The full text of the 100 Reasons the Earth is Old - - a now defunct website …
divided into four sections!
How do we know from geology that the Earth is greater than 10,000 years old?
[Part 1 of 4: Numbers 1 to 25]
1.Tree-ring “long counts” from California, Central Europe, New Zealand, and Scandinavia extend up to ~13,000 years. These chronologies are constructed from hundreds of individual trees that overlap, so that even if a tree did produce multiple rings during a growth season, the ‘extra years’ would disappear in the correlation process. Even John Woodmorappe has written that these tree-ring chronologies cannot be explained by multiple rings being produced in a single year or the mismatch of individual tree records.
2.The oldest individual bristlecone pine trees date to ~5,000 years old by dendrochronology (ring counting), which is older than the traditional date for Noah’s flood. Since we have no reason to suspect that these trees could have formed multiple rings in any given year, these trees provide two constraints: 1) the flood, if it were global, occurred more than 5,064 years ago, and 2) the Earth’s surface, where the trees were growing, has been identical to modern day over the last 5,000 years. The latter point is important, because flood geologists must assume that catastrophic geological processes continued for centuries after the flood to explain Quaternary deposits and erosional features like Grand Canyon or the Channeled Scablands.
3.Long-term records of glacial ice can be dated by counting annual layers beyond 10,000 years. These annual layers can be recognized not only by appearance, but variations in chemistry, which removes any assumptions about growth rate during these intervals and precludes the possibility that multiple rings formed each year.
4.Varved sediments with more than 10,000 layers, such as Lake Sugietsu, Lake Van, and the Cariaco Basin, to name a few. Geologists don’t just assume that these layers are annual, but must demonstrate rigorously that each layer exhibits some kind of seasonal signal (characteristic isotopes, organic matter, or mineral content).
From Figure 4 in Reimer et al. (2013): example of radiocarbon calibration, plotting the radiocarbon age of samples against their known age (between 34–45 ka).
5.Radiocarbon calibration curves confirm that annual layers in trees and varved sediments are indeed annual. The radiocarbon age of annual layers within these deposits are always within ~10% of the age predicted by layer counting, back to nearly 50,000 years. If these layers accumulated catastrophically, or if the radiocarbon method were fundamentally flawed, we should not expect such a match. Additionally, since YEC’s suppose that radiocarbon ages are only apparently old (due to low 14C concentrations during and after the Flood), every marine, tree-ring, and varved lake chronology must be compressed down to ~4,000 years. In other words, the YEC paradigm would predict that trees, glaciers, corals, and seasonally active lakes regularly form 4-10 ‘annual’ bands every year. But they don’t.
6.There is no radiocarbon in old samples, despite claims to the contrary. Geologically old samples of coal, diamonds, and graphite, for example, yield finite radiocarbon ages that are consistent with the expected level of contamination invariably introduced during sample collection and preparation.
7.Continuous coral chronologies from modern communities (i.e. not buried in sediments) extend throughout the Holocene. Corals contain annual bands and may be combined like tree rings to construct long-term chronologies, or dated by the radiocarbon and/or U-Th method. Applying these tools, geologists use corals to reconstruct sea level over the last few tens of thousands of years (or more!).
Cross section of a stalagmite prepared for stable-isotope analysis. Drill pits are from powders collected for U-Th dating. Image from UT-Austin media release.
8.Secondary cave formations, such as stalagmites, can form relatively quickly (1–2 mm/yr) in tropical climates or where summer monsoons bring large volumes of precipitation to the cave system. For caves found in temperate or arid climates, however, the growth rate of stalagmites can be incredibly slow (<0.1 mm/yr). Advanced techniques in U-Th disequilibrium dating confirm what geologists long suspected: these iconic formations took tens of thousands of years to reach heights of half a meter or more.
9.Large subterranean caverns do not form overnight, especially outside of tropical climates. The dissolution of caves is a rather slow process, due to the limited solubility of calcite in very slightly acidic rainwater. Although the process can be accelerated in the presence of active soils or even hydrogen sulfide (a microbial byproduct of petroleum degradation), the sheer size of natural monuments like Mammoth Cave and Carlsbad Caverns cannot be explained in a young-Earth timeline, especially given that these caves are lavishly decorated by secondary formations, which themselves take thousands of years to form.
10.Large terrestrial lakes and inland seas have accumulated more than 10,000 years worth of deposition. Examples include the Black Sea, Dead Sea, Caspian Sea, Lake Baikal, Great Salt Lake, Lake Van, Lake Ammersee, Lake Sugietsu, and Lake El’gygytgyn, to name a few. These lakes are dated by combinations of radiocarbon, annual band counts, and isotopic records that correspond to climatic trends from ice cores. Some contain evaporite layers, indicating that the lakes dried up in the past. In the cases of Dead Sea and Great Salt Lake, this happened many times in the past on glacial-interglacial scales.
11.Lake Baikal in Siberia has collected sediments that are inconsistent with any catastrophic inflow from the surrounding region. The sediments at the lake bottom are rather fine-grained, free of terrestrial plant debris (aside from microscopic pollen near the shoreline), and contain abundant diatoms. These diatoms flourish in the summer months but settle very slowly to the lake bottom, so their presence throughout the sediment column confirms that sediments accumulated under normal conditions, similar to today. Therefore, we can confidently say that the lake basin is potentially millions of years old, given the sheer thickness of lake-bottom sediments.
12.Well developed river flood plains span large areas of temperate and tropical regions of Earth. These flood plains develop over long intervals of time as periodic flooding and migration of the river channel slowly erode the bedrock down to a flat surface. Attempts to describe vast planation surfaces by the retreat of flood waters do not work, because during floods, erosion is localized in channels that form along ‘weak points’ in the underlying rock and sediment. If this erosion took place soon after the Flood, the sediment would still be soft, exacerbating the localization of erosion in deep channels.
Slithering stone in Death Valley. Photo by Momatiuk – Eastcott/Corbis photography.
13.Painfully slow erosional processes in modern deserts, involving wind, ground tremors, or even ice, are the best explanation for some rather bizarre boulders scattered across the dunes. Slow tumbling boulders in South American deserts, for example, had to be weathered slowly by wind in the arid highlands, and cosmogenic dating confirms their old age. Slithering stones of Death Valley, on the other hand, were proven to move only by seasonal ice. These findings imply that the modern landscape has changed little in thousands of years (if not millions!).
14.Evidence for numerous glacial cycles during the Quaternary (i.e. the past 2.6 million years) is particularly abundant in the northern hemispheric continents of North America and Eurasia. These evidences include glacial tills and terminal moraines, which are buried within layers of Quaternary aged sediments. Between these glacially derived layers, relatively warm-weather plants populate the sediments of old river valleys, indicating that climate rebounded after each ice age to one similar to what we find today.
15.Quaternary deposits and landscapes are far too complicated to have accumulated in the ~4,500 years following the Flood. Everywhere we look on Earth, we truly find evidence for ~2 million years worth of processes, whether at high latitudes (where we find evidence for repeated glaciations and deglaciations, separated by warm intervals) or in the tropics (where we find thick desert dune sequences alternating with humid intervals) or in the oceans (where 2 million+ years of Milankovitch cycles are recorded in only a few meters of silt and clay) or in the high mountains (where alpine valleys have been carved out by rivers or glaciers, then infilled by coarse sediment, then eroded again, etc.). Flood geologists unanimously assert that the Quaternary period represents the ‘post-Flood’ era, but there is good reason that conventional geologists ascribe a much longer age: 2.6 million years.
16.Glacial tills from ancient glaciations, such as the ‘Snowball Earth’ episodes in the Late Proterozoic and cold intervals beginning the Late Ordovician and Late Pennsylvanian periods, are found within the geological record and so must be reinterpreted by Flood geologists as submarine deposits of boulders and mud during Noah’s flood. Though ancient tills do occasionally resemble submarine flows, ancient glaciations are not inferred by these sedimentary deposits alone. Instead, a suite of geological data, from fossils to paleoceanographic data to rock chemistry, all support the idea that the whole Earth was much cooler when these tills were deposited.
17.Continental ice sheets do not form in a matter of centuries, especially those that were more than a mile thick and extended in some cases to southern Siberia and the central Great Plains, USA. Flood geologists must maintain, however, that massive ice sheets nearly half the size of Russia not only grew, but melted entirely, then regrew, melted entirely, and regrew more than a dozen times in less than 200-700 years (the timeline depends on which YEC you ask!).
18.Human occupations of nearly every continent can be demonstrated beyond 10,000 years, e.g. in South Africa, ruling out the possibility that humans repopulated the Earth after being obliterated only ~4,500 years ago.
19.Ötzi the Iceman has frequently made headlines in creationist writings, because they accurately perceive this unique find as a challenge to the young-Earth timeline. The remains of this murdered Alpine farmer date to ~5,300 years old, which YEC’s arbitrarily dismiss as “inflated”. Regardless, they do admit that he lived sometime in the beginnings of human civilization (i.e. very soon after the Flood), and so they attempt to turn the argument on ‘evolutionists’ by emphasizing the level of technology (tools, agriculture) carried by Ötzi and his village—”How can this ‘primitive’ man be so advanced?” This response is a non sequitur, because the artifacts found with Ötzi are entirely compatible with reconstructed histories of European peoples. What YEC’s overlook is the geological context of the body: it was preserved in undisturbed ice near the top of a mountain range. This tells us that the morphology of the Alps has changed very little since Ötzi was alive. So when did the Alps have a chance to shed the kilometers of sediment that once covered their peaks? The mountains in which Ötzi was found are indeed very ancient, far older than the body of this 5,300-year-old village outcast.
20.Human settlements that are now submerged due to sea-level rise have been documented beneath the English Channel, North and Baltic seas, off the coast of Israel, Florida, and beneath the Black Sea, to name a few. For much of human history, global sea level was up to ~130 meters lower than today, exposing far more of the continental shelves and pushing ancient coastlines far away from their modern locations. This allowed for human settlements to develop in sites that are now completely submerged. Following the ice age, however, sea level rose sharply and reached near modern levels at ~8,000 years ago. Whatever the absolute timeline, the young-Earth view allows too little time for human populations to develop, migrate across the globe, and construct large settlements prior to the sea-level rise following the ice age (which they assert happened only a few centuries after Noah’s flood).
21.Fossils record long histories of migration of animals from Eurasia to the “New World”, which cannot be accounted for in the young-Earth timeline. Large mammals such as mammoth, mastodon, and giant sloth reproduce far too slowly to account for the population sizes indicated by fossil graveyards between Siberia and the Americas.
22.There is no record of migration from Central Asia to Australia for many species unique to the land down under. Their ancestors, however, are found in the fossil record and imply that modern populations derived from species that arrived to the island well in the distant past, not after the Flood only ~4,000 years ago.
23.Modern oceans are too salty to have been formed only ~6,000 years ago. We know this salt was delivered slowly to the oceans mainly via rivers (i.e. as opposed to being created in situ), because the relative abundance of salts in the ocean is related to their relative solubilities and abundance in the Earth’s surface.
24.Cenozoic aged marine sediments in the Gulf of Mexico or along the west African and east South American coastlines, for example, are far too thick to be explained by ‘post-Flood’ processes. This fact has caused some YEC’s, such as Michael Oard, to push the ‘post-Flood’ boundary later and later into the Cenozoic and consider these marine sediments as Flood deposits.
However, the structure of marine sediments in the Gulf of Mexico and the equatorial Atlantic is clearly related to the modern topography, where large rivers like the Mississippi, Amazon, Congo, and Cross have dumped tons of sediment into the seas, causing massive deltas to form over long periods of time. Due to the economic reward for exploring these sites (which contain abundant oil), geologists have thoroughly mapped out the evolution of ancient deltas through miles of sediment. Their result ubiquitously inform us that the modern landscape is very old and rather stable, and that these late Cenozoic marine sediments were not deposited through catastrophic processes, but by everyday rivers at rates observed today.
25.Deep ocean sediments take far too long to settle to have accumulated in less than 5,000 years. Today, the entire seafloor is covered with microscopic species of plankton, diatoms, radiolaria, etc., in addition to tiny bits of clay and calcite. These particles are so small, that they would remain in suspension under flowing water, so their presence on the seafloor must be explained by a long-time in which they could settle through miles of seawater. The history of seafloor sediments is further amplified by the fact that marine tephra (volcanic ash layers) occur throughout marine cores around the world, but volcanic ash also needs time and calm water to settle out.
A 3,500-year-old volcanic ash deposit from Santorini volcano, in three stages: an air fall pumice (bottom), followed by laminated ash that formed underwater (middle tan layer), covered by a pyroclastic flow (top white layer). Photo by Lee Siebert found here with full description.
[See Parts 2, 3 and 4 of 4]