Ok, so I was having a little spat with a YECist on another site, and I went to check some stuff on Answers in Genesis and I found this argument, I'm hoping somebody that understands geology can weigh in on this, as I'm now determined to refute it but I don't know enough about geology to do so. It's not my thing you see.
4. Not enough mud on the sea floor.
Rivers and dust storms dump mud into the sea much faster than plate tectonic subduction can remove it.
Each year, water and winds erode about 20 billion tons of dirt and rock from the continents and deposit it in the ocean.6 This material accumulates as loose sediment on the hard basaltic (lava-formed) rock of the ocean floor. The average depth of all the sediment in the whole ocean is less than 400 meters.7 The main way known to remove the sediment from the ocean floor is by plate tectonic subduction. That is, sea floor slides slowly (a few cm/year) beneath the continents, taking some sediment with it. According to secular scientific literature, that process presently removes only 1 billion tons per year.7 As far as anyone knows, the other 19 billion tons per year simply accumulate. At that rate, erosion would deposit the present mass of sediment in less than 12 million years. Yet according to evolutionary theory, erosion and plate subduction have been going on as long as the oceans have existed, an alleged three billion years. If that were so, the rates above imply that the oceans would be massively choked with sediment dozens of kilometers deep. An alternative (creationist) explanation is that erosion from the waters of the Genesis flood running off the continents deposited the present amount of sediment within a short time about 5,000 years ago.
So, anybody got any opinions on that one? I suspect that they counted loose sediment without noting that it is compressed into rock, but I don't know.
Edited by Adminnemooseus, : Added the "(Sea floor sediment accumulation)" part to the topic title.
Set up as an ideal the facing of reality as honestly and as cheerfully as possible.
-Dr. Karl Menninger
Repetition does not transform a lie into a truth. - Franklin D. Roosevelt
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