Depositional Features of a Worldwide Flood

Presence of Clastic Dikes

Clastic dike is a geological term used to describe a seam of “foreign” sediment material (i.e., clastic sedimentary rocks such as sandstone) that fills vertical cracks in horizontal sediment strata. These dikes are “stone walls” that can be seen at the surface or sometimes hidden just below the ground surface. Clastic dikes may vary in thickness from a few inches to several feet or more; their height may vary from ten feet to a hundred feet or more; and their length may be a few miles long. Smaller dikes have been found to branch and rejoin a larger one.

Clastic dikes are found worldwide and, according to modern geologic time scales, they are dated between 50 and 250 million years old. So what is the significance of dikes?

Clastic Dikes, Kodachrome State Park, Utah Sketch and photo by Roger Gallop

Visual and microscopic examination indicates the mother sandstone was squeezed upward from below by tectonic forces.³⁰ When squeezing occurred, according to old earth advocates and standard geologic time scale, the source sandstone was already millions of years old. In some cases, the source bed was supposedly deposited 150 to 250 million years before injection of clastic sediment into the younger overlying sediment. This poses a time problem for secular geologists “because the lower layer which furnishes the sediment for the dike must have remained uncemented [for 150 million years] while the upper intruded layers were laid down.”³¹ This is impossible if these rocks accumulated over this vast span of time.

Based on the evidence, it appears that clastic sediment was a saturated, unconsolidated mud when it was squeezed up through cracks of firmer overlying sediment. One can reasonably conclude that the source bed had not had time to harden prior to squeezing—thus, such an event likely occurred during massive tectonic activity such as continental uplift in the latter phase of the worldwide flood. Surrounding sediment subsequently was eroded away by rapid, sheetlike erosion consistent with drainage of floodwaters.