The ice cores show an increase in lead at the count equivalent to a few hundred years BC when lead started being used a lot in plumbing. There is a decrease in the count equivalent to the Dark ages, then increase for the Industrial Revolution. This is good evidence that the ice layers are annual.
There is no apparent change in the appearance of the layers as you go deeper, and there are also many tests done including O 18/O 16 ratios, Ca, NO3, Na. On 3 Greenland cores totalling nearly 6 Km of ice 175,000 isotope tests and 1,000,000 measurements of impurities were done.
No evidence of a Flood there, and the count is about 80,000.
There is a reasonable chance that if this actually represented one recent Ice-age, some of the scientists would have noticed, but people at CMI and AIG sit back in in their armchairs and say that is what happened.
The eruption of Toba in Indonesia is considered the biggest in a long time - 30-40 times Krakatau. It is RM dated at about 74000 years ago. Toba ash is found in India with human artefacts above and below. There is a marked spike in volcanic gases in ice cores at the expected count.
Cores from the bed of Lake Malawi in Africa show a linear increase in C14 date as you go deeper, reaching 50,000 at about 28 metres. At 42 metres as you would expect there is a layer of Toba ash. So Toba date is shown by ice-core count and 2 different RM methods.
A Flood could not sort Toba's eruption products this way, let alone seem to miss the mega-huge amount of volcanism that has to be squeezed in somewhere to account for the volcanic residues seen on the Earth, if it is supposed to have occurred around the Flood.
Re: Siberian Traps volcanics at the Paleozoic/Mesozoic boundary
Large Igneous provinces such as the Siberian and Deccan Traps are outpourings of 100,000s to millions of cubic km of lava. The total on the Earth is in excess of 100,000,000 c km. Their effect can be imagined by considering the effect of Laki in Iceland 1783, when fire fountains to 1400 m high produced about 18 c km lava over 8 months. The associated gases devastated Iceland and had widespread effects across Europe Asia and Africa with weather changes and famine killing up to 6,000,000. For instance, the Nile flood failed and 1/6 Egypt people died or emigrated.
To have all LIPs produced in the last 6000 years would make the Earth uninhabitable, so what would it be like during the Flood year? Noah would not need an Ark, he would need a sealed self-contained survival capsule! And this is without considering all the other volcanoes on Earth.
Ignoring RM dating, the Earth can not accommodate its volcanism in 6000 years.
The Siberian Traps are associated with the great end-Permian extinction. Comparing the dates of LIPs and major and minor extinctions show that many are associated. At least some LIPs are coincident with continental breakups. It may be that a large continental mass produces some insulation to make the mantle hotter beneath, leading to massive plumes which initiate breakup and release much lava through the fissures produced by the splitting.
For volcanophiles, 2 excellent websites are - - volcanocafe.org which has 3 or 4 easily understood articles a month with several years in their archive - largeigneousprovinces.org - more technical monthly articles with about 15 years in archive.
In order to accommodate the evidence for plate tectonics, YEC postulate catastrophic plate tectonics with the plates moving kms per day. That means as they move away from spreading centres at the mid-ocean ridges new crust has to be formed at a prodigious rate. The crust is 6-11 km thick, so every day at least 100 cubic km lava has to be produced for every km of MOR. That is well in excess of 1,000,000 c km. This has to rapidly cool, and take on the magnetic orientation of the madly oscillating magnetic field of the Earth.
As the plates race away, they steadily take on increasing amounts of deposit from the ocean, carefully sorting it so that there are different fossils close to the MOR compared to further away to make it look like lots of time were involved.
If thinking of that hasn't given you a headache, consider what happens at the subducting end. Currently the plates move down slowly at an angle of about 30 deg, gradually heating as they go deeper. The heating causes alteration of minerals in the crust, which releases water, which in turn lowers the melting point of the surrounding magma. The melted magma works its way up and may eventually erupt as the volcanoes of the Ring of Fire etc. This helps to build the Andes, Aleutian Islands, Japan etc.
Now try to speed up that process about a millionfold. Physics would not allow it.
10 feet per day for the movement of tectonic plates seems to be averaging known movement over 6000 years. This is about 10,000 times current rates. It would mean about 10,000 quakes greater than about Richter 7 per year, 100,000 of 6-7, millions of noticeable ones. At no time in Earth's known history has that been observed, so to reach your average it has to be speeded further at some time. Even saying it occurred in the 100 years after the Flood, the rate would be about 500,000 times current rates. The Middle East is a tectonically active place, so Noah would not have been able to stand up to plant his vineyard, and the Tower of Babel would not rise above its first layer of brick.
Any sort of speeding up plate tectonics presents enormous problems for the Flood myth, (like almost all Geology does!)
Trying to average out plate movement over a few thousand years in a gradually slowing scenario still leaves an enormous amount of seismic and volcanic activity in the last 2000 years when people were writing about experiencing these things. Faith, PEOPLE WOULD HAVE NOTICED!
There are core records of significant eruptions in the last 2000 years, and writings about the atmospheric and weather effects, but these eruptions are piffling compared to what you need to fit in - e.g. flood basalts of 1000s of c km per year, year after year. Remember the significant eruption of one volcano, Toba, is readily identified in lake cores, and dated 74,000 years ago.
The Seventh-day Adventist Church's Geoscience Research Institute was set up to find evidence of YEC. They reported at a major church meeting in 2010 that after 50 years of study, they could not explain the evidence in the Earth as YEC without invoking miracles, i.e. more than just bringing and taking away water.
That is what you have left : Creation and the Flood occurred in the last 6000 or so years, but the miraculous way it happened just managed to make it look like long ages were involved.
There is no consensus among Flood geologists over where exactly is the evidence left by the Flood, what before, and what after. They seem to all have reasons why their idea is right and others' are wrong.
Phil Senter in the Reports of the National Centre for Science Education from California State University, 2011, goes through the writings of Flood Geologists, and uses the arguments they put forward against various geological levels being from the Flood, to show that NO geological level could be the Flood layer. These evidences include desert layers, palaeosols, volcanic layers. He did not seem to find Faith's arguments .
Faith, the point of the article I mentioned is that between them Flood geologists produce all the reasons why NO part of the geological record could be the Flood. The various reasons they put forward - between them, not necessarily any one saying all - show objections to every level. The reasons include, but not only, continental basalts, dino nests, animal tracks, aeolian deposits, palaeosols, and raindrop imprints. Any of these things in the geological record show that that particular geol level could not be laid down in the Flood. Usually each writer has their own preferred level, but for each level some other Flood geologist (what an oxymoron that term is) has a reason why it could not be.
No one seems to think the entire geol record is the Flood for the reasons I listed.
As an oceanic plate subducts by a continent, it can be carrying bits of land such as islands or a bit of larger land that it rams against the continent. A great example of that is India plowing into Asia to increase the latter's size. Part of China used to be adjacent to eastern Australia. A lot changes over a couple of billion years. The actual place where the plate bends to subduct can also roll back to change the size of the plate
I am not a trained geologist, but l think broadly speaking Juvenissun is correct. A large part of Eastern Australia was added in the last 700,000,000 years from subduction related volcanism, granite formation, pressure related changes. Gondwanaland break-up was later than that. When India was approaching Asia it plowed up some of the sea bed to add to it, but also folded up rocks to decrease the area a bit.
Near-coastal volcanism can add area by lava flows. I expect coastal erosion works the other way.
I did specify COASTAL erosion such as shown in the coast of Victoria Australia where the limestone is eroded away to produce the Twelve Apostles and other formations. This is decreasing the area, albeit slowly and by a small amount.
Also l remembered Zealandia which is submerged continental crust between Australia and New Zealand and which was formerly attached to Gondwana.
Some of BC has evidence of being connected to the bit of China which was sitting where eastern Australia now is. China split off about 825,000,000 years ago, and BC split from China about 50,000,000 years later. There may be other bits added subsequently.
It is strange that those who work out the movements of bits of continents never find evidence of a global flood.
What do you mean "the water stored in the air is approximately the same amount of surface water on the land"? My geology book says about 0.001% of Earth's water is in the air, less than 3% on the land, 97% ocean.