When Continents Collide

Writing in the early 1800s, lawyer-turned-geologist Charles Lyell radically
changed how people look at the
world. Using his legal training to build
cases, he argued convincingly that
the earth’s piles of rock layers were
formed over millions of years by slow
and gradual processes. His skill was
so persuasive that geologists stopped
even considering the possibility that
some large sediment layers formed
rapidly. Terms to describe fast deposits
weren’t even coined until recent
decades. Older geologic dictionaries
don’t have a word for deposits made
in storms (called tempestites) or for
sediment layers reshaped by earthquakes
(called seismites).

Even now, because of their old-earth
bias, secular geologists assume
a rock layer formed slowly unless conclusively
demonstrated otherwise.
Further, they don’t look for deposits
affected by global-scale events. But
creationists do.

In 1996 a rancher in Wyoming
showed creation geologist Kurt Wise
and me a massive sandstone bed with
convoluted layering on his ranch. At
the time we recognized it as important
evidence of the Flood catastrophe, but
we did not understand how it formed
or its significance.

Then in 2011 creation geologist
Arthur Chadwick reported a surprising
discovery.1 While excavating thousands
of duck-bill and other dinosaur
fossils at the ranch for 15 years, he had traced the same six-foot-thick
(2 m) sandstone bed across the entire
11-square-mile (28 km²) ranch. He also
recognized it as a seismite. That was
astonishing, since geologists are used
to thinking of seismites in terms of
inches, not feet.

So why would anyone care about a
seismite? Because these are sediment
beds with many internal layers (called
laminations) that were still soft when
an earthquake shook the ground and
disturbed the layers. Because the effect
of an earthquake spreads so quickly
(earthquake waves move through rocks
at the speed of sound), an earthquake
can leave its mark over a vast area of
still-wet, soft sediment before any new
deposits are laid on top.

As a result, the nice, level layers
became convoluted. In cross-section,
they look a bit like waves frozen in
stone (like the buckling or folds produced
when one pushes on the edge of
a carpet mat). Thus seismites record the
effects of individual earthquakes that
impacted the soft layers before they
hardened into rock. They’re usually only
inches (centimeters) thick. One of the
largest recorded earthquakes in modern
times, centered near Alaska, produced
only a 9-inch-thick (23 cm) seismite.

Thus this six-foot-thick seismite
across a Wyoming ranch is huge—many times larger than any seismites
known to form by even the most powerful
earthquakes over the past 3,000
years (and there have been some
whoppers!). A few other massive seismites
have been reported,2 but not in
the dinosaur-fossil-filled layers where
Chadwick was working.

More surprises were in store. Kurt
Wise decided to investigate further
because the discovery of an identifiable
seismite would provide a powerful
new tool for geologists. Before Chadwick’s
discovery, geologists had no
easy way to distinguish at which levels
any deposits and fossils lie within the
half-mile-thick (~800 m) Lance Formation.
It’s been basically an indecipherable
puzzle of repeating sandstone and
shale beds, made more confusing
by the rocks being faulted, weathered,
and mostly covered by grasslands.
But geologists want to know
the order in which the sediments
were deposited and the dinosaurs
were buried.

A seismite would make a great
“marker bed.” It’s like a vast sheet
that is different from every layer
below it and above it. If geologists
could identify this sheet,
they would know whether dinosaurs
were buried earlier than the
earthquake (below it), or later than the
earthquake (above it), or maybe even
as a result of the earthquake. That’s
important to reading history from the
rocks (to geologists, anyway).

Wise has found not
just one but at least a
dozen huge seismites.
That’s a dozen or more
massive earthquakes
in rapid succession
that affected hundreds
of square miles.

Wise decided to see how far the
earthquake reached. In an earlier trip
he had already found that this distinctive
seismite bed could be traced onto
a neighboring ranch, where it showed
no sign of tapering off. Then in 2014
he traveled 20 miles (32 km) south of
Chadwick’s excavation to the original
area where geologists first identified
and defined the layers making up the
Lance Formation. His discoveries have
surprised even him. Wise has found not
just one but at least a dozen huge seismites
(see example in photo). That’s a
dozen or more massive earthquakes
in rapid succession that affected hundreds
of square miles. The monstrous
six-foot seismite that Chadwick had
identified paled in comparison to several
others that Wise found, which are
up to 30 feet (9 m) thick.

What catastrophe could cause an
earthquake big enough to disrupt 30
feet of the earth’s surface? Secular
geologists don’t have an explanation.
Not even an asteroid impact can
explain such huge seismites, especially
in rapid succession. Asteroid
impacts are the most powerful geologic
processes known to conventional
geologists, who often postulate that
one killed off the dinosaurs!

So what could explain these huge
seismites? For geologists who begin
with Scripture and are not distracted
by Lyell’s biased arguments, they are
actually easy to explain. Creation geologists
postulate that continents broke
apart rapidly and collided, generating
humongous earthquakes during the
Genesis Flood, which destroyed “the
world that then existed” (2 Peter 3:6).

https://answersingenesis.org/geology/plate-tectonics/when-continents-collide/

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