Posted: May 19, 2021 6:31 pm
Of course, there's another problem corals present for creationist bullshit. Namely, that they would all have been exterminated after being submerged in an extra 9,000 metres of water.
First of all, the combination of enormous pressure and osmoregulatory shock would have killed them off in about 72 hours. If that didn't finish them off, then being cut off from sunlight would finish most of them off, courtesy of the fact that they exist in obligate mutualist relationships with zooxanthellae. If the zooxanthellae are unable to photosynthesise, they die, and when the zooxanthellae die, so do the corals.
But of course, what would kill them off even faster, is being buried in millions of tons of silt dumped upon them by the massively turbulent water flows that would have resulted from this fantasy episode. Which would also exterminate all the higher aquatic plants.
If you want to know how sensitive corals are to the physical and chemical parameters of their environment, just ask anyone who's successfully run a reef aquarium. Every time you perform a water change in a reef aquarium, you need to extract the replacement water from a reverse osmosis machine to remove all the pollutants, then mix in expensively manufactured synthetic sea salt that has the right concentration of expensive trace elements added. You also have to add extra trace elements periodically by hand to keep the corals happy.
Then you have to provide the corals with a well-defined photoperiod, with the daylight provided by expensively manufactured lighting systems that provide the correct power spectrum across the visual range. Then you need to have in place a battery of expensive filtration systems to remove specific classes of pollutant that would build up in the aquarium otherwise, and you even have to provide appropriate water currents in the aquarium, or the corals will curl up and die.
Finally, you have to provide them with proper food, which means finding ways of cultivating live plankton for the corals to feed upon. That in itself is a dark art to put it mildly.
Of course, this isn't a problem for nature. First, the corals grow at latitudes that provide them with the requisite photoperiod. Second, ocean currents subject the corals to continuous water changes, in some cases at the rate of several cubic miles per hour. Third, the consumption of trace elements is easily replaced by coastal erosion. Fourth, those same currents bring in thousands of tons of plankton for the corals to feast upon, from the open ocean. Fifth, corals aren't going to be subject to severe water chemistry changes, in coastal waters directly mixing with the open ocean, which helps provide a nice constancy of water chemistry due to its sheer volume.
Oh, and of course, these provisos (and some others I haven't mentioned) also apply to other aquatic organisms, both freshwater and marine, which would all have been wiped out wholesale by any fantasy "global flood".
First of all, the combination of enormous pressure and osmoregulatory shock would have killed them off in about 72 hours. If that didn't finish them off, then being cut off from sunlight would finish most of them off, courtesy of the fact that they exist in obligate mutualist relationships with zooxanthellae. If the zooxanthellae are unable to photosynthesise, they die, and when the zooxanthellae die, so do the corals.
But of course, what would kill them off even faster, is being buried in millions of tons of silt dumped upon them by the massively turbulent water flows that would have resulted from this fantasy episode. Which would also exterminate all the higher aquatic plants.
If you want to know how sensitive corals are to the physical and chemical parameters of their environment, just ask anyone who's successfully run a reef aquarium. Every time you perform a water change in a reef aquarium, you need to extract the replacement water from a reverse osmosis machine to remove all the pollutants, then mix in expensively manufactured synthetic sea salt that has the right concentration of expensive trace elements added. You also have to add extra trace elements periodically by hand to keep the corals happy.
Then you have to provide the corals with a well-defined photoperiod, with the daylight provided by expensively manufactured lighting systems that provide the correct power spectrum across the visual range. Then you need to have in place a battery of expensive filtration systems to remove specific classes of pollutant that would build up in the aquarium otherwise, and you even have to provide appropriate water currents in the aquarium, or the corals will curl up and die.
Finally, you have to provide them with proper food, which means finding ways of cultivating live plankton for the corals to feed upon. That in itself is a dark art to put it mildly.
Of course, this isn't a problem for nature. First, the corals grow at latitudes that provide them with the requisite photoperiod. Second, ocean currents subject the corals to continuous water changes, in some cases at the rate of several cubic miles per hour. Third, the consumption of trace elements is easily replaced by coastal erosion. Fourth, those same currents bring in thousands of tons of plankton for the corals to feast upon, from the open ocean. Fifth, corals aren't going to be subject to severe water chemistry changes, in coastal waters directly mixing with the open ocean, which helps provide a nice constancy of water chemistry due to its sheer volume.
Oh, and of course, these provisos (and some others I haven't mentioned) also apply to other aquatic organisms, both freshwater and marine, which would all have been wiped out wholesale by any fantasy "global flood".