MY TURN: Mega floods, massive basalt flows and monarch butterflies

Twenty years ago, Bill Buley of the Coeur d’Alene Press wrote an article titled, “Noah Next Door” (2004). The article was on worldwide catastrophism and geological methods.

Outdoor enthusiasts will know of some of the Earth’s Ice-Age (Pleistocene) lakes and associated catastrophic floods. As early as 1890, geologist G.K. Gilbert noted that huge ancient Lake Bonneville in northern Utah had partly drained into the Snake River of southern Idaho. 

Ancient Lake Agassiz (Keating, 1823) was larger than all the Great Lakes combined. The lake included Manitoba, Ontario, Saskatchewan, Minnesota and North Dakota.

The Altai glacial flood of Russia is very similar to the Missoula Flood of Montana, Idaho and Washington researched by geologist J. Harlen Bretz (1920s). The Altai Flood produced giant gravel and sand waveforms up to almost 60 feet high and wavelengths of about 740 feet!

G.K. Gilbert had even demonstrated catastrophism on the moon with his crater impact studies (1892). Up to one quarter of the moon’s near-side surface is covered with huge basalt flows.

There are also huge amounts of catastrophic volcanic flows such as the Columbia River Basalt Province covering parts of Oregon, Washington, Nevada and Idaho. Thousands of feet of basalt lava flows can be viewed in the Columbia River Gorge on the way to Portland, Ore. Hayden Lake even sits on these basalt flows! The Deccan Flood Basalts in India are three times larger than the CRBP.

As a teenager and to encourage me in Earth History, Harry Dunning, a kindly civil engineer and graduate of the University of California, Berkeley (about 1910), gave me his geologic Brunton compass in the 1950s! These precision instruments, invented 130 years ago, are still used today by geologists who map formations and rock units. Mr. Dunning also gave me his textbook, “Geology” by Chamberlin and Salisbury (1906). They were professors at the University of Chicago that J Harlen Bretz attended (Ph.D., 1913).

At U.C., Berkeley (1965), students used a textbook, “Invertebrate Fossils” by Moore, Lalicker and Fischer (1952). The textbook used fraudulent material by Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919). He had faked his embryo drawings on evolution to support his “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” — Or individual organisms repeat evolutionary history of a group of organisms. He was debunked by fellow professors by 1915. Currently many think this evolutionary material is still true!

Bretz’s professors at the University of Chicago, such as Thomas Chamberlain (1897), urged “multiple working hypotheses.” “The spirit of science should be one of absolute honesty in the use of the data available, and it is this spirit which makes it of such high moral value” (1906). However, catastrophism conflicts with uniformitarianism of naturalist James Hutton (1785) and lawyer Sir Charles Lyell (1833). Many wanted to silence Biblical catastrophism!

The trinity of uniformitarianism, macro evolution and radiometric-age dating haunt us to this day. It took over 40 years for the overwhelming mapping evidence of Bretz and orbiting satellites to temporarily silence the universities’ elites — mostly atheists or theistic evolutionists?

Charles Darwin (1859) had no concept of how superb and almost infinitely complex DNA coding is! Like evolutionists today, he misread diversity (for example, diversity in finches or dog types) as macroevolution in species. Many species of animals and plants are unchanged since the Creation — Coelacanth (discovered 1938), Tuatara (1989), Wollemia pine (1994).

Darwin’s dilemma is the “Cambrian Explosion” in which most of the major phyla just appear suddenly as if Created! 150 years after Darwin, evolutionists are still having International Conferences (Banff, 2009) on the puzzle of the Cambrian Explosion!   

Radiometric-age dating is invalid (this author did), because it is now proven that in ancient coals and diamonds that the rate of decay is not constant.

Also contradicting evolution is that fragile and short-lived cells, amino acids, blood cells, proteins and soft tissue are found in some dinosaur fossils! Even our ancestors, in over 200 cultures, said that they lived with dragons (dinosaurs) and that there had been a world-wide Flood, such as in Genesis Chapters 6-9. The most impervious fine-grained mudstones can only protect fossils from destructive fluids and microbes for approximately 10,000 years?

Furthermore, The Belt-Purcell Supergroup Formations of the Northern Rocky Mountains — where we live — were also rapidly deposited, just as J Harlen Bretz’s younger Ice-Age deposits. 

These formations exhibit liquefaction, soft-sediment folds, slumps, water and gas (methane) escape features from overpressuring of the rapidly deposited mudstones and sandstones. Formational contacts are hard to place because there is almost no break in deposition or change in lithology. 

Age for the Supergroup formations has been changed at least seven times — different radiometric-age dating methods vary significantly. There is evidence of seismicity and some formations on the Idaho-Montana border have impactor evidence (shatter cones). There is not only this regional catastrophe, but a global catastrophe with the same sediments and basalts in other basins in Great Britain, South Australia, China, Canada and Siberia.

The battle rages to teach true history, critical thinking skills, and multiple hypotheses thinking to our students. Sadly, the foundations of Earth History are mostly destroyed and replaced with "hay and stubble.”

When you have those beautiful orange Monarch Butterflies fluttering about you it is very surreal! These small creatures have flown thousands of miles navigating with miniature “GPS” systems! The variety of life is immense. There are also moose, mule deer, marmots, manta rays, mackerel, moray eels, mackinaw, mussels, mammoths, macaws, magpies, mallards, Malayan Tigers, manatees, moths, mosquitos, muskox, Moon, Mars, Mercury, giant blue whales, giant sequoias and mankind …

A child has common sense to know that the two-dimensional paintings in an art gallery are created; but evolutionists walk into the multidimensional art of the Earth’s seas, continents and atmosphere and say all is by chance! “They believe and teach adult fairy tales!”

“The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom, and the knowledge of the HOLY ONE is understanding.” Proverbs 9:10. 

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Jim Pearl, geologist, is a Hayden resident.