The Biblical description of Creation as part of the Christian Scriptures
Polystrate Fossils
Fossil trees should show the remains of trees thousands of years after they grew on Earth. But the presence of some fossilised trees vertically within multiple rock strata could show that this statement may not be accurate.
A tree buried in sand which over time became sandstone, would be the obvious way for a fossilised tree to form. But any tree trunk sticking out from the sand would clearly have rotted before the next layer of rock is formed. But there are polystrate trees imbedded in multiple layers of rock!
There are also fossilised leaves that are polystrate. It is even more obvious that the time period in which the leaf was fossilised was indeed very short indeed.
How can a plant span multiple rock strata when the rock layers have taken many, many years to be deposited around the tree? Obviously this is not what happened. So why are these fossilised trees found all over the world?
Many fossilised trees would seem to stand on coal seams. They may or may not have roots. The wood is petrified and the bark around the tree has become coal, regardless of whether the tree is in a coal seam or in sandstone. The rock layers also contain fossilised animals and fish. These fossils do not show signs of rotting; the implication is that the burial is a catastrophic event that killed and buried the creatures. Or maybe there was process that prevented organic material from rotting or being eaten, over hundreds of years whilst rock layers formed around them!
One answer is that a catastrophic deluge occured, ripping up trees, sweeping up animals and plants, and depositing everything together. Many polystrate tree trunks are associated with coal seams. The presence of these coal seams shows that a huge amount of organic material was present in this deluge. The mixture of land animals and plants and fish shows everything being very mixed up together.
Many plant and tree fossils show that the plants were very much bigger than equivalent species today. Some of the animals were much larger then equivalents now, and we know that dinosaurs were very large indeed. There was a lot of organic material available to be mixed together and to turn into coal and oil.
Fossils are found all over the world, including on the top of mountains where there are beds of fossils with animals of all sorts mixed together. Some fossils show fish in the process of eating other fish. All the signs are of a catastrophic event that occurred on a global scale, creating mountains and vallies in a very short period of time. Such a short period of time that it caught fish and animals whilst feeding!
In case anyone thinks that the above scenario is far fetched, I suggest that they look into the Mt St. Helens volcanic eruption in 1980. This was a small scale catastrophic event but there was rapid deposition and erosion that that occurred over a couple of weeks after the eruption. Stratified layers up to 400 feet thick formed as a result of landslides, pyroclastic flows, mudflows, etc, during the eruption.
Fine laminae from only a millimeter thick to more than a meter high formed in just a few seconds each. A deposit more than 25 feet in thickness, and containing upwards of 100 thin layers accumulated in just one day on June 12, 1980. Imagine this on a global scale?
Mt. St. Helens had been surrounded by a lush forest of coniferous trees and numerous clear lakes before the explosion that blew 1300 feet off the top of the mountain. The explosion blew down many thousands of trees, stripping leaves and branches off them in the process. A river of mud traveled down the mountain sweeping trees and debris into Spirit Lake. Many logs were left floating on the surface of the lake. But many more had sunk to the bottom of the lake. Significantly there were many tree trunks floating vertically at the bottom of the lake, others were not floating but were vertical and were buried into the bottom of the lake.
Was this eruption a small scale example of the Biblical flood and the devestation that occurred to the mantle of the earth, pushing up mountains, burying (almost) all the vegetation and organic material present on the surface of the earth?
The devastation was massive, before the flood there was only one continent!
John Mackay excavates giant polystrate tassel fern in
Cumberland Plateau rocks Tennessee USA
Source: http://evidenceweb.net
A beautifully preserved fern.
It is one of the many beautifully preserved leaf fossils that
are evidence of rapid burial.
Source: http://evidenceweb.net
The storms along the coast had caused landslides,
which exposed many new polystrate tree fossils.
Source: http://evidenceweb.net