Creation Revolution

Mud Experiments Overturn Long-held Geological Beliefs

Posted on March 21, 2011

Mudstone

A Call for a Radical Reappraisal of all Previous Interpretations of Mudstone deposits

New research presented in Science journal documents how, contrary to conventional wisdom, mud can deposit from rapidly flowing water.¹ These findings cut across beliefs held by geologists for over a century and signal that ‘mudstone science is poised for a paradigm shift.’²

Using specially designed laboratory equipment, Juergen Schieber, John Southard and Kevin Thaisen have shown that mud-sized material will deposit under much higher current velocities than previously thought.

For more than a hundred years, geoscientists have assumed that long periods of quiet water conditions are required for the deposition of mud. Based on that belief, whenever geologists have encountered mud deposits in the sedimentary record they have interpreted them as forming in a tranquil deposition environment.

Long-age scientists have long attacked the idea that Noah’s Flood was a real, historical event, and disparaged the claim by young-earth creationists that the year-long Flood can account for most of the geological deposits exposed on the earth today. One of their major arguments concerns this widely held but erroneous belief.

For example, Alan Hayward uses the Haymond rock formation in the USA for this purpose, describing it as almost a mile (1.6 km) thick, extending over a large area, and containing more than 30,000 alternating layers of shale and sandstone.³

Hayward assumed the conventional geological beliefs about the deposition of mud as fact: ‘Shale is made of compacted clay. As most readers will have noticed, clay consists of exceedingly fine particles which take a long time to settle in water. Turbulence keeps them in suspension and consequently clay will only settle in calm water.’

He then uses these erroneous ideas to disparage the biblical account of the global Flood: ‘How did the Flood bring in a thin layer of sand and deposit it over a large area, then bring in a thin layer of clay and all this to settle quietly—all in a matter of minutes? And then repeat the whole performance fifteen thousand times?’….

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