Posted by AF [AF] on April 06, 1999 at 06:54:24 {JK6FUAMFdMDjRmAxB/kMdaOt1gg/Zk}:
: You dissed me on mammoth's below in a post.
It's painfully obvious that you're far more interested in who says what than in what is said, and you're particularly disinterested in the actual evidence given to back up what is said. You're also largely interested in "being right", as shown by your constant complaints about having your religious beliefs "dissed". You never write about actual evidence yourself, but only about what other people write.
: Well, here is some more ACTUAL EVIDENCE disputing your IDEA that no evidence for a great flood exists. Another link for you.
Oh brother! You're looking at that demonstrated crackpot Walter Brown's nonsensical theories once again. I've debunked several of his claims on this forum already, which you certainly saw but have forgotten or ignored. Brown's main claims fly in the face of physical law, and his claimed mechanism for many geological features supposedly due to the Flood are simply impossible. Let's examine some of Brown's claims so that we can see how preposterous his claims are. It's quite obvious that you didn't read any of my writeups on Osarsif's webpage, or you'd have already seen that most of Brown's claims about mammoths were debunked long ago in the references I cited. This also proves that you're not interested in facts, but in who makes claims to support your beliefs. In other words, someone's supposed authority is far more important to you than what they have to say.
Brown says that once upon a time there existed vast underground reservoirs of water contained in caverns about ten miles underground. These formed a connected, global network, and at the time of the flood they miraculously erupted at rapidly forming cracks along what are now the edges of the continents. The water spurted at great speed into the upper atmosphere and even into airless outer space, and then fell back to earth partly as water and partly as "hail" after having lost much heat to "the cold of outer space". Some of this "hail" fell on the polar regions, "quick-freezing" mammoths and such. This theory contains enormous violations of physical law and of simple geological observations.
For one thing, there is no evidence that such vast underground water-filled caverns exist or ever existed, and Brown presents none - he simply postulates it. For another, such caverns simply could not exist. The pressure and temperature at ten miles down is so great that rock itself slowly deforms like taffy. If liquid water were down there in any quantity, the surrounding rock would quickly absorb much of it, and squeeze the rest towards the surface. Brown never explains any of this - he simply skirts such difficult issues. Yet another problem is that Brown doesn't mention that it would take a giant miracle to get his supposed caverns to collapse simultaneously around the world - he fuzzily implies that all this was due to natural forces.
Then we have the problem of accelerating virtually an ocean of water to high enough velocity to travel into outer space, and then travel a large fraction of the distance around the earth before falling back. The necessary velocity is nearly the same as it takes for a low-earth-orbiting satellite such as the Space Shuttle to get into orbit. Think about how much energy it takes to boost the Shuttle into orbit, multiply that by the ratio of the mass of the ocean to the mass of the Shuttle, and then think about where that much energy would come from. Certainly not from any forces Brown has postulated, not by orders of magnitude.
Then we have the problem of rapidly cooling that virtual ocean of water from the temperature of rock ten miles down - some 2000 degrees Fahrenheit -- plus the added heat of boosting it nearly into orbit, down to the -150 to -200 degrees Fahrenheit that Brown claims happened. He attributes the cooling to radiation to space. The trouble is that he makes no calculations whatsoever to back up his ideas. Why not? Because actual calculations would prove that his claims are physically impossible. Brown's handwaving scenario of cooling assumes a miniscule quantity of water cooling in complete shadow. However, with virtually an ocean of water up in space, most radiation would be immediately absorbed by the outermost water and reradiated back to the inner water. It would be somewhat similar to the blocking of cooling that occurs on the earth on a cloudy day - the "waters above" - the clouds - absorb radiation from the ground and reradiate most of it back to the ground, keeping ground temperature at an even keel. In the same way an ocean of water "way up there" would not change its temperature very much by radiation to space.
Then we have the problem that any object falling through space that is decelerated by contact with earthly "stuff" accumulates a huge amount of heat. Let's suppose that Brown's scenario of cooling is correct and that the virtual ocean "way up there" actually got down to -200 degrees while it was traveling hundreds of miles virtually in orbit. Upon reentry it would heat up tremendously, just as satellites do when reentering the atmosphere. Such satellites burn up, and the Space Shuttle's exterior can heat to many thousands of degrees upon reentry. Or suppose Brown's heavenly ocean actually fell to the earth without appreciable slowing. Then it would strike the ground at nearly orbital velocity, with such smashing results that nothing on the ground would be recognizable, and it would again heat up to thousands of degrees and burn up whatever was left. The 1908 Tunguska, Siberia explosion was apparently a comet composed largely of water, and it flattened an area of thousands of square miles and started huge forest fires. Thus, Brown's scenario would result in vaporized mammoths, not frozen ones.
Brown claims that the continents got to their present positions by yet another impossible means. He claims that when the great cracks opened around the world and spewed forth all that Flood water, somehow the continents started skidding away from the cracks at about 30 miles an hour, finally skidding to a stop when their leading edges hung up on the rock layers below. Mountain ranges such as the Rockies were raised when those leading edges buckled as the continents came to a halt. But this is an absolutely impossible scenario. Many of the world's mountain ranges are nowhere near the edges of continents, such as the Himalayas. Many of the ranges are so old that they've been worn down to nubs, such as the Appalachians. The structure of the rock itself shows that Brown's virtually instant buckling could not happen. Rock is brittle and shatters when subjected to the kind of stresses that such giant earthquakes would entail. Yet much of the Rockies and other ranges that Brown claims as evidence are extremely folded. Such folding in brittle rock only occurs over extremely long periods of time and/or under extremes of heat and pressure as are only found miles down in the earth. Yet these mountains, Brown claims, were on the surface.
Brown spends time on the Grand Canyon but here again his claims ignore most geological evidence. He claims that after the continents came to a halt, extreme sedimentation occurred worldwide and built up huge thicknesses of sediment such as the Grand Canyon cuts through. However, he fails to account for the many published reports that show that the sediments could not possibly have been set down virtually all at once, and then solidified in place, and then cut through by the Colorado River. Many geologists have described features that prove that the Grand Canyon layers were laid down over long periods of time interspersed with times when, after they had hardened into rock the land had been uplifted and partly eroded. Thus one finds rock cobbles from a lower substrate lying on a surface that had been eroded by streams. Anyone can read the geological literature and find this out for himself - yet Brown ignores all of it.
If you don't think that the above ideas are correct, then by all means do your own research and justify why you think Brown is right. Or perhaps you feel that Brown is such a great scientist that his word is sufficient to establish his claims.
Brown also makes plenty of mistakes in his section on mammoths that you provided a link to - far more than I'm willing to deal with here. Let's examine a few of them. We'll find that Brown engages in massive selective quoting from his sources - in other words, he presents only what supports his case and suppress anything that doesn't fit. In short, he lies to his audience.
In the beginning of the section Brown admits that only a tiny number of frozen carcasses have actually been found, while later he goes back to claiming that millions "must exist".
Brown describes the 1977 discovery of the baby mammoth nicknamed "Dima", but neglects to describe any of the solid research that went into showing how it actually died - research that completely debunks his own claims. The evidence shows that the little mammoth died after struggling for several days in the bog into which it had become trapped - not that it was "quick-frozen" as Brown claims.
Brown claims that the other animal remains - mostly just bones, not frozen carcasses - that have been found in Arctic and temperate regions are not from cold-adapted animals, but that's just plain wrong. Today, musk oxen are found only in the Arctic, and reindeer (caribou) and wolverines are found only in far northern climates. Horses, wild oxen, antelope, bison, beaver, elk, leopards, wolves, bears, voles, squirrels, rabbits, and lynx are quite common in the far north today and/or in prehistoric times. The woolly rhinoceros is extinct, but it obviously could survive in cold conditions just as the woolly mammoth could. How about tigers? Some people are so ignorant that they don't understand that the Siberian Tiger today lives in extremely cold conditions, and so the tiger is not a tropical animal - it is highly adaptable. Brown claims that some of the above animals live only in warm climates but that only proves his ignorance and/or tendency to ignore evidence he doesn't want to deal with.
Brown correctly observes that woolly mammoths must have lived in conditions somewhat warmer than today's. However, he fails to mention that scientists figured this out a long time ago. I present a detailed summary of this evidence in my Flood writeups on Osarsif's website. The only thing of note here is that the popular media often get science information wrong.
Brown claims that the frozen carcasses all were "quick-frozen" and that their internal organs had not decomposed, but that's simply not so. In fact, none of them were in that state according to the evidence presented in the scientific literature that he cites. Sure, Brown cites certain authors, such as Ivan Sanderson, but a careful look at Sanderson's background shows that he was just another crackpot - see my Flood writeup for details. The scientific literature shows, for example, that the Berezovka mammoth's internal organs were quite rotten and that much of its flesh was rotted so badly before it froze that the ground around it had absorbed the odor of rotten flesh before it froze. According to the Russian scientists whose account was published in a 1904 Smithsonian report, the stench was so bad that they could barely stand it, especially after they opened up the carcass.
I have Brown's complete book In the Beginning from which this web information was gleaned. Brown cites a scientist, R. Dale Guthrie writing in Frozen Fauna of the Mammoth Steppe. Guthrie's main exposition is about the frozen bison from Alaska which he nicknamed "Blue Babe". I've written about this amazing discovery many times on this forum. The bison had been killed by lions and mostly eaten before the remains were frozen. The skin was opened up along the spine and laid out on the ground, and then the meat from the body was mostly eaten. The head and shoulders were mostly untouched, and that's what remains. The nose had puncture wounds in it that show that the bison was suffocated by a nose-bite from a lion. One lion broke off a piece of molar in the frozen flesh. That's how the scientists figured out that it was lions that had killed the bison, and also that the flesh was frozen while the lions were eating the carcass. That also proves that lions can live in extremely cold conditions just as the Siberian Tiger does. Guthrie also details how the geology of the area shows that the bison was buried - it actually took a couple of years of slow burial by mud creeping downhill. Again see my Flood writeup for details. Brown ignores all of this information even though it proves - all by itself - that his entire claim about "quick-frozen carcasses" is completely out to lunch. If Brown's claims were correct, Blue Babe could not exist.
: Maybe you should redo your famous research and get it updated!
My research has already taken care of 90% of Brown's claims. Read my writeup and compare for yourself, if you dare. But I'm fairly sure that you won't do any research at all, any more than any of the other "true believers" on this forum, such as You Know, have done. You're all afraid of what you'll find.
I noted that Friend suggested that you read a book on the Flood by Ryan and Pitman, which you said you would. If you do you'll note that the information it contains completely debunks Walter Brown's global flood claims - or at least, you should note it.
AF