by Steve660 » Wed Nov 26, 2014 8:42 pm
Comments on creation.com are limited to 1800 characters, so I have submitted a very abbreviated version of the rebuttal below. I am not optimistic they'll accept it - they've never accepted my previous posts. The rebuttal below is provided "for the record" and so that Angus Kennedy cannot kid himself that he has successfully answered my article. He hasn't. Enjoy.
Angus Kennedy’s weak response to my article suffers from errors, unsubstantiated statements and omissions. Here is a summary, in roughly the order the problems arise in his open letter.
His tired assertion about dating methods relying on “assumptions about rates, original starting conditions and processes” has been rebutted in detail on the usual counter-creationist websites, so merits no further comment here except to point out that the one about “rates” leads to comical consequences. If radioactive decay rates were accelerated by the amount required to make young rocks look billions of years old, then the heat liberated would boil off the oceans, and likely melt the earth’s crust.
His assertion that “God’s tape measure” is recorded in the Bible assumes that the Bible is God’s word.
Kennedy invokes “an unimaginable magnitude of tectonism and magmatism” during the flood. Indeed, the creationists posit catastrophic plate tectonics, with sinking continent-size slabs of dense rock dragging the crust around at a brisk walking pace. Again the heat released would melt the crust, and probably the mantle too. So again the oceans would be boiled off, and an ocean of magma would remain. The oceanic crust comprises about 2/3 of the earth’s surface and consists of about 7 km thickness of basalt. This was all molten in the space of one year, along with all the terrestrial igneous rocks, both intrusive and extrusive.
Consequently there would be no hot water around to cause “alteration and laterization of susceptible rocks”, it was all boiled off, and the rocks would themselves have been molten. And I have not included the intense meteorite bombardment creationists have to cram into the flood year (look at the moon).
Laterite can form from many durable rock types, including granite, rhyolite and basalt, all of which have long been used for monumental purposes. My monuments example therefore stands.
The examples Kennedy gives of disrupted and mingled basalt and laterite do not indicate rapid laterite formation so are irrelevant.
His claim of thin “layers of pink lateritic basalt” within a single flow is more likely several similar flows with weathered tops forming “boles”, which he has mistaken for one single flow. Such boles are common in Antrim and represent the beginning of the lateritisation process on the weathered tops of exposed flows.
He provides no evidence that the alteration claimed to be due to “volatiles streaming up through the basalt” was indeed lateritisation. Where are the chemical analyses, chemical and mineralogical profiles, and isotope data? Laterites have distinctive chemical and mineralogical compositions, and profiles. It could have been zeolitisation, which is very different.
He invokes warm acid rain in the “aftermath” of the flood to generate his fast laterite, but the Interbasaltic Bed is buried under rocks allegedly formed during the flood. So it cannot have formed in the aftermath.
His chemistry is wrong. Kennedy invokes acid rain resulting from volcanic emissions, and his footnote 10 lists some of those acidic vapours: SO2, HF and HCl, which form respectively, sulphuric, hydrofluoric and hydrochloric acids, and he emphasises the last. Unfortunately for him laterite is readily soluble in all these acids. Far from creating laterite, they would dissolve it! In reality laterite forms under much less aggressive conditions, even neutral and alkaline ones.
So his scenario fails because there was no water, it having been boiled off, and the rocks were molten with all that heat. And afterwards, the acid rain was the wrong kind of acid!
The 3 Ma age estimate is the most up to date, and is for the full 30 m thickness (Ganerød 2010).
The comment about uniform thickness was originally one of Walker’s, and concerned the regional topography, not local variations.
Kennedy complains about the absence of gullies forming as a result of deforestation in the course of slash and burn agriculture. I did not realise that creationists posited any kind of agriculture taking place during the flood. Nevertheless there is evidence for natural fluvial reworking of the laterite (Cole et al 1912) and erosional disturbance (Eyles, 1950).
Kennedy complains, “What any unbiased person should spot straight away, and consider to be truly remarkable, is the fact that there are no carbonised remains of any such rainforest to be seen”. But I provided an example of charred remains (Craigahulliar quarry). Here are some more: a bed full of “charred sticks” at Ballintoy, large carbonised “stools of trees” at Cullinane, and “carbonised timber trunks” in Clonetrace mine (Cole et al, 1912). Doubtless many more occurrences have gone unrecorded.
The “pockets of lignite” are widespread, and substantial enough to have been mined extensively.
Kennedy ignores some of my corrections of Walker, like Walker’s claim there are no plant roots (I gave two examples), and his claim that the top of the bed is not altered (it is). Does Kennedy concede these points?
The “facts” from “130 years of geological effort” I “bang on about” include some I had not space to include in the original article. Like the analyses by Eyles (1952) and Hill (2000) proving a laterite composition, both chemical and mineral, and with the expected profile (most leached at the top, proving action by descending water) which Walker ignores (Walker and Kennedy seem to differ in that the former denies it is a laterite, the latter accepts it is, but thinks laterites form fast). Hill also found evidence for alternating wet and dry seasons. Fossil evidence including pollens indicates a surface origin, as does the isotopic signature (Tabor & Yapp, 2005). And radiometric dating coupled to palaeomagnetism gives a rate of formation similar to that observed for modern laterites (Ganerød 2010). The fossils are specifically Palaeocene, another problem for Kennedy. Why not Carboniferous, Devonian, or a random mixture?
The paper Kennedy cites as proving deposition of clay in “fast flowing” water gives speeds of 10 to 26 cm/s. I walk faster than that. It will not do for the violent churning creationists envisage. But since the oceans had all boiled off anyway, the point is moot.
The final paragraph of my article was heavily edited, and the words largely those of the editor.
Creationists really are “highly deceptive and misleading”, and their beliefs are absurd. Laterites do form slowly, the Interbasaltic Bed is a fossil laterite and the evidence for this is overwhelming. Walker’s list of errors, Kennedy’s chemical ignorance, and the creationists’ laughable flood scenario, do not change that.
Cole, G.A.J., Wilkinson, S.B., M’Henry, A., Kilroe, J.R., Seymour, H.J., Moss, C.E. & Haigh, W.D. (1912) The Interbasaltic Rocks (iron ores and bauxites) of North-East Ireland, Mem. Geol. Surv. of Ireland, HMSO, Dublin
Eyles, V.A. (1950) Note on the Interbasaltic Horizon in Northern Ireland. Q.J.G.S. London, cvi, p.136-7
Eyles, V.A. (1952) The Composition and Origin of the Antrim Laterites and Bauxites. Mem. Geol. Surv., Belfast, HMSO
Ganerød, M. Smethurst,M.A., Torsvik, T.H., Prestvik, T., Rousse, S., McKenna, C., van Hinsbergen, D.J.J., Hendriks,B.W.H. (2010) The North Atlantic Igneous Province reconstructed and its relation to the Plume Generation Zone: the Antrim Lava Group revisited. Geophys. J. Int., 182, 183-202.
Hill, I.G., Worden,I.H., Meighan, I.G. (2000) Geochemical evolution of a palaeolaterite: the Interbasaltic Formation, Northern Ireland. Chemical Geology, 166, 65-84.
Tabor, N.J. & Yapp, C.J. (2005) Coexisting goethite and gibbsite from a high-paleolatitude (55°N) Late Paleocene laterite: Concentration and 13C/12C ratios of occluded CO2 and associated organic matter. Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta, 69(23), 5495-5510.