W. Bahngrell Brown, Geology: "Of late there has been a serious rejuvenation of catastrophism in geological thought."3

    Derek V Ager, The Nature of the Stratigraphical Record. "The hurricane, the flood, or the tsunami may do more in an hour or a day than the ordinary process of nature have achieved in a thousand years."4

    Dag Nummendal, Geotimes: "The profound role of major storms throughout geologic history is becoming increasingly recognized."5

    Erle Kauffman, in Roger Lewin, Science: "It is a great philosophical breakthrough for geologists to accept catastrophe as a normal part of Earth history.@6 

  Catastrophism was considered unscientific in the past but now geologists are finding similar concepts acceptable. At geological conventions discussions of major catastrophic events are now common. Some scientists have been particularly concerned that the new trend not be associated with the supernatural, as it often was in the 18th and 19th centuries. They have proposed new terms such as neocatastrophism, episodism, and convulsive events to distinguish the new approach but the terminology and definitions remain in a state of flux.

    While uniformitarianism is no longer dogma, there appears to be no trend toward shortening the billions of years assumed for the history of the crust of the earth. The theorists preserve the long ages by putting long periods of time between the catastrophic events. The new catastrophism does not posit one major event, such as the Genesis flood; nevertheless, current thinking often seriously considers events of worldwide significance.

The Missing Time Gaps

    The proposed time gaps between catastrophic events provide one more argument in favor of the authenticity of the biblical account of origins. The geologic record at these gaps offers no evidence similar to what the earth's surface now shows for the effects of long exposure to weathering agents. Evidence of erosion and soil development, and fossil evidence for the development of plant life are usually missing at these hypothetical major breaks. If long periods of time had intervened, such evidence should be apparent. Norman D. Newell, a leading evolutionary paleontologist, has admitted: "A puzzling characteristic of the erathem [one of the major fossil boundaries in the layers of the earth's crust] and of many other major biostratigraphic boundaries is the general lack of physical evidence of subaerial exposure. Traces of deep leaching, scour, channeling, and residual gravels tend to be lacking, even where the underlying rocks are cherty limestones.... These boundaries are paraconformities that are usually identifiable only by paleontological [fossil] evidence."7

    The paucity of time-dependent features at the so-called time gaps between many of the sedimentary layers of the earth poses a striking contrast with the irregular erosion on the earth's present surface. Since the boundaries between adjacent sedimentary layers usually do not show the physical evidence of the long time gaps, it does not appear that there ever were long periods between the depositions of these layers. These layers appear to have been laid down in rapid succession with little or no time between the events that precipitated their deposition. This is what we would expect of a single catastrophic event like such as the Genesis flood.

    A few samples of catastrophic activities will illustrate how rapid such action can be. In 1976 the great Teton Dam in Idaho gave way, and in less than two hours the waters had cut down through 300 ft of the earthen dam. In 1959 an earthquake in the Madison River canyon in southern Montana loosened material from as high as 1,000 ft above the canyon floor, forming a huge landslide that traveled with such momentum across the canyon that it rode 400 ft up the opposite side. Scientists estimated that the slide was traveling about, 100 mi/hr and that the whole process occurred in less than three minutes. Unfortunately 19 campers were buried beneath the slide.

    In 1929 the Grand Banks earthquake near Newfoundland loosened some mud on the edge of the continental shelf. Within 14 hrs that mud had traveled 500 mi into the North Atlantic and deposited a new, 2-4 ft-thick layer of sediment over 40,000 mi2 of ocean bottom. It is estimated that the mudflow traveled at speeds up to 55 mi/hr8 and, interestingly, ran into the hull of the famous ship S.S. Titanic, which had sunk in this region on its maiden voyage in 1912.

    More significant than the simple recognition that changes can occur very rapidly, the new trend toward catastrophism has engendered the reinterpretation of several processes that once were thought to be slow. Tens of thousands of layers of sediment that scientists originally considered to have been deposited very slowly in shallow seas, are now interpret as having been deposited very rapidly in special underwater mudflows; called turbidites.9 A number of so-called reefs, composed of the skeletons of marine organisms, that were thought to require many hundreds to thousands of years to form are now considered to be the result of rapid debris flows.10 The Goosenecks area of the San Juan River in southeastern Utah has dramatic, deep meanders originally interpreted to have been eroded very slowly. New evidence indicates that they were cut by rapid currents.11

    The southeastern portion of the state of Washington contains huge erosion channels, some of them scores of miles long. These were first thought to represent slow erosion, but after many years of controversy it is now agreed that they were formed by flood activity. Some geologists have postulated that one or more ice dams located upstream broke suddenly, releasing water over the area at the rate of 9.5 mi3/hr, which is 10 times the combined flow of all the rivers of the world.12 Geology has moved a long way from the strict uniformitarianism of a few decades ago, and major catastrophes are again an acceptable part of scientific interpretation.

Paradigms Influence Science

    We can learn from the pattern of thought illustrated by the controversies over catastrophism. In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,13 Thomas Kuhn has pointed out that certain broad ideas, which he calls paradigms, dominate scientific interpretations. As long as these paradigms are normative, they are not questioned. One way or another, most data are interpreted to fit the accepted views.
    Classical uniformitarianism provides an outstanding example of how thinking can be influenced in this way. Hutton and Lyell so thoroughly established the concept of constant geologic change over long periods of time that major catastrophes were completely ignored for more than a century. The effect that this strict uniformitarian conditioning has had on the thought matrix of geology as a whole cannot easily be evaluated, but it is unquestionably considerable. The pattern of strict adherence to accepted ideas raises sobering questions regarding the validity of other dominant ideas in science (to say nothing of human intellectual activity as a whole — science is not alone subject to these episodic thought patterns).

    Because catastrophes are rare, we tend to ignore them and base our conclusions on the usual calm. The disaster caused by the Mexican earthquake and the Colombian volcano might not have seemed so devastating if we were more attuned to the reality of catastrophes, but the normal dominates our thinking. Likewise, because such an event is so unusual, we find it difficult to conceive of a worldwide flood as described in Genesis. But we must not fall into the trap of drawing our conclusions solely on the basis of the normal. In the case of geologic changes, the unusual catastrophe is much more important than the usual calm.

    Fortunately the possibility of catastrophes has important implications for anyone searching for truth regarding the history of this world. Since both the Bible and the book of nature have the same Author, they should agree if correctly interpreted. Much of the evidence of catastrophism found in the rocks does agree closely with what we would expect as a consequence of the worldwide flood described in Genesis. The present trend toward catastrophic interpretations in geology lends support to the authenticity of events described in the Bible.....


A view from Dead Horse Point, Utah.  The striking contrast between the flat parallel layers of sediment and the deep gorge cut by the Colorado River illustrates the lack of evidence for time. Between several of the sedimentary layers major portions of the geologic column are missing. The lack of erosion at these assumed gaps suggests that the layers were laid down rapidly....

Footnotes

1    For a more comprehensive discussion, see Chapter 2 of A. Hallam, 1983, Great Geological Controversies, Oxford University Press, New York. The quotations of Hutton and Lyell presented herein are from this text.

2.   S. J. Gould, 1989, "An asteroid to die for," Discover, Oct., pp. 60-65.

3.   W. Bahngrell Brown, 1974, "Induction, Deduction, and Irrationality in Geologic Reasoning, " Geology 2:456.

4.   Derek V Ager, 1981, The Nature of the Stratigraphical Record, 2nd ed., John Wiley & Sons, New York, p. 54.

5.   Dag Nummendal, 1982, "Clastics," Geotimes 27(2):23.

6.   Erie Kauffman, 1983, quoted in Roger Lewin, "Extinctions and the History of Life," Science 221:935-937.

7.   Norman D. Newell, 1984, "Mass Extinction: Unique or Recurrent Causes?" in W. W. Berggren and John A.Van Couvering (eds.), Catastrophes and Earth History; The New Unformitariansm, Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, pp. 115-127.

8.   B. C. Heezen and M. Ewing, 1952, Turbidity Currents and Submarine Slumps, and the 1929 Grand Banks Earthquake,@ American Journal of Science 250:849-873.

9.   R.G. Walker, 1973, "Mopping up the Turbidite Mess"in R. N. Ginsburg (cd.), Evolving Concepts in Sedimentology, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, pp. 1-37.

10.   E. W. Mountjoy, H. E, Cook, L. C. Pray and P. N. McDaniel, 1972, "Allochthonous Carbonate Debris Flows-- Worldwide Indicators of Reef Complexes, Banks or Shelf Margins," Reports of the Twenty-Fourth International Geological Congress, Montreal, section 6, pp, 172-189.

11.  R. G. Shepherd, 1972, "Incised River Meanders: Evolution in  Simulated Bedrock," Science 178:409-411.

12.  1973, The Channeled Scablands of Eastern Washington: The Geologic Story of the Spokane Flood, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington D.C.

13.  Thomas S. Kuhn, 1970. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed., The University of Chicago Press, Chicago.



taken from: http://www.grisda.org/georpts/gr11.htm

RECORD IS CATASTROPHIC, DAVID M. RAUP, Chicago Field Museum, Univ. of Chicago, "A great deal has changed, however, and contemporary geologists and paleontologists now generally accept catastrophe as a 'way of life' although they may avoid the word catastrophe... The periods of relative quiet contribute only a small part of the record. The days are almost gone when a geologist looks at such a sequence, measures its thickness, estimates the total amount of elapsed time, and then divides one by the other to compute the rate of deposition in centimeters per thousand years. The nineteenth century idea of uniformitarianism and gradualism still exist in popular treatments of geology, in some museum exhibits, and in lower level textbooks....one can hardly blame the creationists for having the idea that the conventional wisdom in geology is still a noncatastrophic one." Field Museum of Natural History Bulletin (Vol.54, March 1983), p.21

taken from: http://www.bible.ca/tracks/dating-radiometric.htm

CATACLYSMIC BURIAL, JOHN R. HORNER, "...there were 30 million fossil fragments in that area. At a conservative estimate, we had discovered the tomb of 10,000 dinosaurs ...there was a flood. This was no ordinary spring flood from one of the streams in the area but a catastrophic inundation. ... That's our best explanation. It seems to make the most sense, and on the basis of it we believe that this was a living, breathing group of dinosaurs destroyed in one catastrophic moment." DIGGING DINOSAURS, 1988, p.131

taken from: http://www.cs.unc.edu/~plaisted/ce/flood.html

Catastrophic floods built Grand Canyon
GRAND CANYON NATIONAL PARK, Ariz., July 20, 2002, Saturday

Dams of volcanic rock laid across the Grand Canyon have burst repeatedly and catastrophically over the past million years -- most recently about 165,000 years ago -- carrying enormous onrushing floods and carving out much of the great landmark in the blink of a geologic eye, new research by U.S. Geological Survey and University of Utah geologists suggests.

The findings tend to support other new data indicating the canyon's Inner Gorge may be no more than 700,000 years old, much younger than earlier estimates of 3 million to 5 million years, said Robert Webb, a research geologist with USGS. ...

taken from: http://www.theologyweb.com/forum/archive/index.php/t-21319