WATER, SOIL, AND OIL

Niagara Falls also indicates that the earth is young. Every year Niagara Falls erodes some of its supporting shelf of rock. Because of this erosion, the Falls are moving upstream about six feet every year, with the result that there is now a gorge seven miles long downstream. But at six feet a year, the entire gorge could have formed in only 5000 years! In fact observers in the mid-1800s noted that the Falls were several hundred feet farther downstream than now. Clearly the erosion rate has been quite rapid, so that the lifetime of the Falls is at most only a few thousand years.

Other physical processes yield a young age for the earth. The Nile Delta is typical of delta systems in rivers around the world. The Nile Delta covers an area of about ten thousand square miles. At the present deposition rate of sediment, the entire delta of the Nile River could have formed in roughly 5000 years. There are many other deltas worldwide that yield similar results for a young age. The Mississippi Delta, for instance, could have grown to its present size in a few thousand years with the present rate of sediment deposition. There seems to be no geologic process that unequivocally points to eons of age for the earth.

Rivers themselves are also chronometers. All rivers, such as the Tennessee River, carry salt into the oceans. If the oceans were originally fresh, and with the present inflow rate of salts and elements into the oceans, the present salt level could have accumulated in a fairly short time. In fact inflow rates actually seem to have been higher in the past, and the oceans may not have been completely fresh at first, meaning that the oceans reached their present salt concentration extremely rapidly. Some processes also remove salt from ocean water, but these processes are not significant enough to invalidate the conclusion that the oceans are young. The oceans obtained their salt content in a short time, not eons of time.

Cosmic phenomena also indicate the earth is young. For example, the Arizona Meteor Crater is nearly one mile wide and about 600 feet deep. It is often claimed to be 25,000 years old, yet Arizona was once a much wetter region. And the absence of much water erosion indicates that this crater is closer to 5000 years old. From a Biblical perspective, if this crater had formed before the Flood, the Flood would have destroyed it because the Flood completely obliterated the earth's surface (Genesis 6:13). Thus the crater must be more recent than Noah's Flood, which according to Biblical chronology was about 5000 years ago.

We move to still further examples of the earth's young age. Alpine valleys in the western United States and around the world have very sharp and rugged features. If the earth were really old, erosion would have worn these features away. Evolutionary philosophy often claims that the land is continually uplifting to counteract erosion, but there is no real evidence for this scenario.

Evolution proposes without proof this idea that the land is uplifting, simply to neutralize the evidence which erosion gives for a young earth. To put it another way, we can say that continental uplift is a device evolution must believe in, because of the prior belief that the continents are very ancient, and must therefore experience uplift, to explain why they look young. But since continental features do look young, why not discard the evolutionary claim of great age? Then there is no need to invoke mysterious uplifting processes, processes which evolution cannot explain anyway.

Even gushers from oil wells show the earth is young. Gushers were very common in oil states like Oklahoma until drillers for oil learned to cap their wells. But if the earth were old, oil would long ago have seeped out of its pores in the rocks below ground, and gushers would not exist. According to hydraulic theory, oil pressures could not be maintained in rock pores for more than several thousand years, another indication that the earth is truly thousands of years old, not billions of years.

There are more processes that indicate a young earth. Meteors flash through the atmosphere on a regular basis. Meteoritic dust, formed as meteors burn up due to friction in the atmosphere, is rich in nickel. If the earth is very old, the crust should be enriched in nickel from meteoritic dust, but such is not the case. This process shows that the earth must be quite young.

Another process indicating a young age is eroded terrain, such as the Badlands of South Dakota. At present rates erosion would level the earth's continents in only a few million years. Now erosion rates, by placing an estimate of millions of years on the earth's age, may not seem to hold much value as a chronometer from a Biblical standpoint. But we need to keep in mind that the evolutionary consensus for the earth's age is many billions of years. So at least in a negative sense, a number of processes such as continental erosion rates, show that the evolutionary age is simply too large to correspond with any real physical process.

Another process that gives similarly large estimates, yet still smaller than the evolutionary consensus, is sedimentary rock formation rates. Thick beds of sedimentary rock, such as the Navajo Sandstone in Zion National Park in Utah, supposedly formed over hundreds of millions of years. But at the current rates of sediment deposition by rivers, all the earth's sedimentary rocks could have formed in a few million years, again an estimate much larger than the Biblical age of the universe, but much less than the evolutionary consensus.