22  River deltas, sea coasts and reefs
Menu  |  back

The material washed into lakes and seas by rivers and streams, allows conclusions to be drawn as to how long these processes have already lasted. It is amazing that there is not a single river delta anywhere on Earth that can definitely be significantly more than 10,000 years old. Even if one studies the current changes in lakes and sea coasts, it is clear that the Earth’s surface, as it is today, can never be millions and billions of years old.


  •  
 The Amazon transports 500 million tons of material a year into the Atlantic. As a result, the shelf in the estuary area of the Amazon is raised by about 50 metres above the surrounding shelf. Under today’s conditions, it would have taken about 14,000 years to deposit this volume. If it is taken into consideration that the Amazon washed considerably more material into the sea during the formation of the Andes than it does today, then this figure must again be drastically reduced. In a good 3,000 years, today’s shelf off the estuary of the Amazon can be filled to the water’s surface.

 The Mississippi transports around 300 million tons of material yearly into the Gulf of Mexico. On the basis of this volume, the gulf would have to be completely filled after eight million years. In truth, however, there is only a relatively small river delta of 50 km in length at the end of the river. Some advocates of a billion year old world say that the material washed down sinks continuously into the sea. Yet there is no trace of it in the drill cores that have been made in the seabed. Such drillings have been made all over the gulf (not to calculate the age of the earth, of course, but in the attempt to find oil ...).

 The Niagara Falls cliffs are, due to the large volume of water, yearly eroded by 1.5 metres. The waterfall is therefore shifting gradually in the direction of Lake Erie. From the distance from Lake Ontario (11.5km) one can conclude that the Niagara Falls are, at the very most, 10,000 years old (1).

Cross section of the Niagara Falls and the Great Lakes from which their water originates.
Cross section of the Niagara Falls and the Great Lakes from which their water originates.

 On England’s Atlantic coast material is constantly being eroded due to the action of the waves. As a result, the coastline is moving inland at an average rate of I metre every 6 years. That means that after only a few million years, England would have completely disappeared. Interestingly, over the whole island group, countless fossils are to be found, which, by conventional reckoning, are supposed to be several hundred million years old (2). This timetable must be viewed critically.

 In North Carolina (USA), in certain places the sea is eating away up to 4.2 metres of land per year. On the other hand, the ancient town of Ephesus in present day Turkey was still, up until less than 2,000 years ago, a seaport, while today it lies several kilometres inland. These shifts underline the pace of geological events (3).

 On the basis of the amount of gravel and sand being introduced, the Vierwaldstätter See in Switzerland will be completely filled in in 4,000 years at the most. The Bodensee (Lake Constance) will not exist for longer than 10,000 years from now.

 Also in respect of the growth of limestone reefs, the consequences of a million years old Earth history are completely missing. The growth of the Zechstein reefs can be explained: Inthe Bahama Bank, today, by organic fixing of washed up limestone particles on microbial mats, lamellae of approximately 1mm per day are formed (4)There are approximately 50 lamellae in 17mm of carbonate; using a simplified calculation, that makes only around 500 years development time for the highest reef (some 60m) in Thuringia (5).

 Until recently, the Carbonates of the Upper Jura (also called the White Jura or Malm), which have grown up to 200m in height, were predominantly interpreded to be ‘sponge reefs’. Nowadays no comparable reef structures are known outside of the seas. Disbelief in this ‘suspicious’ uniqueness and new studies carried out in the course of the last two decades have led to new approaches in reef limestone research. One can assume that, in the future, sedimentation processes will increasingly used for model conceptions of the formation of reef limestone. Concerning the time question, it is of prime importance that carbonate sands as sediments (especially in energy-rich moving shallow water), form substantially faster (and be built in layers on top of each other) than grown reef structures (6).



These 23  |  Menu
back

References:

(1) Larry Pierce, Niagara Falls and the Bible, Creation 22(4), 2000, Pages 8–13, http://www.creationontheweb.com/content/view/276/.
(2) A. Phillips und Tall Order, Cape Hatteras Lighthouse makes tracks, National Geographic 197(5), 2000, Pages 98–105.
(3) Tas Walker, Vanishing Coastlines, Creation Ministries Magazine, Vol. 29, No. 2, March to May 2007, Pages 19–21.
(4) C.D. Gebelein, Distribution, Morphology and Accretion Rate of recent subtidal Algal Stromatolites, Bermuda, Journal of Sedimentation and Petrol, 39, Pages 49–69.
(5) K. Kerkmann, Riffe und Algenbänke im Zechstein von Thüringen, Freiberger Forschungshefte, 1969, C 252.
(6) M. Stephan, Neue Interpretation der Massenkalke des süddeutschen Oberjura, Studium Integrale, October 2001, Pages 91–94, http://www.wort-und-wissen.de/index2.php?artikel=disk/d08/4/d08-4.html.
 
Comment this Site!