Noah supply food and water for all the animals for a year?
[Gen. 6:21] Food for a year would have taken up many times the
space of the animals themselves. (I know of no animals, except
some desert amphibians, that hibernate for anywhere close to a
year.)
* How was the food kept fresh for a year? (Aphids, e.g., can't eat
wilted plants.)
* What did the carnivorous animals eat, especially those which
require fresh meat?
* How did creatures needing special environments survive on the ark?
* How do you explain how all host-specific parasites/diseases made
do with only one pair of hosts (and if they did OK, how the hosts
survived!)
* How was the ark kept livable? Shoveling the manure of the
ungulates alone must have been a full time job for eight people.
* How well ventilated was the ark? The body heat from millions of
closely packed animals must have been very intense.
The flood:
* Where did the water come from? (It would take 4.4 billion cubic
kilometers to cover Mt. Everest.)
* Where did it go?
* If you accept the vapor canopy model of some Creationists, you
must answer some equally difficult questions, such as: What kept
the water up before the Flood? What happened to the heat of
condensation of all that water? Why didn't ultraviolet light from
the sun break all the water into hydrogen and oxygen atoms and
blow them away?
Geological effects of the flood:
* How were mountains formed? Many very tall mountains are composed
of sedimentary rocks. (The summit of Everest is composed of
deep-marine limestone, with fossils of ocean-bottom dwelling
crinoids [Gansser, 1964].) If these were laid down during the
flood, how did they reach their present height, and when were the
valleys between them eroded away? Keep in mind that many valleys
were clearly carved by glacial erosion, which is a slow process.
* How does a global flood explain angular unconformities, where one
set of layers of sediments have been extensively modified (e.g.,
tilted) and eroded before a second set of layers were deposited on
top? They thus seem to require at least two periods of deposition
(more, where there is more than one unconformity) with long
periods of time in between to account for the deformation,
erosion, and weathering observed.
* When did granite batholiths form? Some of these are intruded into
older sediments and have younger sediments on their eroded top
surfaces. It takes a long time for magma to cool into granite, nor
does granite erode very quickly. [For example, see Donohoe &
Grantham, 1989, for locations of contact between the South
Mountain Batholith and the Meugma Group of sediments, as well as
some angular unconformities.]
* How was the fossil record sorted in an order convenient for
evolution? Ecological zonation and hydrodynamic sorting fail to
explain:
1. the extremely good sorting observed. Why didn't at least one
dinosaur make it to the high ground with the elephants?
2. the relative positions of plants and other non-motile life.
(Yun, 1989, describes beautifully preserved algae from Late
Precambrian sediments. Why don't any modern-looking plants
appear that low in the geological column?)
3. why some groups of organisms, such as mollusks, are found in
many geologic strata.
4. why organisms (such as brachiopods) which are very similar
hydrodynamically (all nearly the same size, shape, and
weight) are still perfectly sorted.
5. why extinct animals which lived in the same niches as present
animals didn't survive as well. Why did no pterodons make it
to high ground?
6. how coral reefs hundreds of feet thick and miles long were
preserved intact with other fossils below them.
7. why small organisms dominate the lower strata, whereas fluid
mechanics says they would sink slower and thus end up in
upper strata.
* How can a single flood be responsible for such extensively
detailed layering? One formation is six kilometers thick. If we
grant 400 days for this to settle, and ignore possible compaction
since the flood, we still have 15 meters of sediment settling *per
day*. And yet despite this, the chemical properties of the rock
are neatly layered, with great changes (e.g.) in percent carbonate
occurring within a few centimeters in the vertical direction. How
does such a neat sorting process occur in the violent context of a
universal flood dropping 15 meters of sediment per day? How can
you explain a thin layer of high carbonate sediment being
deposited over an area of ten thousand square kilometers for some
thirty minutes, followed by thirty minutes of low carbonate
deposition, followed by thirty minutes more of .... well, I think
you get the picture. [From: Bill Hyde; see also Kent & Olsen,
1992]
* How do you explain the formation of varves? The Green River
formation in Wyoming contains 20,000,000 annual layers, or varves,
identical to those being laid down today in certain lakes. The
sediments are so fine that each layer would have required over a
month to settle. [From: bill@bessel.as.utexas.edu (William H.
Jefferys)]
* How do you explain worldwide agreement between "apparent"
geological eras and several different (independent) radiometric
and nonradiometric dating methods? [Short et. al., 1991]
* Why is there no evidence of a flood in ice core series? A
worldwide flood would be expected to leave a layer of sediments,
noticeable changes in salinity and oxygen isotope ratios,
fractures from buoyancy and thermal stresses, a hiatus in trapped
air bubbles, and probably other evidence. All such evidence is
lacking in annual layers dating back 40,000 years.
* How were limestone deposits formed? Limestone is made of the
skeletons of zillions of microscopic sea animals. Some deposits
are thousands of meters thick. Were all those animals alive when
the flood started? If not, how do you explain the well-ordered
sequence of fossils in the deposits?
* How could a flood have deposited chalk? Chalk is largely made up
of the bodies of planktonic animals 700 to 1000 angstroms in
diameter [Bignot, 1985]. Objects this small settle at a rate of
.0000154 mm/sec. [Twenhofel, 1961] In a year of the flood, they
could have settled about half a meter. [From xdegrm@oryx.com
(glenn r morton)]
* Deep in the geologic column there are formations which could have
originated only on the surface, such as:
+ rain drops;
+ river channels;
+ wind-blown dunes [Kocurek & Dott, 1981; Clemmenson &
Abrahamsen, 1983; Hubert & Mertz, 1984];
+ beaches;
+ glacial deposits [Eyles & Miall, 1984];
+ burrows;
+ in-place trees [Cristie & McMillan, 1991];
+ soil [Reinhardt & Sigleo, 1989; Wright, 1994];
+ dessication cracks;
+ footprints. [Gore, 1993, has a photograph (p. 16-17) showing
dinosaur footprints in one layer with water ripples in layers
above and below it. Gilette & Lockley, 1989, have several
more examples, including dinosaur footprints on top of a coal
seam (p. 361-366).]
+ How could these have appeared in the midst of a catastrophic
flood?
* How could a one-year flood deposit explain stratigraphic sections
showing a dozen or more mature forests layered atop each other,
all with upright trunks, in-place roots, and well-developed soil?
Such layers of forests appear in many locations. One example, the
Joggins section along the Bay of Fundy, shows a continuous section
2750 meters thick (along a 48-km sea cliff) with multiple in-place
forests, some separated by hundreds of feet of strata, some even
showing evidence of forest fires [Ferguson, 1988]. For other
examples, see Dawson, 1868; Cristie & McMillan, 1991; Gastaldo,
1990; Yuretich, 1994.] Creationists point to logs sinking in a
lake below Mt. St. Helens as an example of how a flood can deposit
vertical trunks, but deposition by flood fails to explain the
roots, the soil, the layering, and other features found in such
places.
* How do you explain the relative ages of mountains? Why weren't the
Sierra Nevadas eroded as much as the Appalacians during the flood?
* How do you explain fossil mineralization - the replacement of the
original material with a different mineral?
+ Buried skeletal remains of modern fauna are negligibly
mineralized, including some that biblical archaeology says
are quite old - a substantial fraction of the age of the
earth in this diluvian geology. For example, remains of
Egyptian commoners buried near the time of Moses aren't
extensively mineralized.
+ Buried skeletal remains of extinct mammalian fauna show quite
variable mineralization.
+ Dinosaur remains are often extensively mineralized.
+ Trilobite remains are usually mineralized - and in different
sites, fossils of the same species are composed of different
materials.
+ How are these observations explained by a sorted deposition
of remains in a single episode of global flooding? [From:
jjh00@outs.ccc.amdahl.com (Joel J. Hanes)]
* How could the flood deposit layers of solid salt, sometimes meters
in width, interbedded with sediments containing marine fossils?
This apparently occurs when a body of salt water has its
fresh-water intake cut off, and then evaporates. These layers can
occur more or less at random times in the geological history, and
have characteristic fossils on either side. Therefore, if the
fossils were themselves laid down during a catastrophic flood,
there are, it seems, only two choices: (1) the salt layers were
themselves laid down at the same time, during the heavy rains that
began the flooding, or (2) the salt is a later intrusion. I
suspect that both will prove insuperable difficulties for a theory
of flood deposition of the geologic column and its fossils. [From:
marlowe@paul.rutgers.edu (Thomas Marlowe). See also Jackson et
al., 1990]
* How were sedimentary deposits recrystalized and plastically
deformed in the short time since the flood? The stretched pebble
conglomerate in Death Valley National Monument (Wildrose Canyon
Rd., 15 mi. south of Hwy. 190), for example, contains streambed
pebbles metamorphosed to quartzite and stretched to 3 or more
times their original length. Plastically deformed stone is also
common around salt diapirs [Jackson et. al., 1990].
* How were hematite layers laid down? Standard theory is that they
were laid down before Earth's atmosphere contained much oxygen. In
an oxygen-rich regime, they would almost certainly be impossible.
* How are the polar ice caps possible? Such a mass of water as the
flood would have provided sufficient buoyancy to float the polar
caps off their beds. No way to drop them exactly back onto their
original location, or to regrow them. (In fact, the Greenland ice
cap would not regrow under modern (last 10 ky) climatic
conditions.) [From: Bob Grumbine rmg3@psuvm.psu.edu]
* A year long flood should be recognizable in sea bottom cores by
(1) an uncharacteristic amount of terrestrial detritus, (2)
different grain size distributions in the sediment, (3) a shift in
oxygen isotope ratios (rain has a different isotopic composition
from seawater), (4) a massive extinction, and (n) other
characters. Why do none of these show up?
* When did impact craters on the earth occur? Geological evidence
indicates that they would have formed in sediments early enough
for erosion and crustal movements to partially erase them.
Creationists Whitcomb and DeYoung suggest they occurred during the
year of Noah's flood. But the heat from all those impacts
concentrated in one year would have vaporized the flood waters.
[Fezer, pp 45-46]
* And before you argue that fossil evidence was dated and
interpreted to meet evolutionary assumptions, remember that the
geological column and the relative dates therein were laid out by
creationists before Darwin even formulated his theory. (See, for
example, Moore [1973], or the closing pages of Dawson [1868], who
was cited above.)
Biological effects of the flood:
* How did all the fish survive? Some require cool clear water, some
need brackish water, some need ocean water, some need water even
saltier. A flood would have destroyed at least some of these
habitats.
* How did short-lived species survive? Adult mayflies on the ark
would have died in a few days, and the larvae of many mayflies
require shallow fresh running water. Many other insects would face
similar problems.
* How did all the modern plant species survive? Many plants (seeds
and all) would be killed by being submerged for a few months. Most
plants require established soils to grow--soils which would have
been stripped by the Flood. Some plants germinate only after being
exposed to fire or after being ingested by animals; these
conditions would be rare (to put it mildly) after the Flood.
* How do you explain the survival of any sensitive marine life
(e.g., coral)? Since most coral are found in shallow water, the
turbidity created by the runoff from the land would effectively
cut them off from the sun. The silt would cover the reef after the
rains were over, and the coral would ALL DIE. By the way, the
rates at which coral deposits calcium are well known, and some
highly mature reefs (such a the great barrier) have been around
for MILLIONS of years to be deposited to their observed thickness.
[From: bmb@bluemoon.rn.com]
* Why is there no evidence of a flood in tree ring dating?
* How does the flood explain the geological sorting of pollen?
Fossil pollen is one of the more important indicators of different
levels of strata. Each plant has different and distinct pollen,
and, by telling which plants produced the fossil pollen, it is
easy to see what the climate was like in different strata. Was the
pollen hydraulically sorted by the flood water so that the
climatic evidence is different for each layer? Furthermore, pollen
and spores are found in association with the trunks, leaves,
branches, and roots produced by the same plants [Stewart, 1983].
How could a flood sort all of them together perfectly?
* How does a flood explain the accuracy of "coral clocks"? The moon
is slowly sapping the earth's rotational energy. The earth should
have rotated more quickly in the distant past, meaning that a day
would have been less than 24 hours, and there would have been more
days per year. Corals can be dated by the number of "daily" growth
layers per "annual" growth layer. Devonian corals, for example,
show nearly 400 days per year. There is an exceedingly strong
correlation between the "supposed age" of a wide range of fossils
(corals, stromatolites, and a few others -- collected from
geologic formations throughout the column and from locations all
over the world) and the number of days per year that their growth
pattern shows. The agreement between these clocks, and radiometric
dating, and the theory of superposition... is a little hard to
explain away as the result of a number of unlucky coincidences in
a 300-day-long flood. [From: stassen@alc.com (Chris Stassen)]
* If a single flood is responsible for all fossils, where were all
those animals when they were alive? From "Six 'Flood' Arguments
Creationists Can't Answer" by Robert Schadewald,
Creation/Evolution IV (Summer 1982), pp. 12-13: "Scientific
creationists interpret the fossils found in the earth's rocks as
the remains of animals that perished in the Noachian Deluge.
Ironically, they often cite the sheer number of fossils in "fossil
graveyards" as evidence for the Flood. In particular, creationists
seem enamored by the Karroo Formation in Africa, which is
estimated to contain the remains of 800 billion vertebrate animals
(see Whitcomb and Morris, p. 160; Gish, p. 61). As
pseudoscientists, creationists dare not test this major hypothesis
that all of the fossilized animals died in the Flood. "Robert E.
Sloan, a paleontologist at the University of Minnesota, has
studied the Karroo Formation. He asserts that the animals
fossilized there range from the size of a small lizard to the size
of a cow, with the average animal perhaps the size of a fox. A
minute's work with a calculator shows that, if the 800 billion
animals in the Karoo formation could be resurrected, there would
be twenty-one of them for every acre of land on earth. Suppose we
assume (conservatively, I think) that the Karroo Formation
contains 1 percent of the vertebrate fossils on earth [land
fossils only--whj]. Then when the Flood began, there must have
been at least 2100 living animals per acre, ranging from tiny
shrews to immense dinosaurs. To a noncreationist mind, that seems
a bit crowded." A thousand kilometers' length of arctic coastal
plain, according to experts in Leningrad [N. Newell, Creation and
Evolution; 1982, Columbia U. Press, p. 62], contains about 500,000
*tons* of tusks. Even assuming that the entire population was
preserved, you seem to be saying that Russia had wall-to-wall
mammoths before this "event."
* How do you explain the relative commonness of aquatic fossils? A
flood would have washed over everything equally, so terrestrial
organisms should be roughly as abundant as aquatic ones (or more
abundant, since Creationists hypothesize greater land area before
the Flood) in the fossil record. Yet shallow marine environments
account for by far the most fossils.
* Even if there room physically for all the large animals which now
exist only as fossils, how could they have all coexisted in a
stable ecology before the flood? Montana alone would have had to
support a diversity of herbivores orders of magnitude larger than
anything now observed.
Historical effects of the flood:
* Why is there no mention of the flood in the records of Egyptian or
Chinese civilizations which existed at the time? Biblical dates (I
Kings 6:1, Gal 3:17, various generation lengths given in Genesis)
place the flood 1300 years before Solomon began the first temple.
We can construct reliable chronologies for near Eastern history,
particularly for Egypt, from many kinds of records from the
literate cultures in the near East. These records are independent
of, but supported by, dating methods such as dendrochronology and
carbon-14. The building of the first temple can be dated to 950
B.C. +/- some small delta, placing the Flood around 2250 B.C.
Unfortunately, the Egyptians (among others) have written records
dating well back before 2250 B.C. (the Great Pyramid, for example
dates to the 26th century B.C., 300 years before the Biblical date
for the Flood). No sign in Egyptian inscriptions of this global
flood around 2250 B.C.
* Why are no human artifacts found except in the very uppermost
strata? If, at the time of the flood, the earth was overpopulated
by people with technology for shipbuilding, why were none of their
tools or buildings mixed with with trilobite or dinosaur fossils?
* How did the human population rebound so fast? Geneologies in
Genesis put the Tower of Babel about 110 to 150 years after the
Flood [Gen 10:25, 11:10-19]. How did the world population regrow
so fast to make its construction (and the city around it)
possible? Similarly, there would have been very few people around
to build Stonehenge and the Pyramids, found the Sumarian and Indus
Valley civilizations, populate the Americas, etc.
Aftermath of the flood:
* How did koalas get from Ararat to Australia, polar bears to the
Arctic, etc., when the kinds of environment they require to live
doesn't exist between the two points.
* How were ecological interdependencies preserved as animals
migrated from Ararat? Did the yucca an the yucca moth migrate
together across the Atlantic? Were there, a few thousand years
ago, unbroken giant sequoia forests between Ararat and California
to allow indigenous bark and cone beetles to migrate?
* Why are so many marsupials limited to Australia; why are there no
wallabies in Indonesia? The same argument applies to any number of
groups of plants and animals.
* How could more than a handful of species survive in a devastated
habitat?
* How could more than a handful of the predator species on the ark
have survived, with only two individuals of their prey to eat? All
of the predators at the top of the food pyramid require larger
numbers of food animals beneath them on the pyramid, which in turn
require large numbers of the animals they prey on, and so on, down
to the primary producers (plants...etc.) at the bottom. And if the
predators survived, how did the other animals survive being preyed
on?
* How could more than a handful of species survive random influences
that affect populations? Isolated populations with fewer than 20
members are usually doomed even when extraordinary measures are
taken to protect them. [Simberloff, 1988]
* How could more than a handful of species survive the inbreeding
depression that comes with establishing a population from a single
mating pair?
* How do you explain the genetic variation in all populations today?
* The Bible states that seven pairs of all "clean" animals, but only
one pair each of other animals, were taken aboard the ark. Thus,
after the flood, clean animals should have started with seven
times the genetic variation. (Clean animals could have had up to
28 alleles of any gene, while non-clean animals would have been
limited to 4 alleles.) Why do we not observe a correlation between
genetic variation and Hebrew dietary restrictions?
Is the flood model consistent with the Bible?
* The model seems to say that large numbers of kinds of land animals
became extinct because of the flood [e.g., Whitcomb and Morris,
1961, p. 69n], while Genesis repeatedly says that Noah was ordered
to take a representative sample of all kinds of land animals on
the Ark to save them from extinction, and that Noah did as
ordered. Which is right?
* Genesis 6:20 and 7:14-15 say there were two of each kind of fowl
and clean beasts, yet Genesis 7:2-3,5 says they came in sevens.
How can a literal interpretation be appropriate if the text is
self-contradictory?
* How could Noah have gathered male and female of each kind [Gen.
7:15-16] when some species are asexual, others are parthenogenic
and have only females, and others (such as earthworms) are
hermaphrodites? And what about social animals like ants and
termites which need the whole nest to survive?
* What was used to waterproof the ark? We are told that God
instructed Noah to coat the ark inside and out with the naturally-
occurring hydrocarbon pitch, which causes a bit of a problem
since, according to Whitcomb and Morris, all oil, tar and coal
deposits were formed when organic matter was buried DURING the
flood.
* If your style of Biblical interpretation makes you take the flood
literally, then shouldn't you also believe in a flat and
stationary earth? [Dan. 4:10-11, Matt. 4:8, 1 Chron. 16:30, Psalms
93:1, ...]
* In fact, is there any reason at all why the flood story should be
taken literally? Jesus used parables; why wouldn't God do so, too?
* Does the flood story make the whole Bible less credible? Davis
Young is a working geologist who also is an Evangelical Christian.
He has personal doubts about some aspects of evolution, but he
makes a devastating case against "Flood Geology." He writes
(Christianity and the Age of the Earth, p. 163): "The maintenance
of modern creationism and Flood geology not only is useless
apologetically with unbelieving scientists, it is harmful.
Although many who have no scientific training have been swayed by
creationist arguments, the unbelieving scientist will reason that
a Christianity that believes in such nonsense must be a religion
not worthy of his interest...Modern creationism in this sense is
apologetically and evangelistically ineffective. It could even be
a hindrance to the gospel. "Another possible danger is that in
presenting the gospel to the lost and in defending God's truth we
ourselves will seem to be false. It is time for Christian people
to recognize that the defense of this modern, young-Earth,
Flood-geology creationism is simply not truthful. It is simply not
in accord with the facts that God has given. Creationism must be
abandoned by Christians before harm is done...." [From:
bill@bessel.as.utexas.edu (William H. Jefferys) See also Young,
1988]
* If God is omnipotent, why not kill what He wanted killed directly?
Why resort to a roundabout method that requires innumerable
additional miracles?
* The whole idea was to rid the wicked people from the world. Did it
work?
* Finally, even if the flood model weren't riddled by all these
problems, why should we accept it? What it does attempt to explain
is already explained more accurately, consistently, and thoroughly
by conventional geology and biology, and the flood model leaves
many other things unexplained, even unexplainable. How is flood
geology useful?
_________________________________________________________________
References
(My thanks to R. Andrew MacRae for supplying most of these
references.)
Bignot, G., 1985. Micropaleontology Boston: IHRDC, p. 75
Clemmenson, L.B. and Abrahamsen, K., 1983. Aeolian stratification in
desert sediments, Arran basin (Permian), Scotland. Sedimentology,
v.30, p.311-339.
Cristie, R.L., and McMillan, N.J. (eds.), 1991. Tertiary fossil
forests of the Geodetic Hills, Axel Heiberg Island, Arctic
Archipelago, Geological Survey of Canada, Bulletin 403., 227pp.
Dawson, J.W., 1868. Acadian Geology. The Geological Structure, Organic
Remains, and Mineral Resources of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and
Prince Edward Island, 2nd edition. MacMillan and Co.: London, 694pp.
Donohoe, H.V. Jr. and Grantham, R.G. (eds.), 1989. Geological Highway
Map of Nova Scotia, 2nd edition. Atlantic Geoscience Society, Halifax,
Nova Scotia. AGS Special Publication no. 1, 1:640 000.
Dundes, Alan (ed.), 1988. The Flood Myth, University of California
Press, Berkeley and London.
Eyles, N. and Miall, A.D., 1984, Glacial Facies IN: Walker, R.G.,
Facies Models, Second Edition. Geoscience Canada, Reprint Series 1,
p.15-38.
Fezer, Karl D., 1993. "Creationism: Please Don't Call It Science"
Creation/Evolution, 13:1 (Summer 1993), 45-49.
Ferguson, Laing, 1988. The Fossil Cliffs of Joggins. Nova Scotia
Museum, Halifax, Nova Scotia.
Gansser, A., 1964. Geology of the Himalayas, John Wiley and Sons,
Ltd., New York, 289pp.
Gastaldo, R. A., 1990, Early Pennsylvanian swamp forests in the Mary
Lee coal zone, Warrior Basin, Alabama. in R. A. Gastaldo et. al.,
Carboniferous Coastal Environments and Paleocommunities of the Mary
Lee Coal Zone, Marion and Walker Counties, Alabama. Guidebook for the
Field Trip VI, Alabama Geological Survey, Tuscaloosa, Alabama. pp.
41-54.
Genesis 6:9-8:22.
Gilette, D.D. and Lockley, M.G. (eds.), 1989. Dinosaur Tracks and
Traces, Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge, 454pp.
Gore, Rick, 1993. "Dinosaurs" National Geographic, 183:1 (Jan. 1993),
2-54.
Hubert, J.F., and Mertz, K.A., Jr., 1984. Eolian sandstones in Upper
Triassic-Lower Jurassic red beds of the Fundy Basin, Nova Scotia.
Journal of Sedimentary Petrology, v.54, p.798-810.
Jackson, M.P.A., et al., 1990. Salt diapirs of the Great Kavir,
Central Iran. Geological Society of America, Memoir 177, 139pp.
Kent and Olsen, 1992. (Columbia University Lamont-Doherty Geological
Observatory) Discover, Jan. 1992
Kocurek, G., and Dott, R.H., 1981. Distinctions and uses of
stratification types in the interpretation of eolian sand. Journal of
Sedimentary Petrology, v.51, no.2, p.579-595.
May, Robert M., 1992. "How Many Species Inhabit the Earth?" Scientific
American, 267:4 (Oct. 1992), 42-49.
Moore, Robert A., 1983. "The Impossible Voyage of Noah's Ark"
Creation/Evolution, #11 (Winter 1983), 1-43. The entire issue is about
the ark. Moore lists over one hundred references.
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