There is a certain context you are missing here. This whole website has a subtext and agenda in which any the existence of a supreme creator, the validity of the biblical creation account (no matter how metaphorical) and Intelligent Design, must be undermined and ridiculed in every single blog entry. The existence of water on Mars opens the possibility of life developing outside of the biblical narrative, which in turn downgrades the insanely miniscule statistical probability of the development of life processes to within the random range.

That is why every time a microscopic bubble is located in a rock that MIGHT have originated from Mars in some wildly improbable meteoric cataclysm, it is trumpeted that this MIGHT have originated from a metabolic degradation of Martian bacterial doody, which in turn obviously means that life can develop any old damn place without a god, whether on Mars or on that outdated applesauce in your refrigerator.

Glaciers can certainly transport and drop huge boulders long distances, leaving them strewn about the surface (ask me, I live in New England but getting them to sit on the surface of sediment is a little trickier. That’s where the ice bergs floating on a sea idea comes in. A glacier would tear up the surface destroying any sedimentary layers and then when it melts, deposit everything (sand, mud, rocks, boulders) in a big jumble. A sea might deposit uniform or seasonal sediments for millions of years building up a deep layer of sedimentary rocks. When the climate is right, ice bergs floating on the sea can then deposit large boulders on top of the undisturbed sediment. So it depends on what we are looking at. If the boulders are on the surface of the sediment, then it might mean a surge of ice berg formation as the climate cooled and glaciers formed, before everything froze up solid. If the boulders are partially buried in sediment, then it could be there was a prolonged period of ice bergs with seasonal deposits (spring or summer runoff transporting mud to the sea which forms sedimentary layers, everything freezes (at least at the surface in the fall and winter, so little happens, then in the spring the glaciers at the edge of the sea melt back some releasing another crop of ice bergs that drop more rocks and boulders, repeat for a few million years.) If the boulders are resting on or in a jumble of other material, then no sea or ice bergs are involved, just a glacier or floods.

BTW Eric, I think you are thinking of the Spokane Flood in the Grand Coulee region of Washington State (12-18000 years ago according to the USGS web site.)

BTW, I’m not a geologist, just watch a lot of TV.

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