Geology // Current TV

Golfer survives plunge into 18-foot deep sinkhole on Illinois golf course

A man is recovering from his injuries suffered after plunging into a 18-foot deep... more

weatherstorm
added this
2 months ago
|
3 comments

"Artificial Earthquake" Reported in North Korea - United Nations Is Reporting This Was a Nuclear Test

. A United Nations Security Council diplomat says there has been a nuclear test in... more

EthicalVegan
added this
3 months ago
|
44 comments

Updated: Five dead after quake and tsunami hit Pacific islands

This doesn't bode well for islands there such as Vanuatu that are already seeing... more

JanforGore
added this
3 months ago
|
26 comments

"Big Cat Makes a Comeback!" - A Small Bit of Hope for the Jaguar

. Big Cat Makes A Comeback! Scotty Johnson (Defenders of Wildlife) | Posted on... more

EthicalVegan
added this
4 months ago
|
52 comments

Biblical-Type Floods Are Real, and They're Absolutely Enormous

Geologists long rejected the notion that cataclysmic flood had ever occurred—until one of them found proof of a Noah-like catastrophe in the wildly eroded river valleys of Washington State.

After teaching geology at the University of Washington for a decade, I had become embarrassed that I hadn’t yet seen the deep canyons where tremendous Ice Age floods scoured down into solid rock to sculpt the scablands. So I decided to help lead a field trip for students to see the giant erosion scars on the local landforms.

We drove across the Columbia River and continued eastward, dropping into Moses Coulee, a canyon with vertical walls of layered basalt. We gathered the students on a small rise and asked them how the canyon had formed. They immediately ruled out wind and glaciers. The valley was not U-shaped like a typical glacial valley, and none of us could imagine how wind might gouge a canyon out of hard basalt. But neither were there rivers or streams. After a while I pointed out that we were standing on a pile of gravel. I asked how the rounded granite pebbles came to be there when the closest source of granite lay over the horizon. Silence.

Hiking through eastern Washington canyons littered with exotic boulders is a standard field trip for beginning geologists. It takes a while to register what you see. A dry waterfall hundreds of feet high in the middle of the desert. Giant potholes where no river flows today. Granite boulders parked in a basalt canyon. Gradually the contradictions fall into place and a story unfolds. Where did wayward boulders the size of a car or house come from? What was the source of the water that moved them around and carved the falls? Today, even novice geologists can conjure up eastern Washington’s giant floods.

Long before the discovery of the scablands, geologists dismissed the role of catastrophic floods in interpreting European geology. By the end of the 19th century such ideas not only were out of fashion but were geological heresy. When J Harlen Bretz uncovered evidence of giant floods in eastern Washington in the 1920s, it took most of the 20th century for other geologists to believe him. Geologists had so thoroughly vilified the concept of great floods that they could not believe it when somebody actually found evidence of one.

Bretz was a classic field geologist and a controversial figure throughout his career. In 1925 he presented the story of the region’s giant floods, seeing what others at first could not—and then would not—see. He spent his lifetime piecing together the story of how a raging wall of water hundreds of feet high roared across eastern Washington, carving deep channels before cascading down the Columbia River Gorge as a wall of water high enough to turn Oregon’s Willamette Valley into a vast backwater lake.

Bretz found exotic granite boulders perched on basalt cliffs hundreds of feet above the highest recorded river level. In the scablands, a desolate region stripped of soil, he came across dry waterfalls and potholes hundreds of feet above the modern river. Gigantic gravel bars deposited within dry valleys implied deep, fast-flowing water. Streamlined hills rose like islands, extending more than 100 feet above the scoured-out channelways.

He realized the chaotic landscape had been carved by an enormous flood that chewed deep channels through hundreds of feet of solid basalt. The ancient flood deposited an enormous delta around Portland, Oregon, backing up flow into the Willamette Valley. The waters, he eventually realized, could have come from catastrophic drainage of Lake Missoula, an ancient, glacier-dammed lake in western Montana.

Bretz was ridiculed until 1940, when geologist Joe Pardee described giant ripple marks on the bed of Lake Missoula. The 50-foot-high ripples, he said, were formed by fast-flowing currents and not by the sluggish bottom water of a lake. Only sudden failure of the glacial dam could have released the 2,000-foot-deep lake. The catastrophic release of 600 cubic miles of water through a narrow gap would sweep away everything in its path. In 1979, when Bretz was 97 years old, the Geological Society of America awarded him its highest honor, the Penrose Medal.

Recognition of the Missoula flood helped other geologists identify similar landforms in Asia, Europe, Alaska, and the American Midwest, as well as on Mars. There is now compelling evidence for many gigantic ancient floods where glacial ice dams failed time and again: At the end of the last glaciation, some 10,000 years ago, giant ice-dammed lakes in Eurasia and North America repeatedly produced huge floods. In Siberia, rivers spilled over drainage divides and changed their courses. England’s fate as an island was sealed by erosion from glacial floods that carved the English Channel. These were not global deluges as described in the Genesis story of Noah, but were more focused catastrophic floods taking place throughout the world. They likely inspired stories like Noah’s in many cultures, passed down through generations.

Since devastating floods were a fact of life on the margins of the world’s great ice sheets, people in those areas probably witnessed them. Early missionaries in eastern Washington reported stories of a great flood among Yakima and Spokane tribes, who could identify locations where survivors sought refuge. An Ojibwa Indian legend from around Lake Superior tells of a great snow that fell one September at the beginning of time: A bag contained the sun’s heat until a mouse nibbled a hole in it. ...Continued at:

http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jul-aug/06-biblical-type-floods-real-absolutely-enormousGeologists long rejected the notion that cataclysmic flood had ever... more

Dagum
added this
8 months ago
|
0 comments

http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jul-aug/06-biblical-type-floods-real-absolutely-enormous

After teaching geology at the University of Washington for a decade, I had become... more

Natmore
added this
9 months ago
|
0 comments

Fukushima Daiichi: The Truth and the Future

http://vimeo.com/41633459 As part of a presentation in Kansai, Japan on May 12th... more

covelogibbs
added this
12 months ago
|
2 comments

Sound The Alarm

A 2005 shot of Brendan Margison surfing in front of the now-damaged nuclear power... more

covelogibbs
added this
1 year ago
|
5 comments

Must see for climate change skeptic republicans.

EARTH: The Operators' Manual An operators' manual helps keep your car or... more

mybologna
added this
1 year ago
|
1 comment

The Fukushima Nuclear Disaster Is Far From Over

ENE NEWS... . HuffPo: Large amounts of radioactive materials could be deposited... more

EthicalVegan
added this
1 year ago
|
13 comments

Pet Geology

The difference a breed makes...

cahtoonist [removed]
added this
1 year ago
|
0 comments

What Really Happened Prior to 'Snowball Earth'?

In a study published in the journal Geology, scientists at the University of Miami... more

aileenalmeda
added this
1 year ago
|
1 comment

Journey Of The Universe: a cosmic, Earth, human transformation

This film and book project is a collaboration of evolutionary philosopher Brian Thomas... more

JanforGore
added this
1 year ago
|
11 comments

DC, NY area evacuates after 5.9 quake hits Virginia

_Thousands of people evacuated buildings across Washington, D.C., and New York City on... more

JanforGore
added this
1 year ago
|
27 comments

Gradualism Versus Catastrophism Part Two

Does the position of geologic strata determine age? In part one of this article, a... more

rodstradamus
added this
2 years ago
|
0 comments

Gradualism Versus Catastrophism Part One

Did the terrain we see around us take millions of years to form? Some recent experiments suggest otherwise.

As mentioned in past articles, Electric Universe proponents think that something is wrong with the "long, slow" view of geology. Fossils are dated based on the rock layers in which they are found, so a uniformitarian view of geology influences the understanding of how life began and evolved on Earth. If the rock ages are wrong, fossil ages are wrong.

It is commonly believed that fossils are created when an animal or plant dies and is subsequently entombed in mud or silt before decay and dissolution. After millions of years, the sediments in which it is buried harden because of pressure from the overlying accumulation of other later deposits.

Tectonic forces then break or bend the ocean bottom (or lakebed), causing it to rise above the waterline and dry out, hardening the sediments into stone. Those layers of stone around the world are used to determine when the fossils were alive, since it is assumed that the top layers are younger than the bottom layers. The layers of hardened sediments are called "the geologic column."

Prevailing theories state that it took millions, if not billions, of years to arrange the scenery on our planet. Mountains rise in response to mechanisms that are so slow as to be undetectable: the Himalayas, the Alps, and the Rocky Mountains retain the same shapes that ancient nomadic tribes saw.

The seas, it is said, have not left their basins in time spans that have no meaning to the human mind. The Atlantic Ocean has bridged the distance between Africa, Europe, and the Americas for a period greater than the human species has existed on Earth.

Rivers, deserts, canyons—all appear to our modern eyes just as they would have appeared to Alexander the Great, Goyathlay, Sargon, or Khufu. The cyclic processes of erosion or sediment deposition are the same today as they were long ago. Most of the current methods for dating artifacts, geologic layers, or fossils are dependent on that presumed gradual, uniform action.

What if the uniformitarian hypothesis is incorrect? What if the topography of Earth was created in a time so short that ancient civilizations were able to record it? What meaning would the Neolithic, or the Jurassic, or the Precambrian eras have? Would evolutionary theory suffer for the lack of a chronological map?

Electric Universe theorists postulate that between 5000 and 10,000 years ago (perhaps sooner), the Earth and its sister planets were engulfed in a catastrophic interplay of celestial forces that have not been seen since. Clouds of electrified plasma and electric arcs described by the ancients as "thunderbolts of the gods" dissected the continental geography, creating what traditional theories say are ages-old structures in an instant of time.

"Evolutionary theory is based upon the belief that a succession of fossil species in a scale of geological time demonstrates that evolutionary progress has taken place... As we have shown in the laboratory, layers of incoming sediment have been wrongly identified as being strata. The scale of geological time and the chronological succession of fossils have been calculated on this mistaken belief: that strata are successive layers of sediment. So the position of fossils, rather than sharing evolution, merely indicates the distribution of marine species which lived at different depths." (Guy Berthault: Fundamental Experiments in Stratification)

Stephen Smith

Hat tip to Mel AchesonDid the terrain we see around us take millions of years to form? Some recent... more

rodstradamus
added this
2 years ago
|
0 comments

Melting Glaciers More Than Just a Name Change for Glacier National Park

Summary: Dan Fagre, a research ecologist at the Northern Rocky Mountain Science Center... more

EthicalVegan
added this
2 years ago
|
25 comments

Nuclear power and earthquake zones overlap in the U.S.

IN THE ZONE: Nuclear power plants like the San Onofre Nuclear Generator in California... more

covelogibbs
added this
2 years ago
|
1 comment

Miyagi PowerPlant Has Damaged

Japan has been shaken due to an earthquake of 8.9 magnitudes. This earthquake has done... more

shaadimeo
added this
2 years ago
|
0 comments

Japan Came Under Earthquake Today

An earthquake hit Honshu, Japan today. This quake did not create tsunami. Other areas... more

shaadimeo
added this
2 years ago
|
0 comments

select your country

Community Spotlight

TAGS

tagged w/ Geology

top videos

find current on tv

find current online

recent comments

© 2013 Current TV, LLC All Rights Reserved

the basics

follow us online

tools

stay in touch

© 2013 Current TV, LLC
All Rights Reserved