The Rocks Don't Lie: A Geologist Investigates Noah's Flood

by David R. Montgomery

  Kulp also described how radiometric ages of rocks determined by measuring uranium-lead ratios agree with the stratigraphic order worked out by field geologists on the basis of Steno’s principles for interpreting structure and stratigraphy. Radiometric dating confirmed the basic order to the stratigraphic record independently from the fossils sedimentary rocks contained. Price’s argument that geologists used the idea of fossil succession (and thus evolution) to impose an artificial order on the geologic record showed how little Price understood geology.

  Kulp asked how if sedimentary rocks really were deposited by great waves moving at speeds up to a thousand miles an hour it would be possible to preserve the kind of ecological zonation creationists called upon to explain fossil assemblages—the idea that the different fossils that characterized different rock formations simply reflected the animal communities in different ecological zones on the pre-Flood Earth. Such a violent current would mix and remix anything ripped up from Earth’s surface. The ecological zonation that creationists invoked to explain the fossil record could not survive the flood they called upon to generate it.

  One of the simplest arguments against a young age for the world’s sedimentary rocks was the amount of water that would need to be evaporated in order to account for the great thickness of evaporites, like the gypsum (calcium sulfate) deposits in Michigan and west Texas. Since less than a foot of gypsum would precipitate out of a thousand feet of seawater, Kulp calculated that it would take evaporation of an ocean 450 miles deep to build up the thick gypsum deposits of west Texas. Based on the most extreme recorded evaporation rates from the Dead Sea, he calculated this would take hundreds of thousands of years. The world’s thick evaporite beds could not have formed in the single year of Noah’s Flood.

  Evidence based on completely different approaches—radioactive decay, the amount of salt in the sea, and even the relationship between the speed of light and the distance to the stars—all indicated that Earth was millions if not billions of years old.

  Kulp concluded his critique of Price’s ideas by warning that pushing demonstrably false ideas would hinder the spread of the Gospel among educated people. An evangelical himself, Kulp studied chemistry until he felt the Lord call him to study geology. He was concerned that for half a century too few evangelical Christians had entered the field of geology; consequently, Price and his disciples exercised too much influence in evangelical circles, given their lack of geological knowledge.

  Few mainstream Christian scholars bought into Price’s flood geology. In 1954, influential Baptist theologian Bernard Ramm critiqued creationism from an evangelical perspective in The Christian View of Science and Scripture. Ramm argued against a recent global flood. He considered it ludicrous to think that people from all the world’s ethnicities could have descended from Noah in just a few thousand years.

  Ramm contrasted two traditions through which Christians approached science. Those adopting the “ignoble tradition” had taken a hostile attitude toward science and “used arguments and procedures not in the better traditions of established scholarship,” whereas those following the “noble tradition” had “taken great care to learn the facts of science and Scripture.”8 To set science against religion was to set creation against creator. “If the Author of Nature and of Scripture are the same God, then the two books of God must eventually recite the same story.”9 Ramm advised evangelical Christians not to confuse interpretation with revelation. Just because the Bible was the infallible Word of God did not mean that it was always obvious as to what it meant regarding scientific matters. Confidence that one understood the clear meaning of scripture did not necessarily mean one did.

  In defending radioactive dating of rocks, Ramm related how experiments under a wide range of pressures and temperatures showed no effect on the rate of radioactive decay. Radioactive isotopes changed at a constant rate. Geologists could tell how long a sample of uranium (or carbon) had been decaying in a similar way to how we could “measur[e] how much gas we have left in the tank [to get] an idea how many miles we have driven.”10

  For Ramm, the idea that Earth existed for millions of years before God reconditioned it for human use adequately reconciled Genesis and geology. In the epilogue to his book, Ramm pointed out that not only did evangelicals of his day not believe that Earth is either flat or at the center of the universe but that many considered the findings of modern geology to be perfectly consistent with their faith.

  Ramm’s book caused quite a stir among fundamentalists. A leader of the self-described new evangelicals, he sought to engage modern culture, avoided belligerency, and embraced scholarship. Shortly after it was published Billy Graham praised Ramm’s book and called for a new view of biblical inspiration that respected and accommodated modern science. It seemed as though the idea of a global flood was vanquished. No serious scientist or mainstream theologian still gave it any thought. The key to accepting the fact that science and scripture could peacefully coexist lay in how one interpreted the Bible—just as it always had.

  Meanwhile, twentieth-century geologists had settled into a comfortably uniformitarian worldview. Studying processes active today, they believed, was the key to understanding the worlds of the past. Anti-catastrophist views were so embedded in conventional thinking that when a young upstart discovered evidence for an enormous flood, it took most of the century for his colleagues to accept his heretical notion. But as geologists reluctantly came to appreciate, once again, the geologic role and topographic signature of catastrophic flooding, they developed a foundation for rational explanations of many of the world’s flood stories, including, some would argue, Noah’s Flood.

  11

  The Heretic’s Flood

  IT IS HARD TO SEE evidence for what you’re sure cannot exist. Twentieth-century geologists were no exception to this rule. They were certain that enormous floods capable of sculpting topography were impossible. Until, that is, one of them rediscovered the ability of catastrophic floods to reshape Earth’s surface in the curious landscape of eastern Washington’s scablands, a desolate region stripped of soil.

  After teaching geology at the University of Washington for a decade, I was embarrassed that I had not yet seen the deep canyons where tremendous ice age floods scoured down into solid rock to sculpt the scablands. So when colleagues asked me to help lead a field trip there, I decided it was about time I checked out this dramatic terrain. But lead a field trip to somewhere I’d never been? No thanks, I replied, how about I just tag along? When the announcement came out, I was listed as a trip leader. Clearly this was going to be educational. The question was for whom.

  Geology field trips usually involve a lot of high-speed talking in low-speed vans. As the designated distraction crossing over Washington’s Cascades, I related the history of twentieth-century arguments over the timing of when the range rose to rival the Swiss Alps. Geologists working in the northern Cascades saw the range as ancient, having risen before waves of black lava flowed out from Yellowstone to cover eastern Washington fifteen to seventeen million years ago. Those working in the southern Cascades argued the range was much younger, having come up well after emplacement of the lava blanket. It turns out that there is a simple way to reconcile these fundamentally conflicting interpretations. The modern topography of the Cascade Range is a composite, the southern half rising much more recently to stand shoulder to shoulder with its elder sibling to the north. Sometimes conflict is all about perspective.

  We descended the Cascades and soon entered the high desert of eastern Washington. The temperate rainforest of western Washington was miles behind us, and the lack of plants made it easy to see the landforms. Once across the Columbia River we continued eastward, driving up onto a plateau where swirling winds blew soil off freshly plowed fields. Racing the dust devils, we dropped into Moses Coulee, a canyon with vertical walls of layered basalt half buried beneath talus ramps. Nothing had removed the rocks that fell to the valley floor. They just piled up in place, right where gr
avity left them.

  We stopped, gathered the students on a small rise, and asked them how the canyon was formed. They immediately ruled out wind and glaciers. The valley was not U-shaped like typical glacial valleys, and none of us could imagine how wind might gouge a canyon out of hard basalt. But neither did anyone see a river or stream. After a while I pointed out that we were standing on a pile of gravel and asked the class to explain how these rounded granite pebbles came to be there when the closest source of granite lay over the horizon. Silence.

  Hiking through eastern Washington canyons littered with exotic boulders has long been a standard field trip for beginning geologists. It takes a while to register what you see there: the water-scoured cliff of a now dry waterfall hundreds of feet high in the middle of the desert; giant potholes where no river flows today; granite boulders parked in a basalt canyon. Gradually, the contradictions fall into place and answer the questions of where car-sized wayward boulders came from and what was the source of the water that moved them around and carved the falls. Students can conjure up eastern Washington’s giant floods once their professors give them the clues. Once you know what to look for, the evidence is hiding out in the open in plain sight. But the idea of a great flood capable of gouging deep valleys into hard rock seems unlikely in the middle of a desert, particularly when you’ve been taught that such a thing is impossible.

  After European geologists dismissed a central role for a catastrophic flood in earth history, the idea became geological heresy. Although J Harlen Bretz uncovered evidence of giant floods in eastern Washington in the 1920s, it took most of the twentieth century for other geologists to believe him. Geologists had so thoroughly denied the existence of great floods that they could not believe it when somebody actually found evidence for one.

  A controversial figure throughout his career, Bretz won no awards until long after he retired and his most influential and vociferous critics died. There was no volume written by distinguished colleagues to honor his career. He was an outsider, a heretic dismissed by the scientific establishment. A classic field geologist, Bretz figured out the story of the region’s giant glacial floods, seeing what others at first could not and then would not see to sort out the pieces of a landscape-scale jigsaw puzzle.

  Bretz became unpopular when he questioned orthodox uniformitarianism, Lyell’s dictate that the processes of today are the same as those of the past. Fresh out of graduate school and perhaps not knowing any better, Bretz identified compelling evidence for a gigantic flood. A reluctant heretic, he insisted on valuing field evidence above theory, piecing together the story of how a raging wall of water hundreds of feet high roared across eastern Washington, carving deep channels before cascading down the Columbia River gorge as a wall of water high enough to turn Oregon’s Willamette Valley into a vast backwater lake. This time it was the scientific community that refused to see the evidence. Vying to be the first to prove himself wrong, Bretz kept digging. But as he kept finding more evidence of a really big flood, the geological establishment kept coming up with ways of explaining it away.

  Bretz taught in his native Michigan before heading west to teach high school in Seattle. A field enthusiast, he spent his weekends and summers studying the geology around Puget Sound as well as glaciers in the nearby Cascade Range. Eventually he enrolled at the University of Chicago, graduating summa cum laude with a PhD based on western Washington’s glacial geology in 1913. After spending a year on the faculty of the University of Washington, where his colleagues did not appreciate his enthusiasm for fieldwork, he accepted an invitation to return to Chicago, where he taught until he retired in 1947. Dedicated to teaching geology in the field and enamored with the landscapes of eastern Washington, he started bringing summer classes to the Columbia River gorge.

  There Bretz found exotic granite boulders perched on basalt cliffs hundreds of feet above the highest recorded river level. Glaciers could not have carried these boulders to these elevations. Geological evidence had already proven glaciers had never reached the gorge. His colleagues thought this part of the Cascade Range lay submerged beneath the Pacific Ocean when the boulders arrived, carried by floating ice. Finding no evidence of marine fossils or ancient beaches, however, Bretz concluded the boulders must have been deposited by fresh water. But what could have generated such an enormous flood?

  Each summer he returned to explore farther upstream. After several summers canvassing the gorge, he shifted north to the scablands. Exploring the strange topography of the area, Bretz came across dry waterfalls and potholes hundreds of feet above the modern river. Gigantic gravel bars deposited within coulees (dry valleys) implied deep, fast-flowing water. Scour lines that crossed over drainage divides showed that flowing water had overtopped ridgelines and spilled into adjacent valleys. Streamlined hills rose like islands sticking up more than a hundred feet above the scoured out channelways. Bretz realized the chaotic landscape had been carved by enormous floods that chewed deep channels through hundreds of feet of solid basalt. Here, right before his eyes, was the unthinkable.

  Ever since Reverend Samuel Parker first described the Grand Coulee as a former channel of the Columbia River in 1838, explorers and geologists agreed that a glacially diverted river that ran across the plateau gradually carved the scablands before returning to its normal valley. But Bretz identified how these now streamless canyons defined a drainage pattern unlike any formed by normal rivers. Here was an interconnected complex of enormous channels that branched out only to reconnect downstream. Such a network could only form if water had filled valleys to overflowing and spilled a great flood over their drainage divides. He called this enormous flood the Spokane Flood. But what was the source of all that water?

  Bretz first presented his thoughts on the channeled scablands to the Geological Society of America in 1923. Focused on describing his field observations, he was careful not to invoke the taboo of referring to a monstrous flood. He attributed the flows that carved the valleys to an ice dam across the Columbia River that forced water to spill out across the scablands. Over successive summers Bretz became increasingly confident that the scablands were not just the gradually produced work of a diverted river.

  He recognized that 100-foot-high piles of gravel on the canyon floors were built by even deeper flows and that the hanging valleys that drained over dry waterfalls were not the product of normal stream erosion. These features were carved by a process that shut off before forming a smoothly integrated channel network. Troubled by how the field evidence pointed to a giant flood spilling over from the Columbia River to scour the scablands, he found good reasons to reject all other possibilities.

  Tracing the evidence downstream through the Columbia River Gorge, Bretz found that his flood deposited an enormous delta around Portland, Oregon, backing up flow into the Willamette Valley. Taking advantage of locations where the flow constricted, he calculated a peak discharge so large he even doubted it himself—over sixty-six million cubic feet per second. Field evidence kept pointing to a really big flood.

  Bretz could think of only two forces that could have produced his troubling flood. Either a very rapid and short-lived warming of the climate or a volcanic eruption beneath an ice cap. Neither provided a satisfying explanation. He had a flood without a cause.

  His colleagues were as perplexed as he was. The battle over how long it took rivers to carve valleys had already been won. Even Bretz acknowledged the challenge that his catastrophic flood presented to conventional thinking. Yet, the giant gravel bars in the now dry canyons mirrored the form of ripples on the bed of a sandy river—only they were much, much larger. Some tear-dropped shaped bedrock hills were still capped with loose silt, showing that the flow that streamlined them did not overtop them. One could map the extent of the flood. Somewhat reluctantly, Bretz concluded that catastrophic flooding provided the best explanation for his field observations.

  In January 1927, Bretz was invited to present his findings to the Geological Society of Washington, DC.
It made no difference that he systematically outlined his arguments: dry canyons carved hundreds of feet into hard basalt, hundreds of dry waterfalls some two to three miles across; the stripping off of several hundred feet of silt and soil over large areas; and interconnected overflow channels that crossed drainage divides. It was an ambush. Representatives of the Geological Society of America and the U.S. Geological Survey also attended the meeting. One by one they rose to crucify the heretic’s description of the flood.

  The first critic cautiously warned about the difficulty in finding a source that could release so much water so fast. Surely, he asserted, many small floods gradually carved the scablands. The next critic doubted that so much hard basalt could be carved out in a brief flood, no matter how deep the flow. Another argued that a diverted Columbia River swollen by glacial meltwater could have slowly incised the scabland channels. This defender of geologic sanity was so eager to dismiss the idea of a catastrophic flood that he argued that the elevations of spillways originally cut at different altitudes were now identical due to subsequent earth movements fortuitously aligning them at precisely the same height. Although no one questioned his observations, every speaker challenged Bretz’s interpretation, pointing out that he had no way to explain how to get so much water so fast. Although this was a lopsided debate, it was deeply rooted in a long tradition of geologists sparring and arguing over how to interpret observations. What everyone, including Bretz, could agree on was that further fieldwork was needed to explain the channeled scablands.