How do you know that such methods of dating are reliable if it has been proven to be in error? Isn’t it an assumption to say that he has only proven rapid layering, rather then the possibility that the method used for dating is compromised?
Well, I don’t remember mentioning dating methods, but let’s deal with this anyway - it’s wrong to say that radiometric dating methods have been proven to be in error. On the contrary, different dating methods used on samples from the same deposit give very close results, and methods, such as isochron dating and concordia/discordia plots that have been developed over several decades are reliable and accurate, and avoid all the most obvious potential pitfalls.
I think you should try to understand what Berthault has actually done, and then you will see that his claims for his work are grossly overstated. He has demonstrated (experimentally in a large tank or flume with flowing water) some principles of sedimentation (sorting within sedimentation beds is very well known, for example the Bouma sequence of turbidites) that geologists have known about for decades, namely the simultaneous deposition of size sorted layers out of flow where there is flow rate shear. The consequences include prograde migration and lateral and vertical sorting. This represents some sedimentation conditions in flowing rivers. That’s it. No really, that’s all there is. It is on this flimsy basis that he claims to have revolutionised the whole of geology.
Well, of course, his claim to have undermined the basis of structural geology is absolute nonsense, not just because radiometric dating shows that it’s nonsense, but because it’s demonstrably nonsense on its own merits. Why? Well, for several reasons:
- His results are relevant to short term sedimentation in a river. They have no relevance to water borne sedimentation in low or zero flow lacustrine and marine environments
- They are also irrelevant to oil shale, varve, micritic laminae, and many other types of geological material
- They are irrelevant to volcanic tuffs, pumice, lapilli and other tephra, igneous rock and breccias formed by volcanic ash and lavas, or to beds of lava
- They are irrelevant to air borne or aeolian beds
- They are irrelevant to evaporites
- They are irrelevant to deposition in coal, bituminous and oil bearing sediment basins
- They are irrelevant to initial calcium carbonate deposition and diagenesis in chalks – and so on and so forth
- Furthermore, they have nothing to say about any case where lithification has taken place in an existing bed as overlying strata must then, by definition, be younger than underlying ones.
- In the many miles of depth of the geological column that is present in some places, many of these different processes can be found within the column, indicating that the environment in which the individual strata were deposited has changed over time. So for example we get fossiliferous lacustrine strata (bearing different index species) separated by volcanic tuff, evaporites or aeolian deposits and then marine strata overbedded by lava all in the same column.
As you can see, it is simply not remotely credible to do a few experiments on sedimentation in flowing water where the sediments are never consolidated, and claim that that invalidates the chronology that all working geologists conclude from the geological column as a whole (and have done since the 1700s). So, of course, the geological community utterly ignores Berthault’s grandiose claims to have revolutionised geology, not because he is a threat to them, but because the claims are so obviously vainglorious. None of his papers from the last seven years have been cited by any respectable geologist as far as I can tell, and they certainly would have been cited if he had a case.
I don’t expect Peter will engage with this, because, contrary to waht he claims, he won’t want to get stuck into the actual science.
Alec
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