Changing Land of Promise—The Effect of Rising Mountains - Part VIII – The Problems Inherent in the Geologic Time Scale

It is understandable that many geologists have great difficulty with anything occurring in the Earth on a rapid basis. Their entire concept of geology is based over time—millions upon millions of years—and the very slow progression of change.

However, the actual record does not verify that belief, since it is now recognized that it did not take place as slowly as once thought. In fact, many layers formed rapidly, with a large portion of the geologic record now recognized to be composed of turbidites (left), a series of individual layers that formed together in cycles in fast-flowing water.
    In some locations thick sequences of strata are bent and plastically deformed. These bent sequences show that the bottom layers were still soft and unconsolidated when the deformation occurred because otherwise they would have cracked into many sections. In addition, polystratic ("many-layer") fossils such as tree trunks up to 100 feet tall show that the layers around them formed rapidly, as they would otherwise have been exposed and rotted away before burial and fossilization. Many other lines of evidence demonstrate the need for rapid formation of the geologic record, while evidence for the passage of time such as paleosols (ancient soil layers) and erosion between the layers is severely lacking
    In fact, the actual record shows extensive evidence for the layers of strata in the geologic record being laid down very quickly, similar to the processes observed when Mount St. Helens erupted. Rapid global formation of sedimentary rock beds is evidence that the earth is much, much younger than once thought—just thousands of years old.
    The major formations of the earth’s crust are sedimentary rock beds. These were formed by rapid erosion, transportation, and deposition by water. There is no global evidence of long periods of time between these layers or indications that these layers took long periods of time to form. For example, sandstone is a major feature of the lower part of the Grand Canyon. The same rock layer is found in Utah, Wyoming, Montana, Colorado, South Dakota, the Midwest, the Ozarks, and in northern New York state. Equivalent formations are found across wide portions of Canada, eastern Greenland, and Scotland. Obviously, the Flood that covered the earth formed the large geological structures that we can observe today.

The numerous studies made in recent years have thrown cogs in the wheels of old-earth theories, verifying the young-earth of the Biblical record. For instance, it was always believed that magma (left) took thousands, even millions of years to work its way to the surface; however, recent studies show:
    • The magma of the Irazú volcano eruption in Costa Rica (1963-1965) to have moved at 150 to 300 feet per day, and in some cases, as much as a thousand feet per day or more.
    • The Front Range of Colorado and in the mountains of British Columbia, Canada, had telling ascent rates between 0.5 and 9.0 miles per year.
    • The Deccan Traps in India (and the Siberian Traps), which have vast quantities of lava rock near the earth’s surface, actually moved at the rate of nine miles per hour, though geologists always assumed formed over millions of years.
    Geologists, who insist that changes take place for millions and millions of years have great difficulty with such Biblical ideas as found in Zechariah 14:3-4 where it is foretold that the Mount of Olives will be split in the midst toward the east and toward the west and there shall appear a very great valley, with half the mountain moving toward the north and the other half moving toward the south. That, they claim would take millions of years--but it will be achieved in hours or days according to the record.
    To show this, recently the Great Rift Valley, which extends about 4,000 miles southward from Syria north of Israel, through the Gulf of Aqaba, Ethiopia, and all the way to Mozambique in southeast Africa, had a gaping crack through the desert of Ethiopia as the crustal plate movement broke open in surprising suddenness.

According to a recent study by Briner, Bini, and Anderson (2009) in “Nature Geoscience,” of prehistoric glaciers, it has been learned that glaciers can melt in a “geologic instant” 
    Many geological processes can happen much more quickly than is conventionally thought. For instance, mainstream science believes that coal, diamonds, and oil require vast amounts of time to develop, when they in fact can form in under a year.  Sedimentary rock and fossil formation require only days or months in the right conditions. And broad tectonic plate movements could have happened in under a year. To this can be added melt-back of glaciers—which is now understood to take a matter of a few years compared to the 20,000 years earlier believed by geologists, not from any data, but of the assumption of deep time.

This example of Muir Glacier in Glacier Bay National Park completely melting in only 63 years is an example of the geologic instant. Image at the left was taken in 1941, the image on the right was taken in 2004. This flies in the face of geologists who claim a 20,000 year plus melt stage of glaciers 
    Take another problem for old-earth claims. The presence of measurable radiocarbon in fossil wood supposedly tens and hundreds of millions of years old has been well-documented by Andrew Snelling and John Baumgardner. Yet, such dates are well above the threshold of the accelerator mass spectrometry analytical technology used, including ten samples of US coals spanning 45-300 million years of the conventional timescale for the geologic record. In each of these cases, meticulous laboratory procedures rule out the possibility that this measured radiocarbon is due to contamination, so it must instead be intrinsic to these ancient organic materials. However, the rapid decay of radiocarbon (C-14), which has a half-life of 5,730 years, demands that all carbon-14 be gone from any sample after only 250,000 years. Thus, organic materials supposedly millions of years old should not contain any radiocarbon whatsoever; however, each of these samples had very measurable radiocarbon.
    The example of Cripple Creek, perhaps the best documented and most carefully measured by reputable labs shows an Ar-Ar radioisotope date of  32 million year old buried volcanic rock dates, but only a 4,300 year old date (Flood) based on the carbonized fossil wood buried in the Cripple Creek gold deposits at 1700 feet of Breccia.
    Another problem for geology is their belief that the Grand Canyon took 70 million years to form. Yet, the strata of the Grand Canyon is flat, like a pancake, meaning not only has it never tilted, but that there has been no change in the terrain’s slope for 300-million years. Does anyone think that it is realistic to believe that earthquakes, continental shifts, catastrophic impacts, or any other cause of strata tilting never occurred over such a time span?
    Another problem for geology is the fact why all the high mountain ranges of the world—including the Himalayas, the Alps, the Andes, and the Rockies—experienced most of the uplift to their present elevations in what amounts to a blink of the eye, relative to the standard geological time scale. That is, these mountain ranges have all undergone several miles of vertical uplift over the last five million years. So on an earth claimed to be 4.55 billion years old, these mountains did not exist in the first 99.5% of Earth's history. Stated differently, geologists claim (by default) that these mountains rose during the last less than 1% of the Earth’s existence, yet they also claim that the driving forces responsible for mountain building have been operating steadily at roughly the same slow rates as observed in today’s world for at least the past several hundred million years.

Still another problem is ice-core drilling. Recently, the United States, Russia, Denmark and France have bored holes over a mile deep into the ice near the poles. Taking everything into account, their findings claim the lowest level of ice was laid down 160,000 years ago. On the other hand, the Greenland Society of Atlanta has recently attempted to excavate a 10-foot diameter shaft in the Greenland ice pack to remove two B-17 Flying Fortresses and six P-38 Lightning fighters trapped under an estimated 250 feet of ice for almost 50 years. Aside from the fascination with salvaging several vintage aircraft for parts and movie rights, the fact that these aircraft were buried so deeply in such a short time focuses attention on the time scales used to estimate the chronologies of ice. Consequently, if the aircraft were buried under about 250 feet of ice and snow in about 50 years, this means the ice sheet has been accumulating at an average rate of five feet per year. The Greenland ice sheet averages almost 4000 feet thick. If we were to assume the ice sheet has been accumulating at this rate since its beginning, it would take less than 1000 years for it to form, suggesting a much, much younger earth than ice-core geologists claim.
(See the next post, “Changing Land of Promise—The Effect of Rising Mountains - Part IX and the Biblical Time Scale,” for an understanding as when South American changes took place and how they are recorded in the Book of Mormon)