At a glance
A global reading of Genesis does not determine which rock layers were deposited during the Flood. Marine fossils and rapidly buried remains require explanation, but cannot alone identify one recent worldwide event. Ross’s arguments from dated archives require examination of the individual records. The Palmer’s oak paper estimates a clone’s age; it does not count thousands of annual rings.
Scripture and geological assignment
Genesis 7:17–24 is central to this site’s global-Flood interpretation. Genesis 8:1–19 describes recession, the ark’s rest and emergence of dry land. Neither passage labels a modern geological formation, sets the Flood’s stratigraphic boundaries or states that every sedimentary rock formed within that year.
Those assignments belong to a scientific model. A YEC account must distinguish created, pre-Flood, Flood and post-Flood features and explain its criteria for doing so. Otherwise, pointing to a formation as “Flood evidence” assumes the very identification needing support.
What Ross argues
Ross attributes high mountain marine fossils to uplift of former seafloors, and distinguishes evidence of rapid local erosion or burial from evidence for a single global event. Those are relevant distinctions: marine origin does not, on its own, date deposition to Noah’s generation, and a rapid process need not be the same process everywhere. [1]
He also appeals to ice and sediment cores and tree chronologies as evidence of long histories inconsistent with a recent worldwide disruption. His chapter discusses seasonal signals, historical markers, cross-record comparisons and modelled orbital cycles. [2] This response does not independently reanalyse those datasets or endorse every numerical age in the chapter.
The YEC objection that some layers can form more than once a year is relevant only when applied to the actual core, location and dating method. Fast burial of aircraft in a coastal Greenland glacier does not by itself invalidate a chronology from a different, stable inland site. Conversely, an inferred old age must be distinguished from a directly counted, independently cross-checked interval. A dataset-specific answer is necessary.
What the Palmer’s oak study measures
The 2009 PLOS ONE paper’s first author is Michael R. May. The authors count annual rings in sampled stem sections to estimate growth rates, then infer the clonal stand’s age from its extent and those rates. Ring data therefore contribute to the estimate, but there is no continuous chronology of thousands of counted annual rings. [3] Ross places the oak among his annual-archive evidence and follows that discussion with a claim about isotope confirmation over 15,000 years. This study’s inferred clone age does not supply a continuous ring-and-isotope record across that interval. That distinction limits this example without disposing of the separate bristlecone, European tree, ice-core or sediment records.
What remains open
These biblical and geological distinctions do not establish a complete YEC archive chronology. Criticism of one oak example does not overturn every other record or prove a recent age.
References below identify sections of the 2025 RTB Press first edition; they do not supply printed page numbers.