Fossils found spanning sedimentary layers?

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Very cool. It reminds me a lot of the way riverbanks look here as the water cuts into the clay...the definition of the layers and so on. Nothing has been compressed into rock here yet though.

It's pretty odd when you see the prairies turn into Canadian shield here. It happens pretty quickly, like the glaciers just kind of ran out of dirt to drop or something. I should likely start a photobucket account and get some of the images on-line. Of course then I'd have to scan a bunch of Kodachromes to put them up too.

I lived in Indiana for years. Northern part is Jo-Block flat, then around Indianapolis it gets wrinkled.

[xrayzed]

Put's on my sedimentologist (sedimentry geologist) hat - they actually pay me to interpret this sort of stuff for a living.

Hi Bolero,

Plenty of good sources above; I'll just add a few more points here.

Here's a modern 'polystrate telephone pole' from the Mt Pinatubo area, formed very rapidly in the same way as as many fossil polystrate trees. While it may span several metres of strata comprising apparent different layers, all were deposited rapidly in closely spaced events - in this case floods following a volcanic eruption.

(http://pubs.usgs.gov/pinatubo/punong1/fig18f.jpg)

That photo is brilliant. It clearly shows that long vertical objects, like wooden poles/trees, can be rapidly buried. It's simple, obvious, and doesn't require the amount of analysis and background understanding the figure on the previous page demanded.

That being said I can predict the creationist responses will be either "it's a fake" ("how do we know this isn't just a sawn-off telephone pole?", or as evidence for Teh Flud ("the pole was buried quickly, just as a flood buries things quickly, which proves uniformitarianism is wrong, therefore there was a global flood").

The first is ridiculous, while the latter is wrong on so many points that I can't be bothered pointing them out.

[ginckgo]

How would they deal with this?

It's what happens when the great caverns of the deep open up and spew forth their waters.

C'mon, keep up!