Yellowstone Petrified Trees

And it came to pass after seven days,

 that the waters of the flood were upon the earth.

Genesis 7:10

"In some places in Yellowstone Park, erosion of a hillside reveals layers of upright petrified trees. At Specimen Ridge, there are said to be 27 layers, while Specimen Creek contains about 50. This means that the Specimen Creek formation is especially huge—its total vertical height is 1,000 meters (3,400 feet). This raises the question: how did the petrified tree layers form?

The evolutionist explanation

Evolutionists and other long-agers usually teach the following scenario:

1. Each layer is the remains of a forest.
   
2. Each forest was buried where it grew by volcanic ash and other debris.
3. Dissolved minerals were soaked up by the trees, petrifying them.
4. After about 200 years, the ash weathered into clay, then into soil.
5. A new forest grew on top of where the previous one had stood. From the well-preserved tree rings, the oldest tree in each layer was about 500 years old on average.
6. The new forest was buried by volcanic ash, and the process repeated.
7. The entire stack of layers was eroded, such that their edges are now exposed in a cliff.

If this scenario were true, it would have taken nearly 40,000 years to form the entire series at Specimen Creek. However, since this scenario is based on the unobservable past, it is not part of normal (operational) science, as this deals with repeatable observations in the present. But as we will see, there are certain features of Specimen Ridge that make no sense under this explanation.

 

Problems with the long-age scenario

Growing trees have extensive root systems, usually 20–30% of the total dry mass of the tree. But the Yellowstone petrified trees have their large roots broken off, leaving ‘root balls.’ This happens when trees are forcefully pushed out of the ground, e.g. by a bulldozer.

A forest buried in place would be expected to have many petrified branches and much petrified bark. But the Yellowstone petrified tree trunks, mostly 3–4 meters (10–12 feet) tall, have very little bark and very few branches. Something has stripped most of the bark and broken off most limbs, leaving only knots in the trunks.

Some of the trees extend into the ‘forest’ layer above. But if the next layer had to wait hundreds of

years for the ash covering to weather into soil (so the ‘next’ forest could grow), then the exposed tree top would have completely decayed. But if the trees were all laid down quickly, this observation should not be surprising.

When trees fall in forests, especially with a flat floor, they have an equal chance of lying in any direction. But in the petrified ‘forests,’ the prostrate (lying down) trees tend to align in the same direction. Also, even the upright trunks are turned so their long axis is aligned the same way. This is consistent with a common force, e.g. moving water or mud, having acted on both after they were uprooted.

If the layers had been buried by volcanic eruptions thousands of years apart, the mineral content of each would probably have been quite different. But the mineral content remains the same throughout over a kilometer of vertical height. This suggests one or few volcanic episodes, with many pulses within each episode, all within a fairly short time frame.

Growing forests have definite soil and humus layers, with lots of rootlets as well as a thriving animal population. However, the petrified ‘forests’ lack all these.

Studies of the Yellowstone plants, including pollen analysis, show that there are many more plant species than would be expected in a forest. And often the pollen doesn’t match the nearby trees. However, this would be explainable if the trees had been uprooted and transported from several places.

In a real forest, plant debris forms an organic layer on the forest floor. The deeper the material, the older it is, so the more time it has had to decay. But the petrified forests lack this pattern of greater decay with depth. There are also finely preserved leaves—since leaves do not retain their shape for very long after they fall off the tree, these leaves were probably buried very quickly.

Volcanic minerals such as feldspars quickly weather into clay when exposed to water and air. But the petrified ‘forest’ layers lack clay. This suggests that none of the layers were exposed for very long.

The patterns of particle sizes in rock layers often indicate how they formed. Consider a bag of mixed nuts—often they will be randomly mixed. Or, if they are shaken, the large brazil nuts end up on top as the smaller nuts fall down through the gaps. But many rock layers which have been laid under

water show patterns different to these. The large grains have sunk to the bottom, and been covered by smaller grains—a pattern called graded bedding. Also, if the water is moving horizontally, alternating layers of coarse and fine grains form.
The Yellowstone ‘forests’ are associated with rocks which contain these laminations, consistent with being formed under water. Some beds of coarse material have tongues of ash penetrating them. Also, such flat beds would seem to require a lot of water so the material can flow over such large distances. Some volcanic rocks in New Zealand that are generally accepted to have been deposited under water look very similar to the Yellowstone rocks.

Under normal circumstances, a tree adds a growth ring every year. The thicker the ring, the faster the tree grew in that time, and this depends on the weather, among other factors. So trees growing at the same time and roughly in the same area should show matching patterns of thick and thin rings. On the other hand, trees growing hundreds of years apart would show different patterns. Because he believed the biblical framework, geologist Dr John Morris predicted in 1975 that trees in different layers of the Yellowstone formations would have matching patterns, rather than completely different ones.

Years later, Dr Michael Arct analyzed cross-sections of 14 trees in different levels spanning seven meters (23 feet). He found that they all shared the same distinctive signature, and that four of them had died only seven, four, three and two years before the other ten. These ten had apparently perished together, and the evidence was consistent with them all having been uprooted and transported by successive mud flows." ICR