Siberian Traps

I haven't written anything new on the topic for many years. My old thing, of a Young-Earth, and what we used to dare call Creationism. Anyway, that's not really what FP is for. Nevertheless. Did you know that toxic gases caused world's worst extinction? Yep -- 90% of all life. 250 million years ago. It seems ... but that's too vague ... it is a fact that the Siberian Traps supervolcano covered an area the size of Alaska with volcanic rock. Its 200,000 year-long history of eruptions caused the Global Warming that caused the Permian extinctions.

The "volcano employed an arsenal of deadly weapons.... Prime among them was carbon. Searing magmas from the volcano intruded into the Tunguska Basin in eastern Siberia, a region laden with thick deposits of coal, oil and gas. Heat from the molten rock baked the hydrocarbons, turning the area into the world's largest fossil fuel-burning plant. In all, the volcano may have belched as much as 100,000 gigatons of carbon into the air (all of humanity emits about eight gigatons of carbon annually)."

But carbon isn't the only killer. Just watch the news. Salt is a killer too. What "happened when lava infiltrated the area's abundant salt deposits[?] When heated in a laboratory to 275 degrees Centigrade (527 degrees Fahrenheit), the salts released a host of toxic gases, chief among them methyl chloride, an efficient ozone-killer." So the world was baked and poisoned and scalded and irradiated.

Well, a moderately sarcastic tone isn't going to be actually convincing. And I'm not up on the details anymore. But here's an alternative. First, we can never dispute the evidence. Not real evidence. Evidence doesn't argue. We can only interpret evidence. We interpret evidence, always, only, through paradigms, through worldviews. The Evolutionist paradigm gives us Permian Ages and hundreds of millions of years. A world Flood paradigm gives us some other possibilities.

None of us should have trouble with mass extinctions. The atheists used to, because the idea was so clearly stated in the Bible, and so was probably wrong. Then they formulated the Evolution Cult, and couldn't get enough of extinctions. No matter. The details of Noah's Ark need not be explored, here. But what are we to suppose might have occurred, during its year-long voyage? Beneath the mile-deep waters, what may have been transpiring? Ontogeny? -- the rising of the Andes and the Rockies and the Himalayas? Indeed. Continental drift? No such thing. Continental drive. It was one of the mechanisms of the Flood itself, fed by juvenile waters bound within the planet's crust since the time it was formed, released in a literally stratospheric blasting of the Fountains of the Deep.

Volcanism? Of course. During and for centuries afterward. We find the evidence abundantly, in what is called pillow lava -- extruded underwater and bearing telltale characteristics. Coal beds were remnants of the once-global Antediluvian forestation, uprooted and buried under massive tidal avalanches of turbid sediments. No coal, before the Flood. Created by the heat and pressure of the catastrophe and subsequent forces. The mechanisms are known. It's not hard to discover or understand -- just to believe.

The Canadian Shield, the Deccan Plateau -- these volcanic relics rival the Siberian Traps in extent and magnitude. What we know, what we have always known, is that the planet has been judged. It's just the matter of the timing.

Consider the Ark. Why gather breeding pairs of all land-based vertebrates together in one small area? Because it was a refuge. The fact that the waters of the Flood receded into the newly, eustatically formed ocean beds does not mean the catastrophe was over. But while the biosphere reestablished itself, there was a haven and a storehouse and a husbandman. The details of reproduction rates and the like are straightforward. It's just surviving those first few years that are tough. The Ark is not an embarrassment -- it is elegant.

Well. I've merely touched on the matter. They didn't report on whether it's pillow lava or not. That would tell us something about the timing.

As for dinosaurs, certainly they survived the Flood. As juveniles of course, but which thrived to some extent afterwards, as we know from preserved nests and eggs and footprints and caproliths, and preserved soft tissues (the idea that these could have survived tens of millions of years takes more faith than I could ever generate). We don't find dino bones mixed with large mammals for the same reason we don't find alligator bones mixed with those of grizzly bears. Different habitats. And so on.

Am I dogmatic? Well, actually, yes, sort of. But no. It's just that I have a paradigm that doesn't explain every imaginable outcome -- only all the outcomes that actually exist. Is it a falsifiable theory? Certainly. If there were a statistically meaningful occurrence of an actual geologic column, like what we saw as kids in textbooks, where the "oldest" fossils were at the bottom -- that would be pretty awkward. Alas for Evolutionists, there ain't no such animal. Remember how I said we don't argue about evidence? The "geologic column" isn't evidence. It's a hypothetical construct that is widely mistaken for a fact, unsupported by evidence. If ontogeny did indeed recapitulate phylogeny -- that would be embarrassing. If there were such a thing as a vestigial organ -- oh my. And so on.

My point isn't to prove I'm right. That doesn't need proving. I'm just right, is all. It's to point out the bias and the folly. Nothing to be done about it. So, uh, anyways, I guess that's alls I wanid tuh say.


J