Physical Evidence of Global Floods: Ocean Sediments, Circumpolar Muck, Erratics, Buried Forests, and Loess

By Charles Ginenthal

Ocean Sediments, Circumpolar Muck, Erratics, Buried Forests, and Loess as Evidence of Global Floods.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Sep 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9781365370090

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Physical Evidence of Global Floods: Ocean Sediments, Circumpolar Muck, Erratics, Buried Forests, and Loess

Physical Evidence of Global Floods

Ocean Sediments, Circumpolar Muck, Erratics, Buried Forests, and Loess

By Charles Ginenthal

Copyright

Copyright © 2016 Charles Ginenthal.

ISBN 978-1-365-37009-0

First Printing 1997

All rights reserved.  Other than as permitted under the Fair Use section of the United States copyright act of 1976, no part of this publication shall be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system without the prior written permission of the author.  

Quoting of this work must be attributed to this book, and not in a manner which would indicate any sort of endorsement.  No derivative works are permitted without express permission of the author.  Reproduction of artwork contained in this book must be properly attributed to this book.

THE VELIKOVSKIAN

A Journal of Myth, History and Science

Quota pars operis tanti nobis committitur?

Charles Ginenthal

Editor-in-Chief

Associate and Contributing Editors:

Lynn E. Rose

Irving Wolfe

Clark Whelton

Copy Editor:

Birgit Liesching

Vol. IV, No. 1

Copyright © 2016

65-35 108th Street

Forest Hills, New York 11375

Preface

Ocean Sediments, Circumpolar Muck, Erratics, Buried Forests, and Loess as Evidence of Global Floods

By Charles Ginenthal

In a prior paper, evidence of whales and other marine life lying on the surface or in near surface deposits was presented as evidence of immense global floods in recent times.[1] If indeed, as Velikovsky claimed, there were great recent global floods,[2] then such deluges should have left immense sediments and unique forms of sediment in their wake.    Furthermore, the distribution and the amount of this detritus should also have been deposited in regions that fully corroborate Velikovsky's theory. As I previously pointed out:

"If the Earth's axis tilted or the crust suddenly, violently, moved over the mantle, then the oceans would move en mass as immense tidal waves, away from the equator and toward the poles ...

u   The tidal waves flowing over the northern ... [lands] would [then] flow south and, in a return flood, where they swept back onto the continental surface, would produce stunning evidence of their rampage over the land... ." [3]

Therefore, such a catastrophic event would have violently stirred the oceans and produced stupendous oceanic flows which would have carried immense amounts of sediment with them to the northern and southern hemispheres and deposited them (this paper will concentrate on the northern hemisphere) in the Arctic Ocean, and the circumpolar lands adjacent to and surrounding the Arctic Ocean.   Those flood waters that reached farthest south should have contained the lightest sediments that the waters could carry as a slurry, and where it stopped or was halted by mountainous barriers, it deposited this lightest material as a second circumpolar ring deep inside the North American and Eurasian continents, while some sediment would also flow with the counterflow back to the Arctic Ocean and adjacent lands.

Between these lightest sediments and the arctic-basin sediments, should also be found buried trees by the millions and in many cases buried forests, along with the remains of various animals, such as mammoths. In addition, the flood waters and ice caps pushed by them would

have scoured the land over which the ice slid to move immense numbers of boulders of all sizes and soil also distributed with a circumpolar orientation. The flood waters would also transport numerous large boulders.

If the oceans flowed from the equator toward the poles, one would expect to find:

Immense sedimentary deposits in the Arctic Ocean forming a bull's-eye.

Surrounding that oceanic deposit will lay another immense deposit inland and south over Alaska, northern Canada, northern Europe, and Siberia for several hundred miles, all of similar materials to great depth (Arctic muck).

Within this second circumpolar layer and beyond it farther south should be buried trees, animal remains, forests, and all sizes of erratic boulders.

Farthest south of all these deposits should be found a last immense layer of the lightest sediments girdling the northern hemisphere (the loess).

This concept does not preclude a great deal of overlap of sediments. Furthermore, on the land, there should also be found a size distribution of these materials that indicates the heavier materials tended to be deposited first (as the Arctic Ocean waters swept southward back and away from the pole where they had built up), and that lighter and lighter materials would then be laid down farther and farther south.    Lastly, there would have been not only a southerly backflow but, where this backflow encountered high mountain ranges, one would expect a second northward counterflow toward the Arctic Ocean.

That this analysis of these sedimentary materials is confirmed by the evidence will be outlined below as a form of proof that great global deluges occurred in historic and prehistoric times.    Before proceeding, it should also be noted that, although this paper deals with geophysical evidence, there are numerous ancient legendary and historical documents that speak of one of these global floods. Several authors and scientists of the past discussed tfiis, of whom the first may have been William Whiston in New Theory of the Earth , where he claimed in 1696 that a great comet nearing the Earth in ancient times caused the Biblical flood.   His book had a profound influence on later scholars who, in various ways, supported the idea that there had, indeed, been a recent global flood. G. Cuvier also conceived of immense floods as a reality, based on Whiston's work.[4] Stephen Jay Gould claims that Cuvier ... does argue for a worldwide flood some five thousand years ago, and he does cite the Bible as support.  But his thirty-page discussion is a literary and ethnographic compendium of all traditions [of the flood] from Chaldean to Chinese..[5]

Henry H. Howorth presented a 51-page compendium of the flood traditions in his monumental book, The Mammoth    and the Flood , which claims there are:

"Traditions of the flood —[come from] Egyptian tradition —Double version of the flood story in the Bible— Similar story [the Gilgamish Epic] from the clay tablets of Mesopotamia and Berosus—'Traces of it among the Aramaic people of Syria and in Phrygia —The flood story among the early Hindus and Iranians—The story of Deucalion and Ogyges among the Greeks, and the legends about Atlantis—The story among the Lithuanians and Norsemen —The legend among the Lapps, the Voguls of the Ural Mountains, the Kalmuks, and the Chinese—The legend among the Esquimaux, the tribes of North America —The Mexicans and the Peruvians, the Caribs of the West Indies and the Orinoco, etc. —The story among the Polynesians, the Fiji Islanders, the Australians, the Philippine Islanders, the Andaman Islanders, etc. —These widespread legends converge upon a common catastrophe.[6]

Historians and scientists have almost unanimously chosen to deny the validity of this nearly universal description of global flooding. Because of their strict adherence to the doctrine of uniformity, such a literary form of evidence, they suggest, can carry no weight. They have (based on their theory of slow change) concluded that all these stories arose from memories of local floods and therefore are not indicative of a global deluge. However, Robert Anton Wilson suggests that an open-minded consideration of all this material could be interpreted in terms of catastrophism.

For instance, there are over 120 flood legends in addition to the one in the Old Testament.   They come from every part of the world... . Throw out the local details and you have one constant: the idea that there was once a flood. So maybe there was?  And maybe a comet created it.[7]

Put into the most basic terms, William Irwin Thompson raises the question: What if the history    of the world   is 'a myth/    but myth is the remains   of the real history   of Earth? [8]

(Thompson's emphasis). Those of us positively involved and interested in Velikovskian research have accepted this implication since 1950, or when we first came upon Velikovsky's books.

But Velikovsky, I believe, had an insight well rephrased by Cyrus Gordon, which explains why mankind will not listen to these relevant voices from the ancient past.



---

[1] Charles Ginenthal, The Flood, The Velikovskion , Vol. II, No. 4 (1994), pp. 7-45.

[2] Immanuel Velikovsky, The Tide, pp. 70-76; Emperor Yahou, pp. 99-104, Worlds in Collision (New York, 1950); Immanuel Velikovsky, Whales in Mountains, Earth in Upheaval (New York, 1955), pp. 46-49.

[3] Ginenihal, op. tit. , pp. 7-8.

[4] Velikovsky, Worlds in Collision, op. tit ., p. 42.

[5] Stephen Jay Gould, The Stinkstones of Oeniugen, Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes (New York, 1983), p. 105.

[6] Henry H. Howorth, The Mammoth and the Flood (London, 1887), p. 412.

[7] Robert Anton Wilson, The New Inquisition (Terape, Ariz., 1991), p. 70.

[8] Wiiliam Irwin Thompson, At the Edge of History (New York, 1979), p. 175.

The Oceans

In a previous paper, this author promised to present evidence regarding Velikovsky’s theory and the oceans: Charles Ginenthal, Ice Core Evidence, 77 le Velikovskian , Vol. 2, No. 4, footnote, p. 56. The following material on the ocean is the fulfillment of that promise.

Velikovsky wrote briefly of the oceanic sediments in Earth in Upheaval.

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 the expedition a series of facts that amount to 'new scientific puzzles.[9]

"'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, the coastal rim of the ocean and its seas.

These considerations presented Professor Ewing with a dilemma: either the land must have sunk two to three miles, or the sea once must have been two to three miles lower than now. Either conclusion is startling. If the sea was once two miles lower, where could all the extra water have gone?*

"It is regarded as an accepted truth in geology that the seas have not changed their beds with the exception of encroachment by shallow water on depressed continental areas. Thus it was difficult to accept the startling conclusion that the bottom of the ocean was at some time in the past dry land.

"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.

... 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 only very recently formed. At the same time, on the flanks of the ridge the layers of sediment in some places are 'thousands of feet thick as was expected.'[10]

All of this, it is assumed, has been explained away by two uniformitarian processes, viz., plate tectonics and turbidity currents.    Plate tectonics gradually produces new ocean bottom surface rock at the mid-ocean ridges, so that the further away one goes from the ridge the older the sediments and the thicker the sediments should become. In fact, there are actually statements in the literature that this is truly the case.    For example, the Encyclopaedia     Britannica Macropaedia,    Vol. 7 (1993), page 850, states that the sediments become progressively older and thicker with increasing distance f r o m the ridge crests.   This is in no way the case; the flanks of mid-ocean ridges contain some of the deepest sediments, and the abyssal deep basins much less of these materials.

To explain the lack of sediment of great depth in these deeps, it is claimed, based on plate tectonic processes, that the ocean basins are no older than 150 million years, and probably closer to 165 million.   Therefore, young oceans would not contain great depths of sediment, which decidedly are not found.

Nevertheless, the theory of plate tectonics is an excellent way to test Velikovsky's thesis. Each predicts mutually exclusive distributions and thicknesses of these sediments. Because the sea floor moves away from the mid-ocean rift, located at the ridges at a rate of about three centimeters or less per year, over long periods of time, detritus in the various forms of clay, silt, mud, shells of various organisms, and chemicals in solution will settle on this moving seabed. Therefore, as expected, the older and more