The Age of the Earth

Fast Facts

J. Quinton Friberg Salt and Light Apologetic Ministries

Table of contents
J. Quinton Friberg

Chapter 1: Radiometric dating and the age of the earth Pages: 4-20
Introduction to radioactive decay Introduction to radioactive dating General assumptions with radioactive dating Carbon dating Carbon 14 and a young earth Potassium- Argon dating Other dating methods Dating methods do not agree with each-other Accelerated decay is happening today Evidence for Accelerated Radioactive decay in history Accelerated radioactive decay theories

Chapter 2: Evidence of an old earth? (Part - I) Pages: 21-36

The geologic column Petrification and fossilization Petrified forests Tree ring dating Varves and the Green River formation

Chapter 3: Evidence of an old earth? (Part - II) Pages: 37-51

The Coconino Sandstone Ice core dating Coral Reefs Chalk beds Diatom beds Stalagmites, stalactites, and cave formation Fossil fuels Lithification

Chapter 4: The earth is young (Part - 1) Pages: 52-65

Short period comets Super Nova remnants Spiral armed galaxies Blue O-Type stars Jupiter and Saturn energy radiation Saturns rings Mountains of Venus Sun luminosity Meteoric streams and particle alignment Enceladus Titan IO

Chapter 5: The earth is young (Part - II) Pages: 66-79

The moon Salt and the Ocean Sediments and the Ocean Earths magnetic field Volcanic measurements Land erosion Helium-Zircon review Helium levels in the atmosphere Population growth Stone age skeletons and artifacts Origin of agriculture

Chapter 1: Radiometric dating and the age of the earth Introduction to radioactive decay In this chapter we are going to be looking at the topic of radiometric dating in quite some depth. I need to warn you before we start there will be a lot of information and numbers in this chapter that are necessary to understand radiometric dating and the problems associated with in. Radiometric dating is the most popular argument used to support the claim that the Earth is billions of years old. To start us off we are going to look at radioactive decay itself so we have a foundation for what we are talking about. There are three different types of radioactive decay. There is Alpha decay, Beta decay, and Gamma decay. The reason that different elements undergo radioactive decay has to do with their nucleus being unstable. Remember the nuclear is the center of the atom where the protons and neutrons are located. In a stable atom the number of protons and neutrons are equal inside the nucleus, however when they are not the atom becomes unstable and uses radioactive decay as a mechanism to stabilize itself. We are going to spend a moment talking about each of these three different types of radioactive decay, starting with Alpha decay. Alpha decay is a very common form of radioactive decay and many of the different radioactive dating methods use elements that are experiencing this type fo decay. In Alpha decay, the nucleus of an atom emits (gets rid of) two protons and two neutrons, as those protons and neutrons leave the nucleus of the atom they grab two electrons on their way out. These two protons and neutrons form into a different element called helium. Helium is the by-product of Alpha decay, whenever there is Alpha decay occurring there is helium being generated. Once a nucleus looses the two protons and the two neutrons it becomes a different element on the periodic table. For example, when a uranium atom undergoes Alpha decay the process produces a thorium atom + a helium atom. The helium atom (which is a by-product of all alpha decay) is commonly called an Alpha particle. Alpha Particle A helium atom generated by radioactive Alpha decay.

The next type of radioactive decay is called Beta decay. There are two different types of Beta decay, there is Beta plus (B+) decay, and Beta minus (B-) decay. The Beta decay that is commonly used for radiometric dating is Beta minus decay. When Beta minus decay occurs one of the neutrons inside of the atoms nucleus turns into a proton. In the case of carbon-14, one of the carbon-14 protons (like shown in the picture) turns into a neutron, and the result is an equal amount of protons and neutrons, which means a stable atom. Also note that when this happens an electron is emitted (sent out) from the nucleus and joins the other electrons that are orbiting the nucleus. The third type of radioactive decay that exists is Gamma decay. In this type of radioactive decay the nucleus of an atom simply releases a Gamma ray in order (energy) in order to help stabilize the nucleus of the atom. We will not go into much detail because there is no radiometric dating technique that uses Gamma decay. Introduction to radioactive dating Now that we have an understanding of what radioactive decay is, lets look at how radioactive dating works. All radioactive isotopes (elements) have what is called a half life. Radioactive half life The amount of time it takes for half of a sample of a given radioactive substance to decay into the daughter product. Let me give you an example of how this works. The half life of radioactive carbon14 is 5730 years. This means every 5730 years half of a sample of radiocarbon-14 will decay into nitrogen. If you have a pile of 5 grams of radioactive carbon-14 and you sit around and wait for 5730 years, you will only have 2.5 grams left in the pile because it has passed through one of half life. All radioactive elements have different half lives, they can be very short, or they can be very long. For example, Sodium-24 is an unstable sodium atom which has a half life of only 15 hours, which is pretty quick. On the other hand, Uranium-238 has a half life of 4.5 billion years! If you were to watch a sample of Uranium-238 for your entire life you would never notice any of it decaying away. Those are just two extreme examples, most radioactive elements have half lives somewhere between those two, and the one that are used to determine the old ages of the earth have half lives from

millions to billions of years. Now that you know how half lives work, we are going to look at the method behind radioactive dating. The idea behind radioactive dating is the comparison of parent and daughter isotope levels in a sample that is being dated. Parent Isotope The element that is undergoing radioactive decay Daughter Isotope The element that is a by-product of radioactive decay As we said earlier, uranium decays to thorium, this would make uranium the parent isotope and thorium the daughter isotope. The way radiometric dating works (normally) is by taking a sample (usually a rock) and measuring the levels of parent and daughter isotopes within the sample. If you have 50 grams of the parent isotope and 50 grams of the daughter isotope then you know that the sample has gone through one half life because the daughter isotope is 50% of the parent and daughter isotope added together. For example, if you have 10 grams of Uranium-238 (which has a half life of 4.5 billion years) and you let it decay for one half life you will have 5 grams left (because you lose half of it each half life.) Furthermore, because the sample has gone through one half life you would assume that the age of the sample is 4.5 billion years old (because the half life for Uranium-238 is 4.5 billion years.) An hour glass is a great way to visualize this scenario, the sand on the top of the hour glass represents the parent isotope that is decaying into the sand on the bottom of the hour glass (the daughter isotope.) You compare the amount of parent and daughter isotopes (elements) to get a radioactive age. The process can get a little more complicated with some radioactive isotopes, sometimes the daughter product is also radioactive and also decaying away, and scientists have to take that into account. In this chapter we will be examining the most popular radioactive dating methods and many problems associated with them. General assumptions with radioactive dating All radiometric dating methods have certain assumptions involved with them that we going to discuss for a moment. Assumption 1: The amounts of parent and daughter isotopes have not been altered by anything except radioactive decay. If something besides radioactive decay was able to alter the levels of the parent and

daughter isotopes inside of a sample, the ratio of parent and daughter isotopes inside the sample would be thrown off, and an accurate comparison cannot be made. Assumption 2: When the rock or sample was formed it contained a known amount of the daughter isotope, typically assumed to be zero. When the rock was formed it is assumed that there are no daughter elements present and all the daughter product that we find is a result of radioactive decay. This is an assumption and has been shown to be incorrect in some instances which we will discuss later on in this chapter. Assumption 3: The radioactive decay rate has been constant throughout history. If the speed that radioactive decay occurs has changed throughout history, we would not be able to tell how old a sample is. If the half life of Uranium-238 at one point in history was different than it is today, that would mean the ages we derive from radiometric dating will be incorrect.

Carbon dating The first method of radioactive dating that we are going to address is carbon-14 dating. Unlike many other dating methods, carbon dating is not used to radioactively date rocks. Carbon dating is used to date carbon based life forms that have died at some point in history. Carbon-14 has a half life of 5730 years which is low compared to most elements used for radioactive dating. Due to the small half life carbon-14 cannot be detected after about two hundred thousand years worth of decay. Carbon-14 is formed by cosmic rays bombarding the upper atmosphere which produces fast moving neutrons (as shown in the picture.) These neutrons collide with nitrogen atoms in our atmosphere producing radioactive carbon-14. The ratio of carbon-14 compared to normal carbon (carbon12) in the atmosphere is extremely low. Carbon-14 gets into all plants (along with Carbon-12) through the process of photosynthesis. It also gets into all animals, because animals have either ate plants or ate other animals that ate plants (there is nothing else to eat.) As long as the organism (planet or animal) is alive it will continue to take in carbon-14 from the atmosphere and the ratio of carbon-14 to carbon-12 will be the same as it is in the atmosphere. When an animal or plant dies it stops taking in carbon from the

atmosphere, and the carbon-14 that is in the sample begins to decay away. One thing you need to remember though is carbon-12 is not radioactive, so the level of carbon-12 in an animal or plant will not change after it has died. However, the level of carbon-14 will change because it is radioactive and decays to nitrogen through Beta decay.

The way carbon dating works is comparing the level of carbon-14 in a dead plant or animal to the level of carbon-14 in the atmosphere. If the plant or animal that you are dating has a measurement 5ppm (parts per million) of carbon-14, and the atmosphere has a measurement of 10ppm of carbon-14, that seems to indicate that the plant or animal has been dead for one half life because it has half the amount of the atmosphere. If the plant or animal has been dead for one half life that would give a carbon dating age of 5730 years. Here is another example: If you were to find a dead plant of animal that had a measurement of 2.5ppm carbon-14, and the atmosphere had a measurement of 10ppm carbon-14, the plant or animal would have gone through two different half lives. The first half life took it from 10ppm to 5ppm, and the second took it from 5ppm to 2.5ppm. This would mean the plant or animal is 5730 x 2 (the number of half lives that have gone by) years old. Despite it sounding scientific, there are many problems associated with the carbon dating method. The problem with carbon dating has to do with the level of carbon-14 in our atmosphere. According to the carbon dating method, plants and animals before they die have the same level of carbon-14 in them as the atmosphere does. But what if the levels of carbon-14 in the atmosphere are changing? This has become quite a problem for the carbon dating method, the level of carbon-14 in the atmosphere is increasing every day. In order for carbon dating to work you have to know the level of carbon-14 that was in the atmosphere when the animal or plant died, because that is the atmosphere the plant or animal would be equal with at the same

of its death. If you dont know the level of carbon-14 in the atmosphere when the plant or animal died, then you cannot get an accurate age for that plant or animal. For example: if you carbon date a dead animal that you find and it has a measurement of 5ppm and the atmosphere has a measurement of 20ppm, you would assume that the dead animal has been through two half lives, the first from 20ppm to 10ppm, and second from 10ppm to 5ppm. However! We are assuming the level of carbon-14 in our atmosphere has not changed over time, and that has been shown to be an incorrect assumption. If the animal had died in an atmosphere with the measurement of 10ppm, not 20ppm like our atmosphere today, that would change the age of the animal. Instead of having gone through 2 half lives (20ppm to 5ppm) it would only have gone through 1 half life (10ppm to 5ppm.) The fact that the atmospheric level of carbon-14 is changing and increasing means carbon dating cannot be accurate. Carbon dating also tends to contradict itself and give dates that cannot possible be correct. For example, Shells from living snails were carbon-dated as being 27,000 years old. (Science Vol. 224, 1984 p. 58-61) These snails are alive! And they are carbon dating as being 27,000 years old. Another example of a living organism being dated is Penguins, which have been dated at 8,000 years old. I dont know about you, but these assigned dates seem to be a bit off. Here are some other examples, Erectus was thought to have vanished some 250,000 years ago. But even though he used two different dating methods, Swisher kept making the same startling find: the bones were 53,000 years old at most and possibly no more than 27,000 years Newsweek (Newsweek, December 23, 1996 , p. 52. p. 52) That is a 96% error between those two numbers, does that sound very accurate? Another dating error was identified for a skull found near Paderborn, Germany, that Protsch dated at 27,400 years old. It was believed to be the oldest human remain found in the region until the Oxford investigations indicated it belonged to an elderly man who died in 1750 (worldnetdaily, Feb. 19, 2005) They carbon dated the remains of a human being and said he lived around 27,000 years ago, they then found out that history recorded that human dying around 250 years ago! One part of the Vollosovitch mammoth carbon dated at 29,500 years old and another part at 44,000. (Troy L. Pewe, U.S. Gov. printing office, 1975 p. 30) One part of the mammoth gave a carbon dating age of 29,500 years old, while the other part gave an age of 44,000 years old. There are many more examples like this of carbon dating giving impossible ages and contradictory ages. The method is not reliable, and many scientists are aware of this. Take this quote for example from a secular scientist Professor Brew, who briefly summarized a common attitude among archeologists towards carbon dating, If a C14 date supports our theories, we put it in the

main text. If it does not entirely contradict them, we put it in a foot-note. And if it is completely out of dating, we just drop it (Earths Catastrophic past Volume 1 Page: 90.) the radioactive dates that go against the evolutionary theory and against the preconceived notions of these scientists get dropped and thrown out. Carbon dating cannot be trusted to give reliable accurate dates.

Carbon 14 and a young earth Over the past several years the Institute for Creation Research (IRC) has researched quite a bit on the topic of carbon-14, and their research has been quite successful in showing the earth is not millions of years old. It was discovered that coal contained measureable amounts of carbon-14 within it. According to secular scientists and evolution, all of the coal in the world formed hundreds of millions of years ago. Coal is made from plants, and the specific way that it is formed will be discussed later on in a different chapter. However it is important to know that coal is made from carbon based organisms (planets.) Carbon-14 gets inside the coal because the plants and trees that the coal was formed from contained carbon-14 in them. Once the plants die they stop taking in carbon-14 from the atmosphere and the carbon-14 that is inside the plants when they die begins to decay. As the plants are turned into coal the carbon-14 inside of them continues to decay at the same rate that it did when the coal was a plant. Remember what I said earlier about carbon-14? After about 200,000 years so much carbon-14 will decay away that our machines would not be able to detect it anymore. This means if we can detect carbon-14 inside of something it cannot be older than 200,000 years old! This has caused quite a problem for those who believe that coal formed millions of years ago, because coal has measureable amounts of carbon-14 within it. This proves that the coal cannot be millions of years old like the theory of evolution claims. Now there has been one theory presented by evolutionists and secular scientists to explain how this carbon-14 can be inside the coal after millions of years. The theory says that the carbon-14 is a byproduct of uranium fission, and is being produced inside the coal today. However, to explain the observed 14C, then the coal would have to contain 99% uranium, so colloquial parlance would term the sample uranium rather than coal. (Dr. Jonathan Sarfati,

http://creation.com/diamonds-a-creationists-best-friend) The level of uranium needed to make this scenario plausible does not exist within the coal samples. Dr. Russell Humphreys said: With their short 5,700-year half-life, no carbon 14 atoms should exist in any carbon older than 250,000 years. Yet it has proven impossible to find any natural source of carbon below Pleistocene (Ice Age) strata that does not contain significant amounts of carbon 14, even though such strata are supposed to be millions or billions of years old. Conventional carbon 14 laboratories have been aware of this anomaly since the early 1980s, have striven to eliminate it, and are unable to account for it. (Dr Humphreys, http://www.answersingenesis.org/docs/4005.asp) The layers of sediments that are supposed to be millions and billions of years old contain detectable carbon-14, showing that they cannot possibly be that old! Remember how I told you coal was supposed to form millions of years ago according to evolution and secular scientists? It was bad enough finding carbon-14 in coal, but the next thing they found it in was even worse for them. The Institute for Creation Research decided to have some diamonds tested for carbon-14. When they got the results back, they found there was carbon-14 still detectable inside of them! This is very hard to explain if they are billions of years old, there should be absolutely no detectable carbon-14 after that long. Plus diamonds are the hardest mineral on earth, and there is no way that you can contaminate a diamond and put the carbon-14 inside in the recent past. The fact that diamonds contain measureable amounts of carbon-14 is strong evidence that the earth is not millions or billions of years old. Potassium- Argon dating The next method of radioactive dating that we will be addressing is the potassium-argon dating method. This is one dating method that is used to give ages of millions of years for different sedimentary layers. Volcanic ash layers are dated by scientists using the potassium-argon method to determine when the lava flow formed. Potassium (which is the parent product) decays to argon (daughter product) with a half life of 1.3 billion years. When volcanic lava is in liquid form

(molten) it is assumed that all the gases within the lava would escape into the atmosphere and then once the lava solidifies (hardens) the gases that are generated after that will be the only gases present. The potassium-argon dating method works by measuring the ratio of potassium to argon inside of a volcanic rock to determine when a given volcanic flow solidified. Before we go into specific problems associated with this dating method, I want to compare it to carbon dating to show you that the ages derived from different dating methods do not agree with each other. In Australia, some wood was buried by a basalt lava flow, as can be seen from the charring. The wood was: dated: by radiocarbon analysis at about 45,000 years old, but the basalt was Dated by the K-Ar (potassiumargon) method at 45 million years. (Dr. Jonathan Sarfati, Refuting evolution page: 111) 45,000 years for the carbon dating method, and 45 million years for the potassium-argon method, I would say that is a pretty dramatic error. Remember how I said that it is assumed that there was no argon in the volcanic rocks when they hardened? Because argon is a gas, and all the gas would escape while the lava was liquid? This happens to be the fatal assumption in the potassium-argon dating method. The levels of argon are not at zero when the lava flow hardens, it has been shown that there is argon present in the volcanic ash and rocks that was not a product of radioactive decay of potassium! The primary assumption upon which K-Ar model-age dating is based assumes zero 40Ar in the mineral phases of a rock when it solidifies. This assumption has been shown to be faulty. (CEN Tech. J., Vol. 10, No. 3, p: 342 1996) If you do not know how much argon (daughter product) was present when the volcanic ash layer cooled down there is no way to tell the age of that ash layer! And it turns out to be impossible to know the level or argon that was present in the ash layer when it solidified, which means it is impossible to derive an accurate age for the volcanic ash layer. You can also date a ash layer multiple times using potassium-argon dating every time, and the dates will not be consistent with each other. Twentyseven samples yielded potassium-argon model ages ranging from 405.1+-10 to 2,574.2+-73 million years. (Dr. Andrew A. Snelling, Earths Catastrophic past Volume 2 Page: 841) The same lava flow gave ages ranging between 400 million years and 2.5 billion years! That is a 650% error between those two numbers. There is one other problem with the potassium-argon dating method that I want to bring up. Every time a scientist uses potassium-argon dating to measure the age of a volcanic ash of known age, the method fails. Below is a list of different volcanic eruptions that have been dated using potassium argon dating. The date that the volcano blew up is the first date (historically recorded) and the second age is what the potassium argon method says the age is.

Hualalai basalt, Hawaii (AD 1800-1801) 1,600,000 years Mt. Etna basalt, Sicily (122 BC) 250,000 years Mt. Etna basalt, Sicily (AD 1972) 350,000 years Mt. Lassen plagioclase, California (AD 1915) 110,000 years Sunset Crater basalt, Arizona (AD 1064-1065) 270,000 years Akka Water Fall flow, Hawaii (Pleistocene) 32,300,000 years Kilauea Iki basalt, Hawaii (AD 1959) 8,500,000 Mt. Stromboli, Italy, volcanic bomb (September 23, 1963) 2,400,000 years Mt. Etna basalt, Sicily (May 1964) 700,000 years Glass Mountains, California (<500 years old) 12,600,000 years Hualalai basalt, Hawaii (AD 1800-1801) 22,800,000 years Antarctica (1984) 640,000 years Kilauea basalt, Hawaii (<200 years old) 21,000,000 years Kilauea basalt, Hawaii (<1,000 years old) 42,900,000 years Isnt it interesting that whenever we date a lava flow of known age the potassiumargon method dramatically fails, but whenever we date an ash layer of unknown age the method is assumed to work? Science continues to show that the potassiumargon dating method is not accurate. Other dating methods In this section we are going to quickly be addressing some other popular dating methods. These dating methods have similar problems to each other and a lot of what I say about one of them will apply to the rest of them as well. RubidiumStrontium dating is the first that we will be discussing. Rubidium is the parent product that is decaying to the daughter product strontium. The first problem with this dating method has to do with the distribution of those elements when the rock they are dating was formed. According to geologist Dr. Andrew Snellings, The geologic processes that formed the sampled rock unite may have caused an uneven distribution in the rock unit of the parent rubidium and daughter strontium isotopes. (Dr. Andrew A. Snelling (Ph.D Geology) Earths Catastrophic past Volume 2 Page: 801) The processes that would cause this un-equal distribution would be found during the historical world-wide flood. This problem was further confirmed when scientists examined newly formed lava flows and found variations in the distribution of strontium. The next problem with the rubidium-strontium dating method is contamination, Contamination is one of the main sources of mineralogical and geochemical variation in granitic rocks, and all main types of likely contaminant have compositions that would lead to an under-estimation of the initial 87Sr/86Sr ratio, and an over-estimation of

the age of crystallization. (Dr. Andrew A. Snelling (Ph.D Geology) Earths Catastrophic past Volume 2 Page: 81) It is possible for contamination to occur within these rocks being dated. This would cause an under-estimation of the initial levels of rubidium and strontium inside the sample, which would cause an over-estimation of the age of the rock. The last problem we are going discuss with this dating method has to do with the mobility of rubidium and strontium under certain conditions. Under certain conditions, rubidium and strontium can move around freely and dramatically change the distribution and ratios of those elements. Recognition of inheritance, open-system behaviors, contamination and mixing, and the later effects of weathering, together have increasingly cause Rb-Sr radioisotope Dating to be regarded as unreliable. (Dr. Andrew A. Snelling (Ph.D Geology) Earths Catastrophic past Volume 2 Page: 817) Open-system behavior means the different elements can move in and out of the rock, thus changing the ratios of either the parent element or the daughter element. Far too many problems have been found with the rubidiumstrontium dating method for it to be considered reliable and accurate. The next dating method we are going to address is the samarium-neodymium method. Samarium would be the parent element that decays to neodymium. This dating method suffers several of the same problems as the last one, the first of which is the mobility of the elements that are used, A study of the Sm-Nd radioisotope systematics in minerals in two granites has shown that hydrothermal fluids interacting with the host rocks, as the granites intrudes and crystallizes, are capable of carrying Sm and Nd in the rocks over distances of at least 1 km. (Dr. Andrew A. Snelling (Ph.D Geology) Earths Catastrophic past Volume 2 Page:822) During the flood you would have exactly these hydrothermal conditions all around the world. Under these conditions samarium and neodymium would be mobile, and this mobility would cause the parent or daughter isotope ratios to be dramatically changed. The last dating method that I want to mention is the Uranium-Thorium-Lead method. This one gets a little more confusing because there are three elements involved. Uranium is the parent isotope of thorium, thorium is the daughter product of uranium and the parent isotope of lead, lead is the daughter isotope of thorium. Here is one quote that sums of the majority of the problems with this dating method, It was found that U (Uranium) appeared to have been lost from samples which exhibit no discernible effects of alteration, so it was even suggested the leaching of U from surficial rocks might be a universal phenomenon. This was because concentrations of U, Th (Thorium), and Pb (Lead), and the isotopic composition of Pb, for whole-rock samples of granites, showed that open-system behavior is nearly universal in the surface and near-surface environment, and that elemental mobility is possible to depths of several hundred meters. (Dr. Andrew A. Snelling (Ph.D Geology)

Earths Catastrophic past Volume 2 Page: 825) Leeching is the process of something being sucked out or removed from something else. This would dramatically alter the parent/daughter ratios inside of these rocks, and the dates derived using this method would be inaccurate and unreliable. It was also shown that open-system behavior is extremely common in these rocks, which means these different isotopes can move into and out of the rocks. Dating methods do not agree with each other Many scientists claim that the dating methods all agree with each other and therefore must be right. ICR (Institute for Creation Research) took multiple samples from the same lava flow in the Grand Canyon and had them dated using four different methods to see if they agreed with one another. The samples in this first example were taken from the Cardenas basalt layer, it gave a potassium-argon age of 516 million years, which is less than half of the rubidium-strontium age of 1.1 billion years, and the samarium-neodymium age was 1.6 billion years, three times the age that the potassium-argon dating method gave. As you can see the different dating methods do not agree with each other. In another case the samples gave a potassium-argon age of 1.2 billion years, then another potassium-argon age of 2.5 billion years, then a rubidium-strontium age of 1.2 billion years, then a samarium-neodymium age of 1.6 billion years, and a lead-lead age of 1.9 billion years. There are many more examples of this occurring that we do not have time address. These are just some examples to help you understand that the different dating methods do not agree with one another. You do not need to memorize the numbers that I mentioned either. Accelerated decay is happening today Several years ago a theory was presented by the creation science community that radioactive half lives might have been accelerated at some point in the recent past. That is to say the half life would have been much smaller than what we observe today and large amounts of radioactive decay would be able to happen very quickly. One problem many people had with this theory arose from a misconception that radioactive half lives cannot be altered. However, this assumption that radioactive half lives cannot change was debunked multiple times. One survey that was done in the scientific literature showed that there had been two dozen experiments where decay rates changing had been reported. Other experiments have shown that radioactive decay rates can be accelerated to a billion times the normal rate under certain conditions. There are other factors that also need to be further studied, For example, we need to explore how isotopes

behave deep within the earth during partial melting, and also in magma-rock systems during crystallization. (Dr. Tas Walker http://creation.com/images/pdfs/tj/j14_1/j14_1_04-05.pdf) We do not know everything there is to know about radioactive decay and behaviors, much research is still needed in this field. It was also shown that the solar activity can change the decay rates of certain elements, New observations have found that those nuclear decay rates actually fluctuate based on solar activity. (Brian Thomas, M.S. http://www.icr.org/article/5656/) It would not be correct to say that decay rates are unchangeable, it has been demonstrated multiple times that the rate of radioactive decay can be changed. Evidence for Accelerated Radioactive decay in history If we are going to claim that radioactive decay was accelerated at some point in history we need evidence to support that claim. We will be looking at an experiment that was conducted by the RATE team that provides strong evidence of accelerated radioactive decay at some point in earths history. Inside granite rocks you find little black mica, and sometimes inside of this mica you find microscopic zircon crystals. These zircon crystals are radioactive due to uranium atoms that are inside of them. If you remember back to the beginning of this chapter we discussed the three different types of radioactive decay, uranium decays by means of Alpha decay. Because uranium decays by Alpha decay that means while it is decaying there is Alpha particles (helium) that are being generated in the process. Helium is the second lightest element on the periodic table, and also is a noble gas, which means that it does not like to bond with other atoms. It is light weight which means that it can move around quickly, and sense it is so small and non-reactive, it can also leak out of almost anything that it is in. People use helium to find leaks in different products they are making, because helium escapes out of things extremely well. There is no exception for the zircon crystals, helium is consistently leaking out of the zircon crystals at the same time that it is forming inside of the crystals. There is a picture/graph to help illustrate this on the next page. This picture represents a zircon crystal, inside of this crystal you have two processes occurring; you have nuclear decay (uranium

decaying to lead) and you have helium being formed in the process. Once the helium is formed from the Alpha decay it starts to escape out of the zircon crystal. The lead (daughter product) does not escape out of the zircon crystal though which means you can tell how many helium atoms have been generated by looking at how many lead atoms are present, because for each lead atom you have there should be one helium atom. The RATE team took multiple samples of zircon crystals and sent them to the words best helium leakage laboratory to measure the rate at which the helium atoms are escaping out of the zircon crystal. They figured out the rate for the different zircon crystals, it varies depending on how deep the zircon crystal was in the ground, because the warmer it gets the quicker the helium will leak out of the zircon crystal. The laboratory took all these different things into account, they measured the rate at which helium leaks out of the crystal, they measured how much helium is in the crystals still, and they measured the total amount of helium that has been generated in the life time of that zircon crystal by nuclear decay. If you find out all this information you can use it to date the zircon crystals. All the information was gathered and they figured out that the helium has only been leaking out of the zircon crystals for about six thousand years, which means the granite rock that contain the zircons would have to have formed at that time. This is a problem because secular scientists believe these rocks formed billions of years ago, not six thousand years ago. But we are talking about accelerated radioactive decay, not the age of the earth, so why bring this up? Well it turns out that when you date the zircon crystals by means of radioactive decay (uranium-lead) you get an age of 1.5 billion years! If these rocks were millions of years old like secular scientists claim, there wouldnt be helium in them still. Here is a graph to illustrate the data. The pink line represents the predictions if the rocks and zircon crystals were millions of years old. The red line shows the prediction if the Bible is correct. And the blue line shows the actual data that was found, see how well it matches the Biblical predictions? The old earth predictions were off by a factor of 100,000. The creationists made their predictions based on the Bible long before they knew the

date, and they were right on the money! This also has great implications when it comes to accelerated radioactive decay. The zircon crystal and helium leakage is giving an age of six thousand years for the age of these crystals, and the radioisotope dating method is giving an age of 1.5 billion years. This means 1.5 billion years of nuclear decay had to happen in the past six thousand years! This is strong evidence that the rate of radioactive decay was accelerated in the past, which means all dates derived from radioactive dating would be wrong and appear much older. As you have probably guessed many secular scientists do not like this conclusion and some of them have tried to show that helium leakage is not an accurate dating method. There have been some theories presented to explain how the observed helium levels could be inside of the zircon crystals if they were billions of years old. The first theory claims the temperature in that region was cooler in the past. The warmer the temperature the faster the helium escapes out of the zircon, because the warmer it gets the quicker the atoms move around. If you cool down the area that means the atoms would move slower and the helium would not leak out as quickly. This theory has two primary problems associated with it. First off the thermal (heat) history for the area these zircons were taken from shows it would have been warmer (not cooler) in the past then it is today, this is due to volcanic history in the area. Secondly, in order to account for all the helium that is in these zircons they would need to have temperatures as low as liquid nitrogen (196 degrees Celsius.) There is no way that this area could have been that cold in the past! The next theory questions the measurements done by the laboratory. Inside of these zircon crystals 1-2% of the helium is not tightly bound to the crystal. This means if you take it to the laboratory for measurements 1-2% of the helium will leak out of the zircon at a faster rate than the rest of the helium will. Some people claim that when the laboratory made the measurements of how quick the helium leaks out of the crystals they were only measuring this 1-2% that initially leaks out of the crystals very quickly, and because they were measuring this 1-2% of rapidly leaking helium their measurements were incorrect. The problem is the laboratory knows this happens, and they recommend that people ignore the initial measurements, which the RATE team did. They only used the measurements of the leaking rate of the other 98% that leaks out of the zircon at a steady rate. One last scenario claims that the helium was put into the zircon crystals in the recent past by outside forces. The problem is, If the helium in the zircons were excess and came from outside them, it would have had to come through the biotite. As I pointed out on p. 9 of CRSQ 2004, the helium concentration in

the biotite is two hundred times lower than the concentration in the zircon. That means, according to the laws of diffusion, that the helium is presently leaking out of the zircons into the biotite, not the other way around. (Dr. Russell Humphreys http://www.trueorigin.org/helium01.asp) There is no way the helium inside of these zircon crystals came from an outside source, the levels of helium we measure in the biotite would be different then we observe if this were the case. The theory that claims the helium came from an outside source says a volcano lava flow is responsible for the helium. The secular scientists who originated this theory wants fluids (from magma) to carry the helium into the granite rock, through the biotite, and into the zircon crystal. He claims this happened in the recent past sometime between 100,000 years ago and 1,400,000 years ago. This scenario has some serious problems associate with it. First off the helium would have escaped from the magma before it reached the zircons, which means once the magma got there no helium would be available. Secondly, the temperatures would have rose dramatically from this magma interacting with the granite rock and zircon crystals, But lets assume for the sake of argument that the helium somehow gets into the zircons. Now it has to stay there. The magmatic fluids would raise the temperature of the zircons considerably higher than their present temperature, and temperatures would remain high for dozens of millennia. (Dr. Russell Humphreys http://www.trueorigin.org/helium01.asp) If the temperatures got raised by the magma this would cause the helium into the zircons to leak out dramatically quicker, remember what we said earlier about temperature and helium leaking? The higher the temperature is the quicker the helium will leak out of the zircon. If the helium was put inside the zircons by magma flows, the temperature would be raised so high that all the helium should have escaped by now (which it hasnt.) Is there a mechanism that could be responsible for this massive sudden increase of radioactive decay? One theory has been presented that uses String Theory to show that this amount of decay is possible. In String Theory, every point in existence is associated with a six dimensional manifold called a Calabi-Yau, The Calabi-Yau spaces have holes, and in superstring theory the sizes of coupling constants are related to the diameters of these hole (Dr. Eugene Chaffin, Theoretical physicist) This quote is say that these different points (Calabi-Yaus) have different size holes within them and the size of these holes controls the different forces in our universe. The strong nuclear force controls Alpha decay inside the nucleus of an atom and if you change the diameter

(size) of the hole that controls the strong force you can change how fast/slow radioactive decay happens. This is one physically way that radioactive decay can be massively accelerated. Accelerated radioactive decay theories Accelerated decay is not the only mechanism available to explain the large amount of radioactive material we find here on earth, some theories suggest that God created the daughter products of radioactive decay already inside of the earth. The theory proposed suggests that large quantities of daughter elements were mixed into the crust of the earth during the flood year. Or that God created the daughter elements already in the crust of the earth, and the flood just mixed them around more. There is no reason why God could not have created these different elements in the original creation. Some people have a problem with the idea that radioactive decay was happening before Adam and Eve sinned, after all decay doesnt sound like something that would be in Gods perfect creation. There are many physical problems that come about if you have decay starting after the fall, and these are not just small problems. When radioactive decay occurs heat is generated from the process. The heat from radioactive decay is responsible for the mantle of the earth being a plastic like rock, and not a solid rock. If there was no radioactive decay our mantle would be smaller than it is today because the heat generated from radioactive decay causes the mantle to expand. Do you see the problem? The crust of the earth is on top of the mantle and is solid, which means if you have radioactive decay start directly after the fall of Adam and Eve the mantle is going to suddenly warm up and expand. If the mantle suddenly expanded due to the heat of radioactive decay the crust of the earth (which is solid) would blow apart because of the mantle expanding beneath it. This would kill everything on the surface of the earth, and inside of the oceans. And it may surprise you to hear that this is not the biggest problem! It gets worse from here. Thermonuclear fusion is a process that takes multiple steps of radioactive decay to work, and the sun powers itself through thermonuclear fusion. This means if there is no radioactive decay there is no sun, or stars. If you take away the sun I think we all know what would happen, everything on earth dies! There is no way that radioactive decay could start after the Adam and Eve sinned, it would have to be occurring by the fourth day of creation when the sun was made. Plus if you think about it the word decay is a word that we humans decided to use when referring to the process. Radioactive decay is simply the transformation of different elements, not the destruction of them.

Chapter 2: Evidence of an old earth? (I) Introduction Back in the year 1830 Charles Lyell published a book titled Principals of Geology, in this book Lyell promoted the idea of uniformitarianism in the study of Geology. Geology - The study of the solid Earth and the processes by which it is shaped and changed. Geology is a very wide area of study having to do with rocks, sedimentary layers, minerals, fossil fuels, and much more. Lyells book convinced Darwin and many people of that time period that the flood was not responsible for the different geological features and rock layers that we see on earth, and claimed instead that they were a result of millions of years of gradual processes. In this chapter we are going to be addressing several of processes and features of the earth that secular scientists have claimed proves the earth is millions of years old. The geologic column The geologic column, often called the geologic time scale, was founded on the idea that the rock layers making up the surface of the earth were sucessively laid down over millions of years. According to the geologic time scale, the futher down you go inside the crust of the earth the older the rocks get. There are different names given for different layers and depths of the geologic column (as shown in the picture.) The geologic time scale is charted out until the era know as cambrian, any lower than that is considered Precambrian rock. Some of the names used for the different sections of the geologic column may sound familiar to you, many people have probably seen the movie Jurassic park, Jurassic is one of the names for s section of the geologic column. Now about now you are probably wondering how they determine which layers are which in the

geologic column. Each layer is assigned something called an index fossil. Index Fossil - fossils used to define and identify different geologic periods The theory of evolution proposes that different species of organisms came into existence by the process of evolution and then after some time went extinct, or evolve into a different kind of animal over millions of years. This would give you a mechanism to identify strata layers and their ages around the world by looking at what fossils are contained in those layers. If there is a trilobite, they would assume that the layer is Cambrian rock, because the trilobite is the index fossil of the Cambrian era. Something you need to know about the dates of fossils and sedimentary layers, some sceintstis will claim that the dates corresponding to the different parts of the geological column are derived from radioactive dating. This is far from true, the geologic column was created before any radioactive dating methods were invented. Another thing you need to know is the geological column cannot be found at any one place on planet earth, It needs to be emphasized that the rock layers making up the pages of this book of earth history (the geologic column) are not all found exposed to view at any one spot on the earths surface. (Dr. Andrew A. Snelling (Ph.D Geology) Earths Catastrophic past Volume 1 Page: 299) We are going to spend some time now addressing some of the different problems that have arisen for those who promote the geological time scale. Now that you know what the geologic column is, lets look at all those problems associated with it! This picture shows a small scale example of the first issue that we will be discussing. In many different areas around the world, there are strata thousands of feet thick that are bent and folded into hairpin shapes like you see in the photo. According to secular geology and uniformitarianism these different layers of strata should take millions of years to form, however the bending of these strata (which are located in many mountains) occurred without the rock cracking! Which proves that the entire formation thousands of feet thick, had to be wet and unsolidified when the bending occurred, which also means the entire formation had to be formed at the exact same time! This does not work if you believe that the layers were laid down over millions and millions of years. Secular scientists have attempted to solve this problem for uniformitarianistic geology, The conventional explanation is that under the pressure and heat of burial, the hardened sandstone and limestone layers

were bent so slowly they behaved as though they were plastic and thus did not break. However, pressure and heat would have caused detectable changes in the minerals of these rocks, tell-tale signs of metamorphism. But such metamorphic minerals or recrystallization due to such plastic behavior is not observed in these rocks. (Dr. Andrew A. Snelling (Ph.D Geology) http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/am/v4/n2/folded-not-fractured) If these rocks had been under the amount of pressure proposed, and then were slowly uplifted and bent without cracking, there would be signs inside the rocks that it happened, and those signs are not there. There has been no scientifically sound explanation to explain these rocks that are bent without any cracking. However, the Bible has a fantastic explanation of how this can occur, the Bible says there was a flood 4400 years ago that covered the entire world and formed many of the different geologic features that we see today.

Paraconformities are where one rock stratum sits on top of another rock stratum, sometimes between the two rock stratum we find ephemeral markings, these would be things like raindrops, ripple marks, and animal tracks. If these two different stratums were laid down millions of years apart from each-other there should be no ephemeral markings present. Any markings made would have been eroded away very quickly. There is no way that you can get animal tracks (for example) to preserve themselves for thousands and millions of years until the rock stratum above is in place. The presences of ephemeral markings has eliminates the idea that there are millions of years of gap time between these different rock stratums. The evidence all points to the different strata layers being laid down very quickly and at the same time! Just like the Bible says said they were. The next issue with the idea that all the strata layers around the earth formed slowly over millions of years comes from poly-strata fossils. Poly-Strata fossils Fossils running through multiple layers of sedimentary layers

Trees are a very common type of poly-strata, they are found fossilized running through multiple layers of sediments. This causes quite the problem for those who believe these layers formed over millions of years, the trees are in the upright position and sometimes they are even upside down! If you believe these layers formed slowly you must believe that the tree stood upright for tens of thousands of years while the sedimentary layers built up around it. But like I said earlier these trees are sometimes found upside down in the sedimentary layers, this causes even greater problems. If the trees are upside down they will have no roots to hold them upright for millions of years, which means they will fall over unless they are buried extremely quick. Furthermore, if you believe these trees stood upright for millions of years while the sedimentary layers built up, the top of these trees would have decayed quite a bit, however this decay is not observed in these polystrata trees. Later in this chapter we will be looking at fossilized tree forests and see how a flood is the best explanation for these observations. There are modern day examples of poly-strata fossil trees forming quickly inside sedimentary layers, and we will be look at those examples later on in this chapter. Many scientists have claimed that the process of fossilization (or petrification) takes millions of years to occur, this claim has also been shown to be false, and will be addressed in details later in this chapter. If you remember back to the last chapter we discussed carbon-14 being found in fossil fuels (coal) and diamonds deep inside the crust of the earth. Other things (such as fossil wood) have also been found to contain measureable amounts of carbon-14 in them. This is bad news for the geologic column, this means any layer that detectable carbon-14 is found cannot be older than 200,000 years. Yet the geologic time scale says these layers are millions of years old! Carbon-14 is strong evidence that the geologic timescale is not historically accurate. Petrification and fossilization In this section we will be discussing the process of fossilization and the speed at which it occurs. Many

people have been taught that fossils take millions of years to form, from the pressure of the rocks and sedimentary layers above them. However, there is strong evidence that fossilization occurs very rapidly. The most stunning evidence in the fossil record of rapid burial and fossilization comes from fossils of soft-bodied creatures like Jelly fish that have been found. Mawsonites spriggi, when discovered, was identified as a fossilized jellyfish. It was found in a sandstone bed that covers more than 400 square miles of outback South Australia. Millions of such soft-bodied marine creatures are exquisitely preserved in this sandstone bed. Consider what happens to soft-bodied creatures like jellyfish when washed up on a beach today. Because they consist only of soft jelly, they melt in the sun and are also destroyed by waves crashing onto the beach. Based on this reality, the discoverer of these exquisitely preserved soft-bodied marine creatures concluded that all of them had to be buried in less than a day! (Dr. Andrew A. Snelling (Ph.D Geology) http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/am/v3/n2/world-graveyard) 400 square miles in Australia contains these soft-bodied fossilized creatures, in order for this to happen they all had to be buried within a day! Sounds like something that would happen in a worldwide flood, and something that would not happen if the sedimentary layers took millions of years to form in this area. This is not the only place where these soft-bodied creatures are found fossilized, they are found in many different places all around the world. There is more evidence that fossils had to form rapidly. This picture shows a fossil of one fish eating another fish! In order to capture this moment the fish would have to be rapidly buried and fossilized. The fossil in this picture was found at the Green River formation, which we will be discussing in detail later in this chapter. Again fossils like this are found all around the world! This is not one isolated example. Another fantastic example of rapid fossilization comes from a fossil showing a marine reptile (ichthyosaur) giving birth! It does not take millions of years to give birth (thank goodness), in order to capture this moment the fossil would have to be formed very quickly. Petrification is a type of fossilization, it occurs when all biological material is turned into stone by impregnation with silica. The poly-strata we talked about a moment ago are examples of trees that have been petrified. Secular scientists have stated that the process of petrification takes millions of years to happen. However, this idea stands in direct opposition to modern day examples of petrification happening very rapidly. The first example pictured here is of a petrified acorn. There was a young boy (7 years old at the time) who wanted to see if some acorns

would sprout if he put them in a bucket of water, after he put them inside the bucket he forgot about them, his mom found them the next year and found that they had all petrified. The acorns are now at dinosaur adventure land in Pensacola Florida. This picture is shows a cowboy boot that was found with the cowboys leg/foot still in it! You might be wondering about now why I am showing you this picture, after all not everyone wants to see the remains of a cowboys leg/foot. Well it turns out that the cowboys leg petrified and turned to stone inside the boot! The boot was made in the 1950s, which means the cowboys leg has petrified since that time. This again is evidence that petrification does not take millions of years to happen. Petrified sacks of flower were found in the basement of an old abandoned house in Arkansas. The house was made in 1910, this means since the time the house was made all these sacks of flower had petrified. Another example of rapid petrification was observed when the grave of a Tennessee doctor was dug up. Fourteen years after the doctor died his wife died and they wanted to bury her beside him, they dug a hole for the coffin but found that the hole quickly filled up with water because of an underwater spring they did not know about, so they buried the wife somewhere else. However, the Grandkids started worrying about their Grandpa (the doctor) being buried where there was an underwater spring and flowing water, so they dug up his grave. When they opened the coffin they found that his body had petrified in less than 14 years. A group of men were looking through a house in Montana that had been abandoned around 30 years ago. While they were looking they found some jars of pickles in the pantry. On one of the jars the top had rusted off and the pickle inside of the jar had petrified and turned to stone. This happened in less than 30 years! A body of a petrified man was found on a beach many years ago in Montana, the man was 58 tall and the man who found the body travelled around showing it off at different places. A petrified waterwheel was found, petrified cowboy hat from New Zealand was also found. There was a 62 year old lady who was having cramps in her side,

she went to the hospital to see what was wrong, and they found a petrified baby inside of her. The baby had been there for many years and had died and petrified inside of her body in a matter of years. This type of scenario has also been reported many other times. Someone found a petrified hammer in a military barracks from world war two. There is a petrified crayon at dinosaur adventure land in Pensacola Florida, the crayon had to petrify in a matter of years. The July 2004 issue of Sedimentary Geology included a paper by five Japanese scientists reporting their experiments on the rapid petrification of wood as an indication that silicified (petrified) wood found in ancient strata must likewise have been rapidly petrified. (Andrew Snelling Ph.D Geology http://www.icr.org/index.php?chapter=articles&action=view&ID=13) The evidence is mounting in favor of rapid petrification and many secular scientists now agree millions of years are not required. Petrified forests In Yellow Stone national part (and multiple places around the world) we find layers of petrified forests stacked up on top of each other. There are 18 stacked forests in Yellow Stone that reach 2000 feet in height. At Mt. Amenthyst-Specimen Ridge, there are 27 of these stacked forests on top of each other, at Mt. Hornaday there are 31 successive forests, and at least 65 levels in the Specimen Creek area. The secular interpretation proposes that one forest grew and then after hundreds or thousands of years a volcano blew up a buried the forest and a new forest grew on top of the old one. These forests are buried in volcanic ash and debris, and so this interpretation seems quite reasonable. If after a volcano eruption it takes 200 years for the next forest to begin to grow (reforestation), and then another 500 years for the trees to grow fully, then it would have taken a minimum of 45,000 years to form the 65 levels at Specimen Creek. Hopefully at this point you are waiting for me to tell you why this interpretation is incorrect and inconsistent with the scientific evidence, so without further ado we will look at the problems with this interpretation, and see how these observations support the Biblical history of a worldwide flood. There is loads of evidence that the petrified forests and the trees that are in them grew elsewhere. That is to say they did not grow where the forests are stacked on top of each other, but were transported there from other areas due to a catastrophic event. In many different cases trees will be passing through the layer above them

(Poly-Strata) this indicates that they were transported there. If the tops of trees had been penetrating into the forest above them, the tops of those trees would be subject to infestation and rotting, If these were successive forests that grew in place, the tops of any tree stumps protruding into the next growing forest would be subject to infestation by insects, rotting, and decay, yet the petrified wood tissue in these tree stumps looks as fresh as the wood tissue in living trees. This is the first way we can tell that these forests did not grow successively on top of each other. The next issue with these forest all growing in the area we find them over long periods of time comes from the variety of species of plants and trees that we find, The most abundant of the fossilized tree stumps are Sequoia (redwoods), with pines being second in abundance. From identifications of the fossil wood, pollen, leaves, and needles, the number of plant species represented in these Yellow-stone petrified forests is over 200. This represents a diverse grouping of species including exotic genera such as cinnamon, breadfruit, katsura, and Chinquapin that presently restricted to southeastern Asia. We would not expect such an ecological diversity if the trees represent a forest in the position of growth. These species range from temperate (pine, redwoods, willows) to tropical and exotic (figs, laurels, breadfruit), and from semi-desert to rainforest types. (Dr. Andrew A. Snelling, Earths Catastrophic Past, Volume 2 Page: 954) The diversity of these forests shows the trees had to be transported from many different areas around the world. There is no way to get exotic, temperature, and tropical trees and plants to grow in the same forest. If these petrified forests grew and were buried where we find them, we would expect to find certain fossils and traces of animals that would have lived in the forest. If a volcano buried these forests many of the animals would not have been able to escape and should be fossilized or left traces that they were there. Animals like snails, amphibians, reptiles, insects, spiders, and worms would not be able to escape the rapid burial of a volcano. The problem is we dont find any traces of these animals or fossils of them! Now if the forests were transported to where they are, and the sedimentary layers were laid down by water rapidly, this can all be explained. Another problem with the scenario of these forests growing where they are found is something called soil horizons. The soil in the Yellow Stone national park petrified forest shows no detectable amounts of lay in them, this means the soil layers do not represent newly formed soil in a forest, but instead were laid down by some other methods (like water.) The absence of clay shows there was no

significant passage of time between the different soil layers in this forest. This proves that these forests did not grow where we find them, and had to be transported to their present location by some means. But how could this occur? Lets look at a modern day example. Mount St. Helens has become a very popular example of how catastrophic conditions can create many of the geological features we see around the world, including these petrified forests. The one thing we do know is these forests could not have grown where we find them today, all the evidence says they originated somewhere else. How could they be transported? A flood (water) would be the only possible way. When Mount St. Helens erupted in May of 1980, it blew millions of trees off the mountain, many of those trees ended up in a lake nearby the volcano (Spirit Lake.) There is a lot to talk about when it comes to geology and Mt. St. Helens, but I am going to leave the majority of that discussion for a later chapter. I want to talk about what happened to the trees in the Lake though. Thousands of trees formed a log-mat on Spirit Lake that would move around and completely cover different parts of the lake at different times. After a while these trees started to sink down to the bottom of the lake, get stuck in the mud, and petrify. Some of the trees sink down a are in the vertical position, while some are in the horizontal position. Sound familiar? This is very similar to what we observe in the petrified forests in Yellow Stone and other places. During the worldwide flood everything would be under water! And thousands of volcanoes (much large than Mt. St. Helens) would erupt. This would cause billions of trees to float around in log mats during the flood, these trees would be able to float and travel great distances, explaining the vast variety and diversity of species observed. Volcanic layers would be provided from the thousands of volcanoes erupting all over the world creating volcanic mudflows. There would be no soil horizons if they formed by a flood, because the soil layers would all be laid down rapidly by water. All that we observe in these petrified forests can be explained by a worldwide flood.

Tree ring dating The next topic on our list to discuss is that of Dendrochronology. Dendrochronology is a fancy scientific word for tree rings dating. Im sure we were all told when we were kids, that if you count the rings on a tree you can tell how old the tree is. If there are five rings, then you assume the tree is five years old, and if there are 30 rings you know the tree is 30 years old. This is true for a lot of different trees, the tree in your backyard is probably as old as the number of rings that it has, however there are some instances when it can be inaccurate and not knowing that has caused many people to doubt the Biblical timeframe given in the Bible. According to secular scientists, the oldest tree alive in the world today is dated (by counting tree rings) at 4300 years old. Interested to note, that would mean it started growing right after the Bible says the flood happened, which is an interesting coincidence. Before we go into the issue Dendrochronology presents to a Biblical time-frame, we are going to look at an issue that it presents to those who believe the earth is millions of years old. We have for many organisms something called an upper-limit on their age, this is the maximum age that organism can get before it will die. It does not mean that they will all get to that point, most of them do not, but it provides an upper age of the organism weather is be a plant or animal. The oldest trees in the world are the Bristol Cone Pines (BCP) and are located in the white mountains of California. The oldest tree (by counting rings) as I said earlier is dated around 4300 years old, and it is called the Methuselah tree. The problem is these trees have not been given an upper limit on their age and they should be able to survive for tens of thousands of years. The question then is, why do we not have any trees with more rings? 4300 is the upper limit on the age of this tree, because the trees typically produce at least one ring a year. Why is there not a tree 10-20 thousand years old? They should be able to survive that long. This is strong evidence that at some point a few thousand years ago, all the BCPs in the world got destroyed, and the one we have now have only been growing since then. This is exactly what you get in a Biblical history, the flood would destroy all the trees and plants on the earth, and after the flood these trees would start to grow again and should not be older than about 4400 years. However, as I said earlier the amount of rings do not always tell us the age of a tree, although they typically produce one ring a year, they can produce more if needed.

If you cut open one of these trees you will find that there are thousands of rings, and you will also find that the rings have different patterns. These patterns correspond to the climate and weather they are experiencing at the time. Because you can see different patterns inside the rings of trees, some people have tried to extrapolate tree rings dating to dead trees that are found in the same area. If that doesnt make sense dont worry, Ill explain it. If you find a distinct pattern in the rings of a tree, you can then go to a dead tree and find that same pattern in its rings. If you look at the oldest point on a living tree, and then you find that same pattern in a dead tree (that died thousands of years ago) you can then move your time frame even further backwards, because you can identify when the dead tree died and how many rings it had before the living tree started to grow. If a living tree has 2000 rings, and you find that there is a distinct ring pattern between rings 30-40 (early in the trees life) and you then look at a dead tree and find that same distinct pattern, but instead of being between rings 30 and 40, that pattern appears between rings 1030 and 1040, that means the dead tree is 1000 years older than the living tree, and you can then go even further back in history with the oldest of these trees. Some have claimed that you can use tree ring dating and go back 9-10,000 years, which would disprove the Biblical timeframe if it were true. Have these trees really been growing for 9-10,000 years? Or is there another explanation to these observations? Lets look at what science has to say. A very important factor in explaining this is the climate that these trees which they are dating grow in. The White Mountains of California are some of the worst conditions for plant life on the planet, Conditions are so bad that few other plants can survive: short cool summers with a growing season thought to be only several weeks long; desert-like aridity, many trees grow out of little more than cracks in dolomitic rocks. Strong winds coupled with air that in the summer is said to be the

driest on earth. (Mark Matthews, http://creation.com/images/pdfs/tj/j20_3/j20_3_95-103.pdf) Some say these mountains have the worst conditions on earth for plant life, but despite these conditions this is where to BCPs are found. Keep these conditions in mind because they will play an important role later on.

The first issue with extending tree ring dating back to dead trees has to do with the proposed age of these dead trees. In all BCPs with over 1,500 rings something called stripe growth takes place. In stripe growth trees, most of the tree has died, but there remains a thin strip of living bark running up the side of the tree that provides water and nutrition for the top of the tree which is still living. The dead portions of these trees have been rotted down to the pith (center) after 1-2000 years of erosion. The question then is this, how can dead wood lay on the ground for up to 7,000 years while the dead wood in stripe growth trees disintegrates entirely in a fraction of that time? Perhaps the wood on the ground is not as old as they think it is. There is no way this dead wood can lie on the ground for 7,000 years and not rot/decay away. After 1-2000 years it should be completely disintegrated, just like the wood in stripe growth trees. But in case you are not convinced that the wood could not have been laying there for 7,000 years without decaying away, there is yet another problem, The claim that wood can lay on the ground undecayed for 7,000 years is even more fantastic when one considers the rate at which the mountains that these trees are growing on are eroding away. LaMarche has found an erosion rate of about 1 foot per 1,000 years in the White Mountains in general and a higher rate in the areas where the oldest trees grow. How is it possible that seven feet of dolomitic surface, can erode away over the course of 7,000 years, while dead wood could remain essentially in place on the surface of the ground over that same period? Can the dead wood really be that much more resistant to destruction than the rocks are? (Mark Matthews, http://creation.com/images/pdfs/tj/j20_3/j20_3_95-103.pdf) There is no way that this wood can lay on the ground for anywhere near 7,000 years without eroding away.

The reason these trees have so many rings has to do with the climate that they live in. In the areas where growing conditions are the best, the trees tend to have only hundreds (not thousands) of rings. It is in the areas with the worst conditions and the least amount of moisture where these old trees are found. Young trees, and trees that are in the areas with more moisture tend to grow one ring per year, because the young trees do not need as much water as the older larger trees. The trees that are large and live in the driest parts of the White Mountains have to grow multiple rings per year in order to conserve water. Growing multiple tree rings in a year is a water conservation method, and the older BCPs in the very dry conditions have to do this in order to survive. Some scientists will claim that they have watched new trees grow and after several years they cut them down and count the rings to see if they grew one per year, and every time they have done that the trees had only grown one ring per year. Remember what I said earlier? Smaller (younger) trees do not have to grow multiple rings, because they do not need as much water as the larger trees (which do grow multiple rings.) Varves and the Green River formation The Green River Formation of Wyoming, USA, is often referred to as irrefutable evidence that the earth is millions of years old. The Green River Formation is a dried up ancient lake that has several million thin layers of shale, it is assumed that each of these layers represents a year of the lakes history, the coarser (Rough or loose in texture) layers would form in the summer and the finer layers would be formed in the winter. A pair of these two layers is called a varve, and they are assumed to form annually (like tree rings.) It isnt a big surprise then that many people assume this proves the earth is millions of years old, after all, if there are millions of varves that each take a year to form, the lake (and earth) must be millions of years old. There are however, some assumptions in this explanation of the Green River Formation (GRF), there is ample evidence that the formation had to form very quickly, and that these annual layers actually formed extremely rapidly.

The first issue we are going to be addressing is the idea that these varves (layers) form annually. There have been many experiments and observations that show that varves can form extremely quickly, including many local floods that have happened. A 12 hour flood in Colorado for example deposited more than 100 layers (varves.) Field observations and laboratory experiments suggest laminae can form in as little as a few minutes, seconds, or almost instantaneously, such as during the June 12, 1980, eruption of Mount St. Helens, when a hurricanevelocity, surging-flow of volcanic ash accumulated a 24 foot thickness of finely laminated ash. (Dr. Andrew A. Snelling, Earths Catastrophic past Volume 2 Page: 948) Mt. St. Helens has provided great evidence for the rapid formation of these types of layers. The flood would have many of the same conditions that were present at the eruption of Mt. St. Helens, there would be rapidly moving liquid which is a key factor in the rapid formation of these varves. It is not correct to say that these are annual varves, they have been observed to form much quicker, especially under the conditions that would be present during a worldwide flood. Inside the Green River Formation there are two volcanic ash layers. According to secular scientists these ash layers were laid down separately, with 12000 years separating them. If a volcano erupted near this lake the ash layer would cover the entire lake at the same time, and after that volcanic layer has been laid down the varves would begin to form on top of it. Because the entire Green River Formation is one lake the number of varves (layers) between the two different ash layers should be exactly the same, because the same number of varves would form on all parts of the ancient lake. It turns out that at one part of the formation there are 1160 varves between the two volcanic ash layers, but in another part of the formation there are 1568 layers separating the volcanic layers. This shows that the varves are not forming annually because the number of varves between the volcanic layers would have to be identical.

The next issue with the Green River Formation simply being ancient lake comes from the variety of fossils found there. the inventory of fossils includes amphibians, turtles, lizards, snakes, crocodilians, birds, bats and many mammals, sponge spicules, worm trails, snails, clams, spiders, ticks, mites, clam, shrimp, crustaceans, crayfish, prawns, many varieties of insects

including beetles, flies, mosquitoes, wasps and moths, as well as many varieties of plants, including ferns, sycamore, maple, oak, pines, and even well preserved flowers. Among the bird fossils are enormous concentrations of an extinct shore bird. (Dr. Andrew A. Snelling, Earths Catastrophic past Volume 2 Page: 951) The extreme variety of species shows that this cannot be an ordinary ancient lake, there has to be a way all these creatures from many different types of habitats ended up being buried and fossilized together. The explanation given by naturalistic scientists of an ancient lake does no satisfy the issue, only a worldwide flood can explain observation. In a worldwide flood dead creatures could float far distances before being buried, and you would have a mixing of multiple habitats in one area. The most compelling proof that the Green River Formation had to form quickly is the well preserved fossils that are found there. Why is it important that these fossils are preserved? In order to preserve fossils to the extent that you find in the Green River Formation you must bury them rapidly or they will decay away and fall apart. Scientists have done experiments where they put dead fish carcasses at the bottom of lakes to see how long it take for them to decay, they found that after six and a half days all the flesh decays away and bones start to disconnect. Well preserved fish fossils prove that these different varves cannot be annual; the fish would have to lay on the ground un-decayed for hundreds of years if they were annual, which has been demonstrated to be impossible. Birds have hollow bones that tend not to be well preserved in the fossil record, so how then did these birds lay dead on the bottom of a lake protected from scavenging and decay for thousands of years, until a sufficient number of very thin annual varve layers had build up to bury them? (Dr. Andrew A. Snelling, Earths Catastrophic past Volume 2 Page: 951) Birds are extremely hard to fossilize under any conditions, and the fact that we have well preserved bird fossils in the Green River Formation is irrefutable evidence that these varves had to form extremely quickly. Incase the well preserved fossils are not enough proof of rapid formation, there have been fossils found in the Green River Formation of one fish eating another fish. This is undeniable proof that these fossils had to formed extremely rapidly. All the evidence supports

the notion that the Green River Formation was formed rapidly. Many times when something is used to prove the earth is millions of years old, it turns out verifying something the Bible says. The Green River Formation shows evidence of rapid burial, which can only be explained by a flood. The formation also contains species from dozens of environments, which can only be explained if there is a worldwide flood to move them around. In the next chapter we will continue our study on the topic of Geology and see how the Bible accurately explains all observations that have been made in the field. Many times secular scientists and non believers forget (or never knew) the Bible teaches a world-wide flood which explains the geologic features we see today. When it comes to geology and the Bible, the answer usually involves the flood. After all, the Bible says the mountains and valleys and different landscapes of this world were formed by the flood (Psalms chapter 104.) Before we end this chapter I do want to talk about one more thing. While it is interesting to study science and how the flood can account for all the different geological features in the world, we need to keep in mind the reason God sent the flood in the first place. And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And it repented the LORD that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart. And the LORD said, I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth; both man, and beast, and the creeping thing, and the fowls of the air; for it repenteth me that I have made them. But Noah found grace in the eyes of the LORD. Genesis 6:5-8. God sent the flood to destroy mankind and all land animals from the face of the earth. This means God has the power to judge his creation, and God has told us that there will be another judgment in the future (by fire.) However, God provides a way out of the judgment, anyone in the world could have repented and boarded the Ark with Noah, but they chose not to. And anyone has the option to trust Christ as their Lord and savior, which is the ark of the coming judgment, but many individuals choose to reject that opportunity.

Chapter 3: Evidence of an old earth? (II) The Coconino Sandstone In this chapter we will continue our discussion in the field of geology, looking at different features around the world that naturalistic scientists claim take millions of years to form. The first feature on our list to address is the Coconino Sandstone. The sandstone is estimated to cover an area of about 200,000 square miles, with an average thickness of 315 feet. Uniformitarianistic geologists interpret this sandstone as being an ancient desert which accumulated over thousands of years. This presents a problem to a Biblical history, because according to the Bible the flood formed the different geological layers, which would include the Coconino Sandstone. If the Bible is true the Coconino Sandstone cannot be an ancient desert that formed over thousands of years, it had to be formed by the flood. A mountain of geological evidence has built up supporting the theory that the Coconino Sandstone was formed underwater, during a huge flood. A study was done that compared the grain sizes of the sand found in the Coconino Sandstone to the grain sizes found in modern day deserts, the study showed that the grain sizes do not match. The observed grain sizes match more closely to those of underwater sand wave, which would be generated in a massive flood. It is also interesting to note that the layer below, and the layer above the Coconino Sandstone both were deposited by water or formed in water, Above the Coconino Sandstone is the Toroweap Formation and below is the Hermit Formation, both of which geologists agree are made up of sediments that were either deposited by and/or in water. (Dr. Andrew A. Snelling, http://creation.com/startlingevidence-for-noahs-flood) It would make sense that all these layers were formed as a result of a worldwide flood. However, the largest indicator that this sandstone was formed underwater comes from the type of animal footprints that are found inside of the sandstone. There are quite a large number of fossilized footprints inside the Coconino Sandstone, many times they are found in sequences called trackways, and these trackways were made by four footed vertebrates (animals) moving across the

original sand surface. The footprint trackways in the Coconino Sandstone have recently been re-examined in the light of experimental studies by Dr Leonard Brand of Loma Linda University in California. His research program involved careful surveying and detailed measurements of 82 fossilized vertebrate trackways discovered in the Coconino Sandstone along the Hermit Trail in Grand Canyon. He then observed and measured 236 experimental trackways made by living amphibians and reptiles in experimental chambers. Putting together all of his observations, Dr Brand thus came to the conclusion that the configurations and characteristics of the animals trackways made on the submerged sand surfaces most closely resembled the fossilized quadruped trackways of the Coconino Sandstone.(Dr. Andrew A. Snelling, http://creation.com/startling-evidencefor-noahs-flood) The best research and experiments conclude that the tracks inside of the Coconino Sandstone were formed by reptiles and amphibians. In case you were not aware, reptiles and amphibians are not found in modern day deserts! There is no way they could have survived if this was a dry, hot, windy, desert like many secular scientists claim. Not only do these footprints show this cannot be a modern day type of desert, they also tell a fascinating story about what was going on when they were formed. We are going to piece together a puzzle to show us what was happening when they footprints were formed. The first thing to note is the animals (reptiles/amphibians) were moving up these underwater sand dunes when the tracks were formed. The tracks also show that the animal was trying to move in one direction (up the sand dune) but was being pushed in another direction by water. This cannot happen if these are desert sand dunes, this can only occur if the dunes are underwater. It appears that these amphibian/reptiles were trying to move up the underwater sand dunes to get to the top (because they needed air), as they were doing this the current was pushing them in the opposite direction. Another factor that indicates that water was present is the abrupt stop in the tracks. If the animal making the tracks was in a normal desert, there would be no way to stop your trail unless you didnt move again. However, if you are underwater it is possible that the current swept you off your feet, which seems to be the case with the Coconino footprints. Secular scientists are now starting to realize that the evidence best supports the Coconino Sandstone formed underwater, Dr Brand (Who did the research mentioned) concluded that all his data suggest that the Coconino Sandstone fossil tracks should not be used as evidence for desert wind deposition of dry sand to form the Coconino Sandstone, but rather point

to underwater deposition. (Dr. Andrew A. Snelling, http://creation.com/startling-evidence-for-noahs-flood) It is also possible to determine the depth the water would have to be to form these cross beds. The height of the cross beds imply that the sand waves were around 60 feet high, which means the depth of the water would be around 300 feet! It is extremely hard to explain this depth of water unless there was a worldwide flood to provide it. The Coconino Sandstone did not take thousands of years to form like many secular scientists want you to believe, it formed quickly underwater. This is very compelling evidence that there was a worldwide flood, remember how high the water had to be to form this sandstone? 300 feet! The study of geology continues to verify what the Bible said all along, there was a flood that covered the entire world. Ice core dating There are many places on planet earth where we find giant ice sheets that cover thousands of square miles, Antarctica and Greenland are the two most notable locations. Sometimes people will drill down into these ice sheets and extract ice cores. Ice cores show layers of dark and light coloration, and it is commonly assumed that these layers are annually formed. In this picture the arrows on the left point to the lighter parts of the ice core, it is assumed that these parts represent summer, and the darker parts surrounding them represent winter. If this is the case, we would have an accurate method of determining the age of these different ice sheets. Secular scientists claim that many ice sheets have taken tens of thousands of years to form and some of the larger ones took over one hundred thousand years. If this is correct it would disprove the Biblical timeframe for the age of the earth (and these ice sheets) because the Bible states that the earth is around six thousand years old. We will be covering the topic of ice sheets (and the ice age) in a later chapter in greater depth. In this chapter we will only be addressing the claim that these light/dark layers represent summer/winter (annual layers.) Back during world war two there was a secret US Army air base located in Greenland. On July 15, 1942, six P-38 Lightning fighter planets and two B-17 bombers lifted off the runway and were on their way to join in the war against Hitler. While they were heading over the polar icecap, they ran into a terrible blizzard, at this point they were now flying blind, the storm was extremely bad and they heard that their first

refueling stop, in Iceland, was socked in, after hearing this they were forced to return to their home base to refuel and wait out the storm. It turned out though that their home base was also closed because of the weather, at this point their planes were running critically low on fuel. Once they heard their home base was closed, they knew their only option was to crash land the planes on the ice. They the planes managed to crash land, the planes were slightly damaged, but nothing to extreme, and all the crewmen survived and were rescued by dogsleds soon after. For years after people would recall the legend of the Lost Squadron of 1942. The planes were left there for 38 years. It was not until 1980 that someone had the idea of finding and salvaging the planes. Airplane dealer Patrick Epps told his friend, Richard Taylor, that the planes would still be like new. Originally it was thought that all they would have to do is shovel some snow off of them and put fuel in them and fly them off into the sunset. Finding the planes was a bit of a challenge though, and it took years of searching and quite a handful of cash before they got their first real clue. Using a form of radar with the help of an Iceland geophysicist, they were able to locate eight large shapes beneath the ice in 1988. After they found where the airplanes were located using radar, they started melting their way down into the ice. Many people were surprised as they watch more and more extensions being added to the hose (to remove the melted water) after all most people were only expected to shovel a small amount of snow off the planes in order to reach them, not melt a hole into the ice sheet. When they finally reached the first plane, it was buried under 250 feet of ice! That amount of ice accumulated in about 50 years. This was a huge surprise to scientists who thought the ice sheets formed slowly. As some of the crew was lowered down into the hole, they noticed hundreds of these dark/light layers on the sides of the hole they dug. How could there be hundreds of annual layers if the plane has been there for less than fifty years? It turns out that these annual layers only represent warm/cold weather, not summer/winter. The dark layers form when the weather gets cold, and the light layers form when the weather gets warm. This was a strong indication that these layers do not to tens of thousands of years to form, but instead can form in a matter of years. The plane had to be taken apart down inside the hole, and the different parts lifted out and reassembled, this is a picture of a reassembled plane from the Lost Squadron. The plane was flown

several years later for the first time. The evidence shows that these are not annual layers, only a change in the weather. Coral Reefs The Great Barrier Reef is the longest coral reef in the world. It is located in Australia and extends from Papua New Guinea down Australias east coast for 1,250 miles. However, the Great Barrier Reef is not the thickest reef around, that title belongs to the Enewotok Atoll located in the Marshall Islands. Many scientists have claimed and bought into the idea that this reef has taken one to two hundred thousand years to form to its present size, if this is true the Biblical timeframe for the age of the earth would be dramatically incorrect. When we are measuring the rate at which corals grow we must take into account that measurements made at the surface will show low rates of growth, and coral below 50 meters do not grow. And there are different things that can speed up the growth rate in these reefs, for example, storms can bring coral from other areas and dramatically increase the rate of growth. However, if we just look at the measured rates of growth we see that there is no problem forming the Enewetok Atoll in a Biblical timeframe, One critic of the biblical model of earth history claimed that the Enewetok Reed would have to have grown at a rate of at least 140 millimeters per year to have formed in less than 10,000 years since the Flood, and states: Such rates have been shown to be quite impossible. However, this claim is ignorant of earlier published, well-documented, direct measurements of reef growth rates of 280414 millimeters per year, which are far more accurate than many published estimates based on radiocarbon dating for coral growth rings. (Dr. Andrew A. Snelling, Earths Catastrophic past Volume 2 Page: 931-932) Secular scientists use carbon dating in their methods for determining the speed at which the reefs grow, as we saw in an earlier chapter carbon dating is not a trustworthy resource. When you take direct measurements of the growth rate of coral reefs, you find that even the thickest of them (the Enewetok Atoll) can be explain in a Biblical timeframe since the flood. In other instances Coral reefs measured growth rates at 120-432 millimeters per year, at this rate the Enewetok Atoll could form in a mere 3,400 years, which fits nicely into a Biblical framework. Another interesting thing about the Enewetok reed is that it had to start growing when the water in that area was shallower than it is today, which means the ocean levels had to be lower at some point in the past.

The Biblical model for the ice age can account for these lower ocean levels, and we will be discussing the ice age in great detail in a later chapter. Chalk beds Have you ever gone outside and drawn something on your driveway using chalk? Have you ever had a chalk board in a class room and wondered where the chalk comes from? Chalk is classified as a sedimentary rock, it is found in several places around the earth in huge quantities. This picture shows the chalk cliffs of Dover, which is probably the most famous chalk formation in the world. According to secular scientists, chalk formed during the cretaceous age which started 145 million years ago and lasted until 65 million years ago. The word Cretaceous is derived from the Latin "creta" which means chalk, so this was the age of chalk. You never knew there was so much history behind that chalk board did you? Another thing that might surprise you is what chalk is made of on a microscopic level. Coccolithophores (also called coccolithophorids) are single-celled algae, they are distinguished by special calcium carbonate plates (or scales) of uncertain function called coccoliths, when Coccolithophores die their plates (or scales) fall to the bottom of the ocean and start to accumulate there. These coccoliths (scales) of dead algae are what make up chalk beds and the chalk that you have used on chalk boards. These microscopic creatures die and accumulate at a rather slow rate today, which has caused many people to doubt the earth is young like the Bible says. After all, some of these chalk beds are hundreds of feet thick, which would take far longer to accumulate then the Biblical timeframe permits. Before we go into great detail on the rate of formation, there are some key features in these chalk formations that indicate that they formed rapidly. The most notable feature that shows that these chalk beds had to form quickly is the level of purity found in these chalk beds. Geologist Dr. Andrew Snellings said: In spite of well-argued claims that the deposition and formation of chalk beds required a longer period than a few weeks towards the end of the Flood year, it is the extreme purity of the chalk beds that argues for their rapid deposition and formation. (Dr. Andrew A.

In order to retain the level of purity found in these chalk beds, they have to be formed rapidly. When we look at modern day calcareous oozes (Chalk beds that are forming) we find that they have other materials mixed into them and are not pure, in order to avoid this chalk beds that we see around the world (like the chalk cliffs of Dover) would have to form rapidly.
Snelling, Earths Catastrophic past Volume 2 Page: 828)

The question remains, is it possible to grow these chalk beds to their present size in a Biblical timeframe for the earth? Coccolithophores are among the fastest growing algae, and sometimes they can multiple at a rate of 2.25 divisions per day. At this rate of division the number can grow extremely rapidly! When you add the average growth rate of the coccoliths, At this rate it is possible to produce an average 305 feet thickness of coccoliths as calcareous ooze on the ocean flood in less than 200 years. If we assume that all limestone layers in the upper Cretaceous are chalk (which is not true), then only 4.1 percent of the earths surface would be required to be coccoliths producing seas to account for all the chalk we find in the world today, and it would only take 1600 years to form. This is a fascinating picture take from a satellite that shows a modern day Coccolithophore bloom. The aqua portion of the water in the bottom potion of the picture is caused by large amounts of these micro algae in the water, the light reflects off of them and makes the water appear this way. In order to form the chalk beds in a Biblical timeframe, we not only have to show that biological reproduction is not a limiting factor, but we also must show that the conditions required for massive reproduction (blooms) were present during and directly following the flood. Dr. Snellings show in his book that all necessary conditions would be present: Quite clearly, all of these necessary conditions for explosive blooming of Coccolithophores would have been present during the cataclysmic global upheavals during the Flood. Torrential rain. Sea turbulence, decaying fish and other organic matter and the violent volcanic eruptions, on the ocean floors, associated with the Fountains of the great deep, and on land, both occurrences cause stream, carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, iron, and other elements to be spewed into the ocean waters and atmosphere, would have resulted in explosive blooms of Coccolithophores on a large and repetitive scale in the oceans. (Dr. Andrew A. Snelling, Earths Catastrophic past Volume 2 Page: 928) All of these factors provide the needed conditions for massive reproduction to take place which would cause chalk beds to form rapidly.

Diatom beds Diatom beds are similar to chalk beds because they are made from microscopic organisms (algae) that accumulated at the bottom of the ocean. Diatoms look like crystals under the microscope (picture) and are sold commercially and have many different uses. The crystal part that you see in these photos is a unique cell wall for the organism made of silica, and is called the Frustule. Diatomaceous earth is a powdery product made from diatoms that can be used for medical purposes. It is dangerous to breath is diatomaceous earth though because the individual Frustules are sharp and cut up your lungs. If you are taking it into your body you would want to drink it or eat it with something else. According to secular scientists, diatomaceous beds formed during the Jurassic period around 199-145 million years ago (before chalk beds formed.) You will notice that many of the same evidence that proved chalk beds had to form quickly is also used to prove diatom beds had to form quickly. Like Coccolithophores, diatom blooms also cause the water to turn an aqua color. Diatoms accumulate at the bottom of the ocean at a very slow rate today, and if you were to assume this rate in the past for the formation of large diatom beds, they would take millions of years to form. However, there is an enormous amount of evidence that diatom beds formed rapid, just like the Bible predicts they would. The first feature of these diatom beds that shows they formed quickly is the purity of the diatomaceous earth. If these diatoms (like chalk) had taken millions of years to form from accumulation at the bottom of the ocean, there would be other material mixed in. If these beds were not exceedingly pure, there wouldnt be much commercial interest in diatomaceous earth. As I mentioned a moment ago, many of the arguments used to show chalk beds can form quickly are also used to show diatom beds can form quickly. Similar arguments apply to the vast thick and pure diatomite beds in the geologic record. (Same arguments are for chalk beds) The scale and purity of these beds necessitates diatom accumulation rates significantly higher than in todays oceans, with abundant explosive diatom blooms resulting from abundant food supplies and favorable conditions for reproduction, combined with ocean currents rapidly accumulating and then depositing them on the ocean flood. The presence of volcanic ash in some of these diatomite beds is also highly significant. Such explosive volcanic activity would have helped provide nutrients for the abundant explosive diatom blooms, and the ash

would have added to the density currents that rapidly swept the diatom skeletons to the ocean floor. (Dr. Andrew A. Snelling, Earths Catastrophic past Volume 2 Page: 929) Biological reproductively is not a limiting factor with diatoms, and the evidence shows that they would have the nutrition necessary to multiple extremely rapidly. The flood can accurately account for the diatom beds that we see around the world. Were not done talking about diatom beds though, we are just getting to the good part! Many times inside of these diatom beds you find fossils of animals that have been well preserved, which shows they had to be buried quickly, not over millions of years. Fossilized fish, turtles, seals, porpoises, penguins, and even ground sloths have been found inside of diatom beds! It is impossible that these different animals could die and lay on the bottom of the ocean for millions of years while the diatoms slowly accumulated around them and buried them. But it gets worse for secular scientists, one of the most common fossils found in the diatom beds those of baleen whales! And we are not talking about one or two fossils we are talking hundreds of them. In the Peruvian Pisco formation, 346 fossilized baleen whales ranging from 16-42 feet in size! Those are some huge fossils. The largest fossil whale contained within diatom beds was found in the Monterey Formation of California, one fossil whale found there was estimated to be 82 feet long! This is impossible to explain if these diatom beds formed slowly over millions of years, whales cannot survive on the bottom of the ocean for that long.

Stalagmites, stalactites, and cave formation If you were to visit a natural limestone cave you would probably notice different formations hanging from the roof and growing up from the ground, these are stalactites and stalagmites. Stalactite - A stalactite is a type of speleothem that hangs from the ceiling of limestone caves. Stalagmite - A stalagmite is a type of speleothem that rises from the floor of a limestone cave

The tour guide inside of these caves is probably going to use the phrase millions of years quite a few times if you take the tour. According to secular scientists, these stalactites and stalagmites took millions of years to form inside these caves. Not only will they claim these speleothem (stalagmites and stalactites) took millions of years to form, they will also insist that the cave itself took millions of years to form. Is it possible to explain large cave formations and speleothems inside of these caves within a Biblical framework? All cave formations would have to be post-flood, because any caves before the flood would be easily destroyed by the catastrophe. We will first address the formation of the caves themselves, and then look at the features within the caves. Limestone caves are assumed to have formed by the long gradual process of acidic water dissolving away limestone. In order to speed up this process and form these caves quickly, we need large amounts of acidic fluids to dissolve away this limestone. The layers of limestone that we see around the world would have been laid down by the flood, and rapid cave formation would occur during the flood and immediately follow it. During the flood large amounts of magma would be released from volcanic activity due to mass plate tectonics, this magma would cause large amounts of hydrothermal fluids to form during the flood. Hydrothermal fluids are acidic due to dissolved sulfur from the magma. These large amounts of acidic fluids would provide the necessary conditions for rapid cave formation during the flood. Ground water at the earth surface following the flood would also be highly acidic due to decaying organic matter which would assist in the rapid formation of limestone caves around the world. The process of forming the worlds cave systems would have commenced during the flood catastrophe itself, reaching its climax at the close of the flood and in the subsequent immediate post flood period, as volcanic, magmatic and tectonic activity waned, geologic conditions began to re-stabilize and the catastrophic process rates of the Flood year waned. Continued draining of water from sediments in the immediate post-Flood period would have ensured that horizontal groundwater flows would have been significant. With decaying of organic matter at the earths surface, these ground waters would have been highly acidic, and these horizontal flows of highly acidic ground waters would have further enhanced the dissolution of limestone beds just below the water table, to further enlarge the developed cave systems. (Dr. Andrew A. Snelling, Earths Catastrophic past Volume 2 Page: 978) The Bible can accurately explain the cave formations we see around the world.

We are now going to discuss the formations of stalactites and stalagmites inside of these limestone caves. This picture shows a man made cave that was dug out for mining purposes many years ago, if scientists didnt know better they would assume these speleothems took millions of years to form, when they really formed in the recent past. Most of the caves that we see around the world are no longer growing and forming speleothems within them, all we see is speleothems that were formed at some unknown point in the past. There are many modern day examples of stalactites rapidly forming under bridges and in tunnels. Experiments have been done to simulate stalactite and stalagmite growth in controlled laboratories. These experiments were designed to determine the effect that acidity, salinity, temperature, humidity, and other factors have on their growth rate. These experiments show that the rapid formation of these geologic features is possible in natural cave environments. We are going to be looking at more examples of rapid formation of speleothems.

In October 1953, National Geographic published this photo (top picture) showing a bat that had fallen onto a stalagmite in Carlsbad Caverns, New Mexico. The picture shows that the bat was cemented onto the stalagmite. However, the bat is well preserved, and if this stalagmite had taken years to form the bat would have decomposed. This bottom picture shows a stalagmite (on the right) that is assumed to take thousands of years to form, on the left side of the photo is a water bottle that someone put beside the stalagmite. In a small amount of time it became completely covered with calcium carbonate (which is what makes up these speleothems.) Speleothems are formed from running water that has dissolves calcium carbonate. The rate at which these stalactites and stalagmites grow depends on the amount of running water (which contains dissolved calcium carbonate.) If you have large amounts of running water rapid formation of speleothems can occur. All necessary conditions for the rapid formation of caves and speleothems would have been present during, and directly following the worldwide flood.

Fossil fuels Evolutionist claim that fossil fuels (such as oil and coal) formed over a long period of time millions of years ago. It is assumed that the process of forming these different products (coal/oil) takes millions of years of pressure and heat. According to most geologists, oil is formed from carbon based organisms that have been heated under pressure for long periods of time (millions of years.) Coal is assumed to have formed from ancient forests and plant life that was buried under large amounts of pressure. All the coal beds in the world are assumed to have formed sometime between 360 and 286 million years ago, and the ages for oil vary considerably, but are all assumed to be millions of years old. There has been much fuss today in the media about pollution caused from the burning of fossil fuels. Many people claim that using these resources to produce energy is destroying our environment and causing global warming because the burning of these products release carbon dioxide (which is a greenhouse gas) into the atmosphere. It is true that when we originally started using fossil fuels to produce energy certain harmful pollutants were being emitted into the environment. Understand that when I say pollutants I am not referring to carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, I am referring to actual pollutants that are harmful to human health like mercury and lead. However, standards have since been put in place to control the emission of pollutants such as mercury and lead and coal burning factories and automobile manufacturers are required to meet these standards. The reason I do not classify carbon dioxide as a pollutant is twofold, first off it is not harmful to humans, and we breathe carbon dioxide in and out with every breath we take. Secondly, carbon dioxide produced by mankind is extremely insignificant when compared to the levels of other greenhouse gases in our atmosphere and when compared to naturally produced carbon dioxide. If global warming is happening (which I dont think it is) mankind is an insignificant factor. Youll have to excuse this rabbit trail, I debated environmental policies in my senior year of high school and I couldnt have a discussion on fossil fuels without mentioning the environmental movement. Now that we are finished with that rabbit trail, its time to discuss the formation and age of these natural gases in a Biblical timeframe. Is it true that oil (including natural gas/petroleum) takes millions of years to form? The year I was debating environmental policies I did a huge amount of research into a process called thermal depolymerization (TDP), this process takes organic matter, usually agriculture waste, and turns it into oil in a matter of minutes! So much for the long periods of time needed to form oil, its happening in a matter of minutes in the

laboratory and on an industrial scale. During the flood large amounts of organic carbon based life forms would be have been killed, buried, and turned into oil very quickly. Three different theories have been popular in history to explain the required conditions for coal formation. The first theory suggested that pressure is the most important factor. Another suggests time (millions of years) is the key to coal formation, and the third theory (which is by far the most popular) suggests that temperature is the important factor when it comes to forming coal. Laboratory experiments have confirmed that coal can form quickly under high temperatures. There is evidence that the coal beds around the world did not form from ancient forests that were buried where they grew. All around the world people have found boulders inside of coal, in the Sewell Coal of West Virginia, 40 boulders were collected and the average weight was 12 pounds, the largest one weighing 161 pounds. The problem is these boulders were igneous and metamorphic rocks unlike any other rock outcrops in West Virginia. This suggests that they were moved here at the same time the coal bed was forming. One theory has suggested that during the flood these rocks could be entwined in the roots of trees and transported from a distance to this area, and then got buried inside of this coal bed along with many trees and plants that got turned to coal. This is the only plausible theory right now to explain these boulders. Coal has also been made in the laboratory in a short amount of time showing that long periods of time are not needed. There have been a few instances where people have found manmade objects inside of coal beds, such findings would undermine the entire timeline of evolution and debunk the theory completely. Coal is supposed to have formed hundreds of millions of years before man evolved, if this is true there is no way that manmade objects could be inside of these coal beds, yet they are. The top picture is a pot that was found inside a lump of coal, the pot is obviously designed and manmade. The bottom picture shows a brass/iron bell that was found inside a lump of coal by a ten year old boy (Newton Anderson) in 1944. There have also been multiple reports of a necklace that was found inside a lump of coal many years ago, no one has been able to track it down yet. According to the

Bible coal formed during and following the Genesis flood. This would mean that these objects were made by people before the flood occurred. The Bible mentions a guy named Tubalcain in Genesis 4:22 it says that he was an instructor of every artificer in brass and iron..." which is what this bell is made of. Tubalcain is mentioned in Genesis chapter 4, which would mean he lived before the flood happened (when this bell had to be made.) There are many other instances of manmade objects being found in places they shouldnt be (according to evolution), I only mentioned the ones found in coal beds here. Back in chapter six we talked about radioactive dating and how carbon-14 is found in coal all over the world. The presence of this coal proves that these coal beds cannot be millions of years old. We are going to review what was said in chapter six about this topic real quick. Carbon-14 has a half life of 5730 years which means after 200,000 years of decay it becomes undetectable to our machines. The Institute for Creation Research had multiple samples of coal tests to see if there were detectable amounts of carbon-14 contained within them. The results show that there is still carbon-14 inside of the coal samples, which proves it could not have formed millions of years ago. (More details are in chapter six.) Lithification Another geological process that is typically thought (by secular scientists) to take millions of years to occur is the process of Lithification. Lithification - The conversion of new, unconsolidated sediment into a coherent, solid rock. This involves processes such as cementation, compaction, desiccation, crystallization. It may occur concurrent with, soon after, or long after deposition.
(Bates, R. L., and Jackson, J. A., (eds.), 1980, Glossary of geology (2d): Falls Church, Va.,

Newly deposited sediments get turned into solid rock through different processes that are commonly assumed to take millions of years. Experiments have shown multiple times though that Lithification can occur quickly under the right conditions. Even the American Geological Institute (which we quoted a moment ago) understands that Lithification can happen soon after sediments are deposited. These conditions
American Geological Institute, 749 p.)

needed for rapid Lithification would have been present during the flood catastrophe that the Bible talks about. It has also been shown that Lithification requires a thickness of at least a mile of overlaying sediments to provide the needed pressure to squeeze out the pore water inside of the sediments and cause solidification. Thus, any sedimentary rock now appearing at the earths surface must at some time in its history have had at least a mile of other sediments lying on top of it, which have since been eroded away. Of course, exactly these conditions would have occurred during the global Flood, when enormous thicknesses of sediments were eroded, transported, and deposited on top of one another, the last deposited sediment layers then being subsequently eroded away as the flood waters retreated off todays land surface into the current ocean basins. (Dr. Andrew A. Snelling, Earths Catastrophic past Volume 2 Page: 912) All the needed conditions for rapid Lithification would have been present during the catastrophic worldwide flood. The study of geology shows signs of a worldwide flood over and over again. Many features cannot be explained by the Uniformitarianistic mindset. The fossilized forests of Yellow Stone, the footprints in the Coconino Sandstone, manmade artifacts in coal, well preserved fossils in the Green River formation and chalk beds, baleen whales in diatom beds, petrified trees connecting multiple layers, all of these features show evidence of a catastrophic worldwide flood.

Chapter 4: The earth is young (pt-1) Introduction Now that we have looked at the different evidence for an old earth and shown how they can fit into a Biblical framework, I want to spend the next two chapters looking at evidence for a young earth and solar system. In this chapter we will be covering the different evidences for a young earth and solar system that are from outside of our planet (mainly in our solar system), and in the next chapter we will be covering evidences from inside planet earth itself. Short period comets The first evidence that our solar system is young comes from comets. There are two different types of comets; there are short period comets and long period comets. Short period comets: Comets that have an orbiting period less than 200 years Long period comets: Comets that have an orbiting period greater than 200 years Comets have a solid center (nucleus) that is made out of ice. Short period comets orbit around the sun at least once every two hundred years, when it gets into the inner solar system and near the sun it starts to lose some of its mass (due to melting and solar winds.) How does this prove that the solar system is young? Well you cant keep on loosing and loosing, eventually its gone. Scientists have calculated the age of short period comets to be somewhere in the neighborhood (although it varies a bit) around ten thousand years. That means within ten thousand years of orbiting the sun, a short period comet will be melted and blown apart. Problem is: we still have short period comets and according to the nebular theory and the Big Bang comets formed 4.5 billion years ago when our solar system did, so why do we still have short period comets? We should not if the solar system was formed 4.5 billion years ago.

Now of course people who want to believe that the universe and our solar system are old have come up with two theories to try to explain the short period comets. The first of these theories is the Kuiper Belt. Kuiper Belt - A chain of celestial bodies that orbit the sun between the planets of Neptune and Pluto The Kuiper Belt is the first theory to try to explain away these short period comets that we still see. Proponents of the Kuiper Belt say that there is a chain of short period comets right between the orbit of Neptune and Pluto, and every now and then one of these comets will either be bumped out of its orbit by another comet, or gravity from one of the planets will cause it to come out of its orbit and start flying towards the sun (and starting a new orbit like short period comets do.) In order for the Kuiper Belt to solve the problem comets present to the idea of an old solar system, there would have to be billions of comets in the Kuiper Belt, the problem is scientists have not even found a thousand of these icy asteroid-sized bodies in the Kuiper Belt. So in order for the Kuiper Belt to be enough to supply our solar system for the needed 4.5 billion years its supply of comets must be continually replenished by the Oort cloud (which we will talk about in a moment.) Another problem that has presented itself for those who believe in an old solar system is all the objects that we have discovered in the Kuiper Belt so far do not solve the problem for them, because these objects typically have a diameter of more than one hundred kilometers, whereas your standard comet nucleus is usually around ten kilometers. The objects found in the Kuiper Belt do not even classify as comets, and cannot be the answer. Furthermore, the few objects that we have observed using near-infrared of the Kuiper Belt, object Quaoar and Charon, both indicate that they contain crystalline water ice and ammonia hydrates, this watery material cannot be much older than ten million years, which is far shorter then what the Nebular theory would need. The Kuiper Belt is a no-go for providing the needed comets to our solar system; the best answer is that the solar system is under ten thousand years old just like the Bible has been telling us all along. The other way that people will try to solve this problem is the Oort cloud. The Oort cloud is supposed to be fifty thousand AU (Astronomical unites) away from the sun (one AU = 93 million miles.) If the solar system formed as the nebular theory

proposes, a lot of debris would be expelled from the solar system by gravity; the nebular theory says that this debris became the Oort cloud. The Oort cloud was supposed to contain the mass of about forty earths in the form of comets, however when the debris was being expelled from the solar system back during the supposed formation, the different comets would have collided into eachother and destroyed each other to the point where the Oort cloud would only end up with one mass of earth worth of debris, not forty. But the largest and most pressing issue with the Oort cloud has to be that there is no observational evidence for its existence. Take this quote from Carl Sagan, an evolutionist and Big Bang astronomer: Many scientific papers are written each year about the Oort Cloud, its properties, its origin, its evolution. Yet there is not yet a shred of direct observational evidence for its existence. (Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan, Comets, p. 201.) Carl Sagan is one of the most well known Big Bang astronomers, and even he knows there is no evidence for the Oort cloud. Here is a quote from astronomer Dr. Danny Faulkner that sums up the theory of the Oort cloud: This raises a very important question as to the scientific status of the Oort cloud. Can something that cannot be observed, even indirectly as in the case of subatomic phenomenon, be classed as scientific? While the Oort cloud is often referred to as a theory, given the usual definition of a theory and the impossibility of observation, can the Oort cloud be termed a theory? Indeed, given that it is doubtful that this idea can ever be tested, one has to question whether the Oort cloud is even a hypothesis. (http://www.answersingenesis.org/tj /v11/i3/comets.asp) Remember what we said earlier? The Kuiper Belt cannot even be a plausible theory without the Oort cloud to replenish its supply of comets, and the Oort cloud would have nowhere near the amount of Comets needed to do this. There has been no valid theory on replenishing the solar systems supplies of short period comets, and that means the scientific evidence points towards a young solar system. Super Nova remnants In chapter two we looked at some different kinds of stars, one of which was a nova, just to recap novas explode potions of themselves repeatedly and form rings around their planets of the debris, super novas on the other hand blow themselves up entirely, creating what is called a SNR (Super nova remnant.)

SNRs come in different stages, the higher the stage the further along the SNR is (in terms of how far it has expanded), and when you get to stage three you should have a very widely expanded SNR. SNRs have been calculated to be able to expand for hundreds of thousands of years, and the remnants should be able to be seen for much longer than that. Super Nova remnant The remains of a star that has completely blown itself up According to current astronomical observations, galaxies like the one that we live in should experience about one supernova every twenty-five years, if our solar system were billions of years old like the Big Bang requires, and if SNRs can expand for hundreds of thousands of years, we should see many still expanding. We will take the number two hundred thousand years for the lifespan of the expansion of a SNR (just as an example.) If a supernova happens every twenty-five years we should have somewhere around eight thousand SNRs expanding in our galaxy. But what do we actually see? We see about two hundred to two hundred and fifty SNRs, which is only two and a half percent of what there should be under the Big Bang model. The age for what we see in expanding SNRs comes out to five or six thousand years of supernovas exploding in our solar system. Furthermore we can measure the rate at which SNR expand, all studied SNRs appear to only have been expanding for less than ten thousand years. You would think if our galaxy were billions of years old we would see some more widely expanded stage three supernova remnants. Spiral armed galaxies In our universe we have several different types of galaxies, we have elliptical galaxies, we have spiral galaxies, and we have irregular galaxies (which is a broad category of galaxies.) Our galaxy that we live in (the Milky Way) is a spiral armed galaxy, and contains roughly one hundred billion stars. Galaxies are rotating, and the outer parts rotate more slowly than the inner parts. They commonly show a spiral

structure (like our galaxy), which is supposed to be the result of this rotation, starting from a simple structure. This means though that after the galaxy has rotated a few times, they will wind themselves up and destroy the spiral structure. Both nearby galaxies and galaxies far away show the same type of spiral structure. So how do spiral galaxies indicate age in our universe? Well if you remember a moment ago, the inside of the galaxies are rotating quicker than the outside of the galaxy. This means that the galaxy is slowly winding itself up and will eventually lose its spiral shape. Under the Big Bang model galaxies were supposed to have appeared billions of years ago, yet spiral galaxies wind up in only a few hundred million years, not billions. Our galaxy for example is supposed to be at least ten billion years old, how then is it still spiral in shape? The Big Bang model fails at explaining spiral galaxies, and instead they strongly support a young universe. Jupiter and Saturn energy radiation Just like blue O-type stars are losing energy to quickly to be millions of years old, some planets in our solar system are radiating and loosing energy faster than they are receiving energy from the sun. The giant gas planets of Jupiter and Saturn radiate more energy than they receive from the sun. Jupiter for example radiates almost twice as much energy as it is receiving form the sun, this is evidence that these two planets cannot be billions (or even millions) of years old. The numbers indicate that Jupiter cant be more than one percent the supposed age of the solar system (4.55 billion years.) This has been a known problem for those who believe in an old solar system for a quite a long time, yet no reasonable answer has been presented, and the evidence at this point, again supports a young solar system. Saturns rings The gas planet Saturn has become very popular in our solar system due to the beautiful rings that it has surrounding it. There are quite a few different features of these rings that indicate that they cannot be millions of years old like the Big Bang theory first said they were. Not only have creation scientists said that Saturns rings cannot be old for many years, NASA now also agrees that the rings have to be young.

The first feature of these rings that I was to discuss is their appearance. The rings around Saturn are extremely clean, and the particles making up the rings are likely coated with fine, dust like ice. The problem is micrometeoroids would gradually erode and darken the particles surface if they were truly millions of years old. Even if we assumed that the particles making up these rings started out as pure ice (A generous assumption) the rings still cannot be over one hundred million years old, just a fraction of the age of the solar system. The next indicator of a young age for the rings of Saturn comes from the moons that are with in the rings. Saturn has twenty-four normal moons within its rings, and thirty eight irregular moons (generally smaller.) The problem is if the rings of Saturn were really millions of years old all of these moons should have been flung away by now. Jeff Cuzzi, a planetary scientist at the NASA Ames Research Center, sums up these two problems with Saturn, he said: There are two reasons to believe the rings are young: First, they are bright and shiny like something new. Its no joke. Indeed, after millions of years, the icy rings should have collected so much space dust that they should be charcoal-colored by now. Second, after only a few million years, the little moons embedded among the rings should have flung away. This is a young dynamical system. (The Real Lord of the Rings. Science @ NASA. Posted on nasa.gov February 12, 2002) NASA now agrees, Saturn indicates a young age. However NASA missed one last problem that Saturn presents for a old solar system. The rings of Saturn are slowing moving outwards and spreading away from the planets. The rate at which the rings are spreading away from the planet can be measured quite accurately and does not match the assigned age by the nebular theory. Everything about Saturn and its rings point towards it being young and later in this chapter you will learn about a few of the moons of Saturn that also show that our solar system could not have formed 4.5 billion years ago. Mountains of Venus If I were to ask you what the hottest planet in our solar system is what would you say? Most people think logically that the hottest planet must be the one closest to the sun; however this is not the case in our solar system. The closest planet to the sun it Mercury, but it is only the second hottest planet in our solar system, the hottest planet in our solar system is Venus (the second planet away from the sun.) The reason for Venuss high temperatures is because its atmosphere

is so thick and filled with heat trapping green house gases, while Mercury (which is closer to the sun) has a very thin atmosphere. The temperature of Venuss atmosphere is 860 degrees F, and this raises a few problems. Venus has very high mountains on its surface, one mountain Maat Mons, rises higher than Earths Mount Everest does above sea level, and this mountain (along with other mountains) have steep slopes sometimes. Venuss surface is so hot that it should be extremely weak and tar-like by now due to the melting from the heat. Lead melts at the temperature of 622 Degrees F, and Zinc melts at 787 Degrees F, which are both melting points under the temperature of Venuss atmosphere. If Venus was as old as the Nebular theory says it is (or anywhere near that age) the heat from the atmosphere would have soaked deeply enough into the planet to weaken its subsurface rocks. This means that Venus would not be able to support mountains, and also the mountains would have soaked in the heat long enough that they would slowly melt down and would not be able to maintain their slopes. However this is not what we observe when we look at Venus, what we see is a planets surface that is supporting large mountains, and mountains that have slopes. Both of these factors indicate that Venus and our solar system are young. Nebular theorists also claim that Venuss surface formed from impacts of meteors, a process we covered in an earlier chapter. If this is the case that means the surface of Venus would have been molten (liquid lava) before it formed a solid crust. The problem is, if it was ever molten the high levels of heat in the atmosphere would prevent it from being able to cool to its present stage.

Sun luminosity Like other stars, our sun derives most of its energy from the process of thermonuclear conversion of hydrogen into helium, these two elements make up the vast majority of the suns composition. This process takes place deep with in the core of the sun, and there is strong evidence that the sun gets at-least half of its energy by this method. The surface of the sun is at a temperature of about ten thousand degrees F, which pales in comparison to the temperature of the core where the thermonuclear conversion is taking place. In the core of the sun the

temperatures reach around 24.5 million degrees F. the sun warms our solar system with its luminosity without which everything that is not already frozen (like the planets closer to the sun) would freeze. Due to the thermonuclear conversion process that fuels that sun, the sun should be a source of energy for nearly ten billion years. The nebular theory says that the sun has been around for four and a half billion years (sense the beginning of our solar system), which means that the sun would have exhausted about half of its life. Over the suns lifetime, the process of thermonuclear reactions would gradually change the composition of the core of the Sun and would alter the suns overall physical structure. Because of this process the sun would, over time, grow brighter because the changing composition of the core from hydrogen to helium. Because helium molecules weigh more than hydrogen molecules, this process will compress the suns core and increase the rate of fusion. The 4.6 billion years sense the solar system formed the sun should have increased its solar luminosity (brightness) by nearly 40%. An increase in solar luminosity means an increase in the amount of energy that we receive from the sun, and thus an increase in heat. Evolutionists maintain that life arose on earth about 3.5 billion years ago; sense then the sun would have brightened about 25%. When you do the calculations, a 25% increase in solar luminosity increases the average temperature of the Earth by 18 degrees Celsius (64F), which means if you were to go back to when life was supposed to have arose and started, the temperature of the earth would be sixty four degrees F lower than it is right now. This creates a few problems for life, because the average temperature on earth is going to be -3 Celsius (26 degrees F) which is below freezing. If the earths temperature on average was below freezing that means that much of the earth is going to be covered with ice and the surface of the earth will increase in its reflectivity, reducing the heat absorbed from the Sun. This is just going to drive the temperature even further down than it already is. There is no way that life can arise on an earth that is covered in ice and oceans that are frozen. This problem for the evolutionists has become known as The Faint Sun Paradox. Now there have been three theories presented by evolutionists on how to solve this problem, and we are going to be looking at each of them.

The first theory says that maybe there was an increase level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere when life formed. Anyone who keeps up to date on the environmental movement in America knows that carbon dioxide is a green house gas, and the idea behind an increase in carbon dioxide billions of years ago would be so trap all the heat we receive from the sun in our atmosphere and that would warm it up and solve the problem of earth being frozen. This theory falls apart on a few different points, the first of which is the assumption that the earth had higher levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, there is no evidence for this being the case early on in earths history. Even if this were the case, it would actually support the young age side. If you had the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that they would need to rise the temperature for life to exists, the carbon dioxide in the cold earth and cold atmosphere would have produced carbon dioxide ice clouds high in the atmosphere, these clouds would then reflect the light away from the earth before it even got to the surface, thus locking the earth in a permanent ice age. The second approach that some evolutionists will takes to try to solve this problem is saying that maybe there was an increase in ammonia and methane in the early atmosphere. Methane and ammonia are also heat trapping green house gases. The problem with this theory is both of these gases are quickly destroyed by sunlight (UV light) and would never be able to reach high levels in our atmosphere because of this. Another problem is ammonia dissolves quickly into water, and if we had enough ammonia to heat the earth to the needed temperature for life to have existed, the ammonia would have dissolved into water, making the oceans extremely toxic. The third attempt to solve this problem is a bit more complex than the first two. The third theory assumes that there were no continents on the earth at that time and the atmosphere had an in-crease in carbon dioxide and rotated on its axis once every 14 hours, which they claim would cause the clouds to concentrate at the equator. With water covering the whole earth, more of the suns radiation would be absorbed, raising the earths temperature slightly. All three of these assumptions are questionable, there is evidence that the earths rotation is slowing down, and if you went back far enough it would have a rotational period of 14 hours, however there is still no evidence that the atmosphere contained increase levels of carbon dioxide. Also this theory assumes that the ocean tops did not freeze (like in the arctic) due to the cold temperature, if this were the case then it would not matter

how much of the earth was water, it would still reflect off of the ice back into space. Also all three of these theories have another problem; they all propose an extreme increase in green-house gases with no way of showing how these gases would eventually decrease and leave the planet, because once the suns luminosity increases, if you still have all of these gases, it is going to make the earth to hot for life to exist. Mercury is a good example of this; if you remember earlier in this chapter Mercury has the highest temperature due to the vast amounts of green house gases. All these theories assume that the green house gases slowly disappeared at the same rate that the sun increased in luminosity, if they disappeared to quick the earth is going to freeze, and if they take to long to disappear then the earth is going to burn. Noon of these theories are scientifically supported, and all are based on huge assumptions that cannot be proven. Not only does earth present a faint sun problem, mars also present a problem for an old solar system. Mars is a very cold planet today, yet there is a great deal of evidence that earlier in its history it had liquid water on its surface, this indicates that mars was much warmed, nebular theorists say this was the case about 3.8 billion years ago. Can you see the problem here? How is it possible that Mars was much warmed 3.8 million years ago? That is when the sun was giving off 25% less heat our solar system, it doesnt take scientist to figure out: that would make Mars cooler, not warmed. Meteoric streams and particle alignment Radiation put off by the sun causes an outward force on particles that are orbiting the Sun. Particles that have a size of less than 100,000th of a centimeter in diameter should have all been blown out of the solar system if it were actually billions of years old, problem is these particles are still orbiting the sun. On the other hand particles that are larger than 100,000th of a centimeter in diameter form a large disk shaped cloud that orbits around the sun between the planet Venus and the asteroid belt in our solar system. This cloud gives off zodiacal light (like in this picture.) Forces acting upon these different small particles should spiral most of them into the sun in less than ten thousand years. This effect is known as the Poynting-Robertson effect. Know sources of replenishment have not been found that can replace the amount of these particles that we still see in our solar

system, comets and asteroids disintegrating can add some of these dust particles, but the rate at which they add is about half of the rate of the loss. This indicates that our solar system is young, not billions of years old. When a comet disintegrates the small particles become a meteor stream. The pointing-Robertson effect would cause the smaller particles in the meteor stream to spiral into the sun at a quickly speed than the larger particles. After about ten thousand years of these particles orbiting, they should be segregated from smallest by particle size from smallest to largest. These are two indicators that our solar system is not billions of years old. Enceladus As we mentioned earlier in this chapter, Saturn has a few dozen moons that orbit the planet within its rings. Many of these different moons also give us ways to measure the age of our solar system. The first one of these moons that I want to talk about is the moon Enceladus. Enceladus is the sixths largest moon of Saturn and is covered with an icy surface. This moon was first discovered in 1789 by William Herschel the night he finished building his new large telescope. For many years people did not think much of this moon, by the nebular theory of the formation of the solar system this moon should be old (around the age of the solar system itself) and dead (not geologically active.) In 1980s three space crafts flew by Saturn, and found out that the moon reflects almost 100% of the light it receives from the sun, further backing the thought that the planet would be old, cold, and dead. The nebular theory also predicted that the moon should have craters covering its surface due to impacts from meteors of billions of years; however what they found was a surface that was mostly smooth with little craters. Scientists still believed that Enceladus was young, but had to cling to the theory that the moon had acquired a new surface in the recent past. Enceladus An icy geologically active moon of Saturn Around 2005 the Cassini spacecraft discovered that there were huge geysers on the moon ejecting water vapor and icy particles into space at supersonic speeds. The first geysers were found near the planets South Pole. Later on in 2008 another spacecraft flew by and was able to get more accurate measurements. It appears that these super sonic jets (geysers) on Enceladus actually produce the material that

make up the outermost E-ring of Saturn, the energy that these geysers produce is estimated around 5.8 gigawatts that is enough to power a city of six million people. The first question is, how is this small moon producing enough heat if it really is billions of years old, to produce these geysers that we can observe? One theory states that radioactive decay (which we talked about earlier) was generating the heat inside the planet and warming it that way. While it is true that Enceladus is the rockiest of Saturns major moons, and probably does have the most radioactive decay happening, it is still nowhere near the level of energy needed for these geysers. How is the interior of this moon still flexible enough to have these geysers? After four and a half billion years the moon should have frozen solid. James Roberts and Francis Nimmo of the University of California modeled the moons interior and found that it would have frozen in only 30 million years, which is less than one percent of the age assigned by the nebular theory. Some people have suggested that Dione (a large nearby moon) could be the cause of the heat, but this is still nowhere near the level of heat needed. Another suggestion is that tidal friction from Saturn is causing the heating of the moon, but after 4.5 billion years the moon should still be frozen solid and tidal friction would not work. Others suggest that maybe Enceladus contain the heat still from when Saturn and the moons formed, this is the easiest answer to the question, but that would mean that Saturn and its moons are not billions of years old, which goes against the nebular theory. One more feature of this moon can be used to indicate a young age, and that is the rate at which it is ejecting water. Enceladus is ejecting up to 375 kilograms of water per second, and if you do the math that ends of being another problem for an old solar system. In the assumed age of the solar system of 4.5 billion years, at current eruption rates Encladeus would have ejected 1/6 of its mass into space, and recycled its entire mass in that time. There is no valid theory that can explain this level of eruptions if Enceladus is billions of years old. Titan There is yet another moon of Saturn that gives us an indication of a young solar system, and thats Saturns largest moon: Titan. Titan is a interesting moon, it ha s the thickest atmosphere of any of the moons of Saturn, and is the second largest moon in the solar system (behind Ganymede, a moon of Jupiter.) One gas that is

present in the atmosphere for Titan is Methane. Methane is broken down by Ultraviolet radiation (UV light) over time and becomes Ethane. The rate at which this process would occur on Titan can and has been measured; Titan should have no more Methane in its atmosphere after about ten thousand years of UV light breaking it down. So what is the problem for an old solar system and the nebular theory? Very simple, we still have Methane on Titan indicating that the moon is less than ten thousand years old. Not only does the level of Methane provide an indicator of youth, but the Ethane levels (which come about from this break down) are quite low, indicating that not much methane has been broken down to ethane in the past. Titan The second largest moon in our solar system with the thickest atmosphere of any moon that contains high levels of Methane and low levels of Ethane There has been a theory presented in order to solve this problem that the nebular theory has. The theory says that maybe there are lakes of liquid methane present on Titan, and that is why we still have these large levels of methane on the moon. First off this is still speculation, lakes of methane have not been proven to exist, the only reason they need them to exist is to solve this problem. Also lakes of Methane would not explain the lack of Ethane from methane break down, if methane has been breaking down for billions of years (like the theory requires) then we should also have large amounts of ethane, which we do not. Titan is a strong indicator that the solar system is young. IO Jupiter is the largest planet in our solar system, and has quite a few moons that orbit it. One of these moons (which is the fourth largest moon is our solar system) is the moon Io. Io A moon of Jupiter that is the most geologically active object in our solar system Io is another moon that draws the attention of many astronomers due to the fact that its the most geologically active object in our solar system. The Galileo mission recorded 80 active volcanoes on this

moon of Jupiter. The first problem with this picture for the nebular theory is the same as with many moons we have previously discussed, after billions of years the moon should have cooled off and no longer be geologically active, yet again this is not what we observe. Nebular theorists have suggested that Jupiters gravity rhythmically squeezes Io to keep it heated by friction, but this cannot account for all the heat that Io is producing. That however is not the most surprising part of the situation: the most surprising part is the amount of material that Io is ejecting through these volcanoes. If Io had been erupting over a period of 4.5 billion years, like the nebular theory requires, at only 10% of its current rate of eruption, the moon would have erupted its entire mass forty times through volcanoes, thats at 10% of the speed we actually see. If we go by Uniformitarianistic methods, assuming the present is the best picture of the past, and then the moon would have erupted its entire mass about four hundred times in 4.5 billion years.

Chapter 5: The earth is young (II) The moon In this chapter we will be wrapping up our discussion on the age of the earth and our solar system. There is great evidence that our planet is young like the Bible says, and not billions of years old as claimed by secular, naturalistic, scientists. The moon is the only celestial body besides earth that humans have been on, many of us are familiar with the names of the astronauts that have walked on the surface of the moon, Neil Armstrong being the most famous because he was the first. During the Apollo missions light reflectors were set up on the moon by American (and Soviet) astronauts. These light reflectors are used to measure the distance from the moon to the earth in great detail, the process is very difficult, but can be done. High powered lasers from earth are pointed and bounced off these light reflectors and the amount of time it takes for the laser to get to the moon and be reflected back gives us a measureable distance (because we know the speed light travels.) The distance today from the earth to the moon is roughly 239,000 miles. Many of us are also aware that the moon causes the tides that we have here on earth. If we did not have the moon to provide these tides the oceans would become stagnant and marine life would cease to exists, so its a very good thing that we have our moon! The moon pulls the water on the earth towards itself which causes a tidal bulge here on earth (exaggerated in this picture below.) At the same time the earth rotates on its axis which causes the tidal bulge to move a little bit ahead of the moon (see picture.) This tidal bulge has a gravitational pull of its own which causes the moon to be pulled ahead of its orbit and towards the tidal bulge (see arrows in picture.) This pulling ahead by the tidal bulge causes the rotation speed of the moon to be mildly accelerated. If you accelerate the rotation speed of the moon you are also going to cause it to slowly drift away from the earth, which is exactly what we have observed in our measurements. It turns out that the moon is receding (getting further away) from the earth 4 centimeters each year. Now there is no need to worry, the moon is not going to suddenly disappear! And even if that was the case, there is nothing you could do about it anyways.

However, this does present a problem for those who believe that the earth and moon are 4.5 billion years old! If you go back in time the moon would have been a lot closer to the earth, the closer you bring the moon to the earth the more gravitational attraction you will cause, and the more gravitational attraction you have the faster the moon is going to move away. Which means if the earth and moon both are millions of years old, the moon would have been receding at a faster speed in the past. Many scientists have done the math and figured out how close the moon would be in the past, and it turns out that the moon would be touching the earth 1.4 billion years ago! This is quite a problem if you believe that the earth and moon both formed 4.5 billion years ago. This is not the end of the problem, millions of years before the moon was touching the earth it would be inside the Roche limit. Roche limit The closest the moon can get to the earth before gravitational attraction would shatter the moon into piece. The Roche limit is 11,500 miles from the core of the earth, which means if the moon comes within that distance of the earth it will be shattered into small pieces like the rings of Saturn. There is no valid explanation for how the moon can orbit the earth for 4.5 billion years! Around a billion years ago the moon would have been shattered into pieces. There is one more fascinating feature of the moon/earth relationship that I want to share with you. This diagram depicts a total solar eclipse that happens when the moon passes directly between the earth and the sun. I have heard from many people that seeing a total solar eclipse is one of the most amazing sights in the world that you can see, and the fact that these eclipses are possible shows how well our God has designed our solar system. The moon is 400 times smaller (in diameter) than the sun, which means the odds of the moon being able to block out the suns light and cause a total eclipse here on Earth is very low. Except, the sun is exactly 400 times further away from the earth than the moon is! This means to us observers here on earth, they appear to be the exact same size. If the sun was at a different distance, or if the moons size varied just a little bit, a solar eclipse would not be possible. This is one of the many evidences that our solar system and planet were designed by an omniscient creator.

Salt and the Ocean I have lived in Colorado my entire life, and for those of you who know your geography, that is nowhere near the ocean. Growing up I had heard about the oceans being salt water, but it was not until I was nine years old that I actually experienced it for myself. When I got inside the water and started to taste the salt, I was disgusted to be honest, but eventually I got used to it. The salt content inside the ocean can be used as a method of dating the ocean, and can give us an indication as to the age of the earth. This method of dating the earth was first suggested by Isaac Newton, and is the probably the dating method that has been studied the longest. Sodium gets inside the ocean by multiple means; rivers run into the ocean and bring sodium with them, surface runoffs and ground water also deposit sodium into the ocean. The amount of sodium dumped into the ocean annually is 450 million tons. There are also ways for sodium to leave the ocean; waves spray water onto the shores and the water eventually evaporates, leaving the salt behind (on the shore.) There are also different clays within the ocean that absorb sodium, and one specific mineral called Zeolite can absorb large amounts of sodium. The amount of sodium that gets out of the ocean is 27% of the sodium that gets put into the ocean every year. We can measure the amount of sodium inside the ocean, and see how long it would take to achieve the observed levels. It turns out that it would only take 62 million years to account for all the sodium that we have in our oceans. The theory of evolution claims that oceans have been on earth for around 4 billion years! If that were true the sodium levels inside the ocean should be far greater! Remember, this number is not the age of the ocean, but is the maximum age if you start with no sodium in the ocean. God could have created the oceans with salt in them already, so this does not present a problem for the Biblical view of history. Sediments and the Ocean Sodium levels in the ocean is not the only indication of age that the ocean offers us, the sediment (mud)

levels in the ocean can also give us an indication of the age of the oceans and the earth. Every year, water and winds erode around 20 billion tons of sediments from the continents and deposits them inside the ocean. These sediments accumulate on the ocean floor at known rates, and the average total thickness for the sediments on the ocean floor is 400 meters deep. There is only one known way to remove these sediments from the ocean, and that is plate tectonics. The crust of the earth (ocean crust) is slowly being recycled by a process known as plate subducted. The earth is composed of many plates (large areas of land) that float on top of our mantle, and in many different areas of the world these plates (on the ocean floor) are being pulled under continental plates and down into the mantle (see picture.) As the plates are subducted they carry away some of these sediments with them. The rate at which plate subduction removes ocean floor sediments has been measured at 1 billion tons per year, the other 19 billion tons stays on the ocean floor. If you take the total amount of sediments on the ocean floor, and the rate at which they are being put there, you get an age of 12 million years for the oceans, assuming there was none of these sediments there to begin with. This again presents a problem for the theory of evolution that claims the oceans have been here for billions of years. If they had been, there should be way more sediments on the ocean floor than we observe today. You might be thinking this disproves the Biblical timeframe for the age of the earth, after the Bible teaches the Earth is six thousand years old, and I just said that sea floor sediments levels indicate that the ocean is 12 million years old. You have to remember that the Bible says there was a worldwide flood, if this is true the majority of the sediments could be deposited during the flood. However, secular scientists do not believe that there was a worldwide catastrophe like the flood, they believe that the way things are happening now are the way things have always been happening (long gradual processes.) Earths magnetic field The most compelling evidence that the earth is thousands of years old like the Bible says comes from our planets magnetic field. Many of us are familiar with magnets and have been entertained by them in the past. The earth has a giant magnetic field that surrounds and shields our planet; this magnetic field is critical for life to exist on earth because it shields our planet from harmful solar radiation. The magnetic field of the earth is what makes your compass point north, because it is attracted to the magnetic north pole of the earth (which is very close to the geographic North Pole.)

Two theories exist to explain the origin and behavior of earths magnetic field. One theory was proposed by secular scientists to explain how the magnetic field could survive for billions of years (The Dynamo Theory) and one was presented by the creationists using observational and scriptural evidence (The Rapid Decay Theory.) The magnetic field of the earth is generated by electrical currents flowing inside the outer core of the earth. The question is how do these electric currents get started? And what sustains them once they are going? We are going to briefly examine both of these theories so you have a better understanding of what were talking about. The Dynamo theory is the theory that all secular scientists promote, because it is the only theory that attempts to explain how earth can still have a magnetic field after billions of years. According to this theory, during the formation of the earth, the earths rotation caused chemical separation to occur in the outer core, because these chemicals were charged different complex currents were set up. These complex currents in the outer core (caused by earths rotation) are why we have our magnetic field under the Dynamo theory. If this theory is correct, the currents generated inside the outer core will be unpredictable, and the magnetic field generated by them will decay and increase in strength randomly and sometimes reverse. If the dynamo theory is correct, the magnetic field should last as long as the earth is spinning, this theory can also be applied to other planets if they have a similar structure. The Rapid Decay Theory is the competing model to explain the origin and function of the earths magnetic field. This theory is based on the Bible verse 2 Peter 3:5 that suggests that the earth was made out of the water and in the water. According to this theory all the planets originally started off as a mass of water and the molecules inside the water were aligned producing a strong magnetic field. God then created the earth (and other celestial bodies) out of this water by changing it into other types of elements (rocks/minerals.) When the transformation occurred, electrical currents in the outer core would be established because the changing of a magnetic field in the presence of a conductor causes an electric current, and this current (that we observe in the outer core today) will cause the magnetic field of the earth. According to this theory the magnetic field will decay at a predictable rate due to friction in the outer core. This friction exists because the liquid inner core is circulating and rubbing against the solid mantles above and the solid inner core

below. This theory also allows magnetic reversals to occur under certain conditions. The first measurements of the earths magnetic field were made by Karl Gauss in the 1830s, and since then we have been making measurements of the magnetic field regularly. It turns out that the magnetic field is decaying quite rapidly, losing 5% of its total strength every 100 years! At this rate the magnetic field will completely disappear in A.D. 3391. There is also archaeological evidence that shows the earths magnetic field was 40% stronger in A.D. 1000, which matches the date of decay that we have observed since the 1830s. How does this show the earth is young? By knowing how fast the magnetic field is decaying, you can calculate how strong the it would have been in history, and it turns out that if you go far enough back it causes a serious problem, It was calculated that the current could not have been decaying more than 10,000 years; otherwise its starting strength would have been sufficient to melt the earth. Thus, the earth must be less than 10,000 years old. (Dr. Andrew A. Snelling, Earths Catastrophic past Volume 2 Page: 873) Thats right, if the magnetic field has been decaying for more than 10,000 years, the starting strength would have melted the earth! This obviously causes quite a problem if you believe the earth is billions of years old. One reason the Dynamo theory is accepted among secular scientists is because it claims to solve this problem. According to the Dynamo theory the magnetic field will randomly increase and decrease in strength, and at times will also reverse. Magnetic reversal - Is a change in the Earth's magnetic field that causes the north and south magnetic poles to switch positions. If a magnetic reversal were to happen today, all the compasses in the world would point towards the South Pole, not the North Pole. When this happens the magnetic field will start to increase in strength and regenerate itself, and then it will start decaying again. Magnetic reversals should also happen slowly according to the Dynamo theory, on the order of thousands of years. According to the Rapid Decay theory, magnetic reversals should happen quickly (weeks) during the worldwide flood. Plate subduction occurring during the flood would be the cause of these reversals, as the plates dive down into the mantle and eventually reach the out core. These two models are dramatically different yet again, according to the Dynamo Theory magnetic reversals happen randomly over long periods of time, and according to the Rapid Decay Theory they happen quickly due to plate subduction and interaction with the outer core. So the question

is, how long does it take for the earths magnetic field to reverse? Is there evidence for either of these theories? The answer is yes. Inside many lava flows there is a mineral called magnetite, as the name suggests, magnetite is magnetic and will record the magnetic direction (where the North Pole is) when the lava solidifies. The outside of a lava flow is going to cool and solidify before the inside, which means if one of these magnetic reversals happen while the lava flow is cooling and solidifying, you could tell by looking at the direction that the magnetite is pointing. If the magnetite on the outside of a lava flow (which cooled first) is pointing in a different direction than the magnetite on the inside (which cooled later on) you know a magnetic reversal happened in the time it took for that lava flow to cool down. This prediction appeared in print three years before the first study was done, and the study confirmed the predictions. Palaeomagnetic measurements of a lava flow at Steens Mountain in Oregon have shown that one of these magnetic polarity transitions (part of a complete reversal) took place in about two weeks, the time period over which the lava would have cooled. (Dr. Andrew A. Snelling, http://www.answersingenesis.org/creation/v13/i4/magnetic.asp) Other thin lava flows have also been found showing that the magnetic field reverses quickly like the Rapid Decay Theory proposes. The Rapid Decay theory was designed to fit the Biblical timeframe and history of the earth. There are five main points to the theory that I want to go over real quick. The first has to do with the initial creation of the earth and the magnetic field, which we talked about earlier. After the creation the theory says that the magnetic field steadily decayed for nearly 2000 years until the flood. During the flood rapidly reversals would take place due to tectonic plates being subducted (pulled) down to the bottom of the mantle and interacting with the outer core. After the flood there would be large fluctuations in the magnetic field for around 2000 years while the outer core recovers from the flood catastrophe. Once recovered, the magnetic field steadily decayed for the past 2000 years at the rate we observe. Not only has the Rapid Decay Theory accurately predicted the magnetic field of the earth, and the rapid reversals that have occurred, it also can predict the magnetic strength of other planets, moons, and stars. Dr. Russell Humphreys, the author of the Rapid Decay Theory, has calculated what the magnetic fields of other planets in our solar system should be if his theory is correct. These calculations are based on three important factors, the mass of the object, the size of the core and how well it conducts electricity, and the assumption that the object was made from water (like we discussed earlier.) He has accurately predicted the magnetic field of every planet in our solar system! Not only did his model explain all known magnetic field measurements at the time, it also predicted the magnetic fields of planets that had not yet been measured. When a theory can make accurate blind

predictions (predicting the unknown) it is a good sign that the theory is true. The Rapid Decay Theory, and the Dynamo Theory, both attempted to predict the magnetic strength of planets Uranus and Neptune. The Rapid Decay predictions were around 100,000 times the Dynamo predictions, and in 1986 and 1989 Voyager 2 flew by the planets and took the measurements. The two rival models were inadvertently put to the test when the Voyager 2 spacecraft flew past these planets in 1986 and 1989. The fields for Uranus and Neptune were just as Humphreys had predicted. (Dr. Jonathan Sarfati, http://creation.com/the-earths-magnetic-field-evidence-thatthe-earth-is-young) Uranus and Neptune are not the only examples of planetary magnetic fields that have been blindly predicted, planet Mercury was also accurately predicted by the Rapid Decay Theory before the measurements were taken. The Dynamo Theory predicted Mercury would have a very weak magnetic field because it rotates 59 times slower than the earth, the field turned out to be far stronger than the Dynamo theory predicted. But thats not all! Not only does this model predict the strength of planets that have magnetic fields, it can predict which planets/moons had a magnetic field in history and no longer do! Dr. Humphreys predicted Older igneous rocks from Mercury or Mars should have natural remnant magnetization, as the Moon's rocks do. Natural remnant magnetization means rock magnetization caused by Mars formerly strong (and now non-existent) planetary magnetic field It was originally thought we would have to wait for a manned expedition to bring back rock samples to be tested in the laboratory, but it turns out the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft had the capability to measure this magnetism soon after the predictions were made. The spacecraft orbiting low over mars surface has measured this magnetism inside crustal rocks, showing that mars had a planetary magnetic field at some point in its history, just like the Rapid Decay Theory predicts. The theory also predicts that the moon had a magnetic field in history that has since decayed away (which has been confirmed.) The Dynamo Theory fails at predicting the planetary magnetic fields of other planets in our solar system, you would have thought we would have given up guessing about planetary magnetic fields after being wrong at nearly every planet in the solar system. (Bagenal, F. "The emptiest magnetosphere," Physics World, (October 1989), 18-19) This quote is from a secular scientist who accepts the Dynamo Theory even though he knows it cannot make accurate predictions. The Rapid Decay Theory fits all observations that have been made thus far in our solar system. There is one more thing I would like to address concerning the earths magnetic field. There are different parts to a magnet, the dominant North and South Poles are called the dipole parts of a magnet, but there are also other non-dipole parts that account for 15% of the total strength of the magnetic field. It has been suggested that while magnetic strength is decreasing in the dipole parts, it is

increasing in the non-dipole parts, and the overall strength of the magnetic field is staying roughly the same. However, data from the International Geomagnetic Reference Field shows that from 1970-2000 the dipole part of the magnetic field lost 235 billion megajoules of energy, while the non-dipole parts gained only 129 billion megajoules. Overall the net loss from all parts of the magnetic field was 1.4% in 30 years. At this rate the field would lose half of its energy every 1465 years. These numbers are consistent with the measurements we mentioned earlier and show that the earth has to be less than 10,000 years old, just like the Bible says. Volcanic measurements If the earth is billions of years old you would expect there to be billions of years worth of volcanic debris spread around the earth. We can measure the rate that volcanic eruptions occur today around the world, and we can measure the total amount of volcanic material on the earth today from eruptions that have happened in history, and they do not equal billions of years. According to the theory of evolution volcanoes have been erupting around the world for the past 3.5 billion years. A subsequent calculation, based on a conservative estimate of an average of 1 cubic kilometer of volcanic material per year being ejected by the earths volcanoes, suggested that in 3.5 billion years the entire earth should have been covered by a thick blanket of volcanic materials reaching a hight of 7 km. (23,000 feet) (Dr. Andrew A. Snelling, Earths Catastrophic past Volume 2 Page: 885) Secular scientists work in the framework of uniformitarianism, which means they should assume that the rate things are happening today are the rate that they have been happening for all of history. In the last quote we did not assume the rate that we observe today, the rate that was measure from 1940-1980 measured 3 cubic kilometers per year just from the massive volcanoes, and that number does not include the dozens of smaller eruptions that occur in that time period. If we take the observed amounts of eruptions and assume volcanoes have only been going off for 2.5 billion years, there should be a layer of volcanic material with a thickness of over 19 kilometers on earth, which is 62,000 feet worth of volcanic material. Instead we only fine around 2,500 feet worth, 24 times less than what secular scientists would predict. Secular scientists have suggested that erosion may be removing the volcanic material from the earth, which would explain why we do not find the expected levels. However, erosion does not offer a good solution to this inconsistency

for the long uniformitarian geological ages, because erosion would only transfer the volcanic materials from one place to another. (Dr. Andrew A. Snelling, Earths Catastrophic past Volume 2 Page: 886) Any volcanic material that has been transferred is still being taken into account with these numbers, so erosion does not solve their problem. The fact remains that there is not enough volcanic material to account for volcanoes erupting for billions of years. Now some geologists are going to claim that the measured amounts of volcanic material is far too great if the earth is only 6,000 years old like the Bible says. This claim ignores the fact that during the flood thousands of volcanoes would erupt due to catastrophic plate tectonics. The flood can account for all the volcanic material that we have found. Many Biblical geologists have also suggested that massive plate tectonic activity would have taken place on the third day of creation when God laid the foundations of the earth, which would also cause many volcanic eruptions. Land erosion There are some processes in the world that happen at such slow speeds that you will never notice it happening in your lifetime, however, the length of your life cannot come close to comparing with the length of time that secular scientists have proposed for the age of the earth. The processes that you will not notice in your own life, if given millions of years, would start to be dramatically noticed. Such is the case when we look at the rate that the continents are eroding. Land Erosion - The process by which material is removed from a region of the Earths surface. Rain and wind are both slowly eroding away the continents and mountains here on earth, and the rate at which this occurs has been accurately measured by geologists. It turns out that the height of the continents on average is being reduced 2.4 inches per thousand years because of erosion. As I said earlier, there is no way that you would notice this in your life time, but if you stand back and look at this from the perspective that earth is billions of years old, some problems arise. According to the theory of evolution, continents have been exposed to weather for the past 3.5 billion years, assuming that the erosion rates were similar in the past, the continent of North America would have eroded flat (to sea level) in a mere 10 million years! And other continents would have eroded flat within a similar timescale. 10 million years

sounds like a long time, but compared to the 3.5 billion years it is quite small. If North America had been exposed for 3.5 billion years, it could have eroded flat 350 times. This also applies on a smaller scale, mountain rangers such as the Caledonides of Western Europe and the Appalachians of eastern North America are assumed by secular geologists to be several hundred million years old. If this is true they should have eroded flat after a couple million years. Some secular geologists have claimed that the mountains are being uplifted from below, while this does occur it cannot account for the sedimentary layers high in the mountains that are supposed to be extremely old, if uplifting is the reason we still have these mountain ranges, erosion should have eradicated (removed) the ancient sedimentary layers on the mountains. As new sediment layers are rising, the old ones would erode off. Some have proposed that the climate may have been dryer in the past, which would decrease the erosion rate of these mountains. This does little to resolve the problem, Estimates of global precipitation suggest variable but average, or even slightly wetter, conditions over the past three billion years. (Dr. Andrew A. Snelling, Earths Catastrophic past Volume 2 Page: 882) If anything the amount of erosion caused by rain would have been slightly greater in the past. The rates at which the continents and mountain ranges are being eroded away suggest that the earth is not billions of years old. Helium levels in the atmosphere Not only does the amount of helium in zircon crystals indicate that the earth is young, the amount of helium in our atmosphere also indicates the earth cannot be billions of years old. Helium is generated by radioactive decay and escapes into the atmosphere from the crust of the earth. Air in our atmosphere is primarily composed of nitrogen (78.1%) and oxygen (20.1%), helium only accounts for a small percentage of air (0.0005%) However, this small percent of helium in our atmosphere turns out to be 3.71 billion tonnes, which is not a small number. Every second 13 million helium atoms per square inch escapes into the atmosphere from the crust of the earth (67 grams), 0.3 million of these helium atoms (1/40th) manage to escape from the atmosphere. At this rate it would take 1.8 million years to reach the current level of helium in the atmosphere. This is quite the problem if you believe that the earth is 4.5 billion years old, because we should have 9000 billion tons of helium in the atmosphere, not 3.7 billion tons if the earth were that old.

Primordial helium - Helium in the crust of the earth that is not derived by radioactive decay. Making this helium problem worse for uniformitarians is the discovery that there are large volumes of helium in the earths crust that have not been derived by radioactive decay, but instead are considering primordial, that is, they have been present inside the earth since its beginning. (Dr. Andrew A. Snelling, Earths Catastrophic past Volume 2 Page: 890) This primordial helium was not taken into account when determining the amount of helium that escapes into the atmosphere from the crust of the earth, which means the level helium in our atmosphere, would take less than 1.8 million years to build up! This is extremely hard to explain if the earth is 4.5 billion years old. The typical response from the old-earth advocates to avoid this evidence for a young atmosphere and earth is to assume that for billions of years helium escaping from the earths crust into the atmosphere managed to reach escape velocity speeds, this is the speed needed to overcome gravity and escape from our atmosphere into outer space. However, this would require the temperature in the upper atmosphere to be far higher than it is. There is no way to account for the low levels of helium in our atmosphere if the earth is billions of years old.

Population growth Population growth cannot be used to establish the age of the earth, but can give us an idea of how long mankind has been here. According to the theory of evolution mankind has been around for about a million years, if this were true you would expect the population of the world to be dramatically larger. Today the human population is growing at a rate of about 1.3% per year, which means its size doubles every 54 years. In history this rate has been both higher and lower, for example in the 1960s the population was growing at a rate of 2% annually and doubled from 3 billion to 6 billion in a matter of 40 years. If we assume however, that the population grew at a rate of 0.01% per year (doubling every 7,000 years) for the past million years that mankind has supposedly been on earth, we still have a serious problem. Assuming that rate (0.01%) there should be more than one tredecillion people on planet earth. For those of you who are not familiar with that number, it is a number that is followed by 42 zeros. At that rate there would be far more people on planet earth than there is stars in our universe. Of course this is not possible because nowhere near that many people would be able to fit on this planet. Stone age skeletons and artifacts

According to evolutionists there was a stone age that last for about 100,000 years. During this time evolutionists claim the human population ranged between 1-10 million people in the world. Fossil evidence has shown that people during this stone age buried their dead, and often with artifacts. If we assume that the population during the stone age was just 1 million people, with an average generation time of 25 years, they should have buried 4 billion bodies (and many artifacts) during the stone age. If we assume that the human population was 10 million at the time, there should have been 40 billion bodies buried inside the earth during this Stone Age. The problem is we only have found a few thousand! This strongly suggests that there was no stone age that lasted for 100,000 years. Some evolutionists have proposed that during the Stone Age people may have cremated the dead, and that is why we dont find billions of skeletons buried. However, cremation was not practiced until relatively recent times (in evolutionary thinking).(Dr Don Batten, http://creation.com/where-are-allthe-people) All the evidence for the history of mankind is aligned with a Biblical view of history, the idea that man has been around for a million years has been proven false multiple times, some people just dont want to acknowledge the truth, because the truth supports the Bible. Origin of agriculture Agricultural practices are responsible for providing food to billions of people around the world, and are also responsible for providing jobs to millions. According to the theory of evolution, modern man existed for about 200,000 years before agriculture (farming primarily) was discovered. During these thousands of years humans would have to rely on hunting animals to feed themselves. There is much evidence that shows that stone age men were as intelligent as we are today, which raises the question, why did none of the 8 billion people estimated to have lived during the Stone Age discover that food plants could be grown from seeds in a systematic manner. Some evolutionists even suggest that up to 40 billion humans lived during the Stone Age period, surely one of them would have figured out that if you put a seed inside the ground food will grow! It could not have taken 200,000 years for this discovery to be made. The recent origin of agriculture suggests that mankind has not been here around for a million years.

The age of the earth is probably the most debated topic in this Creation Vs Evolution controversy. The Big Bang, Nebular Theory, And Biological Evolution cannot be true if the earth is not billions of years old. The Bible says God made the earth in six days (Exodus 20:11) and if you add up the genealogies in the Bible you find that the creation took place around 6000 years ago. The scientific evidence supports what the Bible has said all along, the earth is young.