The geologist, the creationist, exploding mountains and other exciting geological phenomena

Roxrkool comes back to this thread where she originally challenged pandion concerning his claim that the smaller mountains in the western US don't have fossils in them, and he hasn't yet been back to answer her so Robert Byers is on the block instead:

Rox writes:

RB writes:
Another answer , mine, would be that these low mts only appeared after the flood as a part of the great upheavel that occured a few centuries after the flood.

Do you have evidence that limestone, which has specific depositional requirements, can form under catastrophic upheaval and massive flooding conditions? Because much of the world's fossils occur in limestones, which can be found anywhere in the world from the highest mountains to the lowest valleys.

Um, roxrkool has the order of things backwards here. Byers was at least clear that the "upheaval" came long AFTER the Flood so the limestone strata were already laid down long since. The "upheaval" which I assume he is referring to -- and it's very odd to find myself defending Robert Byers who is one of the least articulate and most confusing creationist posters at EvC but anyway -- the upheaval refers to the tectonic uplifting of those mountains of the American Cordillera -- that chain of mountains that runs down the western side of both north and south America -- after the Flood by a few centuries according to him, and merely pushed up the whole column of strata, limestones and all, into mountains. The Flood was long since over with.

But concerning their formation, why is anything more required for the formation of limestone than a massive collection of calcium carbonate creatures dumped together in the same place and then compressed between the layer below and the layer above? Da Flood don't offer no delicate "specific depositional requirements," it just picks the stuff up in its currents and streams and drops it wherever happens to be handy, whether it's a bunch of coccoliths or trilobites or nautiloids or sand dunes or Lucy the Ape.

The whole backbone of North america exploded and crumpled and from this came many of the mts there.
So no seashells on top.

Are you suggesting that the American Cordillera has no fossils? While not exceedingly common, fossils do exist (See below: 1 - 4).

Just to be clear, rox, Byers said nothing about the existence or nonexistence of fossils, that was said by pandion whom you were originally challenging about it, and all Byers did was accept what pandion said and propose an explanation assuming pandion correct. It is pandion who needs to come and answer your challenge.

Where they may not exist are in intrusive igneous rocks, which of course never have fossils. And igneous plutons and batholiths form the core of much of the Sierra Nevada.
Please provide physical evidence that the American Cordillera "exploded?"

This should be interesting. But I've been assuming all he meant by that rather hyperbolic term was that the mountains were thrust up in a fairly short period of time compared to the standard geologic time period, and for that as I say in my previous post there is no direct evidence. You either find the whole creationist scenario plausible or you don't.

But maybe he'll surprise me and turn out to mean something even more dramatic by the term "exploded."