[Editor’s note: In June 1990 The John Ankerberg Show taped a series of interviews with men from several branches of the sciences regarding the evidence for creation. For technical reasons we were unable to air these interviews. Nevertheless, we have decided to release portions of the interviews in a series of articles so you could read the arguments that were being made at that time—more than a decade ago.

Considerable effort has been made to quote the gentlemen correctly. We have attempted to find the correct spelling of the scientific terms used. However, the reader should keep in mind that this is a transcription of oral interviews. Mistakes in spelling and in the technical language should be laid at the feet of the editor.]

Dr. John Ankerberg: Steve, you had some observations about how coal is formed that you wanted to tell us about. Why don’t you do that now?

Dr. Steve Austin: I’ve been involved with the study of the origin of coal and we know what coal is made of. Under the microscope, we can see the cell structure of plants, very beautifully preserved, especially woody tissue and bark. And coal is largely composed of bark tissue of plants.

I’ve been amazed and fascinated by coal. How did coal form? You’ve heard the conventional explanation: the idea that the plant material which forms the coal bed accumulated very slowly in the swamp as peat. Peat accumulates very slowly in modern swamps—a thousand years for several inches to build up—and so it has been suggested that pressure and temperature has compacted the peat formed in the swamp over long periods of time. We make coal beds. Each individual coal layer might require a thousand years to accumulate the peat which is not forming a single inch of coal. That’s the swamp explanation for the origin of coal.

About 20 years ago, I was thinking about this problem and made some observations at a drained, modern swamp deposit along the coast of Nova Scotia. We could see the peat which built up in the swamp. Coastal erosion had drained the swamp and there we saw several feet of peat which had accumulated over hundreds of years. Yet it was rather homogenous in appearance, it didn’t have great sheets of tree bark and it had the appearance of being mashed potatoes to coffee grounds in texture, not the appearance of coal. And we saw what looked like branches that seemed to be hanging out of the deposit. Those are roots. Modern swamp peats are intensely root-penetrated and produce this homogenized texture.

I was thinking the root-penetrated nature of modern peats and the sheets of tree bark that are very beautifully mummified in coal, when a rather outrageous idea came to my mind. I call it the floating log model for the origin of coal. I was thinking about this unusual condition, and postulated that logs could float in an ocean, and they could rub against one another and you could peel off the bark. And underneath this log mat on the ocean you could deposit peat. But it would not be accumulated slowly as in the swamp, but it could accumulate rapidly.

In 1979, I defended my Ph.D. dissertation on the origin of a coal bed in Kentucky, suggesting this model for the formation of the coal bed. You know the story: ten months later Mount St. Helens exploded and made Spirit Lake into a living, modern day example. What I could only conceive of had now become a literal, concrete reality.

When my diving buddy and I went underneath the floating log mat in Spirit Lake, with the hazardous diving conditions there, we noticed something about the lake. There was no bark on those logs. Where did the bark go? It’s gone; it’s been peeled off. It’s somewhere else. So we descended to the bottom of the lake. At the bottom of the lake in places we found up to 3 feet of plant material dominated by sheets of tree bark.

Now if this was later buried by continuing volcanic activity, we could get some temperature and pressure applied, [and] we could make coal. And it would appear to be more like the coal beds, the major coal beds in the United States. We might have another explanation for the origin of coal. A floating log mat model to challenge the conventional peat swamp explanation for the origin of coal.

Can you imagine enormous log mats that formed half the size of the state of Kentucky drifting around in an ocean in the center of the United States? Something like that almost immediately brings to mind a flood of continental, maybe even global, dimension. The more I think about this geologic evidence, the more I find myself thinking continent-wide catastrophe and even global catastrophe.

Could it be that Noah’s flood, like that mentioned in the Bible, provides an explanation for rock layers? It’s long been ignored by geologists, but it seems to me to be a feasible explanation. Over the years, I’ve evolved from being an evolutionist and a uniformatarian in my way of thinking, to be a creationist and a catastrophist in my way of thinking about the earth. And I would argue that we need to continue to think this way, to understand the true history of the earth, and the implications as it might relate to the creation/evolution controversy.

If you had come to me ten years ago before Mount St. Helens exploded and said the volcano is going to cause layered deposits 600 feet in thickness to form even with thin minute layering in certain places, I might have challenged your way of thinking, because I thought that formed slowly. If you would have come to me before the eruption and suggested that mud flows could open up a canyon system, a miniature Grand Canyon, 1/40th scale model of the real Grand Canyon, something like that, I would have thought you had some problems in conceiving of things. Or if you have come to me before the eruption and said to me personally, the volcano is going to cause logs to float upright in Spirit Lake and drop to the bottom and become the first step in the formation of a petrified forest, I would have thought that you were on the lunatic fringe. Because these things should not escape the normal way of thinking. Or even on the origin of coal and peat, if you would have come to me and suggested that peat forms underneath floating log mats, and could be the first step in the formation of coal, that’s what I might have agreed on. I realize that my mind is limited and that I cannot conceive in this new dimension some of the way the earth has operated and what has occurred on the earth.

This has general implications to the whole creation/evolution controversy in the origin of the rock strata layers of the earth. We might even recognize that we need to proceed with this way of thinking to understand how the flood mentioned in the Bible was involved in forming the geological strata of our earth.