Fossil Forests

Fossilized forests, are they rare or are they everywhere?

There are many geologic and oceanic features on planet Earth that cannot be explained by the uniformitarian hypothesis of modern geology.  Increasingly, the trend in our understanding of geology is towards catastrophism.  Volcanic episodes both modern and ancient and even prehistorical demonstrate widespread annihilation of large tracts of land and submarine regions.  The Mount St. Helens eruption blew off 3 cubic miles of earth and devastated a region that is now visible from space.  Pompey and the surrounding cities were destroyed by a similar eruption that entombed homes, sidewalks, people, dogs, art and food; like a still photo, ancient civilizations were frozen in time by the hot ash that buried the towns.

 

The recent episodes of tidal waves such as the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami of Japan or the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami that laid coastlines waste and took hundreds of thousands of lives in their wake were catastrophes witnessed by modern eyes.  Nearly the whole of the State of Washington is scabland – a virtual wasteland of land devoid of earth and trees and riddled with massive hydrogeological formations carved by the ancient Missoula Flood.  Zion National Park, Bryce Canyon and the Grand Canyon of the US are the remnants of flood geology.

 

 

 

Much like the breach of the ice damn that let loose the Missoula waters that scoured Washington State, an ancient inland ocean held in the middle of the US was released by a breach of a still speculative damn of rock or hills.  When released, the waters of this ocean devoured the crust of the earth in short order leaving a deep scar on the planet.  The Grand Canyon alone is a mile deep, 16 miles wide in some regions and 277 miles long.

 

The Great Lakes hold one fifth of all the fresh water in the world and yet they, like Niagara Falls are recent features estimated by secular science at only 10,000 years old.  The Himalayan mounts of which Mt. Everest is the highest peak are said to be millions of years old yet the top 3000 feet of Everest is composed, not of granite, but sedimentary rock – rock formed from the deposition of sediment from an ocean.  Even the Mariana Trench, a 7 mile deep underwater canyon appears to be the result of an underwater collapse of the sea floor and has nothing to do with continental drift or subduction of the ocean basins under the continental shelf.  And the continental shelves are extended perimeters of every continent on the planet; testimony to a global flood.  These shelves were once dry land and still have the remnants of cities, roads, temples and riverbeds; proof positive that the flooding of these plains occurred within the lifetime of human civilization.

In this article the existence of fossilized forests will be discussed.  On or under the land of every continent and nearly every nation are sites on which petrified forests are to be found.  The state of preservation and the nature of many fossil forests can be studied as ecosystems frozen in a moment of time.  While many theories attribute these forests to millions of years of time, the collective details of the facts of these geological oddities beg to be properly interpreted in terms of sudden, overwhelming, catastrophic inundations of water.   Such flooding must occur at global proportions; in some cases freezing the forests in place, in other cases drowning the forests only to overlay them with massive sedimentary deposits hundreds of meters thick.  In the past few years numerous fossil forests have been found.  Two will be considered in some detail; the coal forests of Illinois and the petrified forests of the Antarctic.  There are many other fossil forests around the world.

 

In 2007 the coal mines of Galatia, Illinois revealed a subterranean forest estimated at 300 million to 359 million years old and falling within the Pennsylvanian period of Earth’s geological history.  The site is estimated at 100 square kilometers but it is impossible to know with any precision just how vast the fossil forest is since the coal bed has not been exhaustively mined.  What can be known is that the entire ecosystem of plant life has been captured in near perfect preserved state with trees in excess of 100 feet in length and trunks over 6 feet in diameter fossilized in place. The forest with its peculiar scale and fern trees and the understory and leaf litter are entirely intact.  One scientist called it a botanical Pompeii. Another said it was the closest thing to time travel we will ever come by since the discovery is of a lost world.   Some suggest 6 or 7 forests replaced one another in a vertical arrangement above the forest but this sort of reforestation does not occur anywhere on the planet today.   What does occur today is localized floods that bury forests or uproot tracts of land and bury trees as was seen to occur in the Mount St. Helens catastrophe.  How one forest could grow on top of another one only to suffer the same fate seven times over is pure speculation and a poor guess at that.  It ignores the role of catastrophic flood formation of the laminated sedimentary rock formations both below and above the fossil forests.

 

Void of animal remains except for a few insect parts the forest represents a catastrophic immersion of the land by ocean sediments.  Once trapped in sediment, multiple layers of differing deposits, some sandy others silts, were dropped on top of this buried forest in massive, homogeneous layers to a depth of 800 feet in some cases.  Speculations have been voluminous and inconsistent as to just how this forest came to be buried.  Some say it was global warming that caused the environmental changes leading to repeated flood cycles of a large river basin that may have run through the forest.  Others suggest a single cataclysmic earthquake dropped this region below sea level and the region became inundated with watery sediments.  For certain, the entombment of the forest was not slow nor did it take millions of years.  It was so sudden only animals could escape the catastrophe. It was so sudden that we must assume the entire State of Illinois was involved in the destructive flood since Illinois is known for other fossils associated with coal beds – tracts of lands that are thousands of square miles.

 

Furthermore, the same kinds of fossil forests have been found in Gilboa of New York, supposedly 80 million years older as determined by current geologic estimates of sedimentary stratification.  Unfortunately most uniformitarian estimates of slow sedimentation rates do not apply to catastrophic occurrences. This makes such hypotheses invalid and useless in dating fossil finds.  Remember the K-T boundary is considered proof positive that the dinosaurs were wiped out by a catastrophic event that ended 75% of all life forms living at that time! Some say a meteor caused the extinction event, others volcanism.  One thing is for sure, a flood buried all those bones.

 

In 2012 another fossilized forest dated at 298 million years was discovered under the coal beds of Wuda in Inner Mongolia China.  It was described as “perfectly preserved” with intact trees and leaves, branches and trunks and cones.  It was first buried by volcanic ash in just a few days.  The trees were found standing and so dramatic was the cataclysm that trees were captured in a falling stance next to where they were growing!  Some tree stands were 80 feet tall.  Leaves were found attached to their branches.   The forest was found under a coal mine.

 

Still another “ancient” forest was found fossilized in situ near Glasgow, Scotland in the 1800’s.  Trunks as long as 40 meters and root systems still in tact were found and, as usual, associated with coal beds.  In fact, most coal beds, up to 70% of them are the result of enormous mats of uprooted and floating vegetation that came to rest on the surface of the earth only to be subsequently buried by sediments that later turned to rock layers. The coal harvested for energy is supposed to be 300 million years old and is often described as deposits of swamp growths that built up over millions of years.  All of this guesswork does not account for the required global flood conditions needed to bury these deposits under sediments, whether in situ or as floating debris.  This kind of burial is under hundreds to thousands of feet of sediments.  No one talks of the flood conditions that laid down all the rock that is now the surface of the land and is found exposed on nearly every square inch of the  planet. To suggest this idea gives far too much credit to a Noachian type flooding of the planet.  To admit this is to hand science back to the monasteries from which it arose and that means God must be credited with the facts of life.

Most recently the Antarctic is yielding more and more evidence that the continent was once a sweltering jungle.  One region known as the Amery Oasis has rocks rich in plant fossils believe to date between 200 to 290 million years ago.; the Permian period of earth history.   Trees as tall as 25 meters (90 feet) comprise the lost forest.  In 2005 the dead continent of ice and waste revealed dead beetles by the hundreds, dried moss, pieces of twig that snapped between the researchers fingers.  Atop Elevator Mountain in the Friis Hills another “lost world” of lush vegetation was found frozen, not fossilized.  Supposedly 20 million years ago the buried forest was frozen and over millions of years the mountain rose up above the glaciers to fortuitously preserve this amazing scene.  Most animal life seems to have fled the scene, thought to be the result of climate change.  The animals left but the forest remained?  Animals run from danger like floods but plants are bound to the ground.  Even underwater rainforest cemeteries have been found in seabed off the Antarctica.  A forest that flourished 52 million years ago and lies still buried beneath the sea.

 

There is no end in sight for the fossil forests of the Antarctic.  Fossil trees and shrubs, with their soils and leaf litter are found in position on Alexander Island off the Antarctic Peninsula.  These are Creteceous rocks and the forest community that died in an instant  holds the ancient riverbed that supposedly swallowed the entire region.  While it is described as a forest trapped in fluvial sediments by low energy floods, the muds and silts attest to an otherwise catastrophic inundation that buried the region. The sediments set up later to form rock and fossilize the dead forest.  Evergreens, ferns, shrubs, mosses, flowering trees comprised this lost world.

 

A 2003 publication described even another fossil forest this time of the Triassic period.  So pristine was the forest that multiple ecosystems, tree rings of trunks could be counted and re-creations of the tropical paradise have been made.

And this is only scratching the surface of the geology of Antarctica.

Considering more of the U.S. we can mention the petrified fossil forests of Arizona’s Triassic Fossil Forest that is now a National Park, or the Gingko fossil forests that flourished 15 million years ago in Washington.  There is the Yellow Stone fossil forests and the Mississippi fossil forests and the forests of Utah, and of course those of North Dakota.  Greece, China, New Zealand, Australia, Hungary, England, Greenland, Iceland, the Soviet Union and Canada, Mexico, Patagonia and the list could go on until we run out of nations.   There was a world of untold glory that is now ravaged by catastrophe.  Millions of years don’t contribute to the explanation of the death of planet earth.

Much is made of the rarity of fossils finds of animal remains but even more is made of the strangeness of the finds in the science of paleobotany.  The search for proof of animal evolution is no longer sought for in the fossil record.  Only popular press still believes this hype.  Even more bewildering is the fact that not a single plant lineage can be traced by evolution either by molecular models of modern plants, or by taxonomy of homologous types or by fossil records. There is no evidence of anything evolving, plant or animal

 

 

 

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Bulgarian fossil forests.

 

 

 

Fossilization is made to be a rare event requiring unique and unusual conditions that are just right for mineralization of tissues to occur but the fact is the entire surface of the planet is an open graveyard.  On every continent, in every nation, in every state, in every county of a state and in your own back yard you will find sedimentary rock and in it a fossil of some sort.  From the Arctic to the Antarctic and everywhere in between are the remains of a world that no longer exists.  Lizards the size of apartment buildings, trees the size of sky scrapers, insects the size of birds, centipedes 6 feet long, forests frozen and fossilized in time, 10,000 dinosaurs drowned, buried and fossilized in a single bed; these are typical of what is found around the world.   Dinosaur egg nests on every continent.  Strange and bewildering deaths of entire herds of mammoths, rhinos, certopsid dinosaurs and now complete tropical forests in places no one would suspect.

I ask, do you believe the world is billions of years old?  If you do, why?  Can no one see that the planet has been flooded?  The evidence of this is found in every chunk of sedimentary rock.  This rock forms the crust of every land feature on the planet and yet our educational systems have force fed a commitment to a failed theory, one that none can prove; that the world has sustained billions of years of biological and geological evolution.  This is a flight of fantasy for far better interpretations are available to those who reject indoctrination and seek for truth.

 

GO TO MY VIDEO UPDATES TO SEE SOME FOOTAGE OF SEVERAL SITES OF FOSSIL FORESTS FINDS.