Fascinating flower pots
Noah’s Flood explains Hopewell Rocks, Canada
The Bay of Fundy in eastern Canada is famous for its enormous tides. At Hopewell Rocks, toward the end of the bay, the tide may rise as high as 14 metres (46 feet), but it does not stay high very long. The water is always moving, either up or down, and the level can change by a metre (3 feet) in 30 minutes.1
The tides are eroding the cliffs and leaving stacks that are narrow at their base and look like ‘flower pots’ standing on the shore. These have fascinating names like Baby Elephant, Mother-in-law, and Lover’s Arch. Visitors to Hopewell Rocks, sometimes thousands a day, descend the Main Staircase at low tide and stroll across the ocean floor—until the water begins to rise again.
When I visited Hopewell Rocks some years ago, the large, modern, interpretive centre was equipped with colourful display boards and models. On-site interpreters gave talks about the local wildlife, sea life, and plant life, and told the geological story about how the rocks formed.2 Their story was one spanning eras of unimaginable time hundreds of millions of years ago.
When I descended the steps, I saw that the flower pots were made of gravel that had been cemented into stone. Some of the chunks of rock were angular but most were rounded. This conglomerate rock, as it is called, spoke of large quantities of fast flowing water. Rushing floodwaters would not have taken very much time to deposit that gravel. As I walked across the exposed ocean floor and examined the flower-pot stacks and cliffs, I realised I was looking at evidence from the global Flood of Noah’s time.
Time was the key. Although the interpretive boards spoke of millions of years, I reminded myself that that time was not in the rocks I saw.3 And, after suitably adjusting the times that were quoted,4 the sequence of geological events shown on the interpretive board fitted well with what was expected from Noah’s Flood. The Flood explained it well, giving new insights into features like the origin of the buried vegetation that turned to coal.5 When we apply the new interpretation to the interpretive boards it changes the way we see the world.
Re-posted on homepage: 16 September 2020
References and notes
- Berry, D., A Companion Book of the Hopewell Rocks, 2006. Return to text.
- Tourism NB, Hopewell, Interpretive Centre, thehopewellrocks.ca/about-the-park/interpretative-centre. Return to text.
- Walker, T., The way it really is: little-known facts about radiometric dating, Creation 24(4):20–23, 2002; creation.com/dating_reality. Return to text.
- Oard, M., The geological column is a general Flood order with many exceptions, Journal of Creation 24(2):78–82, 2010; creation.com/flood-order. Return to text.
- Walker, T., Coal: memorial to the Flood, Creation 23(2):22–27, 2001; creation.com/coal. Return to text.
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