Younger All the Time
How Old is the Earth?
A Re-examination
| Author: John Woodmorappe Subject: Geology |
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One of the oldest dating methods in use involves the measurement of the accumulation of salts in the ocean. If we know the rate at which salts are added to the ocean, the rate at which they are removed, and their quantity in the ocean, we can approximate when the process started. Of course, God probably created the oceans with some salt already (so that saltwater fish would have a place to live). Furthermore, during the global Flood, salt must have been leached from land at much greater rates than occurs by rivers today. Therefore such studies can give us only the MAXIMAL theoretical age of the oceans, not their actual age.
Creationist Austin [1] performed a careful study of these factors. Despite the efforts of evolutionists to confuse the issue, he was able to show that the rate of salt accumulation exceeds that of its removal. The oceans must therefore be much, much younger than 4.5 billion years.
Now comes new evidence that the rate at which various salts enter the ocean has been seriously underestimated. Church [2] shows that submarine groundwater discharge to the oceans occurs at much greater rates than previously supposed. It had long been assumed that submarine groundwater discharge occurs at a rate only from 0.01% to 10% the rate of surface runoff (the latter, of course, mainly from rivers). Using radioactive tracers, Church reports that this rate of underground flow can amount to as much as 40% that of all the world’s rivers.
What does all this mean? Church remarks that this find can radically alter our understanding of oceanic chemical mass balance [3]. It also means that salt enters the ocean at much greater rates than previously suspected, and the oceans are all the more decisively constrained to be young in age.
NOTES
[1]. Austin, S.A. 1990. The sea’s missing salt: a dilemma for evolutionists. Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Creationism. Pittsburgh: Creation Science Fellowship. Vol. 2, pp. 17-30.
[2]. Church, T.M. 1996. An underground route for the water cycle. Nature 380:579-580.
[3]. Ibid, p. 580.
Topics: global catastrophes, earth’s antiquity, young earth, YEC, unconventional geology, weird science, little-known data, Noah’s Flood, mysteries of the earth, Kurzzeit, weird but true, salinity tolerances, worldwide