Wednesday, January 15, 2020

Archaeology: 2nd Advent LESSON of Antarctic Forests

For this they willingly are ignorant of,
that by the word of God the heavens were of old,
and the earth standing out of the water and in the water:
Whereby the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished:
But the heavens and the earth, which are now,
by the same word are kept in store,
reserved unto fire against the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men.
2 Peter 3:5-7

"Just two summers ago, a team was surprised to discover not just one but five “forests” piled on top of each other. They claimed the supposedly 260-million-year-old fossils represent a series of different forests that grew slowly and were buried one on top of the other over millions of years.

They found several layers of tree stumps buried upright with parts of their roots still connected. They also found impressions of long, broad, flat leaves jumbled together in massive mats.

The long-held assumption was that the Glossopteris plant was strictly deciduous (meaning its leaves drop annually in the autumn). Scientists made this assumption because they usually find their fossil leaves in mats, similar to thick mats on the floors of modern deciduous forests. The new analysis showed they were a mix of deciduous and evergreen trees. How could this be?

By looking closely at the sizes of the stumps, they also calculate the likely heights of the trees. The largest stump was almost 2 feet in diameter, so that tree was estimated to have been over 100 feet tall before it was destroyed.

-Let’s start with an observation about the stumps.
The published photos of these fossil tree stumps show “intact” roots branching from the bases of the stems. But closer inspection reveals the ends of the roots are missing, having been broken off. So these trees didn’t grow where they are now buried! Instead, they must have grown somewhere else, and then been uprooted and transported by the same water that carried and deposited the
sediments in which they are buried.

-Another clue that all these layers came from the same flood waters is that the wood, bark, twigs, and leaves of these same Glossopteris trees are found buried in coal beds in the same rock unit throughout the southern hemisphere. A similar bed of organic debris accumulated rapidly on the bottom of Spirit Lake after the Mount St. Helens catastrophe.


-What about the slight chemical differences between the different layers? We need to remember that the forests that grew on the pre-flood supercontinent were in a different location than they are today, and they went through a lot before they reached their final resting place. The supercontinent broke apart into smaller continents at the beginning of the flood, and the forest fragments moved around before the sediments were deposited on these continents in different latitudes.
LESSON
Wearing our Biblical “glasses” allows us to view the same evidence but to see how it confirms God’s eyewitness record of the earth’s history, the Bible.
These fossilized tree stumps are not a record of life evolving over millions of years, but a warning of the coming eternal judgment for those who follow human reasoning alone, rather than first trusting in God and his Word."
AndrewSnelling/AIG