Young Earth Evidence. Folds in Sedimentary Rocks

Is there really evidence to support the claims of some Bible believing Christians that the earth is less than ten thousand years old? This debate has been raging for years (and will continue to rage for many more, I'd like to think that the hubs we write answer the questions "once and for all" but that would be a bit too much so in this hub I'll try and present the picture as complete as i know it to be and then at least we'll know the facts.

As I've been researching these hubs I've uncovered some startling facts that have left me amazed at how the earth is really put together and frustrated at the way both sides of the divide have behaved in presenting the facts.

First of all a bit of a statement of where I'm coming from. Personally I've never accepted evolution as to me it just didn't make any sense, how could a place so awesome and so beautiful to behold be the product of pure chance?

Now for the frustrating part. As I've looked into this I found that both sides have been "Economical with the truth" to say the least. The Old earth scientists will leave out the bits of the evidence that don't fit with their theory, and so will the young earth scientists. So what I'm seeking to do is present both sides with as much as I know about kept in so that we can all look at what was really going on and make our minds up. There may be bits I do leave out but that's because I don't know about them (can you write and tell me please? Thanks)

In the last hub in this series we looked at sedimentary Rocks as an indicator of a young Earth. But the sediment is not the only indicator! Another indicator is the fact that in places the rocks (the sedimentary ones) also have folds in the rock that fit the contours of the land yet don't break!

When you get a situation like this it's generally accepted that such formations can only be created by the rocks becoming malleable through processes that might involve heat, moisture and pressure. All three have to be applied in a precise manner so that the rocks don't fracture.

When one or two of the ingredients are there and fractures occur. These are known as EARTHQUAKES and are usually pretty devastating but there are places where the sedimentary Rocks didn't fracture and it left some unusual rock formations

Three hundred miles long, up to seventeen miles wide in places and almost a mile deep in places. At the top of the ridges the rocks are from the Cambrian period (approx five hundred and forty million years ago according to evolutionary geologists). We have always been told that the canyon was formed by erosion with water cutting through the younger sedimentary Rocks at the top into the older rocks below, only problem is the rocks below are from the same period!

What has happened is "rock folding" where due to pressure and other factors the rocks have changed shape and molded to the underlying bedrock seemingly without fracturing! The process is called 'Lithification' and is recognized by both sides of the argument.

Actually it turns out the rocks do fracture but they are so small that we would have a hard time seeing many of them. Some are even microscopic.

Evolutionary geology argues that the rocks were shaped like this over millions of years by constant pressure on the rocks, changes in heat and moisture making the rocks malleable and slowly shaping them over the millions of years. This would require the rocks to be literally re-molded multiple times and all without seemingly damaging the layers and fossils in the rocks.

Wikipedia tells us that the Canyon itself is only forty to seventy million years old when the process of pressure, heat and folding began, that is over four hundred million years after the sediment was laid down and hardened. At this time the process began (and would possibly have taken place multiple times since) that slowly bent and shaped the rocks into the shapes they are in today. The Colorado river then began to flow through the area cutting through the Cambrian rock into the older rocks below. It argues that the Grand Canyon is the result of erosion, but that directly contradicts what others say.

Creationists argue that this is impractical as it would require multiple events over millions of years where it all happened purely by chance and during those times new fossils from the newer period should also be in those rocks now (an area that size would have animals that died and fell into the malleable rocks) it the fossils are all from the Cambrian period.

The Grand Canyon isn't the only part of the globe that has this phenomena. There are others listed below

1. The Appalachian ridges and valleys

2. Lulworth Cove (Dorset, England)

3. The Akwapim Togo ranges (Ghana)

4. The Jura Mountains (Between France and Switzerland, part of the Alps)

5. Nunavut. Canada

6. Crete

7. Carpathian Mountains (Ukraine)

8. Zargos Mountains (Iran/Iraq/Turkey where Mount Ararat is!)

The discussion isn't over the process as the actual process has been settled and both pretty much agree what happened, it's over when the process occurred and what the results were!

When Lithification occurs it's like concrete setting. The soft malleable rock is shaped into whatever form it's going to take and then over a period of time dries out and sets hard. The question is can that rock then 'unset itself' to bend without breaking or with only or tiny tiny cracks only an eighth of an inch across (less than 10mm) to microscopic cracks seen only under a microscope (remember we are talking of millions of tons of rock here).

It has been shown in laboratory conditions that rock can do this with only small fractures, but we are talking on millions of tons of rock doing it repeatedly over a couple of hundred million years!

The real question is could the earth do that without any guiding hand to make it all happen in such a way?

The traditional view and the one that is widely accepted is the view that it happened over millions of years, but it's by no means accepted everywhere, and it's not just the the 'cranky Christians' who read nothing but the Bible that reject this view. In fact the people leading the rebellion against the traditional view are world renown Geologists and Physicists who tell us that things can't have happened this way as the chances of it being able to happen are just too slim!

Evidence to the contrary of the traditional view is slowly coming out but it's not liked by everyone! Just like the evidence for the sediment in the last hub this evidence is also challenged and ridiculed as being from people who don't know what they are talking about (yet both sides have doctorates from the same universities!).

This 'Other view' is one that says the folds in the rock formations were caused by a cataclysmic event of literally Biblical proportions as the Earth was ripped apart in a series of massive explosions (NO! Not Aliens invading!!!) as described in the book of Genesis Chapter 7

⁶ Noah was six hundred years old when the floodwaters came on the earth. ⁷ And Noah and his sons and his wife and his sons’ wives entered the ark to escape the waters of the flood. ⁸ Pairs of clean and unclean animals, of birds and of all creatures that move along the ground, ⁹ male and female, came to Noah and entered the ark, as God had commanded Noah. ¹⁰ And after the seven days the floodwaters came on the earth.

¹¹ In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, on the seventeenth day of the second month—on that day all the springs of the great deep burst forth, and the floodgates of the heavens were opened. ¹² And rain fell on the earth forty days and forty nights.

Notice in the account that the water came from two sources! We often talk of the water from above the ground but it also came from below! The result was that the earth was literally ripped apart causing massive damage and creating the fractures in the tectonic plates we see today.

After the initial explosions (that killed everything on the surface of the planet that weren't in the Ark) the waters began to settle resulting massive amounts of sedimentation with the dead creatures settling on the floor of the flooded areas to be quickly buried and folded into the positions we see them today. Once the sediment had settled and the waters receded the rocks dried out and set hard into the formations we see today.

This hub really is just an introduction to the whole subject. Did the earth over millions of years slowly and methodically deform the rock structures into what we see today? or was it a huge catastrophe like the one that supposedly killed off the dinosaurs but one that happened relatively recently?

To me one of these scenarios takes a lot of faith to believe in. The faith to say that it all happened by chance over millions of years! I was originally going to leave my own conclusion out of this hub but the reality is I just can't bring myself to accept that it was by chance and took so much precision on behalf of blind nature to accept the traditional evolutionary view!

One major cataclysmic event that ripped the earth as it was known at the time (we do know that it the distant past the continents were joined into a super-continent!) makes far more sense! I realize very few will agree with this, but at least in this hub you begin to see why I see it this way!

I've tried to represent both arguments fairly but there may be important points that are missed out, if you know of anything missed in the hub then please leave a note so that I can look into it.

Leave a comment and let me know what you think.

Lawrence