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Patriarchs and Prophets, Chapter 7, Ellen G. White, author, Ari Meyers, narrator
“Some kinds of catastrophic action is nearly always necessary for the burial and preservation of fossils. Nothing comparable to the tremendous fossiliferous beds of fish, mammals, reptiles…found in many places around the world, is being formed today.” 1
Trilobites, crinoids and ostracods, marine life fossils, originally at home in sea beds, have been discovered strewn high and dry across the Summit of the Himalayan Mountains, where Mt. Everest towers 29,050 feet above sea level. Even if these marine critters could swim like fish, where was the waterway? Just how and when did these sea animals scale those five vertical miles?
Fossil trilobites adorn the summit of the Himalaya Mountains.
Stranded five miles above their natural marine habitat,
just how and when did they get there?
Sea going creatures didn’t simply crawl or swim up the mountains to die but offer clues to a past natural disaster that gave Mother Nature a major league facelift.
An ancient, once thriving organic biomass lies buried 35,050 feet below the surface of the Gulf of Mexico. There it is, the Tiber Oil Field, 250 miles off the coast of Houston, pumping black gold from a well, drilled down seven miles beneath the ocean’s surface.
Something drastic and powerful must have happened to rearrange the face of Mother Earth in order to have spread these once living plant and animal life forms across a vertical twelve-mile span—five miles up and seven miles down. The phenomenon is beyond regional.
Fossil fish have been discovered 17,000 feet up the slopes of the Andes.
It seems feasible that the impact of a seven-mile wide asteroid striking the Gulf of Mexico could have cut a massive gouge in the ocean floor and also polluted the atmosphere with a toxic poison that killed plant and animal life.
If an asteroid caused toxic atmosphere could kill the dinosaurs, what would bury the carcasses? A thin layer of iridium is not a likely answer. What’s the source of the mega-billion tons of sediment that buried a global trail of dead dinosaurs? Unless covered promptly, and completely, under extraordinary high pressure, what’s to prevent decay rather than fossilization?
The remains of once living plants and animals normally decay and disappear when exposed to oxygen and nature’s ravages. But that same, once living, organic matter can leave clues to its prior existence in the form of fossils or fossil fuels when buried suddenly, pressured by tons of sediment, deprived of oxygen, and subjected to heat.
With or without a villain asteroid killing off an entire species, it must have been sudden hydraulic action that would have fossilized Gobi dinosaurs. At the time it was a wetter and greener Gobi and home to “…hundreds of dinosaurs and mammals…Avalanches of water-soaked sand buried the animals alive, creating one of the world’s richest fossil sites. The fossils appear remarkably complete in that…all the bones are connected to form whole skeletons…death was sudden, and the ill-fated creatures were quickly buried before scavenging animals could make off with the meaty bits.” 2
Thousands of fossil dinosaur eggs have been discovered, strewn across a parched square mile of layered mudstone within the Argentine badlands at the Auca Mahuevo site. “Every evidence shows that the embryos may have perished in a flood that quickly buried the eggs in a layer of silt and mud. This made it possible for the soft tissues to fossilize before decaying, an extremely rare occurrence.” 3
Irrespective of conjectured time frames, “dinosaur bones…had to fall into water and be buried to be preserved, and most dinosaurs spent most of their time on dry land.” 4
“When paleontologists are lucky enough to find a complete dinosaur skeleton…there’s a good chance it will be found with its head thrown backwards and its tail arched upwards.” 5 The unusual posture, known as the dinosaur death pose (“opisthotonic death pose”), suggests this land-based reptile must have been buried rapidly while drowning in a watery grave.
Land animal fossils, such as the dinosaur Muttaburrasaurus in Australia and T-Rex in Canada, have been “found buried with marine creatures such as shellfish, turtles and fish…” 6
High up Chile’s coastline in the Atacama Desert, reputedly the driest strip of land on the planet with an average annual rainfall of a mere 0.04 inches, is said to have been a wetlands at one time, covered with residual water from the ice age. “More than 80 whales, including 25 complete skeletons, were found in one of the driest deserts in the world…So how did the whales make their way from the ocean to the desert and end up so close to one another when they died?” 7
A treasure chest of 20,000 fossils has been discovered fifty feet below the surface of a southwestern China mountain. A team of “scientists led by Shixue Hu of the Chengdu Geological Center detailed their findings online, Dec. 22 [2010], in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.” The cache includes “exceptionally well preserved” fossils “with more than half of them completely intact, including soft tissues.” 8 Even with sudden burial from catastrophic hydraulic action preventing early decay, “soft tissues” could not have survived for millions of years.
The presence of “fossil land plants suggest the marine community lived near a conifer forest” in a “tropical climate.” 8
Another treasure-trove of tiny fossil embryos discovered in China was “…most likely buried alive one day in a sudden catastrophic overflow of sediment.” 9 Absent such a process, dead organic material will decay and disappear. Prolific fossil residue hints at sudden hydraulic burial.
“Fossilized dinosaur tracks scale sheer mountain cliffs, which are tilted topsy-turvy by some unseen, latent power—trademark testimony to the magnitude of cataclysmic force. Seashells and fossilized marine life litter bone-dry hilltops and mountain slopes, far above today’s sea level.
“Chains of today’s high-altitude, rugged terrain lay submerged underwater in the past, until sea beds awash in the currents of a cataclysmic deluge or powered by some convulsive thrust inside the Earth’s crust pushed mountains skyward from the ocean’s floor.” 10
The Siwaliks, foothills to the Himalayas, which run for several hundred miles and are 2,000 to 3,000 feet high “…contain extraordinarily rich beds crammed with fossils: hundreds of feet of sediment, packed with the jumbled bones of scores of extinct species…the remains of terrestrial animals, not marine creatures.” 11
The fossil bones of a whale were discovered on a desert hilltop near Bakersfield, California. “Marine fossils are found…covering glacial deposits in Michigan…Whale fossils have also been found 440 feet above sea level north of Lake Ontario; more than 500 feet above sea level in Vermont; and some 600 feet above sea level in the Montreal area.” 12
Honeycombing through thousands of feet of West Virginia’s mountainous terrain is a black biomass treasure that heats homes and generates electricity. Masses of compressed ferns and trees, a residue of another time, provide the raw material for those rich coal veins.
A once lush band of living vegetation, thriving under the sun’s rays, didn’t die a natural death. Coal didn’t just bury itself but remains a visible footprint left by a colossal hydraulic event that moved and built mountains. Twenty-nine West Virginia miners lost their lives in April, 2010, while extracting coal from those underground tunnels that extend five-miles beneath the light of day.
The best evidence suggests Mother Earth underwent an unprecedented face-lift that shifted multi-millions of tons of terra-firma, burying and crushing vegetation and in the process, mixing the recipe for creating fossil fuels.
Fossil remains of trees have been discovered embedded upright in coal seams with vertical trunks pointing skyward, penetrating through multiple coal seam layers. “Polystrate trees are fossil trees that extend through several layers of strata, often twenty feet or more in length. There is no doubt that this type of fossil was formed relatively quickly; otherwise it would have decomposed while waiting for strata to slowly accumulate around it.” 13
This polystrate tree phenomenon argues for sudden and near-simultaneous burial of multi-layered strata, posing a time quandary antagonistic to evolution’s million-year scenarios.
Nature’s subsurface reservoir of carbon-based fuels is finite!
This biomass residue is not a naturally renewable resource. Nowhere is a replacement supply being manufactured naturally. Once tapped and pumped dry, the pools of black gold, like the coal veins extracted from earth’s crustal recesses, are gone for good. Civilization’s voracious fuel consumption collides with sober reality. Even the world’s largest supply of crude oil, discovered 4,247 feet below the sands of the Saudi Arabian desert in 1938, is finite and will vanish eventually. 14
The Permian mass extinction event, took out a majority of insects, an estimated 70% of terrestrial vertebrates and a staggering 96% of marine life. Mass extinctions were not the by-product of the failure of some ancient species to compete for survival, unable to transmit its “unaltered likeness” to some “distant futurity” descendant.
How can mass burials that created fossil cemeteries containing multiple plant and animal species be explained apart from the simultaneous impact of the churning force of hydraulic energy?
How could billions of barrels of petroleum and mega tons of coal form without the sudden submersion of forests and lush meadows, overwhelmed by the surge of sediment-laden water?
No way did billions of barrels of crude oil and mega-tons of coal undergo a sudden massive cover up without input from some unusual power source! Considering Earth’s scrambled topography and diverse geology, evidence shouts out loudly that sometime in ancient history a major catastrophic event scrambled Earth’s surface.
So just when and how did that prodigious wealth of organic life find itself crushed thousands of feet under sea bed basins while marine shell animal life fossils wound up stranded high and dry riding mountain summits?
What earth-shattering convulsion shuffled and buried vast acreages of lush forests of ferns and trees deep below the Earth’s surface while simultaneously snuffing out a sobering majority of plant and animal species?
No matter how the geological and paleontological evidence is sliced, diced and scrutinized, the explosive, hydraulic power of a global flood emerges as the prime candidate powering the event that tore apart an entire ecosystem and caused across-the-board extinctions of plant and animal life.
Species extinctions and ecological decline highlight the Global cataclysm’s legacy!
Today’s perception of floods as torrents of rain, raging river currents swallowing buildings, sweeping away bridges and breaching dams, is not remotely equivalent to the global hydraulic cataclysm that devastated Planet Earth. Towers of brightly colored sedimentary rock stand mutely as reminders of a long gone higher ground level, swept away in a flash by an unprecedented surge of hydraulic power.
No question about it, fossil marine life has been discovered at the crest of the Himalayas while fossil fuels exist 35,000 feet below sea level—a 12- mile vertical stretch of plant and animal residue suggesting an unimaginable hydraulic explosion. Some observers wonder if before the Global Flood, the top of today’s mountains comprised ancient sea beds while mountains once rose where oceans now rule. Speculation exists that there might have been a time when Earth hosted a single land mass, a supercontinent labeled Pangea.
No mere earthquake, landslide or meteor strike delivers the mega-million tons of dirt and sediment necessary to bury and exterminate the entire species of dinosaurs and sea snakes—gigantic life forms likely incompatible with humans. Could the global hydraulic cataclysm have triggered a geomagnetic pole reversal? All can agree, reverse polarity is not an everyday event!
The Global Flood must have been more than a tsunami or an unusual dose of torrential rainfall stirring the sweeping current of reckless, raging rivers! Imagine instead, the surface of Earth shredded like paper; a crumbling land mass tipped topsy-turvy; an explosive tumult possibly aided by a ring of fiery volcanoes; high Richter scale earthquakes; a grinding shift of tectonic plates; unrelenting hurricanes; a cascade of meteor strikes—a deadly cocktail of force that sculpted mountains; gouged yawning canyons in the landscape; redesigned sea beds; and exterminated most plant and animal species. Left in its wake would be a frigid “ice age” and the scouring power of glaciation.
*****
Before and after the untethered violence of Global hydraulic devastation, regional floods have contributed to multiple layers of mud, limestone and sand sediment that create and preserve fossils. Still, the Global Flood remains the ultimate source of fossil formation and the reshaping of Earth’s contours.
Seventy percent of today’s Earth surface remains water-covered. The other thirty percent is etched with watermarks of local floods, earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis and hurricanes. So, if earth’s land mass can be flooded region-by-region in piecemeal fashion, why not a gully-washer sweeping the global landscape?
A witness in the 1925 Scopes “Monkey Trial” admitted “practically all of the earth has at some time or other been covered by water.” 15
Donald R. Lowe, Stanford professor of geological and environmental sciences, with colleague, Louisiana State geologist Gary R. Byerly, speculate that 3.47 million years ago, earth may have been mostly covered with water when struck by a meteor. The scientists reasoned if the ocean contained the same volume of water as today, it would have been two miles deep. 16
Another twentieth century observer believes “the world got soaked seventy million years ago, as sea levels rose five hundred feet.” 17 The “five hundred feet” assessment sounds suspiciously global.
At 282 feet below sea level, California’s Death Valley is both the lowest, driest and hottest spot in North America. In the heart of Badwater Basin is a lakebed once covered with water at least 600 feet deep, some say 10,000 years before the present—a likely residue of some serious hydraulic action.
Alfred Russell Wallace, evolutionist contemporary of Darwin and hardly a fan of the Global Flood of Noah’s day, cited “denudation” and “destruction” of the earth’s geology as explanation for the lack of fossilized transitionals.
However inadvertent, Wallace’s words can be read to imply fingerprints of a past, worldwide, hydraulic cataclysm. “…Denudation is always going on, and the rocks that we now find at the earth’s surface are only a small fragment of those which were originally laid down…Almost every mountain range, with its peaks, ridges, and valleys, is but the remnant of some vast plateau eaten away by sub-aerial agencies; every range of sea-cliffs tell us of long slopes of land destroyed by the waves; while almost all the older rocks which now form the surface of the earth have been once covered with newer deposits which have long since disappeared.” 18
Wallace believed “…granite can only be formed, and metamorphism can only go on, deep down in the crust of the earth…What an overwhelming idea does this give us of the destruction of whole piles of rock, miles in thickness and covering areas comparable of those of continents…” 18
Charles Darwin, the same guy that assured readers a bear could evolve into a sea creature as “monstrous as a whale,” declared, “we may feel certain…no cataclysm has desolated the whole world.” 19 Undeterred by lack of credentials as a university-trained hydrologist, paleontologist, or geologist, Darwin staked out his claim rejecting a worldwide flood by substituting unfounded surmise for hard fact. Turning his back on the Biblical account of life’s creation miracle, he likely understood that if he bought into the deluge of Noah’s day, his thesis would be hung-out-to-dry, demolished and swept away as so much fossilized flotsam in a rising tide of contrary evidence.
Despite massive doses of spin and hype, when a discredited idea is fed into a fact machine hoping for evolutionary metamorphosis, the machine still grinds out tainted fiction.
*****
The Biblical account of the Global Flood Multiple is echoed in secular accounts. At least 95 diversified cultures perpetuate a variety of versions of a historic hydraulic event that devastated earth’s geography.
The Gilgamesh Epic offers details of an event resembling, in some respects, the Genesis account of the Global Flood. It might be argued that the twelve tablets describing this hydraulic Epic plagiarized from the writings of Moses, a charismatic presence blessed with a commanding intellect credited with preserving the primary record of Noah’s flood in the Genesis narrative. The Akkadian version, discovered in Ashurbanipal’s Nineveh library, is estimated to have been written sometime between 1,300 and 1,000 BC—at least a century after the era of Moses and the Exodus.
Genesis 1:2 describes a water-covered earth existing prior to the creation of life. Since water covered the earth prior to the creation of life, it’s not unreasonable to recognize the possibility of a relatively recent worldwide hydraulic deluge covering “all the high mountains” after life’s appearance. The flood of Noah’s day tore the core of the earth inside out leaving an upside down trail of clues depicting unprecedented devastation.
At beginning’s time zero, perfection reigned on Planet Earth. Every component of natural law thrived in synchronous harmony in a pulsating symphony of ecological balance. DNA had not been corrupted or mutated. Complex formulas of atoms and molecules coalesced in a living, irreducibly complex ecosystem. Rather than rain drops, earth flourished with its own internal sprinkler system delivering gentle mists and fine dew. A once pristine earth boasted a temperate climate, lush forests, jumbo-sized life forms, and balanced biodiversity.
Unlike the commonly depicted, grunting, barely-human cave men, pre-flood humans possessed knowledge to invent, to explore, and the wisdom to preserve accounts of significant events and mind-expanding discoveries.
Defective human choice disrupted perfection, dooming the landscape. Precipitous ecological decline followed, wreaking havoc with the natural world. Deterioration set in the moment the first human parents abused their freedom in ego-driven pursuit of faux wisdom. Did the “forbidden fruit” contain a virus that corrupted the genetic code and set the death spiral in motion? Beyond eventual human death, the direct consequences of sin, the “ground” was cursed and “thorns and thistles” blighted the landscape. 20
A disrupted nature upset earth’s eco-balance. Life would not have been immune to localized earthquakes, landslides and droughts, with some fossils likely forming years before the Global Flood disaster.
Desensitized to the sanctity of life, humans worshiped objects of nature rather than the Creator. Brutal conflict replaced God’s law of love. Brother murdered brother. While the “heroes of old” were considered “men of renown,” they had become so prone to “violence” and degradation that “all people on earth had corrupted their ways” and “every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time.” 21
The Lord was “grieved…and His heart was filled with pain” when He “saw how great man’s wickedness on the earth had become…the Lord said, ‘I will wipe mankind, whom I have created, from the face of the earth.’ ” 21
The Genesis narrative reports a global-wide, hydraulic catastrophe in which the “fountains of the deep” exploded from within the Earth and “waters flooded the earth for a hundred and fifty days” covering “all the high mountains under the entire heavens.” 22
In the midst of a corrupt culture devoted to self-serving indulgence, Noah remained loyal to the Creator. God warned him of a coming worldwide deluge and delivered specifications for construction of a life-saving ship. Noah, a man of faith, devoted 120 years of his life building the ark while enduring the jeers and snide remarks of skeptics who had never seen rain and held no respect for God, the Creator of the universe.
Eventually, nature’s eco-skid was marked by the hydraulic cataclysm that
unleashed those “floodgates of heaven” in an unrelenting downpour that raged, non-stop, for forty days and nights. When “all the springs of the great deep burst forth” 23 to mix with 960 hours of heaven’s open floodgates, the planet succumbed to devastating upheaval. Those never before seen thunder jets of water, exploding from inside the Earth, combined with molten debris from volcanoes tossing rocks like confetti left no place to hide.
After 150 days and nights of pounding terror, “all the high mountains under the heavens were covered…to a depth of more than twenty feet.” 24 Even a structurally sound ship, like the ark, could not have survived the torrent of violence but for the protective hand of the boat’s Master Designer. Noah and his family, along with multiple kinds of animal life housed in the ark, were tossed about like corks riding waves of fury, but still weathered the heart-stopping onslaught, unscathed. In a single year of violent convulsions, the Earth had been turned almost upside down in a flash of time.
Relentless pounding had been intensified by “a wind over the earth,” 25 unleashing Tsunami-like waves as floodwaters subsided. To prevent the stench of decay, those hurricane-force winds not only contributed to the water’s shredding Earth’s crust like a bolt of sheer cloth but also buried the scattered remains of plants and animals in rapidly stacked layers of sediment.
In addition to preserving fossil memorials confirming the power of the Global Flood and the authority of the Creator, the wind dried habitable portions of the Earth where survivors could forge new lives.
After months of turbulence, the ark docked on Mt. Ararat. Noah and his family stepped out of their sea-worthy ship to a scene of unimaginable desolation. Nothing remained the same. The sight must have sickened their senses, a stark reminder of what they had escaped mingled with grim recollections of what no longer existed. A corrupted Earth had been cleansed by water just as water baptism symbolically cleanses the converted sinner.
While much pre-flood knowledge would have been lost in the destructive waters of the deluge, the eight human survivors would logically have preserved critical, encyclopedic information much as families today rescue heirlooms from local fires and floods.
Perhaps the remarkable shipbuilding skills, evident in the navies of the ancient Chinese Empire and possibly even the designs of World War II’s Liberty Ships were influenced by the design of Noah’s ark.
If Noah and his family had used this narrow slice of time to record in written form the drama of the most harrowing moments of their lives along with descriptions of the pre-flood world, the prized, museum quality records would have been preserved and passed to future generations. Moses, author of the Genesis narrative, would have had access to much of such data through his Egyptian royal education and his cultural ancestry leading to Abraham..
Regional floods, earthquakes, tectonic plate shifts, volcanic explosions, radical climate swings, the erosive power of hurricane force winds, and the relentless grind of ocean tides carve stone monuments. Tsunamis erase coastal villages, trigger fires resulting from natural gas explosions, and threaten all forms of life with doses of radioactivity released by earthquake and water damage to vulnerable atomic power plants.
Never again would Earth be devastated by another Global Flood. God delivered this promise to mankind with a rainbow symbol, arcing across the horizon. “Whenever the rainbow appears in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and all living creatures of every kind on the earth.” 26 The “rainbow resembling an emerald,” 27 encircling God’s throne, completes the symbolism of His absolute justice and unfathomable love.
The next time you fill your car’s gasoline tax and see a rainbow’s colors circling the heavens, consider just how that fossil fuel managed to hide thousands of feet below sea level or under sandy deserts for thousands of years, created and stored there by the colossal hydraulic force of the Global Flood.
“Every living thing on the face of the earth was wiped out; men and animals and the creatures that move along the ground and the birds of the air were wiped from the earth. Only Noah was left and those with him in the ark.”
Genesis 7:23
WLJ
© 2023 Warren L. Johns. All Rights Reserved.
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