Some of the most intriguing questions in geological studies can be well answered by the flood model. such basic issues as stratification and fossil formation continue to baffle the evolutionist. While there are no pat answers, the Genesis flood (see the scripture Genesis 5:13-17) can well have supplied the necessary mechanisms for these and other observable phenomena.
A mudflow is a mass of water saturated rock debris, typically containing a wide variety of particle sizes, that moves down a slope as a fluid under influence of gravity. Mudflows are important in canyon building and rapid burial of the type necessary for fossil formation.
The video Mt St Helen’s: Explosive Evidence for Catastrophe has an instructive sequence on canyon formation at incredible speed. Canyon building by dam breach may well explain the Grand Canyon, forty times larger than that at Mt. St. Helen’s. Lake Bonneville in the northern United States and Canada, its natural dam similarly damaged, would have rapidly emptied its immense body of water.
Unconsolidated (that is not solidified, nor cemented) clays and sands, saturated with spring thaw, may break through and roll down a valley at up to six miles per hour, pile up a temporary dam rebreach and move on. At its head it leaves a clean cut scar with a rough floor and steep walls a few feet to several tens of feet high.
In arid regions, a thick mass of silt, sand, and coarser debris scoured from canyon walls by a downpour, may roll for miles, damming, piling up, breaking through, and gradually coming to a stop as it thickens through loss of water and spreads over the plain.
Such a mudflow, pouring down Cajon Pass, California after a cloudburst, overwhelmed a freight train, carried the engine more than a mile down the canyon, and buried it so deeply beneath the mud and boulders that it could only be found by using a sensitive magnet.
An underwater flow at Zug, Switzerland occurred within three years of building a retaining wall at the lakeshore. For two years after completion of the wall water began to appear in previously dry cellars. The ground settled and pavements cracked. July 5, 1887 a small section of the retaining wall and three houses dropped into the lake.
Half an hour later wooden piles from the wall bobbed to the surface a hundred yards out. Three hours later streets and houses suddenly settled beneath the lake, an average drop of twenty five feet. Some buildings moved thirty to sixty feet. A trench two hundred feet wide and up to twenty feet deep was excavated about one thousand feet long in similar silt and sand on the lake bottom. The tongue ended about one hundred forty five feet below water level. More than half the material of the tongue was from land, the remainder came from the eroded trench.
Horizontal differences in density within gaseous or fluid bodies can cause turbidity currents. Turbidity currents are short lived, powerful, gravity-driven masses consisting of mixtures of sediment and water of greater density than the surrounding water. These can flow down slope at high speed, spreading horizontally. The motion is maintained by internal turbulence.
Strong, sediment laden currents are known to sweep through the dark abyssal canyons and spread great aprons of coarse detritus at bases of submarine slopes. They contain vast amounts of material and are of major importance in the transport of land sourced sediments from shallow water to deep ocean basins, where in many places they have built up the relatively flat abyssal plain. Turbidites are deposits of the sedimentary load that are gradually dropped as the current comes to rest.
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