Published in the Church of God Quarterly for juniors, 1990
One day the cold November wind of Iceland lashed a fisherman’s face. It
caught
his net. When he threw
it out again, he noticed smoke rising from the North Atlantic about four miles
out from Geirfuglasker.
“Look! Smoke!” He shouted to his partner. “A ship’s on fire!”
The ship's captain radioed for help and headed the small fishing boat in
the
direction of the
smoke. Moments later the captain radioed again, “No ship is in danger. But fire
is shooting out of the icy ocean!”
Dr. Thorarinsson, a well-known geologist, was at the scene in a couple
of hours. He watched from the deck of a ship a safe distance away as red
volcanic rock and ash spouted into the sky. Gigantic flames lashed upward as if
trying to lick the sky. Day after day he watched an island being rapidly formed.
Two years later, in 1965, he built a house on the new island. This new
island was named Surtsey. The house was headquarters for scientists studying
the new plants and animals that invaded the island.
Several leading evolutionary geologists watched as natural forces within
the earth formed not only a new island but one with a landscape that appeared
to be thousands of years old. “The varied and mature landscape was almost
beyond belief,” Dr. Thorarinsson wrote.
“What elsewhere may take thousands of years...the same development took
weeks or even a few days here.”
Evolutionists use an uniformitarian time scale for estimating the age of
the earth, rocks, fossils, etc. According to this time scale, changes in the
earth’s surface are a gradual process rather than sudden upheaval. Geologists now
realize because of Surtsey (the new island formed by the volcano) that this
time scale could be very misleading.
Shortly after the island’s first birthday it had a mountain which has an
active volcano, wide sandy beaches, impressive cliffs which were grayish white
and resembled the cliffs on the English Channel. There were hollows, secluded
valleys, soft waving surfaces and boulders worn almost round by the surf. Gales
and sandstorms dealt blows on this island within its second year.
Some geologists watched as small amounts of hot lava flowed gently down
to the edge of the sea. When the ice-cold seawater splashed upon the steaming
lava, it shattered into a billion small bits of sand! When Surtsey was a
two-year-old island, it looked like it could have been 10,000 years old!
Surtsey Island is good evidence that our earth could be young, much younger
than evolutionists want to admit.
The violent eruption of Mount St. Helen on May 18, 1980, gave some more
Geological surprises.
In six minutes it leveled enough trees to build an estimated 640,000 houses.
The mountain paradise turned into a bald wasteland. Mud and rock avalanched
into Spirit Lake, causing waves up to 850 feet high on the north shore of the
lake. As the water returned to the lake, it scoured trees, plants, soil and
volcanic debris from the mountain’s slopes. This was dumped into the lake
forming an approximant 320 foot-thick deposit on the bottom. This mat of wood,
bark and plant life under the water pressure has already formed peat.
Peat is the first material in the formation of coal. This peat is
already much like certain coal beds of the Eastern United States. Until recently,
scientists have believed that coal was formed slowly sometimes taking a thousand
years. I wonder if this peat will soon change into coal.
Twenty-three square miles of a valley on the north side of the mountain
were covered to an average depth of 150 feet with rocks and volcanic debris. In
this valley hills and gullies formed within five days which geologists would
have thought to have taken hundreds of years. Some of these gullies are 50 feet
deep. A miniature “Grand Canyon” over 100 feet deep is believed to have formed
in one day. The erosional features of Mount St. Helen are not unique, but are
similar to those seen elsewhere when a volcano errupts.
At Lituya Bay, Alaska, an enormous wave destroyed the forest along the
shore as high as 1720 feet above the ocean. It stripped the hills of vegetation
and changed the mountain into a wasteland. Such stripping would have taken
thousands of years under “normal” conditions.
On November 20, 1980, at Lake Peigneur, Louisiana, a well driller
accidentally penetrated an underground salt mine. Two hundred forty million
cubic feet of lake water emptied suddenly into the mine. This caused tree-like
patterns of channels in the lakebed
for a depth of 200 to
300 feet.
On the night of June 8, 1974, a rain storm in southern Brazil eroded a
valley 16 feet deep, 50 feet wide, and 1600 feet long into a gently sloping
field.
Scientists estimate that the 277 mile long Grand Canyon, carved by the
Colorado River, took three to six million years to form. This all took place
long before man kept records of erosion. But one of the world’s largest
man-made disasters was the unrestrained flooding of this same river between
1905 and 1907. In nine months, the runaway river formed 43 miles of channels
with an average width of 1000 feet, and depth of 50 feet. It removed almost
four times the amount of dirt removed while digging the Panama Canal.
If the Colorado River had kept eroding at that rate for 113 years it
could have cut another canyon as large as the Grand Canyon. If it had kept on
the same rate for just three million years, the canyon it carved could be 2,000
times deeper than the Grand Canyon. This is just more evidence leading us to
believe that the earth is young.
The moon also tells us that the earth is young. Scientists believe that
the earth and the moon are about the same age. They also know that strong ultra
violet light and X-rays change rocks to dust at a very slow rate. Even this
small amount could during a billion years, cause the moon to have at least
twenty miles of dust on its surface. However, the astronauts did not sink into
miles of dust when they landed on the moon. They only found enough dust to make
good footprints!
Surtsey Island, Mount St. Helen, flooding, well drilling, the small
amount of moon dust and a multitude of other evidence has caused many great
scientists to believe that the earth is less than ten thousand years old, not 4
½ billions years old!
Charlotte Huskey
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