John S wrote:
I mentioned this in the thread “Questions for Uniformitarianists”, but I want to caution again about making generalizations about the rock record based on a single area.
I’m not sure what you mean by a “single area”. I presented pictures from 3 different areas. And by no means are the pictures unique. Such illustrations of parallel strata are abundant.
Here are two pictures of deformation in Paleozoic rocks in the Appalachian mountains:
The pictures you presented are pictures of the surface, not a cross-sectional picture. So, they do not quite address my argument. Some better pictures that would address my argument are cross-sectional pictures that show faults/folds between stratum.
Rocks of the same age that are further away from the collision aren’t deformed. Does that lack of deformation mean that plates didn’t collide and form the Appalachians? No – it just means that those undeformed rocks weren’t involved in the collision.
I agree with your statements, but I fail to see how they address my argument.
Some more questions about plate tectonics. When the plates move, where exactly is it moving? Where are the lines of demarcation of the plates?
I wanted to point out that in the thread “Questions for Uniformitarianists” I’ve mentioned many different mountain building events (orogenies) that occurred at different times in geologic history in different geographic areas. Those orogonies were caused by the plate collisions.
(From the Q’s for U’s thread)
I mentioned several different orogenies (mountain building events). I’ll use two of them, the Late Precambrian Grenville orogeny and the Early Paleozoic Antler orogeny as examples.
Again, what would be illustrative are the cross sectional analysis of mountains.
Here is a paper on the Pink Mountain Anticline. In figure 4, it diagrams the cross section of the mountain. All of the layers are parallel to each other. This would indicate that the mountain was formed after all the layers were laid down. Also, the faults lines run all the way to the top of the layers. This is consistent with catastrophism and not consistent with uniformitarianism as I have argued here.
Here is a cross sectional diagram of the Swiss Alps. Again, it appears that the mountain was formed after all the layers were laid down.
Here is another illustration of the Swiss Alps to demonstrate that gradual compression cannot have occurred while all the layers were being deposited. But, the compression event must’ve happened after all the sedimentary layers were formed.
