A creationist sequence of events:

Why it works:

The Shock Dynamics theory explains the mass extinction of woolly mammoths and other large mammals found in post-Flood sediments.  The theory shows how the protocontinent (similar to Pangaea of Plate Tectonics) was shattered by a giant meteorite impact and the pieces flung to their present locations over about 26 hours.  Before the impact, what is today North America and northern Asia were below 60 degrees latitude.  Overnight they were violently thrown northward.  Cross-continental wind storms buried millions of mammoths deep in loose wind-blown soil, while hundreds of thousands more were swept into the ocean onto continental shelves.  The Siberian environment quickly changed from temperate grasslands to arctic tundra with permafrost.

Creationist researcher Michael Oard has studied the extinction of the woolly mammoth for many years.  Here are some of his findings.⁷  "There are probably millions of mammoths buried in the permafrost of Siberia alone.  The mammoths are found with a wide variety of other mammals, large and small, many of which were grazers.  They lived in a grassland environment with a long growing season, mild winters, very little permafrost, and a wide diversity of plants -- quite different from the climate in the region today."  "They were buried in the dust storms that deposited the loess blankets found in those regions today.  Some were entombed in a standing position."

Siberia, Alaska, and the Yukon Territory of Canada, together with the surrounding shallow ocean (Bering Strait), are called Beringia.  "Mammoths are commonly found in surficial sediments from western Europe eastward through northern and eastern Asia, Alaska and the Yukon.  Mammoth remains are also found on some of the islands in the Bering Sea and are dredged from the shallow continental shelves surrounding Beringia.  Enormous numbers of ice age mammals, most commonly mammoths, are dredged up from the unconsolidated sediments of the North Sea by trawlers."  "Mammoth and mastodon teeth have been dredged from 40 sites along the continental shelf off the eastern US in water up to 120 meters deep."  "It would be conservative... to conclude that several million mammoths are buried in Beringia."

"Woolly mammoths are not the only fossil mammals found in the permafrost of Beringia.  There are a wide range of other mammals, large and small, that accompany the mammoths.  These include the woolly rhinoceros, wolf, fox, lion, brown bear, camel, deer, ground sloth, pika, wolverine, ferret, ground squirrel, moose, reindeer, yak, musk ox, giant beaver, lemming, porcupine, coyote, skunk, mastodon, antelope sheep, voles, hare and rabbit, plus many species of birds, rodents, horses, and bisons."

"There is abundant evidence that the woolly mammoths in Siberia, Alaska and the Yukon died after the Flood."  The surface sediment "lies upon hundreds of meters of consolidated sedimentary rock that a large majority of creationists would attribute to the Flood."

As a result of "great tectonic and volcanic upheaval, the stratosphere would have held great quantities of dust and aerosols."  "Thus sunlight would have been partially reflected back to space from the volcanic products trapped in the stratosphere.  Less sunlight would have meant cooler land surfaces."  "Evaporation would be much greater at mid and high latitude than today due to the much warmer water.  Copious evaporation close to the ice sheets would have been most favourable for their rapid growth."  Oard is probably not aware of the Shock Dynamics theory and, along with most creationists, believes the "great tectonic and volcanic upheaval" occurred during the Genesis Flood rather than long afterward, as presented here.  However, the effects are just as relevant.

Oard writes, "I believe the secret to their demise and burial can be found in the type of sediment surrounding the woolly mammoths."  "The vast majority of the animals are found in the 'yedomas' of Siberia and the 'muck' of Alaska.  The yedomas, a Yukut term, are hills 10-20 meters, sometimes up to 60 meters, high."  "There is now general agreement that the yedomas and muck are loess -- a wind-blown silt!  Much data support the wind-blown origin of this sediment."  "Thus it seems likely that the mammoths in Beringia were mostly killed and buried by dust storms."  "The permafrost would then move upward after the loess was deposited and rapidly freeze the remains, thus accounting for the rapid burial."  "Copious wind-blown dust even occurs in the ice age portion of the Greenland and Antarctic ice cores."

"Today, Siberia is well known for its bitterly cold winters."  "Siberia today is in the permafrost zone where up to a meter of the surface melts in the summer.  Water pools on the surface forming massive bogs and muskegs, making summer travel difficult, if not impossible, for man and beast."⁷

If only two mammoths survived the Flood, was 300 years enough time to build the population of millions that we find buried?  Yes.  If we use the elephant life-cycle as a model, a 13 year doubling rate would produce a population at least as large as that which was buried.

Animals today live in some parts of the world and not in others.  In the same way, before the Shock Dynamics event, large mammals occupied different regions of the protocontinent.  So along with the woolly mammoth, in Europe and northern Asia the woolly rhinoceros, giant deer, and cave bear are found buried.  In North America it is the columbian mammoth, mastodon, saber-tooth cat, giant ground sloth, shasta ground sloth, and yesterday's camel.  In South America it is the litoptern, notoungulate, and glyptodon.  And in Australia it is the giant kangaroo, marsupial lion, diprotodon, short-faced kangaroo, and giant short-faced kangaroo.⁶

After the Flood, receding flood waters would have carved long caves in the newly deposited limestone.  Several hundred years later waves carried carcasses of animals deep into these caves during the upheaval of the Shock Dynamics event.  The book Cataclysm!¹ has a chapter (10) describing the bodies of all kinds of mammals carried deep into limestone caves throughout the world.  "The shattered remains of countless 'Pleistocene' (Ice Age) animals and plants were deposited both north and south of the equator, in limestone caves and rock-fissures".  "These caves, via narrow fissure-like tortuous passages, often penetrate solid rock for horizontal and vertical distances sometimes exceeding several hundred feet, are intersected by separate fissure systems, and are globally very numerous."  "Most of the remains retrieved from these apertures have been deposited in great confusion, with normally incompatible kinds of animals lying in unnaturally close juxtaposition.  Often accompanying these organic masses are both rounded and angular stones of dissimilar composition and, less frequently, sizable boulders.  All these objects are usually enveloped and united by consolidated muds, earths or hard breccias".  They report on caves found in Europe, Asia, North and South America, and Australia.  Occasionally human remains are there as well.

The flat layers of sedimentary rock laid down by the Flood were folded and faulted long after the Flood by Shock Dynamics tectonics, not while the flood waters were still high.

No dinosaur fossils or footprints have been found in Mesopotamia (Iraq).

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Finding the time:

The tenuous chain of assumptions and documented errors of radiometric dating is well known to creationists.  The discovery of measurable Carbon-14 in fossilized organic material does, however, put an upper limit on the age of the biosphere:  "Given the short Carbon-14 half-life of 5730 years, organic materials purportedly older than 250,000 years... should contain absolutely no detectable Carbon-14."  "Almost without exception, when tested by highly sensitive accelerator mass spectrometer (AMS) methods, organic samples from every portion of the Phanerozoic [(fossil)] record show detectable amounts of Carbon-14!"  AMS is capable of measuring Carbon-14 levels of less than 0.01 percent modern carbon (pmc).  The mean value for fossil samples is 0.29 pmc, while samples without fossils have a mean value of 0.06 pmc.  "In terms of the standard geological timescale, all these samples should be equally Carbon-14 dead."²  Dates determined by other radiometric methods for similar samples are far older, up to hundreds of millions of years.  But the discovery of protein and soft tissue in a dinosaur fossil thought to be 80 million years old¹¹, confirming previous finds¹², adds more doubt to these supposed vast ages.

Without a verifiable way to determine absolute age, researchers in catastrophic geology can only judge relative age; lower rocks were laid down before higher rocks.  That is to say, lower catastrophes occurred before higher ones, with rapid deposition of perhaps thousands of feet of sediment in a single catastrophic event, and each new event may have removed some of the previously deposited sediment by scouring.  The rock record would not reveal the time between events.

Even when a catastrophic event is acknowledged by uniformitarian geologists, it may not be readily apparent.  A 1994 article on the famous Chicxulub impact in Mexico illustrates their problem.  It described an attempt to discover if deposits on Texan and Mexican coasts were from impact-generated tsunami waves.  "Sedimentologists present could see no clear evidence to determine whether the chaotic breccias had been deposited rapidly, perhaps by tsunamis, or over many thousands of years, perhaps as parts of turbidity flows.  The problem stems from the fact that modern tsunamites show no unique distinguishing characteristics."³  A letter to the editor added this anecdote from a reader's college days.  "A group of undergraduates was transported to a site with the purpose of surveying and sampling what was described to us as a varved clay deposit.  However, while cutting my first 'clean' section, my colleagues and I discovered a plank of obviously planed-and-sawn timber encased in the 'varves'.  It eventually transpired that the 'varves' were, in fact, the tailings of unwanted clay from a gravel working.  This shows the benefits of maintaining an open mind."³

The geologic column was invented before the theory of evolution.  It assigned rocks to places in the column mainly according to the fossils found in the rocks.  One of the popular myths of the geologic column is that the Earth is covered like a layer cake by successive strata.  In reality, the coverage is quite spotty.  As depicted in this map, if the world were covered in the youngest strata it would be light brown all over, without any of the oldest (red) rock showing.  That means up to hundreds of millions of years of sedimentary deposits, according to the uniformitarian scenario, are missing from much of the Earth's surface.  These are not just canyons cut by rivers down to lower strata, but large portions of all continents.

From Grolier Online Atlas - Geology

That distinctive layers do exist is generally accepted.  Theorizing begins with how the fossils got there.  In the uniformitarian view, as long as a type of creature such as a trilobite existed, occasionally some of them would be fossilized, accumulating in layer upon layer of sediment deposited gradually over millions of years.  Thus the point at which trilobite fossils diminish in number or disappear from higher rock layers is considered the time of extinction; all the layers below record "trilobite life as usual".  The catastrophist view is that until a catastrophic event occurred there was virtually no fossilization going on.  Then suddenly whole series of sedimentary layers were laid down. They hardened into rock and fossilized the creatures buried in them.  Thus the point at which trilobite fossils diminish in number or disappear from higher rock layers marks the end of their extinction event, which includes all the layers piled up below that point.  The difference is important. Which is right?

Unburied carcasses disintegrate quickly, so fossilization requires rapid burial.  The very slow accumulation of sediment on the floor of a lake or ocean in the uniformitarian scenario could hardly cover even a leaf.  Covering a dinosaur would take millennia, so local floods, landslides, or quicksand-like pits are postulated.  Yet many strata extend over vast regions.  Large numbers of creatures and plants are found fossilized together, often broken in pieces or piled up.  The uniformitarian scenario does not fit reality.  On the other hand, the catastrophist scenario requires no special pleading, particularly for the action of huge tsumani-style waves of water.  The work of French geology researcher Guy Berthault⁴ has shown that multiple layers of graded beds of sediment can be deposited simultaneously by a single wave, and that lamination is affected by current speed.  On a large scale, this would produce a whole series, or sequence, of strata from an individual wave.  Deposition by wave after wave over an area could lead to repetitive groups of sequences.

For geologists paid to find oil and gas deposits, the tidy geologic column was not sufficient to describe the complexities they encountered.  Over the last 40 years, the method of Sequence Stratigraphy was developed.  It identifies individual groups of rock layers as depositional sequences that form larger 2nd order supersequences (Tejas I, Tejas II etc. below).  These in turn form 1st order megasequences (Tejas, Zuni etc. below).  Sequences are correlated with alternating episodes of inundation by water (transgression), followed by removal of the water (regression).  In the uniformitarian view, these cycles may last millions of years.  But Sequence Stratigraphy can be applied just as well to catastrophism.

From Lowell E. Waite, www.geocomplexity.com/Global_cycles.htm

Note the two "mega-petroleum systems" (MPS) below.  The Paleozoic MPS is floored by basement crystalline rocks or massive evaporate deposits and extends upward to the massive sealing evaporite deposits of the Permo-Triassic.  It includes three major source rock intervals.  The Meso-Cenozoic MPS is floored by Permo-Triassic evaporites and extends upwards to the present day (Holocene) surface.  The Meso-Cenozoic MPS includes three major source rock intervals.

From Lowell E. Waite, www.geocomplexity.com/Global_cycles.htm 

The Permian-Triassic boundary is often referred to as the greatest extinction in Earth history by uniformitarians.  You can see here how the type and volume of fossil fuels differ above and below the Permian-Triassic boundary (or Upper and Lower Absaroka).

From Lowell E. Waite, www.geocomplexity.com/Global_cycles.htm 

In the next chart of global black coal and lignite deposits, note the break in deposition at the Permian-Triassic boundary.

After Thomas, Larry. 2002. Coal Geology. John Wiley & Sons, LTD, UK. p. 47

Most of the massive limestone strata came from calcium carbonate precipitating from saturated sea water; some came from bodies of sea floor animals.  This chart shows the amount of limestone and dolomite found in each part of the standard geologic column.  A new sequence of carbonate mass deposition begins between the Permian and Triassic.

From MacKenzie, Fred T., John W. Morse. 1992. Sedimentary carbonates through Phanerozoic time.
Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta, Vol. 56, pp. 3281-3295

All continental flood basalts occurred above the Permian.  The most massive by far of these outpourings of molten rock onto the surface of continents was the Siberian flood basalt flow, right at the Permian-Triassic boundary.  It is likely that this flow occurred before the Shock Dynamics event, perhaps at the end of a previous global catastrophe.  How much earlier may be hard to determine.

The Appalachians exemplify impulse mountains raised at the beginning of the Shock Dynamics model.  Folding of these mountains was caused by pressure from the shock wave initiated by the giant meteorite impact east of Africa.  This is borne out by a specialist in Appalachian geology who wrote, "maximum orogeny [mountain building] took place in a linear core belt... These rocks, and any floor on which they may have rested, were as if gripped and squeezed between the jaws of a giant vise, and at the same time heated up enough to become quite plastic and to stew in their own juice, in the fluids released as they transformed into mineral assemblages."  "...for me the vise is not a metaphor but a fairly exact model.  Thus the evidence of intense shortening perpendicular to the length of the chain, not only in the folded marginal belts but also in the central core belt, is too clear for me to doubt that there was not only confining but directed pressure, the greatest compressive stress being consistently directed roughly horizontally across the orogenic belt."  "Compression then relaxed, and the thickened crust rose isostatically to form mountains and has continued to do so ever since."¹⁰  As a believer in Plate Tectonics, he cannot find a mechanism in the crust that could do this, and imagines mantle convection must be involved.

In terms of the ocean floor timeline, separation of the protocontinent (Pangea in Plate Tectonics) began shortly thereafter, in the mid-Triassic, along with massive outpourings of flood basalts as the rift opened to begin forming the Central Atlantic at the end of the Triassic.  Initial folding of the Appalachians is placed roughly somewhat earlier, in the mid-Permian, followed by planation in the mid-Triassic and "isostatic rebound" in the Tertiary.  In Plate Tectonics, all these events supposedly took place over millions of years, while in Shock Dynamics it was a matter of hours.

A very candid book, The Origin of Mountains⁸, was published in 2000.  The authors, Cliff Ollier and Colin Pain, are two PhD Australian researchers in geomorphology with experience in geology before and after the Plate Tectonics revolution.  While generally supporting Plate Tectonics, they list 17 problems with that theory.  Some of these are: 1) "The total length of spreading sites is three times longer than that of subduction sites." 2) "The North America plate rides indiscriminately over the North Pacific (and other) plates with no regard to spreading sites, plate margins, or transform faults." 3) "If subduction is the cause of mountain building, why did mountain uplift occur mainly in the last 5 million years, while subduction is supposedly a continuous process that worked over the past 50 to 200 [million years] in different parts of the world?" 4) "Subduction fails to explain why there is a period of still-stand [erosion], when land was extensively planated [ie. made smooth] before the period of mountain uplift on a global scale." 5) "Plate tectonics as a general principle has been enormously helpful in many aspects of geology, but its practitioners have neglected the ground surface, and have often been uncritical in their time scales.  The geomorphology of mountains and their recent origin make plate tectonics an improbable mechanism for mountain building."⁸  Of particular interest here is that most mountain uplift is relatively recent, and that globally the surface was made smooth prior to the raising of mountains.  They also say that "Uplift occurred over a relatively short and distinct time.  Some earth process switched on and created mountains after a period with little or no significant uplift.  This is a deviation from uniformitarianism. The mountain building period is generally relatively short.  It does not appear to be on the same time scale as granite intrusion which takes tens of millions of years, or plate tectonics which is continuous.  The same rapid uplift occurs in areas where hypotheses such as mantle plumes do not seem appropriate.  We do not yet know what causes this short, sharp period of uplift, but at least the abandonment of naive mountain building hypotheses might lead to further realistic explanations."⁸  Their list of mountain ranges mostly includes the "collision" and "brake" mountains of Shock Dynamics which are raised in the latter part of this 26-hour event.  The sudden and unique nature of the mountain building they describe is characteristic of the effects from a shock impulse of global proportions.

The smooth planing of many continental surfaces prior to mountain building is also interesting.  Sliding landmasses would naturally cause waters to overrun the continents and send giant waves rushing across oceans to opposite shores.  Here at last we find a cause for the sediment-bearing waves that catastrophists have long recognized as the source of strata of limestone, dolostone, sandstone, shale, etc. thousands of feet thick, as well as for scouring and planing-smooth vast continental surfaces.

Finally, a correlation can be found between "magnetic striping" on the Atlantic and Indian Ocean floors and the two mountain building episodes following the giant meteorite impact, as described elsewhere on the newgeology.us website.

The principal results of the Shock Dynamics event are the division and movement of continents to their present locations, and the building of mountain chains and other surface features.  These actions appear to fit into the portion of the geologic column from the Triassic through the Pleistocene when looking at the ocean floor.  Thus the geologic column and seafloor magnetic striping are not on the same timeline.

The major divisions in the fossil-bearing (Phanerozoic ) part of the geologic column, the Paleozoic, Mesozoic, and Cenozoic, do contain different populations of animals and plants, though there are many overlaps.  This chart shows where plant fossils appear.

Here is where the broad range of fossils are found in the geologic column.

After Fenton, Carroll Lane, Mildred Adams Fenton. 1989. The Fossil Book: A Record of Prehistoric Life. Doubleday, New York. p. 65.

Mass extinctions have been located by researchers throughout the geologic column.  Many are shown here, with the length of the lines indicating the level of devastation.

After Hallam, A., P.B. Wignall. 1997. Mass Extinctions and Their Aftermath. Oxford University Press, UK. p. 5

Surprisingly, only one has been attributed, and that tentatively, to a meteorite impact.

From Hallam, A., P.B. Wignall. 1997. Mass Extinctions and Their Aftermath. Oxford University Press, UK. p. 248

From Keller, Gerta. 2008. Impact stratigraphy: Old principle, new reality. in Evans, K.R., Horton, J.W., Jr., King, D.T., Jr., and
Morrow, J.R., eds. The Sedimentary Record of Meteorite Impacts: Geological Society of America Special Paper 437, pp. 147-178.

The Cretaceous-Tertiary (K/T) boundary includes the famous termination of dinosaur fossil deposition.  The massive Deccan Trap continental flood basalt outpouring is associated with this boundary.  Its location in western India makes it reasonable to connect it to the separation of India from Africa following the giant meteorite impact.  Also, the apparent global fallout of iridium (Ir) at the K/T boundary suggests an end to high-energy activity. The thin layer of clay in which the iridium spike (concentration) is found is significant because it indicates a thick global dust cloud, an expected consequence of a giant impact.  The persistent work of Gerta Keller in recent years has shown that the Chicxulub impact was not connected to K/T extinction.  Her placement of the Chicxulub impact 300,000 years before the K/T extinction⁵ is meaningful to uniformitarians but not for catastrophists, who place at least the whole Mesozoic section in a single event.

However, another finding is noteworthy: "Throughout Central America, the Chicxulub glass spherules have never been observed together with the iridium anomaly or the mass extinction but always well below it."⁵  Glass spherules, or shocked quartz,  are traceable chemically to a specific meteorite impact; iridium fallout is not, thus far. Hundreds of impact craters have been found on land, some larger than Chicxulub.  The question naturally arises, why are there not more large iridium spikes found in the geologic column?  After studying about 8,000 rock samples, researchers at Los Alamos Laboratory concluded "The K/T Ir anomaly is far stronger than anything we have found in our analysis of thousands of sedimentary-rock samples from throughout the fossil record.   Our work on Deccan basalts and other forms of volcanism have convinced us that eruptive processes were not the source of the Ir anomaly."⁹  Keller proposes that a larger impact than Chicxulub yielded the K/T Ir anomaly.  The Shock Dynamics impact, with an 800 km wide crater, certainly suffices.

The conditions prior to the Shock Dynamics event may have been quite different than they are today, ranging from the transparency and chemical balance of the atmosphere, to the volume and chemistry of the oceans, to the depth, composition, and solidity of sediments on the protocontinent, to the properties of the crust.  The scale of the cataclysm is far beyond human experience.  I invite your thoughts on these issues from a catastrophist perspective at mike@newgeology.us.

Elevation map from National Geophysical Data Center, NOAA website

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References

1.  Allan, D.S., J.B. Delair. 1997. Cataclysm! Compelling Evidence of a Cosmic Catastrophe in 9500 B.C.      Bear & Co., Rochester, Vermont.

2.  Baumgardner, John R., D. Russell Humphreys, Andrew A. Snelling, Steven A. Austin. 2003. Measurable      ¹⁴C in Fossilized Organic Materials: Confirming the Young Earth Creation-Flood Model. Proceedings of      the Fifth International Conference on Creationism, R.L. Ivey (editor), pp. 127-142.

3.  Benton, Michael J., Crispin T. S. Little. 1994. Impact in the Caribbean and death of the dinosaurs.      Geology Today, November-December 1994, pp. 222-227.

4.  Berthault, G. 2002. Analysis of Main Principles of Stratigraphy on the Basis of Experimental Data.      Lithology and Mineral Resources, Vol.37, No. 5, pp. 442-446.

5.  Keller, Gerta, et.al. 2004. More evidence that the Chicxulub impact predates the K/T mass extinction.      Meteorites & Planetary Science, 39, Nr 7, pp. 1127-1144.

6.  Lister, Adrian, Paul Bahn. 2007. Mammoths: Giants of the Ice Age. University of California Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles.

7.  Oard, Michael J. (2001?) The extinction of the woolly mammoth: was it a quick freeze?  11 pages, open      source online.

8.  Ollier, Cliff, Colin Pain. 2000. The Origin of Mountains. Routledge, London. pp. 296-307.

9.  Orth, C. J., et.al. 1990. Iridium abundance patterns across bio-event horizons in the fossil record.      Geological Society of America Special Paper 247, pp. 45-59.

10.  Rodgers, John. 1970. The Tectonics of the Appalachians. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York. p. 224.

11.  Schweitzer, Mary H., et. al. 1 May 2009. Biomolecular Characterization and Protein Sequences of the      Campanian Hadrosaur B. canadensis. Science, Vol. 324, 626-631.

12.  Schweitzer, Mary Higby, Jennifer L. Wittmeyer, John R. Horner. 2007. Soft tissue and cellular      preservation in vertebrate skeletal elements from the Cretaceous to the present. Proceedings of the      Royal Society B, Vol. 274, pp. 183–197.

John Michael Fischer
www.newgeology.us
2005-2009