{This is a new video by Kurt Wise. Speliogenesis means formation of caves. Hypergene means by water flowing downward. Hypogene means by acidic water flowing upward, which is the way most caves formed. About the first 2 thirds of the video are pictures of water channels on the roofs of caves in Tennessee. Following is a transcript of the remainder of the video. Most caves formed during the Great Flood c. 5,200 years ago.}
1. Since conventional geologists believe most of the western U.S. caves are formed by hypogene speliogenesis, it's very possible (I'm going to make that jump) ... to suggest that all limestone caves (I'm gonna say worldwide) were formed by hypogene speliogenesis, not by hypergene speliogenesis, as J. Harlan Bretz suggested. ... One thing about hypogene speliogenesis {is that} the speed at which it operates is really dependent upon the temperature and the acidity of the water. Hypergene spieligensis takes a long time, almost certainly hundreds to thousands of years. But hypogene spleogenesis can potentially occur in a matter of hours, days or weeks - actually just about any amount of time that you postulate, depending upon the concentration of the acids. So, as a result, hypogene speliogenesis can occur within biblical timescales. It could occur within the flood, after the flood, it could fit into the biblical time.
These images are of acidic water erosion of the ceiling of a cave in Tennessee.
2. ... Secondly, for hypergene speliogenesis to work, you need water from above and you need a water table that's below the land surface. Well that doesn't work during the flood. During the flood the water table is above the land surface, so hypergene speliogenesis doesn't {cause} any cave formation during the flood. The flood doesn't speed up hypergene sphelogenesis, it stops it. In contrast, hypogene speliogenesis needs water from below that is acidic. And then the nice thing about the flood model is, if in fact most of the limestone is formed during the flood, and most of the limestone is not formed at the beginning of the flood, but during the flood, then all of the water-laden sediments that are laid down before the limestone are the way for eroding the limestone above it. Plus, we've got all sorts of chemistry going on that can add the acidity that we need. So the flood actually provides the water necessary for hypogene speliogenesis to work and to work very quickly. What's interesting here too is that, as we argue that hypogene speliogenesis is the only, or the primary, method by which caves are formed. The conventional model has a very difficult time explaining where those waters came from. The flood model produces an explanation for it. It becomes a challenge to the other model.
These images show the same kind of erosion extending from the cave walls up to the ceiling.
3. Also, another thing that's very curious as far as the fossil record is concerned, one thing that is very curious about the fossil record of caves is that we have no fossils in cave sediments that are older than the Pleistocene. This is amazing. So we're now talking about a cave with some mud in it. And then you got bones of things that crawled into the cave and they're fossilized inside of the cave. It's what most people would think of as fossils in a cave. They're not in the limestone that the cave is carved out of. They're in the mud that fills the cave. And again, this is the first time I realized this. We have no fossils in cave sediments that are older than the Pleistocene. So in a pile of rocks tens of thousands of feet thick across the surface of the earth, cave fossils are only found in the very top {of the fossil record}. They are not found in any of the other caves. We have caves that are older than that, but they're filled with sediment that does not have fossils in it. They don't have animal or land fossils. Thet's not what you would expect if the earth is very old and it's always had caves and there's always been some land animals that wandered into a cave and got buried in there, and you should find land animal fossils in caves all the way back to the oldest rocks of the planet. We have caves, we have holes in rock full of younger sediment, but we have no land fossils in any of those caves until the Pleistocene. And that makes a whole lot of sense here, because if the rocks that the caves are cut into were formed in the flood, and the rising waters that eroded them and created the caves occurred in the flood or thereafter, that's the very first time in Earth history that you'd have been able to crawl into a cave.
{PLEISTOCENE CAVE FOSSILS}
4. A limestone cave would have been after the floodwaters have left the continents, brought the water table down, dried out the caves and allowed the animals to get into the caves, which thus we can explain why there are no cave sediment older than the Pleistocene, even. We've got fossil bats in the fossil record. They're beautiful, beautiful fossil bats. The oldest fossil bats are not found in cave sediments. They are found in lake sediments. We have cave animals also in the fossil record. But when we find them, the oldest ones are not found in cave sediments, they're found outside of cave sediments. It's not until the Pleistocene that we finally get bats preserved in cave sediments. So hypogene speliogenesis explains why land animal fossils do not get into caves until the Pleistocene, and that also would indicate the Pleistocene is after the Flood, which we already believed it was. The conventional model has a very hard time explaining that. So I believe in hypogene speliogenesis. Not only do we have a model for the origin of caves in a biblical timescale, but we actually have a model that explains features of caves that cannot be explained by the conventional model.
ELECTRIC FORCES
Kurt mentions acidic waters etching channels in limestone caves, but the Flood and other cataclysms surely involved very enhanced electrical activity, so electrical forces seem likely to have enhanced the acidity or the etching or erosion capability of the water on the ceilings of caves.
PLEISTOCENE FOSSILS
I found yesterday that the Pleistocene rock strata were those deposited during and at the end of the Ice Age from glaciation, melting glaciers, wind-blown loess, etc. Velikovsky listed in his book, Earth in Upheaval, many fossils found in caves and rock fissures due to cataclysmic floods. Though most caves formed during the Great Flood, glacial meltwater floods likely deposited dead animals and plants in the caves centuries later, before and during the Younger Dryas cataclysm c 4,500 years ago.
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