Don't tell me there's no proof for evolution

If following ID the world was covered in water, meaning no ground was exposed, what volume of water based on the surface area of the earth would be required to do such a thing?

Diest TKO wrote:

If following ID the world was covered in water, meaning no ground was exposed, what volume of water based on the surface area of the earth would be required to do such a thing?

Hi Deist,

The answer to this question is dependent on just how flat (uniform) you believe the surface of the Earth might have been.

Let's take an extreme example just to illustrate the point: Suppose the crust of the Earth were completely, uniformly flat. If that were the case, then water would be the next lightest material (after dirt/rock and before air) and even a tiny amount of water would cover the entire surface of the earth. The entire volume of liquid water would be spread evenly over the entire globe and every square inch of land would be under water.

When RL suggests that mountains might not have been as high, he may also be implying that ocean trenches may not have been as deep, and difference between the rise of a continent and the depth of the ocean may have been more uniform.

I don't think it makes any sense to try to address RL's vision of water covering the surface of the earth until you get some reasonable understanding of how how he envisions the uniformity of the planetary crust. And you're never going to get details like that from RL.

Structures of KNOWN recent origin are 'dated' as millions of years old. Something wrong there, y'know?

I simply stated that there IS evidence that many of the high mountain ranges were at one point underwater

and that there is good reason to think that all of the continents may have been basically one landmass instead of many widely separated ones.

Both of these factors make it much easier for the entire earth to have been submerged.

some wag in the Canadin geo survey, AAUMING THAT THERE WAS A fLOOD, computed a Wilson cycle continental drift speed of about 7 miles per hour.

real life wrote:

Structures of KNOWN recent origin are 'dated' as millions of years old. Something wrong there, y'know?

Examples please?

xingu wrote:

real life wrote:

Structures of KNOWN recent origin are 'dated' as millions of years old. Something wrong there, y'know?

Examples please?

Mt St Helens.

xingu wrote:

real life wrote:

Structures of KNOWN recent origin are 'dated' as millions of years old. Something wrong there, y'know?

Examples please?

Mt St Helens.

The concept of radioisotopic dating is fairly simple. The method used at Mount St. Helens is called potassium-argon dating. It is based on the fact that potassium-40 (an isotope or "variety" of the element potassium) spontaneously "decays", becoming argon-40 (an isotope of the element argon). This process proceeds very slowly at a known rate, having a half-life for potassium-40 of 1.3 billion years. In other words, 1.0 gram of potassium-40, in 1.3 billion years, would decay to the point that only 0.5 gm was left. Theoretically, given certain assumptions, one could measure the amount of potassium-40 and argon-40 in a volcanic rock sample and calculate how old the rock is. When this is done, the age is usually very great, often millions of years.

In June of 1992, Dr. Austin collected a 15 lb. block of dacite from high on the lava dome. A portion of this sample was crushed, sieved, and processed into a whole rock powder as well as four mineral concentrates. These were submitted for potassium-argon analysis to Geochron Laboratories of Cambridge, MA, a high quality, professional radioisotope dating laboratory. The only information provided to the laboratory was that the samples came from dacite and that "low argon" should be expected. The laboratory was not told that the specimen came from the lava dome at Mount St. Helens and was only 10 years old. The results of this analysis, shown in Figure 2 (below), were recently published.1


Sample (Mt.St.Helens' new dome) "Age" (in millions of years)
1. "Whole Rock" 0.35 ± 0.05
2. Feldspar, etc. 0.34 ± 0.06
3. Amphibole, etc. 0.9 ± 0.2
4. Pyroxene, etc. 1.7 ± 0.3
5. Pyroxene 2.8 ± 0.6

-------------------------------------------
Figure 2. Potassium-argon "ages" for "whole rock" and mineral concentrate samples from lava dome at Mount St. Helens.
What can one observe about these results? First and foremost is simply that they are wrong. A correct answer would have been "zero argon" indicating that the sample was too young to date by this method. Instead, the results ranged from 0.35-2.8 million years! Why is this? A good possibility is that solidification of magma does not reset the radioisotope clock to zero. Probably some argon-40 is incorporated from the start into newly formed minerals giving the "appearance" of great age. It should also be noted that there is poor correspondence between the different samples, each taken from the same rock.

Is this the only example where radioisotope dating has failed to give correct dates for rocks of known age? Certainly not! Dalrymple2 gives the following potassium-argon ages for historic lava flows (Figure 3):


Historic Lava Flow Potassium-Argon "age" (in millions of years)
Hualalai basalt (Hawaii, AD 1800-1801) 1.6 ± 0.16
Mt. Etna basalt (Sicily, AD 1792) 1.41 ± 0.08
Mt. Lassen plagioclase (California, AD 1915) 0.11 ± 0.3
Sunset Crater basalt (Arizona, AD 1064-1065) 0.27 ± 0.09
0.25 ± 0.15

Austin sent his samples to a laboratory that clearly states that their equipment cannot accurately measure samples less than two million years old. All of the measured ages but one fall well under the stated limit of accuracy, so the method applied to them is obviously inapplicable. Since Austin misused the measurement technique, he should expect inaccurate results, but the fault is his, not the technique's. Experimental error is a possible explanation for the older date.


Austin's samples were not homogeneous, as he himself admitted. Any xenocrysts in the samples would make the samples appear older (because the xenocrysts themselves would be old). A K-Ar analysis of impure fractions of the sample, as Austin's were, is meaningless.

Austin sent his samples to a laboratory that clearly states that their equipment cannot accurately measure samples less than two million years old. All of the measured ages but one fall well under the stated limit of accuracy, so the method applied to them is obviously inapplicable.