Wednesday, May 6, 2009

The Stone Forest in the Desert

These are some images I took in August, 2007 during our visit to Petrified Forest National Park in the badlands of southern Arizona. It was an incredible experience to walk through a graveyard of petrified trees - colorful giants composed of solid quartz, thickly scattered across rolling hills with no water in sight. Where did they come from? Did they grow here?








Park staff will tell you the trees drifted into their current location from distant forests during the Triassic period, and in a mixture of water, sediment and volcanic ash were very slowly petrified and buried (and are now being slowly revealed by erosion.) But is this really a satisfactory explanation?

Consider the petrified forests of Yellowstone National Park.
"Evolutionists explain the petrified forests of Yellowstone as the result of an ongoing cycle: 1) A forest grows and then is buried by volcanic ash and other debris. 2) Dissolved minerals are soaked up by the trees, petrifying them. 3) The ash weathers into clay and soil. 4) A new forest grows on top of the previous one, which is subsequently buried by volcanic ash to begin the process again. This process would have occurred numerous times to produce the 27–50 layers of petrified forests found here at Yellowstone, estimated to have taken over 30,000 years. Eventually these layers, with their forests, were exposed by erosion, revealing what we see today at Yellowstone...

...Biblical creationists explain these forests in a different way. The evidence points to catastrophic processes, which are consistent with the Bible’s teaching of creation about 6,000 years ago and a worldwide Flood. The petrified forests of Yellowstone actually are the result of catastrophic burial during the Genesis Flood, which with its associated volcanic activity, would have produced the right conditions for these trees to have been rapidly deposited and then to have been petrified quickly.
Quoted from Petrified Forests in Yellowstone.

Isn't it interesting how the same "evidence" generates two drastically different explanations?

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