Reddit reviews Assembling California (Annals of the Former World)

So John McPhee books are generally pretty great and won't be too... much? For somebody just getting into it. The problem with most geology books is that they're going to get a little technical, and it can be easy to feel out of your depth (especially considering even basic terms aren't really taught in science classes in grade school). Anyway, Assembling California is a good one. Annals of the former world is another one by him that's really great, but it's a little thick.

There have to be some decent youtube videos, but even sites like Lynda don't have anything geology-wise.

If you want to get into it a little more casually, follow (legit) science groups/publications on social media. AGU is pretty active and posts on a wide variety of geologic topics (they have some good blogs, too); the NSF and NOAA also post cool stuff, but it's not specifically geology-related.

Honestly, your best bet is to try a class though. Geology is a pretty varied field, and even if intro-level courses are generally kind of... dumbed down (in a lot of schools they're called "rocks for jocks")? They'll still get you more than you might out of random googling.

I am reading Assembling california by John Mcfee

I'd start reading books such as Geology of the SF Bay Region and, one of my favorites, Assembling California. You might be able to borrow these from your uni.

These will give you a good start/background and from there find more detailed publications with maps on USGS website.

The most obvious answer is all of the civilizations that spanned the period when Noah's flood was supposed to have happened:

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Global_flood#Things_that_happened_during_the_Great_Flood

We have ice cores from places like Greenland:

https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/data-access/paleoclimatology-data/datasets/ice-core

Ice sheets are like enormous layer cakes. You get layers for the seasons. The layers trap what-eve is blown in on the wind. The wind carries dirt and pollen from across the world.

We have uninterrupted records of what was happening on the planet that reach back over 150,000 years:

http://blogs.agu.org/wildwildscience/2010/07/31/oldest-greenland-ice-core-recovered/

We have very similar data from lake sediments:

https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/data-access/paleoclimatology-data/datasets/lake

And we have the same kind of data from sea floor sediments.

And we have rivers sediments. The rivers bring sediments into their deltas and that stuff stacks up thousands of feet deep for big rivers like the Mississippi.

We have very clear data that tells us that there was no global flood and no rearranging of the Earth's crust beyond the very slow plate tectonics that moves things at about the same rate that your fingernails are growing.

> I was under the impression that the many of the younger scientists have shifted away from uniformitarianism, and that the major difference between young-earth supporters and the long-age supporters is the timescale of events preceding the most recent series of global catastrophes.

Nah, that's just creationists trying to move the goal post.

Geology happens over periods of time that are mind boggling huge. Yes, there will be small events that happen suddenly. A volcanic eruptions here, a ruptured glacial dam there.

Aside from extremely rare events, things that happen on a >100 million year interval like the Chicxulub impactor ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicxulub_impactor ) there simply aren't 'global catastrophes'.

There are things that happen over millions of years that can have big effects but it's moving the goal post to call those 'global catastrophes'. Firstly because they happen in a small region and their effect spreads out very slowly. And secondly, they're a long series of events that can literally span millions of years. There are very few example of this kind of thing. The Siberian Traps are probably the best know example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siberian_Traps

'Global Catastrophes' are the work of fiction.

Here's a link to what's probably the most enjoyable book I've ever read about how the field of geology evolved from the older fashioned views to the current view:

https://www.amazon.com/Assembling-California-John-McPhee/dp/0374523932

John McPhee has written an number of excellent books about Geology and a bunch of other fields. But I'd start there if I wanted to know more about the question you just asked.