Using the small extent of my intuition in the geological field, I have discovered a major and largely overlooked flaw in the theory of creationism, one that will probably never be mended. Here is a brief explanation.
I'm sure you'll know, magnetites are rocks that are attracted by the magnetic north.
here is how it works:
>>You have some cake batter
>>You put magnetic chocolate sprinkles on the batter
>>They arrange themselves north.
You bake the cake and they are then stuck permanently in that north-facing position.
This is a more human demonatration of what is constantly occures on our ocean's mid-atlantic ridges, on the sides of the rift valley (we learned all this in science today, and I did a little research for myself). Lava erupts from underwater volcanoes, carrying magnetites. The lava flows down the sides of the volcano and, and in this liquid, the magnetites align themselves with the magnetic north. The lava then cools and hardens, preserving the magnetites in their position, which is always facing to the magnetic north.
Now when scientists looked at core samples of the volcanoes, they found something that was unusual, something that completely baffled them. At close analyzation of the magnetites that had been preserved in the hardened lava, they found that some pointed to the current magnetic north, but others, sealed in deeper layers, pointed to what is today the south! They found changes in several layers. And they never found an exception to the patterns. How to explain this? Well, there are two theories:
1. The planet’s crust moved around the other side of the planet like the peel of an orange. Yet this would require a tremendous amout of force, and is thus unlikely to be resonsible for this anomaly.
2. The magnetic poles- well- moved, from one end of the earth to the other. Basically, something caused a polar flip, so that north was south and vice-versa. To put is even more simply, if you were holding a compass at the time of the flip, you would see the needle, pointing northm actually make a 360 degree turn to the south! But we can only guess what could cause this mind-boggling event.
Now looking back at the magnetites, and using disputed dating methods, we find that the last "polar flip", if that is what it was, occurred around 200,000,000 millions years ago. Do the math, and you find that 200,000,000 years is slightly less than 1/22 of the earth's age (4.5 billions years) in question.
Now here is where things start to get messy for those clever and unusually cunning creationists... According to them and their assertions, the earth is 6000-10000 years old. Assuming that this is true, the last magnetic flip occurred 272 years ago, because if you shrink 4.5 billion years of earth history into 6000 years, and then find 1/22 of 6000, you get 272. But to the untrained eye, this would be nonsense. Compasses had been invented 272 years ago, and ships and sailors were navigating the planet. I would imagine that these sailors, totally dependent on their compasses, would have noticed something out of the ordinary, had the magnetic poles flipped to the other side of the planet. But maybe that's just me.
Now let's look at the other scenario- a ten-thousand year-old earth. Here we get a polar flip about 454 years ago. Let's take a look at the world at this time- The New World has been discovered, and ships are sailing to Asia via south of the Africa. And yes, compasses were around- not the ideal scenario.
The compass, according to
http://www.wavespring.com/justin/china/compass.htmlwas first discovered by the Chinese just a hundred or so years after the supposed birth of Jesus, and soon became "real" and usable in about 900 AD. The Europeans learned of the compass in the 15th century, or the 1400s. Of course, the last polar flip, depending on the creationist model, occurred between 270 and 450 years ago. not one single record of the magnetic poles flipping.
Of course, creationists could resond with their clich-like arguments-the magnetic poles flipped only a few thousand years ago, but C14, which dates the fossils of primitve animals older than the fossils of advanced beings with stunning and seemingly flawless precision, has made a mistake by a few hundred million years. If you ask me, this is a pretty unconvincing argument. Science dates these rocks, while creationists assume that these rocks are 100s of millions of times younger than they are said to be, and also formed before or just after the proposed date of the flood. Not based on any evidence, but based on speculation and ancient mythology.
Then of course, there is the outright denial that this data exists, or that the data is inaccurate, typical of less-scientifically immersed creationists. And so would begin a long duration of squawking, in which creationists would only get the chuckle from archaeologists and geologists of all calibres. Of course, the scientists would talk to them as they may to a child, explaining the symmetry at either sides of the volcanoes, and the perfect collaboration of either side, at which point the creationists would silently retreat to their reality resistant bomb shelter, ignoring evidence and truth.
So, in the opinion of the scientific community, which only works on hard evidence, the creationist model is irrelvant, unless a constituent can present polished evidence (using one of those long lost dating methods that indicate the earth is no older than 10000 years) that magnetites and the lava encompassing the former are indeed 4000 or so years old, which would be a few hundred years after Noah navigated the seas without the use of a compass. (Which would mean that between the creation of the planet and the last polar flip, the planet would have undergone magnetic facelifts a number of times, all causing drastic changes in the world's climate and having disastrous effects on the human population)
Or maybe someone could show us that not only did the continents split in one year at what must have been miraculous rates, but that they also moved around the entire planet, so that north was south and vice-versa, in what would have been a logic defying time.
Oh, that would be the day- a creationist proving science wrong
give it a break.
[This message has been edited by quicksink, 03-14-2002]
[This message has been edited by quicksink, 03-14-2002]
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