The Recent Uprising of the Andes

The age of Tiahuanaco, an ancient city complex along the southern shores of Lake Titicaca on the Peruvian-Bolivian border, has long been a point of controversy among scientists and archaeologists. According to Hans Schindler Bellamy, who spent some time studying Tihuanaco and wrote both The Calendar of Tiahuanaco (1956) and The Great Idol of Tiahuanaco (1959), stated: “The geological record indicates a late elevation of the Andes, and the time of its origin is brought ever closer to our time” (Built Before the Flood: The Problem of the Tiahuanacu Ruins, Faber and Faber, London, (1943, p14).

The ancient city of Tihuantico

Also, according to Frank C. Hibben, archaeologist and anthropologist from Harvard, and Director of the Maxwell Museum of Anthropology, stated: “Archaeological and radiocarbon analyses indicate that the age of the Tiahuanaco Andean culture and of the city itself is not much older than four thousand years” (Treasure in the Dust, J. B. Lippincott, Philadelphia, 1951, p56).
    In addition, Immanuel Velikovsky has stated that “Sometime in the remote past the Altiplano was at or below sea level, so that originally its lakes were part of a sea gulf. The last upheaval, however, took place in an early historical period, after the city of Tiahunacu had been built; the lakes were dragged up, and the Altiplano and the entire chain of the Andes rose to their present height” (Earth in Upheaval, Paradigma, 2009, p88; original edition by Doubleday & Company, Inc., Garden City, New York, 1955).
    Charles Ginenthal, in quoting Dr. Carl Sagan, a professor of astronomy from Cornell University discussion at a symposium of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, stated that these cities of Tiahuanaco and those surrounding the area “were built at lower elevations and were uplifted with the Andes about 3,500 years ago when civilization there declined” (Carl Sagan and Immanuel Velikovsky, New Falcon Publications, 1995).

In the distance is the Uspallata Range in South America from which heights Darwin surveyed the mountains that were once under water

It was Charles Darwin, who in 1835 climbed the mountains in the Uspallata Range, 7,000 feet high in the Andes, and looked down on the plain from a little forest of petrified trees broken off a few feet above the ground and wrote in his journal: “It required little geological practice to interpret the marvelous story which this scene at once unfolded; though I confess I was at first so much astonished that I could scarcely believe the plainest evidence. I saw the spot where a cluster of fine trees once waved their branches on the shores of the Atlantic, when the ocean—now driven back 700 miles—came to the foot of the Andes.

Agua de la Zorra Forest where Darwin saw trees at 7,000 feet that had been beneath the ocean in the time of man

Darwin continued: "I saw that they had sprung from volcanic soil which had been raised above the level of the sea, and that subsequently this dry land, with its upright trees, had been let down into the depths of the ocean. In these depths, the formerly dry land was covered by sedimentary beds, and these again by enormous streams of submarine lava—one such mass attaining the thickness of a thousand feet…the ocean here must have been profoundly deep, but again the subterranean forces exerted themselves and now I behold the bed of that ocean, forming a chain of mountains more than seven thousand feet in height.
"Vast and scarcely comprehensible as such changes must ever appear, yet they have all occurred within a period, recent when compared with the history of the Cordillera; and the Cordillera itself is absolutely modern as compared with many of the fossiliferous strata of Europe and America—But how extremely young the cordillera of the Andes is, only the research of recent years has brought out” (Nature, Vol 5, March 28, 1872, pp420-422, where Darwin discussed Hacienda of Quintero, claiming “The proofs of the elevation of this shoreline of coast is unequivocal’).

    While the HMS Beagle was undergoing repairs and Captain FitzRoy faced financial difficulties during July 1834, Darwin had some spare time and at his own expense took a six week land expedition to the east, into the High Andes in Chile and Argentina (see map above). During this journey, Darwin recorded everything he found. In Chapter VII of one of his journals he described the cordilleran geology, particularly the region in Uspallata in Mendoza province. This area today is known as Agua de la Zorra, and called loosely Bosque de Darwin (Darwin’s Forest). It was formalized in the geological reports of Map 3369-09, Uspallata (1997).
    Also is the statement by Norman Macbeth of Stanford and the Harvard Law School, and author of Darwin Retried: An Appeal to Reason (Harvard Common Press, 1971) who states of the Andes: “Apparently all have risen extensively since men moved in, and much of the upthrusting has occurred in the short period since the retreat of the glaciers. It is impossible to express this precisely in years, but the span of time is almost infinitesimal when compared to the figures commonly used by geologists. Needless to say, the upthrusting was not quite an everyday event. Checking a couple of college textbooks…I found that practically nothing was said about mountain building and that the subject seems to baffle the scholars.”

Mountain building that took place when the Earth was still young and the rock still elastic as evidenced by the folds rather than breaks, yet mountains that rose in the very recent past

The orogenic process of mountain building, is where large-scale movements of the Earth's crust (tectonic plates), including folding, faulting, volcanic activity, igneous intrusion and metamorphism leads to the large structural deformation of the Earth’s lithosphere (crust and uppermost mantle) due to the interaction between tectonic plates—this is caused by the geologic activity below the surface, resulting in colliding with one another and buckling up the surface like the hood of a car in a head-on collision.
    Thus the understanding of specific landscape features in terms of the underlying tectonic processes is called tectonic geomorphology, and the study of geologically young or ongoing processes is called neotectonics (recent tectonic movement), sometimes called “active tectonics,” meaning the process is still going on. Obviously, the Andes Mountains are considered “neotectonic” activity, a word coined by Vladimer Obruchev in 1948, to describe recent or “contemporary topography” (V.A. Obruchev, "Osnovnye cherty kinetiki i plastiki neotektonik," Izvestiya Akademiya Nauk, Seriya Geologicheskaya, Vol 5,1948, pp13–24).
    This latter is important for those who believe that mountains have been around for a very long time. As the University of Reno Center for Neotectonic Studies clearly states: “the study of geologically recent motions of the Earth’s crust, particularly those produced by earthquakes, with the goals of understanding the physics of earthquake recurrence, the growth of mountains, and the seismic hazard embodied in these processes."
    “Produced by earthquakes,” an idea championed by Charles Darwin who thought earthquakes had modified the surface of the entire planet (David Brassan, “Darwin the Geologist,” History of Geology, Scientific American, 2012), which should sound rather familiar to us, as in “behold, there was a more great and terrible destruction in the land northward; for behold, the whole face of the land was changed, because of the tempest and the whirlwinds and the thunderings and the lightnings, and the exceedingly great quaking of the whole earth” (3 Nephi 8:12, emphasis added), and “insomuch that it did shake the whole earth as if it was about to divide asunder” (3 Nephi 8:6, emphasis added).

Underlying bedrock determines the surface landscape

The effects of tectonics on landscape are heavily dependent on the nature of the underlying bedrock fabric that more or less controls what kind of local morphology tectonics can shape, and their effects on geomorphology can range from very long periods to minutes or less. As an example, earthquakes, can in terms of minutes, submerge large areas of land creating new wetlands.
    The point of all of this is to remind every reader that, despite the entire geologic and so-called “scientific community” claiming the world is 4.55 billion years old, we have continual evidence before us in these scientific disciplines to show that the world is far, far younger than these so-called experts claim. The fact that we have been taught this from the earliest kindergarten class attended and all through elementary, middle- and high school, and college levels, the world is not billions of years old, though much of what it is made of is that old for it was organized out of existing matter (which cannot be annihilated) and, therefore, is in that category quite old, but as a whole, is very young. So young, in fact, that Carbon-14 in the atmosphere has not been equalized and, in fact, is only about one-third on its way to being so, suggesting that the Earth’s atmosphere is less than 30,000 years old—actually, around 10,000 years.