The buried forests at Yellowstone National Park have long been considered to be powerful evidence of tens to hundreds of thousands of years of buried forests. The long list of similarities between the “buried forests” at Mt. Saint Helens and Yellowstone suggests that perhaps the latter forests were formed in decades, not millennia.

Increasing Acceptance of Global Catastrophe

What we have learned about geologic catastrophes combined with evidence in the rocks for those catastrophes have forced rather significant changes in geologic interpretation in this century. In the first half of the century a vast percentage of the rock record was interpreted to have been formed very slowly. Due in large part to valiant struggles by individual geologists — such as the half-century struggle of J Harlan Bretz from the 1920’s on – neo-catastrophism has become popular. Neo-catastrophists interpret individual rock layers as due to distinct local catastrophes. Beginning in 1980 with the dinosaur/asteroid controversy, it has more recently become popular for geologists to consider not just local, but global catastrophes to account for the geologic evidence they see. One can be assured that for a community to have made such an incredible shift — in spite of the strong association which exists between catastrophism and creationism — there must be profound evidence for catastrophe throughout the geologic column.