Mt. Helens? Wasn't that several hundred years ago? Not several years, unless I've missed something ... Anyways, about the fossils you meant, no well-read geologist finds them surprising, and no geologist has ever claimed that it took millions (or even thousands) of years to bury them.
Science is perfectly happy with the idea that deposition is
occasionally rapid.
However, to see this as evidence for all these kind of fossils to be possibly way younger ánd obviously ignoring the dating methods along the way is problematic, there are some good arguments against this.
Apart from this:
"Some upright fossils had rotted-away interiors by the time their burial was final. So, in those cases, the tree may have stood dead for some time. The typical height of upright fossils is on the order of two meters, so many of these fossils represent only the base of the original tree. The top of the tree presumably rotted."
Quote:
There are at least three lines of argument against this.
The first argument is that the fossils aren't all found on one single level of the Geologic Column. Some are from the Devonian Period, well before the dinosaurs. Some were buried long after the dinosaurs went extinct. This is what you would expect if each burial was caused by a small, local event. And, there are differences, depending on where they are found. For example, giant lycopod trees are only found in Carboniferous Period rocks, and cypress trees aren't found below the Cretaceous Period. The same comment applies to their leaves and spores and pollen. But this is exactly what you would not expect if a single, global flood had washed over them. Surely the flood would have ripped many trees up, and dropped them elsewhere. Or if not the trees, at least the pollen.
The second argument is that some upright fossils were transported to where they are now. Others are clearly still in place (in situ), because they are still rooted into a fossilized soil. The transported trees have had their root systems ripped, but the in situ trees still have the small, fine rootlets in place. It does not seem possible for a single global event to transport some trees and not others.
The third argument is that there are some upright trees which are on top of other upright trees. We know that the upper tree grew after the lower one was buried, because the uppper tree is clearly in situ.
An example of this is a burrow pit near Donaldsonville, LA. When they excavated backswamp clays to rebuild the adjacent levee, they uncovered three levels of upright cypress forests buried on top of each other beneath the recent floodplain. These polystrate trees are buried within recent Mississippi River deposits that are only 4,000 years old. The much older upright trees in Yellowstone Park are similarly layered.
You see, the opposite result of what a 'global flood' would provide.
Cheers
