The Naica Cave Crystals - Digging into a Reference by AiG's Elizabeth Mitchell

Faith & Science Conversation
, ,
1

The AiG archives has a response, penned by Elizabeth Mitchell, to the cave of gypsum megacrystals found in a cave associated with a Mexican mining operation. The formations at this site are incompatible with any timeline measured in a few thousand years. What is instructive in Mitchell’s reply is both the lack of any substantial evidence casting doubt on the scientific analysis of these crystals, but more especially her willingness to seize on a dubious quote to conjure an illusion of dissent in scientific ranks.

Discovered in 2000, the prismic cavern is like something out of a Journey to the Center of the Earth adaptation, where people can walk on crystalline beams up to 11 meters long and weighing in the tons. They are the largest gypsum crystals known to exist, and how they grew to their enormous size has been investigated. The conclusion from working out the rate of growth at the conditions of the cave: these crystals would have developed over a rough period of millions of years, give or take an order of magnitude depending on variations of temperature and saturation. Against this, Mitchell writes:

…the true time frame is likely many orders of magnitude smaller than that proposed in the latest study. How long is that? Likely closer to the 30 or so years originally suggested by the mining company geologist and superintendent of exploration in a Mexican newspaper article.

That a working geologist might suggest these enormous crystals grew from nothing quicker than some kids leave home just demanded to chase down the article’s reference to see what AiG was up to this time. It did not lead to a peer reviewed journal, nor a geological survey, nor a popularized science publication, nor any primary source at all, but to an independent website, which in turn translated the article from a column in Spanish which ran in an undisclosed Mexican newspaper. Mitchell avoids quoting the following excerpt…[ bold mine ]

Geologists conjecture that a chamber of magma, or superheated molten rock, lying two to three miles underneath the mountain forced mineral-rich fluids upward through a fault into openings in the limestone bedrock near the surface. Over a period of time, maybe more than 30 million years, this hydrothermal liquid deposited sulphides rich in silver, lead and zinc on the limestone bedrock. These metals have been mined here since prospectors discovered the deposits in 1794 in a small range of hills south of Chihuahua City. In addition, the hydrothermal fluids dissolved gypsum, the same material used in wallboard and plaster of paris, located in the bedrock. Hot, mineral-rich solutions gave birth to these giant selenite crystals.

Note that here the company geologists reportedly associate the source for the cave crystals with the same long term processes which generally enriched the mineral deposits of the mine.

Further down is where Mitchell gets the quote she seizes upon. [ bold mine ]

The crystals formation process is more complicated because it depends on temperature, pressure, geochemistry and the fluctuation of the aquifer within the cave. The thermal water, rich in sulfuric acid by the action between water and the oxidation of lead and zinc sulfur, ascends across the fractures and gets the carbonate by dissolution of the limestone. Upon reaching super-saturation the precipitation and crystallization of calcium sulfate started. We think that growing the crystals took more than 30 years if there wasn’t a change in the cave conditions.

Well, thirty million years as expressed in the opening paragraph is certainly more than 30 years, with the “more” being up to millions of years. Given this discrepancy, it is fairly suspect that a typo was literally lost in the translation, which escaped any proof reading at the web site. Because it suited her purposes, Michell made no attempt to reconcile or validate this informal news clip and just eagerly exploited the 30 years verbiage.

The mine staff article goes on “We are doing an investigation in conjunction with the Granada University from Spain”, working with the one and same team that Michell headlines as opposing debaters. Nothing was debated. The research papers are right there in her two of her own footnotes, where the lead authors, specialists in crystal formation dynamics, are associated with the University of Grenada

Formation of natural gypsum megacrystals in Naica, Mexico

Ultraslow growth rates of giant gypsum crystals

What then is Mitchell’s alternative model? From her AiG article…

another crystal growth mechanism or another set of conditions—which would necessarily result in a different rate of crystal growth—should tell a shorter tale of these tall crystals.

Another crystal growth mechanism! Well that clarifies things. What mechanism? Laser eyed bunnies from space? Aztec priest spells? What on Earth is she even suggesting? As far as another set of conditions is concerned, did Mitchell read her own references? Gypsum crystal growth is a dynamic constrained process for which different conditions can result in no growth or even dissolution of crystals. For all the protestations that creationists are all in favor of observational or operational science, she offers squat to support her claptrap.

The Naica Cave crystals are just one of thousands of geological features that contradict the dogma of a young Earth, but this post is more concerned with the habitual duplicity that is characteristic of AiG. But when you are completely out of touch with reality, this is the kind of thing you have to do.

EDIT: They are the largest known to exist → They are the largest gypsum crystals known to exist

7 Likes
2

That’s a great catch! Thanks.
Do you think it would help to contact answers in Genesis directly? They may find it helpful.

1 Like
3

I do not do much in terms of private correspondence. Given that they are the largest YEC organization by far, I might hope that they lurk by this forum every so often.

3 Likes
4

I think so. Great catch; it’s a reminder to always keep our eyes open. Thanks.

2 Likes
5

I wasted so much time during the height of COVID doing other people’s homework. Someone would send some blog post from a person in a white coat peddling “alternative therapies” who mentioned “a study.” Sometimes it took ages to find the source, because the blogger slyly didn’t even include a citation. Then read the abstract and conclusion with a robust but antiquated and neglected high school and undergrad science education (vintage early '80s) and a lot of looking up on the way. I understood enough to understand the blog posts didn’t say what the article did. Ugh.
It feels like whack-a-mole in every field sometimes.

5 Likes
6

Although the Naica Cave crystals are perhaps the most photogenic large crystals, they are not the largest recorded crystals for any mineral, and they formed faster than many much smaller crystals. However, one might argue that a sizeable chunk of the inner core is the largest crystal in Earth.

Tracing the basis for a creation science claim is often challenging, and sometimes they dig up a claim related to some obscure area that no one has done much research on.

2 Likes
7

OP edited to indicate gypsum crystals.

Mitchell’s article also make no mention of contextual issues. These crystals which in themselves required in the realm of hundreds of thousands to millions of years to reach these sizes, grew in an existing cave system which itself would have required geological time to form. So that duration has to be added. There can be no karst caves where there is no limestone to begin with; at the minesite the limestone sequence dates to 100 mya containing albian age planktonic foraminifora. The formation features a complx history with interbeddings, igneous intrusions, and an underlay of evaporites dating back to 113 mya.

The volume of limestone on Earth presents an insurmountable problem for YEC. You cannot account for the amount of organisms required, or deal with the heat of formation [YEC keeps wanting high energy catastrophic events, but without all the annoying energy], in anything near the span of time allowed for the flood. In Mitchell’s world, kilometers of marine deposition, dewatering, compactation, limestone formation, uplift, cave formation, and crystal growth - scientifically every step in sequence taking geological time - all ridiculously managed to happen since 2400 BC. That is after when Egypt’s pyramids, themselves made of fossilized limestone, were built.

4 Likes
8

Yes; in general YEC claims pay no attention to the overall stratigraphic context to what they are trying to explain away at the moment.

The evaporites are likewise problematic for a global flood - salty enough to precipitate them is salty enough to kill practically all macroscopic aquatic life.

3 Likes
9

why should this be a problem for a creationist anymore than it would be for any large scale flood model?

Even in the secular cosmology, early in earths history water was only slightly saline.

If salinity was a problem for a global flood, why cant a creator God perform a miracle to ensure the survival of water creatures that might be affected by it?

I do not understand why it is that any Christian refuses to accept that God can perform miracles with creation, the flood, and Sodom/Gomorah…and yet they are quite happy to believe in the miracles Christ performed whilst he was on this earth (his incarnation and virgin birth being the first dilemma)?

This whole claim is such that either, one accepts ALL biblical miracles or, NONE. The individual who accepts none is denying Christianity (there is no theological middle ground here)

10

The foundational problem is that the global flood of modern young earth claims is not a biblical miracle. It contradicts itself, contradicts the biblical account, and contradicts the evidence of God’s creation. It pretends to be biblical and scientific while just making stuff up. What actually fits the biblical and geological evidence is a major regional flood of some sort.

I and most others on this list do not doubt that God can perform miracles with creation, the flood, the cities of the plain, etc. But that does not mean that we should believe every claim that God performed miracles, no matter what the evidence is. Remember that it was Satan who demanded that Jesus work miracles in the wilderness. Miracles are no excuse for denying the evidence.

The specific difficulty is that, in a global flood, the water is mixing globally. Ignoring several other problems, in order to get salt precipitating out of water, the concentration of dissolved salts has to be salty enough to kill most life. But if there is a global flood, that means that the water globally is salty enough to kill most life. Noah would need aquaria. Also, if the water globally is salty enough to precipitate out salt, it would precipitate salt out globally. There should be a salt layer around the world for a particular time interval in the Flood if Flood geology were based on reality. But in fact, salt deposits occur here and there at ages back to the late Precambrian. They match what should be expected if various places over time were sunny with poor connections to the rest of the ocean, so lagoons and seas sometimes dried out enough to start precipitating salt (just as they do today). Often there are layers in the evaporites that match seasonal changes, also not compatible with a Flood geology model.

5 Likes
11

When all else fails, YEC often invokes the miraculous to explain away evidence of age. This is generally founders because

There is no point or purpose to the miracle other than creating the appearance of false age.

Why would giant crystals be created hidden in a cave?

There is no record.

A global flood would leave an dramatic imprint. What we actually have is a smooth record of continuity stretching back hundreds of millions of years, with embedded events which are not global floods. This is a different category from miracles which would not be expected to leave any trace.

There is no scriptural basis.

In the Biblical flood narrative, the water comes up and water goes down. There is none of the fanciable tectonic movement, accelerated radioactive decay, algae blooms, heterozygosity, and on and on. All that is invention.

3 Likes
12

This topic was automatically closed 6 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.