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Posted on 05/09/2017 7:47:56 AM PDT by fishtank
Archive Classic: The Mystery of the Ultra-Pure Sandstones
Reprinted from June 27, 2003, this mystery is worth considering still. What caused these global deposits that are not being formed today?
6/27/03 — R. H. Dott, Jr (Univ. of Wisconsin) has a problem. He’s been trying to explain a geological puzzle for 50 years, and it is still unresolved. All around the world, sandstones are found that are “remarkably pure” that “seem nonactualistic” (jargon for “They can’t really be there”). These pure quartz arenites, as they are called, were considered a major puzzle half a century ago, when Dr. Dott was a student. Some of them “extend laterally over vast areas encompassing one or several states,” and they cover vast areas of Africa and Arabia, the Great Lakes region, South America, Australia, and more. These “sheet sands” (as they are nicknamed) are part of a notorious gang: “Together with the origin of dolomite, red beds, black shale, and banded iron formation, they made up a group of seemingly intractable geological problems” (emphasis added in all quotes).
(Excerpt) Read more at crev.info ...
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No, it doesn't. Catastrophic events create messy piles of debris. Not finely sorted deposits.
Ever been to beach at Destin, FL?
No
“Catastrophic events create messy piles of debris. Not finely sorted deposits. “
Who told you that?? Where did you read that? Or are you just guessing?
There is ample evidence of just the opposite happening, ie the thin platinum layer deposited all over the globe at the KT boundry.
My vote is you are just guessing.
I am not guessing. Finely sorted deposits are functions of stable depositional environments.
Pure white sand, as far as you can see. It’s beautiful. Just remember: some of those dark shapes swimming in the water with you are dolphins. Some are not.
Well, standard uniformitarian theory denies catastrophic events, so how can it tell us what they would look like if they happened?
https://pubs.usgs.gov/pp/p1563/figure6.html
Figure 6A. Field characteristics of tephra units, Mount St. Helens. A, Road cutbank about 10 km northeast of the volcano. Coarse grain size and white color of the lower unit shown identify tephra set W, which here consists almost entirely of layer Wn. Tephra set W is overlain by the dark, fine-grained set X, and in turn by the light-gray to brown, coarse-grained layer T. The brown color of layer T results from iron staining in a surficial soil zone. Dark-gray ejecta from the 1980 eruptions lie at the top of the outcrop. Fine-grained set X here forms a slight ledge in this outcrop. The ledge causes small particles of layer T and the 1980 deposits to cover the base of layer T, which is not finer in its lower part as the photograph might suggest. Small pick shown for scale. Photograph taken 1982.
Figure 6C. Road cutbank about 14 km northeast of the volcano. Roadcut exposures over a wide area northeast of Mount St. Helens show distinct pale bands of pumice lapilli separated by darker bands of chiefly ash. Here, pale layer T lapilli are underlain by the dark band of set X, which separates the layer from the coarse, pale set W (mostly layer Wn). Tephra set W is about 125 cm thick here. Sets B and P and the upper part of set Y form a dark ash stratum below set W. In a fresher exposure, layer Yn in the lower part of set Y would be seen as another stratum of pale lapilli (see Fig. 34). Photograph taken in 1983.
Floods leave sorted deposits. Big floods are catastrophic. Igneous rock tends to be heavy so a steady state flood tends to sort out the heavier sands from the lighter sands.
However a flood big enough to sort sand beds as big as several states would be a flood of Biblical proportion.
Hey...could it be?
In this argument I, after looking at the St. Pete sandstone, have to come down on the multicycling side of the theory.
yes thank you exactly right iridium not platinum
Geologists have come around on catastrophism, the Channeled Scablands in the NW US being a prime example.
There are some good videos on Youtube about Lake Missoula.
I had no idea the event repeated itself a hundred times or so.
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