Moon and Mars Puzzle Geologists
“Young” features have
no explanation,
leaving scientists baffled
Before digging into the news behind the headline, we must explain that “young” to secular geologists can mean millions of years. So entrenched is belief in Deep Time among moyboys, they cannot even conceive of solar system objects being really young the way ordinary people think of young.
The consensus geological timeline for the solar system is 4.5 billion years. If this timeline were portrayed on a 45-foot rope, a hundred million years would be one foot. So when geologists find features so “young” they are faced with the challenge of explaining what happened that recently in relative terms.
With that in mind, here are some anomalies discussed recently in geological literature.
Where on the Moon was the eruption that produced the recently reported ∼ 120 million year old volcanic glass beads? (Icarus March 2025 issue). Three scientists ran divination exercises on glass beads found by China’s Chang’e rover in soil on the far side of the moon. The beads told them, ‘We are 120 million years old.’ That’s “extraordinarily young” for moyboys. What could have made lunar pyroclastic volcanic glass beads in recent times? The scientists figured that an explosive stalled dike (a volcanic jet of magma) might have caused a vent to appear on the surface. Such a dike would have implanted a circular vent with a dark surface less than 200 km away. So they looked around in a 200-km radius around the site, but couldn’t find one. This left them baffled. Other notions of how to make young glass beads have problems. The answer, they say, lies in futureware.
To address these conundra, and help assess the reported extraordinarily young ∼120 Ma basaltic pyroclastic volcanism, further regional searches for a source vent, and geochemical characterization and dating of CE-5 regolith glass beads, should be of the highest priority.
The question of whether lunar volcanism extends into the last few hundred million years is critical to fully understanding the thermal evolution of the Moon (Fig. 1) and other planetary bodies.
This implies that if they can’t figure this problem out they may not be able to explain other moons and planets in the solar system.

Comparison of the moons of the solar system.
Late Amazonian ice near Athabasca Valles, Mars: Recent megaflood or climate change? (29 Nov 2024, Icarus). These Martian geologists figure that water had to be present for rootless volcanoes to form at a location on Mars called the Athabasca valley flood lava (AVFL). But water is hard to come by on the red planet. Where did it come from? Where did it go? James Head and colleagues reached for the catch-all explanation for every mystery: climate change!
Either the climate allowed equatorial ice to be present in the subsurface at the time of the AVFL, or geologically recent aqueous floods in Athabasca Valles were much larger than indicated by published models.
The latter might sound like the dreaded creationist Flood geology, so the scientists would prefer the climate change explanation. But if climate change happened on Mars, what about earth? Doesn’t that tend to get humans off the hook, if scientists can appeal to the Stuff Happens Law for climate change on another planet where there are no SUV’s or fossil fuels?
The ground ice hypothesis will need to be subjected to multiple tests, including the plausibility of recent climate change that allows ice to be stable at the equator and the ability of lava to erode Athabasca Valles.
Once again, futureware comes to the rescue. Secular scientists must never think outside the box of Deep Time. No feature is ever really young in their explanatory toolkit. But believe it or not, this trio of scientists actually thinks climate change—including major floods of water—might be possible today on Mars!
Numerical models of floods passing through the ~30-km-wide and 300-km-long channel system suggest a peak discharge around a million cubic meters per second (e.g., Burr et al., 2002a, Burr et al., 2002b, Burr et al., 2004; Burr, 2003; Keszthelyi et al., 2007; Durrant et al., 2017). The youthful crater retention age for Athabasca Valles has led to the suggestion that Mars may be capable of major aqueous floods to this day (e.g., Burr et al., 2002a, Burr et al., 2002b, Burr et al., 2009). If correct, this hypothesis would support the idea that Mars continues to be able to generate catastrophic aqueous floods and has extant subsurface aquifers that would have high astrobiological interest (Rummel et al., 2014).
Quick: change the subject to hydrobioscopy. If water floods portions of Mars, life might be evolving there!

Mars has frozen water at its poles, but liquid water is not possible on the surface today because it would sublimate in the thin atmosphere.
Bonus News from Earth
Geologists rewrite textbooks with new insights from Cambrian Rocks of Grand Canyon (8 Nov 2024, U of New Mexico). This press release and one from the Utah State tell about strata in the lower Grand Canyon that bracket the Cambrian Explosion—that inexplicable period when some two dozen animal phyla appeared in the fossil record within a geologically “brief” period of time. Stuff happens, Darwin taught. Some stuff can be dramatic.
The Darwin commercial appears early in the press release:
Something dramatic happened about 500 million years ago called the Cambrian “explosion,” during which an incredible diversity of life forms became preserved in the rock record. These fossils included major groups of diverse animals that evolved into animal groups still living today (including humans).
Cambrian strata appear in the Tonto Platform in the Grand Canyon. That includes the Tapeats sandstone (the lowest sedimentary layer above the Great Unconformity), the Bright Angel Shale, and the Muav Limestone.

Cambrian strata appear in the The Tonto Platform in the Grand Canyon. That includes the Tapeats sandstone (the lowest sedimentary layer above the Great Unconformity), the Bright Angel Shale, and the Muav Limestone, indicated between the bottom two gaps on this diagram.
Having reinforced the doctrine that humans came from slime over time, the geologists mention something of note about the history and philosophy of science that astute readers should ponder: a major scheme for dates and classification of layers by Eddy McKee (the McKee model) formulated in the early 20th century is wrong.
The then-understood longer timeframe for the Cambrian transgression, along with a gradualist thinking of continuous deposition with no unconformities, and optimistic lithofacies and fossil horizon correlation, led to this interpretation.
These scientists say it’s time to “rewrite textbooks” and update McKee’s slow-and-gradual model of sediments forming in shallow seas. 21st-century geologists are hip. They know that the Tonto Platform required multiple transgressive events as sea levels rose and fell up to 5 times. Now that’s modern science!
Leave the worries about animal types appearing abruptly in the rocks to the evolutionary paleontologists. Dr Stephen Meyer is knocking on the door with something to say about that, but they were taught to ignore him.
The paper appears in GSA Today November 2024. It completely ignores the question of how two dozen animal phyla could suddenly appear by evolution, and also ignores the 100-million-year gap above the Tonto Platform. Those issues aside, lead researcher Carol Dehler and partners can keep getting paid at their jobs till the next generation of geologists revise the textbooks again.
Perhaps some future geologists will wonder how the 2024 class could state the following and ignore the implications:
Other analogous Cambrian sequences are also thought to be controlled by eustatic sea-level rise (Montañez and Osleger, 1996; Haq and Schutter, 2008; Snedden and Liu, 2010; Keller et al., 2012). Younger analogs exist as well, such as the Aptian passive-margin record of the Arabian Peninsula, which has a strikingly similar depositional pattern to the Tonto Group, spans a similar duration (~14 m.y.), and hosts three unconformities (Davies et al., 2002).
Ahem; doesn’t that sound like something global happened? Doesn’t that also call into question the ages of the rocks?
There are some modern scientists who do take these kinds of evidence seriously. They’re called creationists and flood geologists. And when they mean young, they really mean young: thousands, not millions. They don’t have to explain away dinosaur soft tissue, missing millions of years, global megasequences, folded but uncracked strata, and fossil graveyards.