It’s a waste of time trying to have a discussion on these threads, one is either accused of being a religious bigot or a fool, by minds so indocrinated their brains are useless fossils.
I’ll throw in a little from Darwin’s journals and I’ll begone:
30th.—The solitary hovel which bears the imposing name of Villa Vicencio has been mentioned by every traveller who has crossed the Andes. I stayed here and at some neighbouring mines during the two succeeding days. The geology of the surrounding country is very curious. The Uspallata range is separated from the main Cordillera by a long narrow plain or
2 A
[page] 354 USPALLATA PASS CHAP.
basin, like those so often mentioned in Chile, but higher, being six thousand feet above the sea. This range has nearly the same geographical position with respect to the Cordillera, which the gigantic Portillo line has, but it is of a totally different origin: it consists of various kinds of submarine lava, alternating with volcanic sandstones and other remarkable sedimentary deposits; the whole having a very close resemblance to some of the tertiary beds on the shores of the Pacific. From this resemblance I expected to find silicified wood, which is generally characteristic of those formations. I was gratified in a very extraordinary manner. In the central part of the range, at an elevation of about seven thousand feet, I observed on a bare slope some snow-white projecting columns. These were petrified trees, eleven being silicified, and from thirty to forty converted into coarsely-crystallised white calcareous spar. They were abruptly broken off, the upright stumps projecting a few feet above the ground. The trunks measured from three to five feet each in circumference. They stood a little way apart from each other, but the whole formed one group. Mr. Robert Brown has been kind enough to examine the wood: he says it belongs to the fir tribe, partaking of the character of the Araucarian family, but with some curious points of affinity with the yew. The volcanic sandstone in which the trees were embedded, and from the lower part of which they must have sprung, had accumulated in successive thin layers around their trunks; and the stone yet retained the impression of the bark.
It required little geological practice to interpret the marvellous story which this scene at once unfolded; though I confess I was at first so much astonished that I could scarcely believe the plainest evidence. I saw the spot where a cluster of fine trees once waved their branches on the shores of the Atlantic, when that ocean (now driven back 700 miles) came to the foot of the Andes. I saw that they had sprung from a volcanic soil which had been raised above the level of the sea, and that subsequently this dry land, with its upright trees, had been let down into the depths of the ocean. In these depths, the formerly dry land was covered by sedimentary beds, and these again by enormous streams of submarine lava—one such mass attaining the thickness of a thousand feet; and these deluges of molten stone and aqueous deposits five times alternately had
[page] 355 SILICIFIED TREES XV
been spread out. The ocean which received such thick masses must have been profoundly deep; but again the subterranean forces exerted themselves, and I now beheld the bed of that ocean, forming a chain of mountains more than seven thousand feet in height. Nor had those antagonist forces been dormant, which are always at work wearing down the surface of the land: the great piles of strata had been intersected by many wide valleys, and the trees, now changed into silex, were exposed projecting from the volcanic soil, now changed into rock, whence formerly, in a green and budding state, they had raised their lofty heads. Now, all is utterly irreclaimable and desert; even the lichen cannot adhere to the stony casts of former trees. Vast, and scarcely comprehensible as such changes must ever appear, yet they have all occurred within a period, recent when compared with the history of the Cordillera; and the Cordillera itself is absolutely modern as compared with many of the fossiliferous strata of Europe and America...
http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?viewtype=text&itemID=F59&pageseq=1
From Earth in Upheaval by Immanuel Velikovsky
In the fall of 1949, Professor M. Ewing of Columbia University published a report on an expedition to the Atlantic Ocean. Explorations were carried on especially in the region about the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, the mountainous chain that runs from north to south, following the general outlines of the ocean. The Ridge, as well as the ocean bottom to the west and to the east, disclosed to ~e expedition a series of facts that amount to new scientific puzzles.
One was the discovery of prehistoric beach sand. . . brought up in one case from a depth of two and the other nearly three and one half miles, far from any place where beaches exist today. One of these sand deposits was found twelve hundred miles from land.
Sand is produced from rocks by the eroding action of sea waves pounding the coast, and by the action of rain and wind and the alternation of heat and cold. On the bottom of the ocean the temperature is constant; there are no currents; it is a region of motionless stillness. Mid-ocean bottoms are covered with ooze made up of silt so fine that its particles can be carried suspended in ocean water for a long time before they sink to the bottom, there to build sediment. The ooze contains skeletons of the minute animals, foraminifera that live in the upper waters of the ocean in vast numbers. But there should be no coarse sand on the mid-ocean floor, because sand is native to land areas and to the continental shelf.
This is another one of the many facts discovered in recent times that lead me to believe that the earth’s land masses did recently shift in all directions, leaving world wide evidence of an event so powerful that it changed the face of the world as the survivors had known it.
Yet another clue that adds legitimacy to the possible of great earth movements was the discovery that the Atlantic Ocean sea floor had very little sediment cover.
From Earth in Upheaval by Immanuel Velikovsky
But there was another surprise in store for the expedition. The thickness of the sediment on the ocean bottom was measured by the well-developed method of sound echoes. An explosion is set off and the time it takes for the echo to return from the sediment on the floor of the ocean, is compared with the time required for a second echo to return from the bottom of the sediment, or from the bedrock, basalt or granite. These measurements clearly indicate thousands of feet of sediments on the foothills of the Ridge. Surprisingly, however, we have found that in the great flat basins on either side of the Ridge, this sediment appears to be less than 100 feet thick, a fact so startling. . .
Actually, the echoes arrived almost simultaneously, and the most that could be attributed in such circumstances to the sediment, was less than one hundred feet of thickness, or the margin of error.
It had always been thought that the sediment must be extremely thick, since it had been accumulating for countless ages. ... But on the level basins that flank the Mid-Atlantic Ridge our signals reflected from the bottom mud and from bedrock came back too close together to measure the time between them. . . They show the sediment in the basins is less than 100 feet thick.
The absence of thick sediment on the level floor presents another of many scientific riddles our expedition propounded.
It indicates that the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean on both sides of the Ridge was very recently formed.
It has since been shown that throughout the world’s oceans the expected amount of sediment does not exist.
http://www.goldenageproject.org.uk/942.php
Amazing stuff is it not? Such a shame that his work was twisted in such a way as to be very nearly unrecognizable from the original. One of these days I’ll have to look into Lyell’s story to determine what drove him to create the uniformitarian myth.