Buried in a Day: Fossil Graveyards and the Geological Evidence for Noah's Flood

SPEAKER A Around the world, we find massive fossil graveyards—millions of animals buried suddenly in thick layers of mud and sand stretching across continents. Is that slow and gentle geology or the fingerprint of a global catastrophe? In this episode, we'll walk through the evidence from fossil graveyards, rapid burial, and rock layers and ask a simple question: Do the rocks around us confirm the Bible's account of Noah's Flood? Welcome to Faith and Science. I'm Kaysie Vokurka. Joining me to discuss this topic is Dr. John Ashton. Welcome once again, Dr. SPEAKER B John. Hello, Kaysie. Dr. SPEAKER A John has written a book called The Big Argument: Does God Exist? And in today's program, we'll be drawing on insights from chapter 9, which has been contributed by Andrew Snelling. So, John, how do the features of fossil graveyards, which are written about in this chapter, How do they line up with a rapid catastrophic burial as opposed to slow gradual processes? SPEAKER C Sure, okay. So the geological model for the Earth, of course, is that the sediments were built up solely, the uniformitarianism model. And hence we have the millions of years. But I think what many people don't realize is the enormousness and the type of deposits that we find around the world. Now, many people see the Grand Canyon, have been to the Grand Canyon or see pictures of the Grand Canyon and see all the different layers and the strata and so forth. Some of those strata there spread from New Mexico to Canada. They are sedimentary layers of— Huge. Of sedimentary rock that has been spread massively over a huge area. You know, 1.5 million square kilometers, for example, for the Morrison Formation. Now the other thing is when we look, for example, say in the Morrison Formation that spreads over that area, we find a lot of dinosaur remains. But mixed up with those dinosaur remains are the remains of crocodiles, turtles, clams, you know, all sorts of other things, all mixed up and spread over this area. So this is a major catastrophe. Yeah. And what many people don't realize, again, is that many of these layers and strata, we find in them mixtures of both marine and terrestrial animals, mixtures of freshwater and marine. Creatures. It's all mixed up. Now, we don't see anything like that happening today. I mean, a few years ago we had an area of the state of Queensland in Australia, an area in Queensland I think was the size of the state of New South Wales or something like that, covered by floodwaters in Queensland. It was a massive area of Queensland covered by floodwaters, but it didn't fossilize goannas and koala bears or kangaroos or, you know, rabbits. So you require rapid catastrophic burial to do that. And we still find these layers around the world. SPEAKER B Yeah, and the point that so many different creatures from completely diverse habitats all mixed in together, that means that the water has interacted and mixed up into a whole stew, if you will, with all these creatures together and then just laid it out. Exactly. Yeah. Which, that's very, very intense. Like, some event that's caused that. So, right. So just those features really point to a huge catastrophic event. SPEAKER C Yes. And I think most geologists recognize that these fossilization of many creatures has occurred during catastrophic extinction events. They recognize that there have been times when it seems the entire world was covered by water. Mm-hmm. Other are smaller, more localized catastrophic events. The difference with the biblical model is that says that it was one gigantic global event worldwide. Mm-hmm. And there's very, very strong evidence that it was a single event too. SPEAKER B So what would be some of the things that point to it being a single event as opposed to multiple small ones separated by millions of years, as they might say? SPEAKER C Yeah, sure. Okay. One of the main evidence for this is that if we look at the, there's about a 500 million year span of geological column that we say was deposited as catastrophic events, right? And so in these are multiple layers going through. And what we find is with these layers, they sit what we say conformably on top of one another without any signs of erosion in between. Right. And yet they span millions of years. Right. And this is quite fascinating. There should be in between these supposed layers that have been laid down, then these events that occurred millions of years apart. So they say that the global events occurred millions of years apart. There should be signs of erosion, soil formation, burrowing of little earthworms and creatures and this sort of thing. In pretty well all the cases, we find there's no evidence of that. They're just layers conformably sitting on top of one another as if they were formed immediately after one another. And this is, this is very interesting. I think in the Tappet Formation, which is one of the earliest, lowest Cambrian formations just north of the Grand Canyon, you've got a gap of about 400 and some, 470 million years, I think, with the rock layer on top. And there's deposits sitting on top of it about more than a kilometer thick of sediments. And then this layer is bent at right angles, supposedly 470 million years later without cracking. And so we've got this, the, this whole formation, this really thick layer of sediment that is then bent at nearly 90 degrees without cracking. Now that can only occur when it's soft. SPEAKER B Soft, yes. SPEAKER C Saying that, hang on, there can't be hundreds of millions of years between. It's set and hard, it's been under, buried under pressure. One of the other fascinating things is, of course, we find marine fossils up on the Himalayas, you know, on Mount Everest and so forth. In the mountains of Peru, and I think I've mentioned this before, we've found large, deposits of whale remains, fossils of whales up in the mountains of Peru. Very random. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Along with sharks and dolphins and these other things up there. So quite clearly there's been massive structural changes that can't have occurred under some slow uniformitarian, situation, which is used to date the rocks. 'Cause they measure the thickness and they say, okay, we deposit slowly over millions of years. That's how they got the original millions of years dates for these things. But it just doesn't fit. You can't, you know, deposit things, you know, that way. The other evidence that we have is that we can work out the rate at which water was moving. And there's a tech, it's called cross-bedding. And there are other techniques that we can work at calculating the rate at which the water was moving that deposited some of these deposits, right? And some of them we've got up to, you know, 30 meters a second, 100 feet per second of water speeds. And these water speeds are carrying huge amounts of material, spreading them over hundreds, thousands, and sometimes up to a million square kilometers. Of material. This is catastrophic event like nothing that we see. We haven't, on Earth today, we haven't seen any types of catastrophic events occurring that mirror what we see must have happened in the past in the geological record. And it exactly fits the flood account that there was this massive global event where the fountains of the deep opened up, water came up from out of the earth. Water then obviously condensed and it rained. And there was a massive disturbance of the earth's surface. That's what we see. And it must have been all at once, again, because when we look at all these layers around the world, they all sit essentially conformably on top of one another without signs of erosion. These layers that are separated by millions of years, there should be massive erosion. And the other problem we have is, of course, we know from current geographical data and measurements of erosion rates, the rate at which rivers are carrying sediment into the ocean, all this sort of thing, the continents would erode away in less than 10 million years. You can't have layers hundreds of millions of years apart and no erosion in between and no evidence of where this material went. SPEAKER B So those layers shouldn't even be there if there was 10 million. No, no, no. They would've completely eroded. Like, we shouldn't even see the stacking at all. Yeah. Well, that's right. If there was that many gaps. If there was that— SPEAKER C That's exactly right. And the other thing is that erosion, when it occurs, doesn't occur like in a nice flat sheet. You know, I had a nice level graded driveway on my property, get some heavy rain, and I get all the furrows and things as the water chooses the path of least resistance. And so there's no evidence of this, of this uneven erosion. And again, What about all the animals that are supposed to have lived there, all in between those? Where's the evidence for those? Now, it's very interesting that at times we do find footprints in the different layers of, you know, animals fleeing. A couple of fascinating things. We find that around the world, the water flow is pretty well always in the same direction, which is very— these were all events separated at different times, so we'd expect water flow in different directions. Water flow is in the same direction. The animals tend to be running always away, the footprints away from the water flow, like trying to get away. And the thing is, then those footprints are buried. There's no then sign of erosion away and unevenness. And so again, we should, if these layers are millions of years old, we should see a lot of evidence of soil formation in between, different types of erosion surfaces, all these sort of effects which we don't find in fine. We see one layer, then on top of another layer rapidly buried. And again, something like the Morrison Formation, if you're going to bury dinosaurs, some of which were quite big, some of them are broken up, some happen to be together along with all different other animals mixed up with them, including, you know, freshwater animals and so forth and sea creatures, clams, Again, it's a totally different scenario. It's gotta be a massive catastrophic global event. And that fits what we see buried out there in the fossil record. SPEAKER B Mm, mm. Yeah, it really highlights how important it is to have an open mind to all of the data and evidence out there and pull it all together and see what kind of picture it creates. And then try to come to some conclusions as to what it's pointing to, because you've just mentioned a whole lot of things. That really, really point to it being a global single event that happened. SPEAKER C And I think many people, we don't understand the enormity of these deposits. You know, like your limestone deposits, which are rich in fossils, spread from Ireland across Europe, Turkey, down to Israel, Egypt. It's a massive deposit. You know, the same as the ones in Western Australia, similar deposits in North America. All from the same layer. It's the same layer all the way around. Yeah. And we find these similar layers around the world. Yeah. So it's a similar pattern. It's global. Global event. And the amount of material that has been moved is a massive event. Nothing would survive in it, really. And that's exactly the picture painted in the biblical account. Marine creatures survived because they were in the water, they could get around. Little insects survived on mats of vegetation, this sort of thing. And the air-breathing animals, God miraculously provided for in the ark. SPEAKER B Yeah, thank you for explaining that in detail so we can get a clearer picture of the evidence out there for, the geological evidence and the, in the fossil record as well that lines up with the global flood event model. SPEAKER A Have you ever struggled with doubts about God's existence or known someone who has? What helped you through it? Share your thoughts and stories in the comments. Your journey could inspire someone else who's searching for answers.