God created the universe in the beginning.
I realize that this will be a shock to some people. As a Geologist, that means the universe was created some tens of billions of years ago. To some Christians that means the universe was created 6,000 years ago. The earth is several billion years old for a Geologist and 6,000 years old for some Christians. As a follower of Jesus I can state without doubt that the Bible is inspired by the Holy Spirit and is absolutely true. Many Christians think I am an evolutionist at this point. I am not. I am not exactly sure how much time has elapsed since God created the universe, although I know that He did. I do not subscribe to it as a particular theory as it is inadequate to describe what has transpired throughout time. Then again, I am not a creationist. I have pretty much refused to discuss Geology and Christianity with Geologists and non-Geologists or with non-Christians and Christians when it comes to this subject. There is the nagging suspicion that my words might not be well-received and a waste of time for some people. I will tell anyone who asks that I believe the Bible is 100% true, Geologist or Follower of Jesus. I will also be glad to tell people what I know. People from both groups want to argue about this subject. I do not. I do not want to be the cause of stumbling for a Follower of Jesus. You may know if you need to read any further already. I know what I know and that is that.
What happened after God created the universe?
In 1920 a Geologist with the Yorkshire Geological Society published a paper showing the periodicity of the extinction and speciation cycles throughout the rock record. Life would begin, flourish and then suddenly disappear from the face of the earth, including marine life. Axlerod's work was especially interesting to me since my education and training was as a paleontologist. I gave the relative age date for the first evidence of amphibians on the planet for instance. They were in the Pennsylvanian System. I dated stratigraphic horizons based on fossil spores 10m to 120m in size as well as being interested in the paleoenvironments. I compared spores and pre-pollen as well as the fructifications of the plants with fossils from around the world. Libya has similar spores and at the time Africa was joined to North America. You could have walked to Spain through Great Britain from Kentucky by traveling to the New England area and then Canada at the time. India had an environment similar to that of Antarctica with minor strews of sparse organic material. The state of Kentucky was about 5° above the Equator at the time and its southern border was oriented in a northeasterly-southwesterly direction, instead of east-west as it is now.
The major unconformities are the boundaries between Systems based on a radical change from marine transgressive to terrigenous sedimentation which means uplift and erosion. I had access to coal samples that contained the fossil spores and also broke them down to look at the micro-petrography of the attritus and detritus that ended up in the peat that eventually became coal. I also looked at the stratigraphy and petrology of the underlying and overlying sediments. I did this on a regional basis and investigated how it related to tectonism and the subcratonic margin of the Appalachian Basin. Although it is not well-known, the eastern section of the United States and Canada almost spilt off to form a smaller continent along the Appalachians. This area of the United States is part of the Eastern Interior Aulocogen. A major compressional feature with the failed-arm of a triple junction radiating to the east is one way to describe the structural Geology of a part of the United States east of Cairo, Illinois. This means that there are a lot of faults and major structural features that determine the relationship of the earth's crustal movement on a sub-continental basis where there are places that have likely uplift and some places will likely "sink" if the earth's crust moves. The layers of sediment are not contiguous as a layer cake is. There are layers of what appears to be volcanic ash that is thick between Systems in places. In the pieces of coal formed over 350 million years ago the micro-rocks (I just invented that term) show that there was active vulcanism before the coal was formed and the rocks were carried downstream ending up in my samples of coal. In order to explain this in brief a lot of details are being left out. In short, vulcanism, continents crashing into one another and drifting apart has been going on for millions to billions of years. Something else happened too. The mass extinctions were caused by something big, something cosmic. My best understanding is the general periodicity of the big cosmic event that happens on a regular basis is about 65 million years. This would be due to a massive asteroid like the one that wiped out the dinosaurs. In 2002 the Silver Pit asteroid impact was discovered in the North Sea, showing that at least two huge asteroids hit the earth at the same time, one in the Yucatan Peninsula and the other in the North Sea. The earth travels around the Milky Way Galaxy and it has been suggested that there is one area with a great amount of cosmic debris and/or geomagnetic activity. Every 65 million years we hit a bump in the road that wipes out almost all life. Few species survive and the ones that do are altered genetically. The Systems are not as regularly timed and involve major movement of the earth's crust, major upheaval and mountain building. Those are a few of the things that have happened. There is a fairly regular cycle of destruction and speciation evident from my studies and the studies of others.
Understanding that God created the universe is central to understanding Salvation and Destruction. It always has been.
Mankind came along at sometime in the past after God created the universe. From what records we have it is difficult to have a clear picture of mankind's activities more than 50,000 years ago. One of my sites was in an area where Native Americans camped and hunted some 12,000-16,000 years ago. They also buried a lot of people there and left behind artifacts. The area where I live has the most archaeological evidence of Paleoindians in North America. A local biologist showed me a beautiful shell that had a hole drilled in it that had been worn by a Native American some 12,000 plus years ago. I wondered about the man who had found it and imagined that he had given it to his sweetheart to wear those many years ago. Things like that happened since God created the universe.
One day about 12,500 to 10,000 years Before Present an asteroid came screaming into the atmosphere at about 45,000 miles an hour over what is now Alaska. Like a plumed serpent leaving a writhing trail of smoke it literally hissed as people hundreds of miles away observed it. On its way it broke into two pieces before entering the air space over Canada with one traveling over part of what is modern-day Minnesota, the Michigan Peninsula and New York before landing in the Atlantic Ocean 1,500 miles offshore. The other piece came in over the Rockies went over where St. Louis is now and exited air space over North America in the Carolinas. As the pieces went through the atmosphere pieces of molten rock sloughed off and left millions of pieces of brimstone embedded in the Atlantic Coastal Plain and the Atlantic Ocean.
The earth was surrounded by a canopy of ice during the Ice Age. In a few parts of a second it was breached. In less than ten minutes thousands upon thousands of animals and people were instantly immolated, huge amounts of water, silt, and CO2 was in the upper atmosphere from impact and it started raining all of this. Radiation, ultraviolet light, and debris from outside the protective canopy poured into the atmosphere. Mastodons were flash frozen while eating on dry land in what is now under the Arctic Ocean and in modern-day Alaska and Siberia by the rain of CO2, ice crystals, atomized water as an icy mist, and silt. Mapping of the planet shows that there was a much greater land mass than there is today as mean sea level is 400 higher now. The Atlantic Ocean had been accumulating sediment and making banks out off the continental shelf for millions of years. The island of Bimini was larger and had cold weather cedars growing there. Mapping that I have shows that it is likely you may have been able to walk almost all the way to Cuba. We know that most likely the earth was tilted on its axis and there was sudden upheaval. Lake Titicaca of South America in the Andes on the Bolivia-Peru border had been a major seaport just moments before the asteroid came to earth. Continental margins were no doubt shaken and the "solid" land near the shoreline in some places slumped down slopes that were destabilized. Places that had cities were almost instantly 2,000 feet beneath the surface of the Atlantic Ocean. Soon tsunamis were on their way to the shores of continents all over the world.
Some people knew it was coming. A few survived.
to be continued...
Cogan proposes one impact crater located where the lowermost one is shown on the map above. An evaluation of the seafloor topography of the Atlantic Ocean suggests the two locations indicated are impact craters.
Terrestrial Evidence of a Nuclear Catastrophe in Paleoindian Times
Cogan, John, The New Order of Man's History, Elton-Wolf Publishing, Seattle, Washington, 2001.
Base Map excerpted, reduced and altered from
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