Geology: A Science in Constant Revision

Slow-and-gradual uniformitarian geology is so 1830. Get with the times: fast, rapid, dynamic forces and theory revisions.

Scientists have trouble learning about events in human history, let alone unobserved, unrecorded history. For instance, six researchers writing in PNAS say that previous estimates of death tolls from plagues in the time of Emperor Justinian (541 to 750 CE) are way off. The plague was nowhere near as catastrophic as most writers have long assumed. If this wrong about history with written records to draw from, how wrong could geologists be about events assumed to be hundreds of times as old with no eyewitnesses?

Wolfe Creek Crater younger than previously thought (University of Portsmouth). Scientists who thought this crater in Australia was 300,000 Darwin Years old were way off. The new number is 120,000 Darwin Years. By all appearances, it is far younger than that. Darwinians, however, love their long ages, and don’t want to give ammunition to young-earthers. 120,000 Darwin Years is now the consensus truth! Cosmic radionuclide dating says so! See the latest scenario in Meteoritics and Planetary Science that asserts, “Considering the geomorphic setting, the most likely age of the crater is” 120,000 years, plus or minus 9,000 years. This comes from experts who were 2/3 wrong about the previous consensus estimate.

Gigantic tsunami pushed boulders as heavy as tanks inland, scientists say (Fox News Science). Geologists tend to underestimate the power of water. Look at the boulders in the photo: as heavy as tanks, these rocks were lifted high above a cliff in a tsunami in Oman just 1,000 years ago, the article says. Creation geologists point to boulders as big as houses in the Tapeats Sandstone, the first sedimentary layer in the Grand Canyon (see ICR). The forces that plucked those boulders and redeposited them at the top of the Great Unconformity must have been stronger than anything seen in modern times.

Arizona’s Barringer Meteor Crater

Extra-Terrestrial Impacts May Have Triggered “Bursts” of Plate Tectonics (Geological Society of America). One good-size meteor can ruin your whole theory. Surely geologists have figured out plate tectonics, haven’t they?

When—and how—the Earth’s surface evolved from a hot, primordial mush into a rocky planet continually resurfaced by plate tectonics remain some of the biggest unanswered questions in earth science research. Now a new study, published in Geology, suggests this earthly transition may in fact have been triggered by extra-terrestrial impacts.

“We tend to think of the Earth as an isolated system, where only internal processes matter,” says Craig O’Neill , director of Macquarie University’s Planetary Research Centre. “Increasingly, though, we’re seeing the effect of solar system dynamics on how the Earth behaves.”

Impacts are the magic bullets that naturalistic geologists call on to explain just about everything in the solar system. Now secular geologists are invoking them to kick-start plate tectonics. Large meteors “could” do this, they speculate, as long as they were finely tuned to fit Goldilocks criteria: not too small to accomplish nothing, but not too big to destroy the Earth.

Mars: we may have solved the mystery of how its landslides form (The Conversation). How can landslides travel far beyond the distances physical laws say they should be able to go? Friction should stop some landslides long before they travel as far as some of them have gone. The mystery of the “long runout landslides” is addressed by Magnarini and Mitchell in this article, who think they have a new idea based on vibration theory, vortices and strata thickness. Because Mars preserves its landslides better than Earth, they studied landslides in Valles Marineris. A big landslide, intuitively, happens quickly—within hours or even minutes. No moyboy dates required.

Secular geology is like the weather in Vermont, only slower. If you don’t like it, wait five to fifty years, and it will change—sometimes by a wallop.

For illustrations of how secular astronomers rely on impacts for everything, see the video by Spike Psarris, “Our Created Solar System” at CreationAstronomy.com.