Can anyone explain polystrate fossils as geology views them?

Question

Creationists like Kent Hovind often use something they call polystrate fossils as evidence of the new earth hypothisis. Basically they point petrified trees passing through perpendicular strata.

What is the geologists view on this if any?

Answer 1

There are a number of good explanations as to how these fossils form; see reference 1.

A good way to look at it is like this: if you've ever visited a reservoir after it's been flooded, you can usually see trees sticking up out of the water, even years or decades after it's been flooded. Water is a surprisingly good preservative for woody material, and folks have even started logging operations to remove timber that has been submerged for over a hundred years- logs that were sent to lumber mills, but sunk along the way. This, in fact, is pretty much what happened with the Petrified National Forest- large numbers of logs that washed downstream as part of volcanic events. The difference, of course, is that they were buried horizontally.

Standing timber that manged to get preserved was located in a region with either a pulse or repeated, smaller pulses of sedimentation, burying the material quickly enough that it couldn't decay first- and even this is contestable, as it is possible to find burrows in some buried wood: insects, worms, etc. attack the buried material. Another possibility is flooding, followed by burial in sediment while the material is still standing- the same as in the reservoir analogy.

In fact, death is not required. To quote Wikipedia:

"Mainstream geologists have also found that some of the larger polystrate trees found within Carboniferous coal-bearing strata show evidence of regeneration after being partially buried by sediments. In the case of these polystrate trees, they were clearly alive when partially buried by sediments. Because of their size, the sediment, which accumulated around them, was insufficient to kill them. As a result, they developed a new set of roots from their trunks just below the new ground surface and grew higher to compensate for the part of the trunk buried by sediment (Gastaldo et al. 2004). Until they either died or were overwhelmed by the accumulating sediments, these polystrate would likely continue to regenerate by adding height and new roots with each increment of sediment, eventually leaving several of meters of former "trunk" buried underground as sediments accumulated."

So- it's just more silliness to produce a convoluted explanation around natural events- even ones we can find in our own backyards and local reservoirs. Who, after all, has not had to stump a field? Tree remains can last an awful long time, and get buried before decomposition even begins. A little less common these days, perhaps, due to artificial controls (drainage of wetlands, prevention of mass wasting of sediments on hillside slopes, etc.), but certainly very common on a geologic time scale.

Answer 2

Okay, I'm a geologist and I agree with Truckie101. Let me remind you that any form of "creationism"--no matter what they call it--is not science. So, be wary of their sophistry, some of them are pretty good at it.
Remember that science builds it's views and theories from the accumulation of testable knowledge; in religion however, they've already decided what the answers are, and want to force everything (all inclusive) to "fit their mold"--so to speak. These are not compatible approaches to gaining knowledge; and only science lives up the standards we regard as scholarship.

Be careful---and good luck!