Sedimentary Rock: Evidence of Noah's Flood?

Noah’s Boys in the City of Mother Earth is an exciting tale of adventure and romance set in the years before Noah’s Ark and Noah’s Flood, the catastrophic deluge that drowned the wicked culture of Noah’s day, and drastically changed the face of the entire earth. 
But wasn’t Noah’s Flood just a made-up fairy tale, a religious myth?  After all, we have all been taught that people are actually the product of millions and millions of years of Darwinian evolution, and that the cosmos developed over “billions and billions of years.” The dogma is a familiar one: first, a Big Bang, and then a slow, gradual upward ascent from inanimate matter to living cells, and finally to complex animal species and mankind.  Such an intricate and delicate process of minor genetic changes occurring over a geologically vast period of time must somehow be evident in the geological record, right?  But what do the rocks show?  Are some things so obvious we might overlook them?
The photograph above is of the North Dakota Badlands in the Theodore Roosevelt National Park.  The most striking feature of the picture is the colorful layering of the exposed sedimentary rock.  As the National Park Service brochure1 explains, the fantastic eroded landscape of the park consists of hundreds of feet of layered sandstone, siltstone, mudstone, and soft volcanic ash (bentonite clay).  Additionally, some areas show layers of lignite coal (itself composed of leaves and branches compacted into peat, and chemically changed into soft, wood-textured coal) and even fossils, particularly fossilized wood. 
The presence of vast numbers fossils is particularly interesting.  Fossils do not normally occur today, as the carcasses of dead animals or the leaves and branches of plants are quickly removed or decayed by scavengers, bacteria, rotting, and erosion.  Fossilization only occurs under special circumstances, such as the quick burial into an anoxic environment, or the presence of hard skeletal parts; so it is only natural to wonder why they are seen here in such vast numbers.
The thickness of the layers of sedimentary rock, silt, and ash are remarkable in themselves, for they speak of powerful movements of water, great enough to move gravel, sand, or silt, the sediment that makes up “sedimentary” rock.  Furthermore, each layer is largely free of evidence of surface weathering or plant life.  And “sedimentation” itself indicates a process of sorting out particles according to specific gravity and particle size, as may occur after shaking dirt into a jar and allowing it to settle to the bottom.  Flooding comes to mind.  And if flooding was involved in the formation of the sedimentary rock deposits around the globe, it must have been cataclysmic, for sedimentary rock covers an estimated 73% of the earth’s landmass2, at an average depth of 5400 feet, varying from none in the Canadian shield to 60,000 feet off the Louisiana coastline3.   This was a stupendously vast amount of sand, silt, rock, and volcanic ash acted upon by water!  Could this be evidence of Noah’s Flood?
Regrettably, neither of the two opposing models of the origin of the earth’s geology (Darwinian Evolution versus Biblical Creation) can be proven through experimentation or personal observation, since they happened so long ago; and despite the assurances of park brochures that the deposits were laid down beginning 65 million years ago during the Paleocene Epoch, current methods of dating require unverifiable assumptions regarding the initial proportion of key elements, or else demand circular reasoning from the assumed age of key fossils.  A certain element of faith is required to believe the timeline of either model, whether the sediments are millions of years old, or mere thousands. 
The facts, however, cannot be disputed: the sedimentary deposits created through the action of water are thick, and cover the entire world today. When the plain facts are separated from questionable evolutionary assumptions, Noah’s Boys in the City of Mother Earth, set in a time before Noah’s Great Flood, may not seem so hard to believe, after all!
G.M. Horning
References:
1.  Geological Rock Formations: brochure of Theodore Roosevelt National Park, National Park Service, 2017
2.  Sedimentary Rock: Wikipedia article, accessed 6/20/2017
3.  Professor Stephen Nelson: Occurrence, mineralogy, textures, and structures of sedimentary rocks, Geology 212, Tulane University website, accessed 6/20/2017

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