The Stones Cry Out

Flood Geology Challenge #4:

El Capitan reef: Guadalupe Mountains National Park, Texas.  (Photo by author) 

Following the example of the Turks and Caicos above in Challenge 3, El Capitan displays a logical progression along a fossil carbonate platform that was active in the Permian Period.  About 10 miles behind El Capitan, red sandstones and siltstones and evaporates are encountered.  As you walk toward El Capitan you see dolomite with very little skeletal material.  Typical fauna here are gastropods, forams and some stromatolites.

If you keep walking you encounter dolomites with much more skeletal material.  These rocks contain gastropods, fusulinids and green algae.  Some ooids can be seen here as well.  Further, as you approach El Capitan, you find massive dolomitized packstones and boundstones.  Numerous fossils of corals, brachiopods, mollusks and bryozoans can be found in this area.  El Capitan itself consists of debris of the afore mentioned packstones and boundstones that appear to slope towards the cliff face.  As you walk further away from El Capitan you are in a series of sandstones and shales, some of which contain boulder-sized clasts of the dolomite found up in the mountain.

If you noticed, I did not mention any interpretation in the paragraphs above.  I have only mentioned factual observations.  When forming an interpretation between slow and gradual formation versus rapid catastrophic formation, we have a consideration to make.  Do the observations make sense based on any modern analog or do they appear random and chaotic?  Random and chaotic packages appear frequently in the rock record, but not here.  The sedimentary facies and faunal assemblages appear in an ordered and distinct succession.  If you remember the Turks and Caicos platform example and how the modern environments could be used to predict and interpret the Pleistocene environments, the same can be used here.

The hike you just made around El Capitan took you through a cross-section from terrestrial deposits into a restricted lagoon to a higher energy back reef setting to the reef, then the fore-reef debris setting, over the platform margin slope, out into the basin where chunks of the reef had fallen and been incorporated into the clastic turbidite sequences.  Thus, the modern analog can be used to predict and interpret depositional settings in the ancient.  A global catastrophic Flood could not have been responsible for creating, burying and then preserving the delicate platform with all its faunal communities in a way that we could recognize today.  Catastrophes preserved in the record speak of turbulence and chaos and never give an impression of order.