Post 20: Montana Musings E

Glory to Jesus Christ, y'all!

(That's Delta Airlines.)

I apologize for being incommunicado the past weeks. Been traveling a lot (posts on that upcoming), then a sickness on the last trip, followed by a prolonged cough, residual from illness at first, but then aggravated and rekindled by multiple days of ozone, and a couple of them also featuring Canadian smoke. Our central air could electrostatic-HEPA out the smoke, but not the ozone! 🫩 Trachea and nasal passages felt like they were lightly sunburned.

(Please pardon my still-unskilled privacy protection measures!)

But at least, as of yesterday, Mama's doing well. As am I, mostly.

The past several Montana posts largely dealt with the underground, so this time, we shall look at what's above ground.

(Bozeman, MT airport. Looking Northeast.)

(View from cowboy hat friend's cabin outside Bozeman, looking South.)

(Word of Warning: there will be ZERO homework this time: just relax and enjoy! (Lotsa damp Kleenex all around, I'm sure. You betcha!)

(Looking North from friend’s cabin towards the Airport.)

(Over Chicagoland, on the way from Cincy to Minneapolis-St. Paul.)

(Montana lowland landscape on approach to Bozeman.)

In case it isn't obvious, I love to fly! When relaxing in God's Presence, the next best thing after being in front of the Blessed Sacrament is being in the window seat with the Baby Jesus, looking out with awe at His world! Being a Great Flood Geologist and also having a Meteorology degree under my belt, if the post-Flood world isn't causing me TMJ problems from jaw-dropping scenery, then it's the cloud formations! Nota Bene, clouds behave VERY similarly to smoke, the difference being that smoke is heated from beneath, while clouds are heated both from underneath, and from within from the heat of condensation of water droplets and/or ice crystals.

(Cumulonimbus clouds rising up over the mountains and dropping their snowflakes melting into raindrops.)

All that said, let's recall the Great Flood: Fountains of the Great Deep causing torrential rain and simultaneously power blasting the sides of the world-encircling rupture(s) while sending pulse after pulse of sediment- (and dead critter-) laden water onto the granitic continents, piling up the dirt and debris to a depth of about two miles. Then the whole kit and caboodle mostly sliding Pacific Basin-ward (as the Atlantic Basin rebounds from lack of (power blasted away) overburden) and wrinkling/deforming as the bottoms of the plates snag on irregularities in the now nearly-empty subterranean water chambers.

All of this, at this point, is happening under water: a global ocean, but soon the global interior mass shifting plus the slide-caused buckling forms deep ocean basins that enables the water to run off the continents, doing A LOT of erosion…RIGHT QUICK.

Besides creating features like the earlier-featured Jefferson River Gorge by scouring out the not yet fully hardened sediment to form local valleys, the water also deposited vast sheets of sediment on the flanks of mountain ranges, ranges that would have been taller before the receding water did its work!

(Denver, Colorado is at the start of the sediment blanket washed off the Rockies, a blanket we call the Great Plains, extending all the way out to the Mississippi. The Rockies are in the haze behind the city. (Ya, Southwest Airlines on the way back East.))

The Rocky Mountains, majestic though they are, have a violent look to them, and that's often the case up close. (Following shots on the way to Butte from the East. Driving on I-90.)

The receding water did its work, but so did subsequent glaciation: during the post-Flood Ice Age that lasted until the very high continents and very deep ocean bottoms isostatically adjusted to the present day equilibrium. Lower, warmer land altitude melted most of the ice caps, while rising ocean bottoms, and melt water, covered land bridges and reduced the overall exposed land areas. Peleg would have experienced that not terribly long after Babel. More on glaciation next post.

So, whether flying or driving, if you have the correct paradigm in mind, you'll see the marks of the Great Flood everywhere you look.

Our Lady of Guadalupe, aid us!