Gumby Geology Stretches to Fit Darwin’s Timeline
Guess how fast the Sierra Nevada
Mountains formed? In a “geologic
instant” they’re now claiming.
Mountains grow slowly except when they grow rapidly. That fits the Darwin pattern: animals evolve slowly except when they evolve rapidly. The one fixed parameter in Darwin’s storytelling empire is the timeline of millions and billions of years.

illustration by Brett Miller
Sierra Nevadas Formed in a “Geologic Instant” – Geologists Raise the Speed Limit for How Fast Continental Crust Can Form (SciTech Daily). Jennifer Chu of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology knows never to tweak the timeline, even if it requires moving mountains. “Study [prepare to be hoodwinked] suggests parts of the Sierra Nevadas formed in a ‘geologic instant,’ more than twice as fast as previously thought,” she begins Tontologically. With Darwin vapors rising, she enters her moyboy trance and begins her tale as if an eyewitness.
Although we can’t see it in action, the Earth is constantly churning out new land. This takes place at subduction zones, where tectonic plates crush against each other and in the process plow up chains of volcanos that magma can rise through. Some of this magma does not spew out, but instead mixes and morphs just below the surface. It then crystallizes as new continental crust, in the form of a mountain range.
Scientists have thought that the Earth’s mountain ranges are formed through this process over many millions of years. But MIT geologists have now found that the planet can generate new land far more quickly than previously thought.
In a paper published in the journal Geology, the team shows that parts of the Sierra Nevada mountain range in California rose up surprisingly fast, over a period of just 1.39 million years — more than twice as fast as expected for the region. The researchers attribute the rapid formation of land to a massive flare-up of magma.
It was actually 2.5 times as fast as expected, they later clarify.
Did they perform their divination on the whole mountain range? No; just the southern end near Tehachapi. The recent grad has learned his craft well. “It was sort of an instant,” says Benjamin Klein, grad of 2019. “It was a little over 1 million years, but in geologic times, it was super fast.” Not many normal people would consider a million years an instant, but this is academia.
Millions of years is such a convenient concept, they can stretch and squish the Darwin Years any way they need to in order to keep King Charles happy. He does need lots of time to get humans from bacteria.

Gumby, the flexible clay animation character from cartoons.
“The entire batholith was constructed in almost 200 million years, but we know over that period of time, there were periods when it was highly active and periods that were quieter, with less new material added,” Klein says. “What we were able to show in this area was that, at least locally, the rate at which magma was brought in is much faster than the average rates that have been documented in the Sierras.”
Geologists have thought that magma flare-ups occur as a result of unusual activity in the Earth, such as tectonic plates suddenly colliding at a faster rate. According to everything researchers have documented about the Bear Valley Intrusive Suite, however, no such activity transpired at the time the mountain range formed.
“There’s no obvious trigger,” Klein says. “The system is pretty much going along, and then we see this big burst of magma. So this challenges some basic notions in the field, and should inform how people think of how quickly these things could be happening today, in places like the Andes or the volcanos in Japan.”
Be a good citizen scientist and go watch your local hills for a million years. It could make you famous, but also a fall guy. Why observe when you can just speculate? After all, the previous accepted rate was gospel truth last year. Next year, who knows what Gumby Geology practitioners will come up with?
If you watched the film “Dismantled” we recommended Saturday Oct 9th, you remember how the battle between creation and evolution is not about religion vs science. Science can only deal with what is observable, testable, and repeatable. This paper meets none of these requirements for science. Klein and the other moyboys observed rocks in the present, then made up a story of how they got that way.
The issue is, rather, a question of one view of history and another view of history. All scientists can do is try to take present-day evidence and try to see if the narrative they invent makes a reasonable match to that evidence. The few rocks they examined cannot talk. The fact that they had to speed up their theory of orogeny by 2.5 times shows that neither the earlier theory or the revised theory are reliable. That’s why we call it Gumby Geology. By contrast, the Bible’s record of mountain formation has not changed since it was recorded some 3600 years ago. It’s rock solid.
Build your house on the rock, Jesus said: i.e., his word. And he was a creationist, an eyewitness of what he did on those 7 days when the world was created by intelligent design— not by chance.
Comments
6 days?