Global Cenozoic coals indicate high post-Flood boundary

For yet seven days, and I will cause it to rain upon the earth forty days and forty nights; and every living substance that I have made will I destroy from off the face of the earth. Genesis 7:4

"Thick Cenozoic (with respect to the secular understanding of the

geologic column) coal beds have been discovered on nearly every continent. 

North America has its most extensive and thickest coal beds in the Lower Cenozoic section of the Powder River Basin, Wyoming. Powder River Basin coal beds, which are all within Paleogene system rock layers, contain the largest reserves of low-sulfur subbituminous coal in the world.

Cenozoic coal beds in South America are also the thickest and most extensive compared to other coal layers. Cenozoic coal beds alone make up about one half of all coal in South America and the tonnage is estimated to be greater than that found in any other geologic system or combination of systems.

Germany, one of the largest coal producers in Europe, has

approximately 65% of its coal reserves in Cenozoic rocks. 

Australia has vast coal beds in the Cenozoic basins along the country’s southern boundary, especially in the onshore and offshore portions of the Gippsland Basin. Here, the Miocene brown coals of the onshore Latrobe Valley are up to 200 m thick.

China has significant volumes of Cenozoic coal both onshore and offshore. The onshore coals are mostly in eastern China, found in Cenozoic-age basins. Early Cenozoic, Paleogene coals are found onshore in northeastern China, whereas the younger Neogene coals dominate the onshore in southeastern China.
An extensive Cenozoic coal deposit is also found in offshore China, offshore southeast Asia, and north and east of Russia under the Sea of Okhotsk and the Arctic Ocean (Laptev Sea and East Siberian Sea). The South China Sea has some of the deepest Cenozoic coals discovered to date and in the deepest water. Oil wells in an area of the southern South China Sea known as North Luconia (about 280 km west of Borneo) encountered Oligocene coal beds within a 1,500 m section of sediment that today resides 3,000 m below sea level.

Uniformitarian scientists believe all coals accumulate in situ and not by transport.
Q: So how do they justify these thick coal beds that accumulated so far offshore and in such deep water? 

Evolutionary geologist Peter Lunt tried to explain:

“Coal-bearing Late Oligocene beds are known in several wells in North Luconia, but now in water depths of more than 1,000 m, with these coals typically 3 km or more below modern sea level. These wells therefore indicate 3 km or more of basement [crustal] subsidence since the Late Oligocene.”

Lunt added that the depth of these coal beds complicates the necessary subsidence history of the area:

“Geohistory analysis of the G10-1 well shows that the Oligocene section [containing coal beds] drilled there is both thick and rapidly deposited. The facies [perceived environment] is remarkably consistent over the 2,100 m of section, with facies … suggesting coastal to very shallow marine throughout.”

Lunt explained that the lack of variation within the vast coal-rich

Oligocene section (greater than 10,000 km) was simply due to these thick coal beds having sunk at exactly the same rate as the coal was accumulating, keeping the coal swamps constantly at about sea level. Maintaining such a perfect balance of subsidence and deposition while a 1,500-m-thick section was accumulating across such a wide area seems highly improbable; such explanations are based on supposition and bring belief to the issue, not fact.

In total, over 3,000 m of subsidence had to take place in the southern South China Sea (1,500 m for the Oligocene coal beds and then a second 1,500 m to accommodate the deep-water Miocene rocks deposited on top). Subsidence is defined as the sudden sinking or gradual downward settling of the surface of the earth in a certain region with little or no horizontal motion. 

However, this particular act of subsidence had to be nearly instantaneous to change from a perceived ‘coastal’ environment to a ‘deep-water’ environment across the Oligocene-Miocene boundary. This explanation truly exceeds credible science.

Our conclusion is that all the onshore and the offshore Cenozoic coal beds were produced by the runoff processes late in the Flood. 

---Vast forests of trees living on the pre-Flood uplands were ripped

from the land as the floodwaters crested on Day 150. These huge mats of vegetation were trapped in subsiding Cenozoic basins buttressed by adjacent mountains that were simultaneously rising as the water began to recede. 

Other vast mats of vegetation may have been transported en masse off the various continents and buried in the ocean as the Flood continued to recede, creating vast Cenozoic coal beds offshore. This scenario best explains the Cenozoic coals found both onshore and offshore.

--The pre-Flood world was apparently stratified by ecological zones. 

Paleozoic coals, like those found in Lower Carboniferous and Permian rocks, are dominated by wetland and coastal plants living at near sea level such as lycopods and pteridosperms. 

Mesozoic coals are dominated by gymnosperms, ginkgos, and cycads, plants living at slightly higher elevation. 

Cenozoic coals are composed of mostly angiosperms and some gymnosperms that were living at the pre-Flood highest elevations. As the Flood sequentially progressed from Day 1 to Day 150, it inundated higher and higher ecological zones, resulting in the stratified fossils and coals we observe globally." 

CMI