Bulletin Board, "Catastrophism" section, November 4, 2000 ( http://www.jamesphogan.com/bb/content/110400.shtml )
As I've said in early postings, I'm pretty convinced that the doctrine of slow, gradual geological and biological change is wrong, and that things happen far more rapidly and more recently than is conventionally taught. This apparently causes some people to leap to the conclusion that I must be a Creationist. I'm not, in that I don't buy their answer either (showing that the butler didn't do it doesn't prove that the chauffeur did) although I think that some of their work pointing to what's wrong with the orthodox line is more solidly based than it's fashionable to admit. One person wrote a rather derisive note asking if I believed in a global flood too. Apparently, the answer to the question is taken as an indicator of one's political stripe and has nothing to do with what actual evidence from the surface of our planet might say. Well, below are a few facts consistent with the idea of immense, planet-scale oceanic surges from equator toward the poles, resulting from an axial shift or crustal slip caused by a recent close encounter with a large astronomic object of the kind Velikovsky proposed.
. Immense deposits of sediment where such surges would have slowed or encountered barriers. Seismic reflections of the Arctic Ocean, where huge inflows would result from the northward narrowings of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, show stratified sedimentary layers from a minimum of two miles in thickness to five miles—much more than can be accounted for by the rivers emptying into that basin. The foothills of northern India—where a north-rushing tidal flow would plow into the wall of the Himalaya—extend for hundred of miles and consist of sediments 2,000 to 3,000 feet deep. Sediments forming the seabed of the northerly enclosed Bay of Bengal, extending east into the Gulf of Siam, average 20,000 feet and reach over 50,000 feet.
. If seabeds were formed only by slow spreading outward from the ocean ridges, the sediments would be thinnest at the ridges and become progressively thicker with distance as the ocean bed grows older. Some textbook writers were so confident that this would be the case that they wrote it as fact before the evidence was in. Actual drillings showed, paradoxically, deep sediments at the flanks of the ridges, then little progressive change until sudden thickening at the continental margins—precisely where huge oceanic flows would be slowed and shed their burdens.
. Enormous fossil beds containing the remains of millions of animals, torn-up trees, deposits of "muck" made up of gravel, soil, clays, and mineral and organic matter, forming a circumpolar ring across Alaska, upper Canada, Siberia—where the reverse flow from the polar surge would inundate the northern continents. Some islands off northern Siberia, several hundred feet high, consist of practically nothing but animal bones and broken tree trunks. The Siwalik Hills north of Delhi have been described as containing fossils of such variety and profusion that the animal world of today seems impoverished by comparison.
. Loess. A second circumpolar ring of lighter slurries (which would be carried farther) found deep inside North America (Texas, Colorado, Louisiana) and Eurasia (China, Mongolia, Turkestan, Russia), along the northern sides of mountain chains where floods from a south-flowing polar source would deposit them. Often grading into huge areas of sand beds (e.g. Nebraska, 21,000 square miles averaging 25 feet deep) difficult to reconcile with wind-borne origins but nevertheless usually explained that way. Smaller belt in the southern hemisphere, found in the Argentine Pampas, southern Australia, New Zealand.
. Erratics. Large rocks transported far from places of origin. The usual explanation of their being carried by glaciers runs into trouble with the physics of how glaciers actually move themselves and other objects. Essentially, glaciers move by melting at the base and flowing over, which gives them no way of moving large boulders uphill. Many large erratics are found at high elevations. The force exerted by water flows, however, varies with the sixth power of velocity, meaning that while current moving at 2-3 mph might not be able to move more than a small pebble, 10 mph can move upward of 5 tons, and 50 mph, many thousands of tons. Further, erratics occur in great numbers in places that were never glaciated, such as Uruguay, Jamaica, Maryland, Georgia, Spain.
. Whales, whalebones, and other deep-sea remains found hundreds of miles from the ocean in North Africa, southeastern and western USA, Central Europe, sometimes atop mountains.
So yes, maybe there's something to the 120-odd world-flood legends apart from that of the Old Testament, which range from the Hindus and Iranians, Lithuanians and Norsemen, Lapps, Voguls of the Ural Mountains, Kalmuks, Chinese, Eskimos, North American Indian tribes, Caribs, Mexicans, Peruvians, Polynesians, Fiji Islanders, Australians, Philippine Islanders, Andamans . . .
The above extracts are from Vol. II, No. 4 (1994) and Vol. IV, No. 1 (1998) of The Velikovskian (http://www.knowledge.co.uk/velikovskian/)—click for subscription information.