Geology Discussion

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Post your photographs and discuss geology topics here.

I'll kick things off with some photographs of The Great Unconformity from the Denver area. This feature essentially marks the eastern beginning of the Rocky Mountains, where 290-million year old sedimentary basin deposits unconformably overlie 1.6-billion year old metamorphic and igneous rocks that form the backbone of the North American continent. The unconformity underscores several global-scale questions in geology, such as plate tectonics, impact events, pangea, etc.

[img][800:659]http://i757.photobucket.com/albums/xx214/DenvrDave/GreatUnconformity.jpg[/img]

[img][800:554]http://i757.photobucket.com/albums/xx214/DenvrDave/UnconformityAnnotated.jpg[/img]

First three edits fixed minor details regarding ages. Fourth edit added introductory text.

Last edited by DenvrDave on 08 Aug 2010, 7:51 pm, edited 4 times in total.

I've just been re-reading some interesting material on things of this nature. You might like:

Forbidden History by J Douglas Kenyon


Its sad how Science and Academia become so entrenched in their own dogma, that they absolutely refuse to even entertain the notion that the established explanation for things may no longer adequately explain the evidence and need to be reevaluated. They're like bible-thumping fundamentalists, who treat the very suggestion that there might be a different answer that makes more sense, as heresy.

Thanks for the suggestion, I'm always on the lookout for interesting reading material. Was this comment aimed at the post or the book?

Well, both, kinda.

Since my 'to read' stack is literally several feet high already, would you please elaborate?

Nonsense. The conventions of physical science rest on empirical falsification of theories. You are just annoyed that there is much evidence in favor of the latest version of the theory of evolution. The world is not as it is described in the Bible. The world is over four billion years old and their is tons of evidence that support that conclusion and not an iota of credible evidence that contradicts it.

ruveyn

Here are some photos of North Table Mountain, which has a record of the KT Extinction Event that occurred roughly 65.5 million years ago. The KT Extinction Event was a global-scale mass extinction of a wide variety of animal and plant species that occurred within a relatively short period of time, including almost all known dinosaur species. The two most prevalent theories for this event incude a massive asteroid impact that is now buried beneath the Yucatan Penninsula, Mexico, and massive volcanic activity near the Deccan Traps in west-central India. This is an example where two competing but not necessarily incompatible hypotheses can explain a series of observations, scientists are divided over the answer, and a definitive conclusion must await further observations and analysis. Geologists routinely use multiple working hypotheses to tackle problems.

[img][800:738]http://i757.photobucket.com/albums/xx214/DenvrDave/NTMountain1.jpg[/img]

[img][800:737]http://i757.photobucket.com/albums/xx214/DenvrDave/NTMountain2.jpg[/img]

Serious geology is like being a detective. All a geologist really has to go on are the clues from the past and some general physical principles. Unlike physics, one cannot really recreate the conditions that existed on the planet millions or billions of years ago. Everything has to flow from an interpretation of the clues and the clues are constantly eroding away.

I think geology is one of the cleverest sciences and because of the lack of reproducibility of conditions it is much harder than basic physics.

ruveyn

I've heard that geologists tend to have very high job satisfaction.

Where does "the Bible" say otherwise?

And of course, it does not.

Bishop Ussher reading the Bible quite literally computed that the time interval from creation to his time put the creation at 4004 b.c.e. at three o'clock in the afternoon. this means taking the word day (yohm in hebrew) as a 24 hour day and a year (shanah in hebrew) as a 365 and a fraction day year.

That is how the 6000 is arrived at. By reading the Bible literally, which is a bad idea.

In the Jewish Calendar the year is 5771 from the Creation which makes it the same order of magnitude as Bishop Ussher's calculation.

ruveyn

I understand, but who is to say the Bishop is correct?

By a literal reading of the Bible, Usher was correct. By any other reading, he may not have been.

So then, and to avoid insulting Usher or any other scholars of Scripture or of Hebrew, I maintain the simple thought that the matter of the length/s of the six "days" mentioned in Genesis might not have been accurately represented even when eventually mentioned at all. At least two or three of us would have had to have actually been there at the time and seen it for ourselves in order to now bear absolute witness of the matter.

Nice pics, DenvrDave, and now you can have your thread back!

Thanks Lee! I do enjoy a good debate about fact-based versus faith-based points of view of the natural world, and I appreciate that this thread has stirred up some interesting dialogue. However, I'll post my opinions on the subject in PPR and stick to geology stuff here. But by all means, please continue

Here are some photographs of fossilized dinosaur footprints and bones from rocks of the Cretaceous period found near Denver. Dinosaurs were a diverse group of reptiles that were the dominant terrestrial vertebrates for 160 million years. By comparsion, Homo sapiens (womankind and mankind) have been the dominant species for approximatley 500,000 years, although that timeframe is debatable and may be longer. Regardless of the exact amount of time Homo sapiens has dominated the earth, the question remains, will our species survive as long as the dinosaurs? The study of dinosaur fossils draws from several scientific disciplines, including geology and biology.

[img][800:799]http://i757.photobucket.com/albums/xx214/DenvrDave/Tracks1.jpg[/img]

[img][800:812]http://i757.photobucket.com/albums/xx214/DenvrDave/Tracks2.jpg[/img]

[img][800:844]http://i757.photobucket.com/albums/xx214/DenvrDave/Tracks3.jpg[/img]

[img][800:838]http://i757.photobucket.com/albums/xx214/DenvrDave/Bones1.jpg[/img]

[img][800:735]http://i757.photobucket.com/albums/xx214/DenvrDave/Bones2.jpg[/img]