Kurt, you're taking me some really interesting places.
This is awesome!
In the middle of a cave.
Well, it's actually an airshaft for one of the coal mines
for one we were looking at a little bit earlier.
But the top of that airshaft is collapsed
so we can see some of the rocks above it.
Yeah.
And we're seeing some things we've already seen before:
right up here you see some fossil logs,
but they're not in sandstone like we saw before.
They're actually in shale.
And if we look a little further above it,
we've actually got a coal seam — right up there —
that runs right over our heads and on from there.
And notice an interesting thing
about this cool seam is the very flat top.
Yes.
So look at the coal has fallen out; it's left a very,
very flat surface.
That's one of the characteristics of coal.
It's got a flat top.
Almost every coal seam has an incredibly flat top
and a flat bottom.
I can see this in the other side of the exposure.
So two of the features of coal can be seen here.
And another thing that can't really be seen
unless you look at under the microscope —
Steve Austin studied coal for his Ph.D. dissertation —
and looking at it in a microscope
he could identify plant parts in the coal,
specifically bark, in the coal.
Okay, what's going on here?
So the question is why is it made of bark.
And the idea is we've got these logs — ultimately
what Steve did was propose
that there was a log mat floating on a body of water —
logs are floating on the surface.
And they're lichopod logs; they're logs that are of trees
that are hollow.
They've got bark,
but they do not have any internal secondary wood.
While they're floating on the water,
they roll against one another, peeling the bark off.
The bark gets waterlogged,
and falls down to the bottom.
So as the water… as the log mat floats about,
it drops this layer of bark…
Depositing bark all around where it's floating…
So it could float out of that area
and deposit bark someplace else.
What that allows is —
if you already have a flat surface —
the bark falls on a flat surface,
producing a flat bottom to that pile of bark.
And then when the log mat floats out of that region,
it leaves a flat top on the pile of bark.
Then, later, the bark can be coalified into coal.
And that would explain the coal seams:
the fact that they're made of layers of bark,
of pieces of bark,
the fact that they're flat topped and flat bottomed.
And those are difficult — actually,
basically impossible to explain any other way.
Well, yeah, because, see,
I was taught — under the conventional paradigm —
that coal takes a long time to form,
and it forms in the bottom of a swamp.
But that's not what we're seeing here.
No, that's not what we're seeing.
If it was a swamp,
several things would be true of what we're looking at.
First of all,
if it's a swamp, you've got trees growing
— rooted in soil.
So you would expect to see roots in the material
underneath the coal.
And when you see these logs — I don't see…
I don't see any roots in here.
And underneath modern swamps,
you've got lots of roots all over the place.
Right.
So we don't see that.
Plus, think of the bottom of the swamp.
Do you think the bottom of the swamp is nice and flat?
No, it's not.
It's this uneven
as the surface would be with all these trees sticking up in it.
We don't have trees growing from… through the coal down
into the material,
and then we've got this flat surface.
All of a sudden we've got coal.
And in a swamp
if you dig up the stuff in the swamp to see what kinds
of plant material — there's lots of plant material in there
— but if you pick it up it's,
well, Steve would describe it as coffee grounds.
It's a good description.
More fine.
Yeah, the… the roots growing
through this stuff messes it up — bioturbates
it is what we call it — and destroys the structure.
You can't find pieces of bark in there!
They're not recognizable; they're tiny little fragments.
You can't find branches;
they've been broken up and they're unrecognizable.
Leaves are unrecognizable.
So if that's what coal was formed from,
you wouldn't find pieces of bark in it.
But that's what Steve was finding in his coal seam:
chunks of bark.
So he's got a flat bottom, chunks of bark,
and then a flat top.
If you've got a forest growing there,
how do you shave the forest
off flat so that the coal stops all of a sudden….
Yeah.
And... it allows you to get a very,
very flat surface.
How does that happen?
Doesn't make any sense.
So the conventional explanation,
with a swamp over long periods of time,
just didn't work.
As a matter of fact,
what Steve did is… he was interested
in doing a dissertation on coal,
went to an institution famous for studying coal — Penn State —
and then asked, okay,
of all the coal seams that you're familiar
with in the United States,
what's the best example of a marsh-produced coal?
And they directed him to the Kentucky 12 coal
and that's what he did his dissertation on.
But when he looked at it, he found a flat base,
a flat top,
and besides that,
even seats in it —
thin layers of shale in the middle of the coal
with flat bottoms
and tops to even those thin layers
and pieces of bark in the coal.
And he concluded,
I can't explain this in that model.
Standard way.
So what he did was develop for his dissertation a new model.
If this log mat blew away you could have a layer of bark,
and then a layer
of mud could come in — an inch of mud could come in place —
and cover the bark that's already here.
Then the log mat can float in,
deposit more coal, flow back out again,
get another thin layer of mud.
And he could repeat this any number of times,
perhaps as much as the 120 times
you've got coal seams in the Illinois Basin,
for example,
as you float this back and forth.
And he defended this interpretation
of the Kentucky 12 coal seam for his Ph.D. dissertation.
Then it was accepted.
And then, of course, the comment was something like,
well, we just, I guess,
we just happened to find the one coal
that has those characteristics.
The wild theory.
But all the coals I've ever seen have those same characteristics:
flat bottoms, flat tops,
and they just can't be explained by these marsh theories.
So, Kurt, help me here because
if we have a layer of peat from the bark
that is a deposit on the bottom,
and then we have a mud layer that comes over the top,
it would appear to me
that the mud layer… shouldn't it just destroy that peat layer?
How does it get over the top?
Well, subsequent to that kind of research — Steve's
and some other research in trying to explain
how mud layers are formed,
and sand layers are formed,
and — well, I think he's already talked to you about….
Mudflows, yes.
…the nautiloid bed.
Well, the nautiloids are in a lime mud.
And the idea there is that that's a mud flow
that flowed over the surface of the bottom of a body of water.
And it hydroplanes; it's going so fast
that there is a layer
of water between it and the substance underneath
and just shoots straight
across… Well it doesn't deform when it's hydroplan
… like if you hydroplane on your vehicle… on the car.
It doesn't leave any skid marks….
Sure.
… okay?
It doesn't mess up the surface —
because you're not on the surface,
you're on water.
So if there was a thin layer of water on top of your bark layer,
you could have a mud flow come
in an inch thick — three inches thick,
a foot thick —
and not disturb the bark that's already there,
nicely deposit it on top and….
Well, if that's the case,
then one would expect — from a Genesis model —
that that thin layer
of mud in between would contain fossils.
But do we find fossils in there?
Actually sometimes it does.
And when it does [they]
almost invariably are marine fossils.
Now that's really weird.
Where are the marine fossils coming….
Sure.
So you've got this forest,
this swamp that was destroyed on the land,
and then got this mud
that comes in with fossils from the ocean?
And then, somehow,
after this deposit was made a new forest grew
without disturbing that one inch thick layer?
How do you grow trees in the mud layer now?
Right.
This makes no sense.
However if you've got the concept
of this floating log mat,
then the log mat can drop a pile of bark in,
can float off — be blown off to another area.
You can have marine mud or non-marine mud — whatever,
I mean — can come in and deposit.
Then the log mat floats
back over the area and deposits more bark,
and then floats away,
and you could repeat this any number of times
in any sequence you want.
And, again, you explain all the features found
in coal seams: flat bottoms,
flat top, seats with flat bottoms,
flat tops — even marine fossils in there.
It could… it's all easy, except for one thing.
What's interesting about these coal seams,
is you can trace them from here all the way up into Canada,
and all the way down into the Gulf of Mexico —
underneath the Gulf of Mexico —
and trace them west all the way across the length of Tennessee,
past the Mississippi River into Missouri,
and trace them east.
Skip the Atlantic Ocean,
they're in Europe — all the way across Europe into Russia.
The size of this mat of logs is the size of a continent.
How did we get that much?
See, and think
of that flood concept that the Bible talks about.
And if it's a global flood,
you've got North America and Europe covered,
and at the point these rocks are deposited, North America
smashed into Europe.
And they're connected.
So this log mat could float back
and forth across — all the way from what's now Moscow,
all the way over to the Mississippi River
and back again —
depositing coal seams over both of these continents….
That are consistent across both continents,
yet now separated by the Atlantic.
…in exactly the same… yeah.
And in the Atlantic you don't find any coal,
you don't find any fossils.
When you find the fossils,
these lichopods are the exact same lichopods
that are over there in Europe.
Exactly the same.
They're exactly the same… In fact,
the entire coal seam layer,
the entire Carboniferous
as they call it in Europe is… has got the same species —
the same pollen —
all the way through
what's conventionally understood to be 100 million years of time.
Same plants, same animals.
In fact; for my dissertation I worked on lingula,
which is a brachiopod species — bivalve species —
and the same species of lingula metaloides
and lingula squamiferus are found from the base
of the Carboniferous to the top
of the Carboniferous — exactly the same species.
Another person I know — did a dissertation on pollen —
finds exactly the same species all the way through.
It's the same.
It's the same forest.
All over.
It's been deposited over all of that region.
It makes sense in a flood model;
it makes no sense whatsoever in the conventional.
Okay.
Kurt, there is a question I'm sure
that's in a lot of people's minds
— just as it would be in mine.
The conventional paradigm,
when it talks about coal, says that coal forms
over a long period of time.
It's not a quickly-formed substance.
What have we found?
Yeah, well, that's what I was taught.
That's what I understood.
I got the impression
that it has to be made over a long period of time.
I had the opportunity when I was at the University
of Chicago as an undergraduate to work in the high energy,
high temperature, high pressure physics lab.
Geophysics lab, I'm sorry.
And we made rocks.
This is a really cool job!
Usually we are making metamorphic rocks,
which would be… we've got a metamorphic mineral
of some sort —
that's a mineral
that's been changed from some previous rock.
We have a theory about
what rocks were changed to produce this.
So the idea was to grind up
the rocks we thought they were made from,
mix them together,
put them in a little capsule — a little gold capsule — put them
in a thermos and a heater
which goes up
to a temperature we think would form that mineral,
and then put pressure on it that we think was necessary.
And wait whatever period of time it takes
for the chemical reactions to occur.
Take it out,
X-ray it, see if we got the mineral we hypothesize.
So, I shouldn't say I was doing it …
I was just the undergraduate, just doing the stuff
and it was really cool.
We made all sorts of rocks.
And it was interesting to me
that those rocks didn't take long to form.
In fact most of the time the rocks we were dealing
with at high temperatures only took minutes.
I could run this in an hour for almost all rocks.
Now when you're dealing with rocks that are made
at lower temperatures, cooler temperatures,
it took longer.
And the slowest- forming rock that I ever formed was,
in fact, coal.
And we made coal.
and it took forever.
It took three or four weeks….
Oh, my goodness.
…to form coal.
It was… and… and.
That's instantaneous.
I mean it's crazy!
I thought, you know, it takes a long time,
but that's the longest…
that's when you're basically at the boiling point of water —
so it's really low temperature compared to the temperature
of most rocks —
and it took a long time.
What's interesting too — here, this is cool.
I just can't resist this…
If you just put plant material into the oven,
it'll never form coal.
You just sit it there and nothing would happen.
But if you added a catalyst, the thing happened quickly.
It would happen in the three weeks.
And so the catalyst… of course,
a catalyst in general is some substance that you add
to a chemical reaction — doesn't change,
it… doesn't change the catalyst,
but the catalyst speeds the reaction.
So these…this catalyst would make it possible
to form coal very rapidly.
And the catalysts,
there's all… We experiment with all sorts of things,
and it turns out that
a whole bunch of clay minerals — montmorillonite, illomite,
and so on — if you put it
into the plant material it acted as a catalyst,
and the thing goes to coal very quickly.
Oh my goodness.
Now think about this.
If you burn coal,
you get an ash that results —
that is unburnable.
It is the catalyst.
So coal is full of the catalysts.
And guess where
the montmorillonite and all that stuff comes from?
Volcanic ash.
It actually falls down from the sky
from volcanic eruptions.
So all you need are volcanic eruptions —
which are occurring all the time during this this whole thing —
raining down this volcanic ash.
And you've got what you need
to form coal in the matter of three or four weeks.
So in the history
that we have recorded for us in Genesis and all
that we have seen,
we have this mat
of logs producing this peat building up on the bottom,
and then we have these laminar mud flows
that come in over the top,
and more peat and more peat.
And what you're saying, then,
is that all of that can produce coal seams
within a matter of weeks.
Yes.
In the course of a yearlong flood —
like we describe
in Genesis — we could produce the 150 plus coal seems
that we see on the earth right now.
So by the time Noah gets off the boat,
we have all of those coal seams in place?
Yeah, it's already there.
It's already there.
It's ready for people to burn
and develop culture following the flood.
If we go to another site down the trail …
Okay.
I can show you some other evidence from that forest
that was destroyed in the pre-flood
world to produce this floating mat of logs.
Okay.
So let's go take a look at that.
I'm right behind you.