Uniformitarianism & Age of Creationists' Earth

Berthault's experiments are perfectly OK. The problem is, again, in the application. They involve conditions that could occur in nature, but practically never do. Take, just for one example close to my house, the redbeds in the Palo Duro Canyon near Amarillo, Texas. They are hundreds of feet thick and consist of thin little leaves of red sandstone or siltstone with white layers of crystalline gypsum interbedded all through them. Thousands of layers.Formations that look just like them are forming now, between Anglagard's home and Midland, Texas at a place called Red Lake. It's a lake of sorts maybe one month out of the year in wet years, and otherwise a big flat pan. When it rains hard, reddish sand and silt wash into the pan with the rainwater and then settle out. Then the water evaporates in the sun, and the gypsum and other salts it carries crystallize on top of the silt. The cycle repeats year after year - though the dirtbikers and four-wheelers disturb it a lot lately.It looks just like those redbeds. And Berthault's experiments can't make something similar, what with the delicacy and grown-in-place nature of the gypsum crystals.And that's only one of hundreds of formations Berthault can't make. The White Cliffs of Dover come to mind - Thomas Huxley showed that about 140 years ago.

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"The wretched world lies now under the tyranny of foolishness; things are believed by Christians of such absurdity as no one ever could aforetime induce the heathen to believe." - Agobard of Lyons, ca. 830 AD

I'll bet that the modern lakes (playas, really) have been studied: there are lots of Pleistocene digs not too far away, like the Clovis area that the arrowheads took their name from. I know nothing of how to search that literature, but I bet that a day at the Texas Tech library could fix that.

Hi, Gregrjones! Welcome aboard! In some cases, by direct observation. We can see supernovae that are billions of light-years away, and so we are seeing light that was emitted billions of years ago. The progression of the amount of light a supernova gives off with time is determined mostly by the speed with which radioactive nickel-56 produced by the exploding star decays to iron-56. And the measured speed is the same in a supernova from seven billion years in the past as it is in a lab at Oak Ridge, Tennessee.And radioactive decay is an awfully fundamental process.