Some thick and extensive sedimentary layers have 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 the sand on a white beach. It is hard to imagine how any process, other than global liquefaction, could achieve this degree of purity over such a wide area. 16 Almost all other processes involve mixing, which destroys purity.
Streams and rivers act on a small fraction of the available sediments and deposit them along a narrow line, but strata are not linear features. Liquefaction during the flood acted on all sediments and sorted them over large areas in a matter of weeks or months.
Sedimentary layers usually have boundaries that are sharply defined, parallel, and nearly horizontal. Thin, sharply defined layers are sometimes stacked vertically, thousands of feet deep. If each layer had been laid down thousands of years apart, erosion would have destroyed this parallelism. Again, liquefaction explains this common observation.
Varves are extremely thin layers which evolutionists claim, without much justification, are laid down annually in lakes. By counting tens of thousands of varves, they believe elapsed time can be determined. However, since varves are so uniform, show no evidence of the slightest erosion, and are deposited over wider areas than tiny "stream deltas," they are better explained by liquefaction. PREDICTION 14: If representative corings are taken in the bottom of any large lake, they will not show laminations as thin, parallel, and extensive as the varves of the Green River formation.
Dead animals and plants quickly decay, are eaten, or are destroyed by the elements. Their preservation as fossils requires rapid burial in sediments thick enough to preserve their bodily form. This rarely happens today. When it does, such as in an avalanche or a volcanic eruption, the blanketing layers are not strata spanning hundreds of thousands of square miles. Liquefaction provides a mechanism for the rapid burial of trillions of fossils in appropriate layers. A similar statement can be made concerning fossilized footprints and tracks of many animals. (See also 21. Rapid Burial on page 7 .)
Limestone layers, hundreds of feet thick, are sometimes found. The standard geological explanation is that those regions were covered by incredibly limy (alkaline) water for millions of years geology likewise claims that coal layers, sometimes more than a hundred feet thick, first accumulated as a thousand-foot thick layer of undecayed vegetation. Nowhere do we see that happening today. Conversely, liquefaction would have sorted vegetation buried during the early stages of the flood into thick layers, which would later become coal. Furthermore, coal layers often lie above and below a repeating pattern of other layers, called a cyclothem. These patterns are understandable in the context of liquefaction.
Fossils are sorted vertically to some degree. Evolutionists believe this is a result of macroevolution. The mechanism by which macroevolution could happen is not understood, and many evidences refute it. (See pages 3 - 13 .) Liquefaction, an understood mechanism, would sort animals and plants. If liquefaction occurred, one would expect some exceptions to this sorting order, but if macroevolution happened, there should be no exceptions. Many exceptions exist. (See 25. Out-of-Place Fossils on page 7 .)
Almost all animals are directly or indirectly dependent on plants for food. However, geological formations frequently contain many fossilized animals without fossilized plants. 17 How could they have survived? Apparently the fossilization process involved a sorting that treated plants and animals differently.
The absence of meteorites in deep sediments is consistent only with a rapid deposition of all the sediments. (See 77. Shallow Meteorites on page 28 .)
Visualize a deck of cards sliding across the table. Friction from the table acts to slow the bottommost card. That card, in turn, applies a decelerating force on the second card from the bottom. If none of the cards slip, a frictional, deceleration force will finally be applied to the top card. But if a lubricant somehow built up between any two cards, the cards above the lubricated layer would not decelerate, but would slide over the decelerating cards below.
Similarly, the decelerating, granite hydroplates acted on the bottommost sedimentary layer riding on the hydroplate. Each sedimentary layer, from the bottom to the top, acted in turn to decelerate the topmost layer. As each layer decelerated, it was severely compressed. This is analogous to suddenly squeezing a water-saturated sponge. The sediments were forced into a denser packing arrangement, freeing water in the process. Angular sedimentary particles also broke as they were crushed together. As the broken fragments settled into the water-filled spaces between particles, more water was released. The freed water was then forced up through the sediments, causing massive liquefaction.
As the deceleration (and thus compression) of the sedimentary column increased, the layers became more and more fluid. Eventually, a point could be reached where the sediments were so fluid that slippage occurred above a given level, as in our deck of cards. Below that level, compression and liquefaction would have been extreme. Fossils below that level would have floated up and collected at this level where sliding took place.
The lowest of these levels appears to be the Precambrian-Cambrian interface. The Precambrian, where it exists, is famous for being a thick sedimentary layer containing almost no fossils. Fossils suddenly begin to be found just above the Precambrian-Cambrian interface at the beginning of the Cambrian. (See 24. Missing Trunk on page 7 .) Evolutionists interpret the Precambrian as about 90% of all geologic time mistakenly associated with passing time.
In the Grand Canyon, the Precambrian-Cambrian interface is an almost flat, horizontal surface that is exposed for 26 miles above the Colorado River. The layers above the Precambrian-Cambrian interface are generally horizontal, but the layers below are tipped at large angles, and their tipped edges are beveled off horizontally. It appears that, as slippage began during the compression event, the layers below the slippage plane continued to compress to the point where they buckled. The sliding sedimentary block above the slippage plane beveled off the layers that were being increasingly tipped.
Evolutionists have a different interpretation. The tipped, Precambrian layers represent a former mountain range, because mountains today often have steeply tipped layers. (See FIGURE 37 .) Since the tipped layers are beveled almost perfectly horizontal, the top of the mountain must have eroded away. That, of course, would take a long time. Then millions of years would have had to have passed, so seas could have flooded the area, because fossils of sea-bottom life are found just above the Precambrian-Cambrian interface. Within various groups of layers above that, other fossils are found, which required different environments (such as deserts and lagoons), so obviously, greater time is needed.
Cross-bedded sandstone. Sand layers would have had the greatest water content, because sand grains are fairly rounded, leaving relatively large gaps for water between the particles. Therefore, the sand layers were the most fluid during the massive liquefaction that accompanied the compression event. Deceleration would have forced the sand forward, displacing the water backward. This compression of horizontal sand layers would have tipped, buckled, and beveled individual layers and groups of layers, forming what is known as cross-bedded sandstone. (See FIGURE 79 .)
Liquefaction Plumes and Mounds. The large water content of liquefied sand layers would have made them quite buoyant. Whenever a low density, fluid layer (such as the compressed, water-sand mixture) underlies a denser, liquefied layer, the potential exists for the lighter fluid to float up in plumes through the denser fluid. These upward plumes of sand that penetrate other layers are seen in many places on the earth. (See FIGURE 76 and FIGURE 77 .)
When a deep, thick, sand layer is laterally extensive, the plume would spill out on the surface of the earth. This spilling-out would resemble volcanic action, only water-saturated sand would erupt, not lava. Small liquefaction mounds , as they will be called, appear when liquefaction occurs during earthquakes. 19 (See Levin's description on page 147 .) Ayers Rock in central Australia appears to be a very large example of this. (See FIGURE 82 and FIGURE 83 .) As with liquefaction plumes, Ayers Rock also connects to a thick sandstone layer below ground. Many smaller, but similar, mounds are found throughout the southwestern United States.
All liquefaction mounds seem to have holes in their sides for releasing their stored water soon after they "erupted." The channels from which the water exited have collapsed except for the opening, which was under much less collapsing stress. Those holes now look like pock marks. Some have claimed they are erosion features from wind and rain. Obviously, wind and rain would smooth out the pock marks, not make them. Besides, the "pock marks," which will be called water vents , are found only in the sides of mounds, not the tops, where they should be if outside erosion formed them.
The above material is Copyright (c) 1995 - 1997 by the Center for Scientific Creation
b. "Potentially more important to geological thinking are those unconformities that signal large chunks of geological history are missing, even though the strata on either side of the unconformity are perfectly parallel and show no evidence of erosion. Did millions of years fly by with no discernible effect? A possible though controversial inference is that our geological clocks and stratigraphic concepts need working on." William R. Corliss, Unknown Earth (Glen Arm, Maryland: The Sourcebook Project, 1980), p. 219.
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.2 1
The following quotation gives evidence of catastrophes in the past, not necessarily part of the Genesis Flood; in fact, the authors believe the dinosaurs were killed by a volcanic event and then buried in a catastrophic flood:
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
FOSSIL PROGRESSION?, DAVID M. RAUP, Chicago Field Museum, Prof. of Geology, Univ. of Chicago, "A large number of welltrained scientists outside of evolutionary biology and paleontology have unfortunately gotten the idea that the fossil record is far more Darwinian than it is. This probably comes from the oversimplification inevitable in secondary sources: lowlevel textbooks, semipopular articles, and so on. Also, there is probably some wishful thinking involved. In the years after Darwin, his advocates hoped to find predictable progressions. In general, these have not been foundyet the optimism has died hard, and some pure fantasy has crept into textbooks...One of the ironies of the creationevolution debate is that the creationists have accepted the mistaken notion that the fossil record shows a detailed and orderly progression and they have gone to great lengths to accommodate this 'fact' in their Flood Geology." New Scientist, Vol. 90, p.832, 1981
Answer: Present earth conditions are not producing fossils such as are found in abundance in fossil bearing rocks.
Fossils like those found in the rocks are not today observed being formed anywhere on the earth by the gradual processes just described. When plants and animals die they are immediately attacked by scavengers, fungi, and bacteria, which destroy them before they can be buried by sediments and fossilized. Any appreciable formation of fossils apparently requires sudden entrapment and rapid burial, a catastrophic process.1
Answer: The major features of the sedimentary rock strata cannot be explained in terms of the processes seen on the earth today. Two excellent reviews of this subject have been published by Dr. Steve Austin of the Institute for Creation Research, to whom we are heavily indebted for much of what follows.10
a. Vast horizontal strata point to a global flood.
In our southwestern states, where they are well exposed by erosion, but also across the continent and everywhere in the world, thousands to hundreds of thousands of square miles of flat, horizontal strata, from a few feet to hundreds of feet thick are found. At no location on the earth may the production of similar sedimentary deposits of like extent be observed today. These formations are composed of sandstone, graywacke, shale, conglomerate, limestone and other types of rock. Some of them extend for thousands of miles, spanning whole continents. For example, the St. Peter sandstone, composed of clean quartz grains, has been traced in twenty states from California to Vermont.11 The Shinarump conglomerate in the Southwest covers some 125,000 square miles,12 and another conglomerate blanket is reported to extend from New Mexico to Saskatchewan and Alberta.13
A continental blanket of clean sandstone, before being deposited, required a steadily flowing current traversing a great distance to separate the sand from silt and gravel. A continental blanket of conglomerate required a continent-sized maelstrom of water in violent, chaotic motion to dump an ungraded mixture of material of all sizes across thousands of miles of terrain. Tremendous water action such as that which would be produced by a global flood seems to offer the only reasonable explanation for the observed facts.
b. Sedimentary rock strata have features which suggest continuous and simultaneous deposition.14
If the contact surface between two successive parallel sedimentary rock layers is smooth and regular, showing no signs of erosion, the two layers are said to be "conformable." If there is evidence of erosion of the lower surface before the upper layer was deposited, the contact is called a "disconformity." Since erosion begins as soon as a land surface is exposed, conformable contact surfaces indicate uninterrupted deposition of sediments. What is found through the greater part of the world's sedimentary rocks, conformable surfaces or disconformities? Conformable surfaces are the general rule, whereas disconformities are relatively rare.
Thus, the sedimentary rock strata appear to have been laid down rapidly, without large periods of time between them. In fact, it is not uncommon for two layers with a conforemable contact surface to grade into a single layer, without a definite contact line. Also, in some cases a disconformity at one point becomes a conformable contact some distance away. The combined effect of these facts is to do away with the vast time scale assumed for geological history. A catastrophic global flood may be the correct explanation after all.
A striking example of missing time has recently been studied in the Grand Canyon.15 Along the North Kaibab Trail the Mississippian Redwall Limestone is seen to intertongue with the lower and supposedly much older Cambrian Muav Limestone. There is no evidence of a disconformity. It appears that the two strata were deposited almost simultaneously. Yet according to the evolutionary time scale a period of 200 million years separates these two limestone deposits.
c. Finer structure of strata is explained in terms of the flood.
The finer structure of sedimentary strata, called stratification, is also difficult to explain satisfactorily in terms of the more or less gradual processes observed in action today. The four common types of stratification seem to be more easily explained in terms of the kind of very rapid water action which a global flood would have produced. Simple lamination,16 cross lamination and cross bedding,16 ripple lamination,17 and graded bedding18 all are equally well or better explained in terms of the global flood hypothesis than they are in terms of the uniformitarian principle.
d. Many massive sedimentary rock formations contain thousands of thin, horizontal laminations. Traditional interpretation takes these to be annual layers or "varves" laid down over multiplied thousands of years in lakes and seas. Thus these laminated formations are adduced as evidence for long time spans required to accumulate the many layers. However a large body of information in the recent geological literature has undermined this view. In the excellent 1994 book, Grand Canyon -- Monument to Catastrophe, edited by Steven Austin of the Institute for Creation Research, reviews this evidence at some length.19 There are numerous examples of sediments composed of many thin lamminae that were laid down rapidly in short periods of time, even in minutes. For example, such a thinly laminated deposit was formed in a few hours during the catastrophic flows of water and volcanic ash released by the explosion in 1982 of Mount St. Helens in Washington. Similar laminated sedimentary deposits have also been produced experimentally by moving, silt laden water in a hydraulic tank. In addition, such laminae have also been deposited from stationary water in a laboratory by French scientist, Guy Berthault.20 In addition, there are finely laminated sediments up to hundreds of feet thick that are now known to have been deposited rapidly under catastrophic conditions in mere hours. An important type of evidence for geologic time has thus become highly questionable.
e. Composition of many sedimentary rock strata is to a large extent still unexplained.
Not only the structure, but also the composition of sedimentary rock formations bears witness to catastrophic deposition of most of the sedimentary rocks in the earth's crust. Limestone,21 dolostone (limestone containing much magnesium carbonate),22 cherts (flint-like stone),23 graywacke,24 and "evaporites" (such as gypsum or rock salt)25 cannot be suitably explained in terms of processes observed on the earth today. In fact, they apparently were formed by water currents and oceanic chemical reactions on a scale which is incomprehensible in terms of present earth activities. Geologists cannot agree on the explanations for these facts, and there is much mystery still. One thing is certain: a global flood seems to offer the best possibility ultimately of explaining all of the facts.
f. Vast volcanic lava outpourings.
In the states of the Pacific Northwest, in India and elsewhere, hundreds of thousands of square miles of territory were engulfed by floods of basaltic lava which must have flowed like rivers and stacked up layers thousands of feet thick. Volcanic action on this scale is unheard of in the modern world.26
g. Earth's crust violently altered.
Many other characteristics of the rock structures of the earth's crust suggest catastrophic activity on a giant scale not seen today. Large scale folding, faulting, and uplifting and sinking are examples. Great river canyons in the ocean bottoms and shallow water deposits on the sea floor indicate that the oceans may have been thousands of feet lower than at present.27 Striking evidence from archaeology indicates that the Andes and Himalaya mountain chains were pushed up thousands of feet in historic times.28
h. Mount Ararat submerged.
On Mount Ararat, a volcanic mountain complex, pillow lava is found at the 14,000 foot level.29 Pillow lava has been extruded under water and is recognized by its high glass content caused by very rapid cooling. All of the igneous rocks examined on Ararat by geologist Clifford Burdick were highly glassy. Ararat apparently was submerged in water to above the present 14,000 foot level. It probably was built up under the water during the flood. The entire world must have been inundated at the same time.
All of these evidences from geology and many more point to a violent, catastrophic past history of the earth. They imply global flood with associated volcanic and mountain building activity which changed the face of the earth.
6. Are the rock layers and their embedded fossils always found in the same order, with simple fossils on the bottom and complex ones on the top, in the same order in which evolution is said to have occurred?
Answer: There are many places on the earth where rock strata and fossils are found in the reverse order from that predicted by evolutionary theory. Many of these are very difficult for geologists to explain. If they cannot be explained, the evolutionary history gets turned around backwards, which is embarrassing for the theory ofhistorical geology.
Dr. Walter Lammerts has compiled references in the scientific literature to hundreds of such reversals of evolutionary geology.30 Sometimes a reversal can be shown to be caused by the overturning of a fold in intensely deformed sediments. But in other cases folding cannot explain it. The stock explanation in such cases is that a "thrust fault" allowed older strata containing simple fossils to be slid out on top of younger rocks contain complex fossils.
The most famous example of a so-called thrust fault is the Lewis Overthrust, covering some 13,000 square miles of mountain ranges in Montana and British Columbia. However, the physical evidence that an entire system of mountain ranges slid thirty to sixty miles out on top of underlying strata is absent. A thick layer of ground-up mixed rock from the two layers should be found between the upper and lower members of the supposed overthrust structure. It is nowhere to be found, not at any of the known exposures of the contact surface. The rock layers appear to have been conformably deposited one on the other in the normal manner. If the simple algae fossils in the upper layers (rocks classified as Precambrian dolomite) were not supposedly a billion years older than the complex marine fossils in the lower layers (classified as Cretaceous shale), the idea of a thrust fault in that area would never have occurred to geologists. but the theory of evolution must be saved at any cost, so heroic feats of geological imagination are performed to explain away the obvious facts.31
Another related type of evidence which is embarrassing to the defenders of the traditional geological claims is the discovery of many different kinds of pollen in Precambrian rocks.32 This information would have flowering plants appearing on the earth up to a half billion years too early to fit in the theory of evolution. Perhaps the evolution and the years are really imagination.
7. What is the biblical picture of earth history?
Answer: While the Bible does not give a detailed picture of earth history, it does provide a framework for interpreting the fossils and rock strata. The opening verses of the Bible indicate that in its original form the earth was surrounded by water, perhaps in violent activity. Thus the earliest sedimentary rocks formed would be devoid of fossils, for life had not yet been created. This was on the first day of creation, ten thousand or so years ago. On the third day of creation God lifted the original continental mass from beneath the waters. Probably until the Flood, thousands of years later, the level of the dry land was generally lower and more even than today, the mountains much lower than today's mountain ranges. Sea level was considerably lower and the land surface therefore greater than at present. When God judged the sinful human race with the Flood of Noah, rain fell and perhaps additional water was brought to earth by special divine provision, and juvenile waters poured out through fissures in the crust of the earth in tremendous volume. In addition, the ocean bottoms and the land surface may have changed their relative levels, the former rising and the latter sinking.
The effect was to cover the land surface totally and subject the entire earth to the action of global water currents and wave action of cataclysmic violence. The land surface was deeply eroded and every living thing swept away. The sediments with the dead plants and animals were deposited to form the strata observed today with their content of fossils. Great earth upheavals, volcanic activity, vast lava outpourings, and rapid mountain building accompanied the latter part of the Flood and continued for centuries afterwards on a diminishing scale. Perhaps in the centuries after the Flood the original land mass began to separate into the present continents. Genesis 10:25 may refer to a crucial stage in this separation, as well as to the division of the nations at Babel. In the post-flood period glaciers advanced and retreated. Gradually the conditions on the earth stabilized, the land and seas were filled again with living creatures, and the descendants of Noah spread around the world.
Answer: A great many facts point to rapid, catastrophic burial of the plants and animals which are found as fossils today.
a. Fossil caves, fissures, mass burial sites, and sedimentary strata discovered in Europe and America were jammed with masses of mixed bones of many sorts of animals from widely separated and differing climatic zones, for example:2 (1) Cumberland Cavern in Maryland, containing remains of animals from cold northern regions, warm, damp semi-tropical regions, and from more arid environments, (2) Norfolk forest-beds in England, which contain remains of temperate zone plants, and large numbers of both northern cold-climate and tropical warm-climate animals, all mixed together, (3) rock fissures in England and France contain masses of broken bones of many kinds of animals from both cold and temperate zones.
b. The Baltic amber deposits and the Geisaltal lignite seams in Germany contain fossil insect, plant and animal remains which must have been collected by some cataclysmic process from different areas all over the earth, from near arctic to tropical zones, and transported from Africa, the East Indies, and South America to be dumped in northern Europe.3
c. Numerous fossil graveyards contain stupendous quantities of fossilized bones of many different kinds of animals thrown together in jumbled masses so as to be explainable only in terms of catastrophic water action of vast proportions. These include the Agate Spring Quarry in Nebraska, the Siwalik Hills fossil beds in India, and the fossil fish graveyard strata of Lompoc, California, the Old Red sandstone in Scotland, and many other fish graveyards in Italy, Germany, Switzerland, etc.4
d. In many locations in the world are found extensive rock strata containing sometimes billions of fossilized animals, frequently densely packed together. They often display evidence of terror and struggle. These facts seem to suggest anything but slow, calm conditions of formation.
e. The vast coal deposits of the world generally do not give evidence of having been fossilized in the same location in which the plants originally grew. Instead they appear to have been dumped into place by flood action.5 Usually there is no evidence of a soil layer in which the supposed forest once grew. There are also many examples of "polystrate fossils," fossilized tree trunks which extend through a number of layers of sedimentary rock and coal, some of them up to one hundred or more feet in length.6 These surely must have been covered up very rapidly in order to be fossilized into coal before the termites got to them. Sometimes up to one hundred layers of coal separated by rock layers have been found at one location. It is not uncommon to find marine tube worms embedded in coal, attached to the coalified wood. Also not uncommon are pairs of coal layers separated by sedimentary rock, which over a distance of some miles are found to merge into a single coal layer. Thus, the rock layer cannot represent a long period of time. These data strongly indicate that the vegetation was rafted in from other locations by great ocean currents, dumped, covered with sediments, and rapidly converted to coal by the pressure of deep overlying sediments. Finally, pressure and heat can convert wood to coal in days,7 and garbage can be changed to oil in less than an hour by a recently developed commercial process.
The entire fossil record is much more easily understood to be the result of global flood action of great rapidity and violence, rather than of the relatively slow processes mostly observed today. British paleontologist Derek V. Ager believes that most fossils were produced in short periods of catastrophic activity separated by long periods of relative quiet.8 However, as we shall see, there is much evidence that the sediments which he believes to represent slow deposition were also laid down rapidly.
4. Are sixty-five petrified forests stacked one on top of the other at Specimen Ridge in Yellowstone Park? Does this famous geological formation represent a vast span of time?
Answer: Much evidence shows that the Specimen Ridge "fossil forests" are not the remains of forests which grew one on top of the other during long periods of time. Rather, it appears that trees from distant forests were ripped up and transported by water to be dumped at Specimen Ridge. The facts strongly indicate that the standard view long held by geologists is completely wrong.
The traditional view held by geologists is that the Yellowstone petrified tree formations represent many forests which grew one after the other. Each took hundreds of years to grow before it was buried by volcanic ash and slides of volcanic breccia (sharp-edged chunks of volcanic rock cemented to form a solid rock). Then another forest grew on top of it, only to suffer a similar fate, until perhaps as many as fifty to sixty-five forests had been buried and petrified. This explanation has been accepted without question for almost a century. However, recent detailed research has brought to light much evidence that contradicts this traditional view.
Dr. Harold Coffin has conducted careful studies over a number of years on all aspects of the Specimen Ridge formations. Some of the facts that do not fit the picture of forests' being buried where they grew are as follows:9
a. Tree roots abruptly terminating or broken.
b. Almost all trees completely stripped of bark and limbs.
c. Small trees upright, unbroken (a breccia flow would push them over).
d. Ring patterns of neighboring trees do not match.
e. Both upright and prone trees lined up as if by water current.
f. No valid evidence of soil layers where trees grew.
g. Absolutely no evidence of animals found where soil layers should be; also, very few cones found.
h. Many examples of trees overlapping with roots on one located at a level part-way up the trunk of another.
i. Broad leaves found where tree trunks are only conifers.
j. Pollen scarce and not of same kind as the tree trunks.
These and other facts strongly contradict the uniformitarian view. The evidence better fits the view that trees were ripped up and transported from another location by water and dumped in place at the same time that repeated volcanic eruptions were layering the area with ash and breccia. The evidence supports the view that this happened rapidly, not slowly over periods of tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of years.