Free Republic

Probably you have heard the expression, ‘Seeing is believing’, but is that always true? In fact, quite often it’s the other way around: ‘Believing is seeing’. This is true of geology, for example. Geological evidence does not speak for itself, and so it must always be interpreted. And how we interpret that evidence is always influenced by our beliefs. A good example of this is found on a roadside interpretive sign near the Sheep Rock Unit of the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument in central Oregon. This is where the John Day River flows through a water gap[1] called...

Oct 28, 2009 — Two articles announced solutions to the evidential problem that most troubled Darwin – the sudden appearance of complex animals at the base of the Cambrian fossil record.  Both of them involve chemical elements.  The only difference is which element. Science Daily announced a “Novel Evolutionary Theory For The Explosion Of Life.”  The article acknowledged that “The Cambrian Explosion is widely regarded as one of the most relevant episodes in the history of life on Earth, when the vast majority of animal phyla first appear in the fossil record.”  The article also acknowledged it to be a...

Remnant Press Release FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE - OCTOBER 20, 2009CONTACT: H. M. OWEN (U.S.), noevolutioninfo@gmail.com or PETER WILDERS (Europe), wilderspeter@gmail.com The Scientific Impossibility of Evolution November 9, 2009 9:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. St. Pius V University (Rome) In Response to Pope Benedict XVI’s Call for Both Sides to be Heard The 150th anniversary of Darwin’s "Origin of the Species" in November 2009 will be the occasion for a unique conference at Pope Pius V University in Rome presenting a scientific refutation of evolution theory. According to Russian sedimentologist Alexander Lalamov...

PHILADELPHIA -- Ohio State University geologists have found that important rocks from Niagara Gorge -- rock formations that are used to judge the ages of rocks and fossils around North America -- formed five times faster than previously thought. The finding means that scientists will have to re-examine studies of sedimentary rock deposited across North America during the Silurian period, from 416 to 443 million years ago.

Years ago, National Geographic published a remarkable photograph of a polystrate fossil, a fossilized tree that extended stratigraphically upward through several layers of rock in Tennessee. Its roots were in a coal seam, and the overlying deposits included bedded shale and thin carbon-rich layers. An advocate of any form of uniformitarianism would believe that it took many, many years to deposit this sequence of layers (much longer than it takes for a tree to grow and eventually die and decay), yet one vertical fossil extends through them all. This one fossilized tree offered a direct contradiction to the evolutionary mantra...

Was our oldest ancestor a proton-powered rock? --snip-- The picture painted by Russell and Martin is striking indeed. The last common ancestor of all life was not a free-living cell at all, but a porous rock riddled with bubbly iron-sulphur membranes that catalysed primordial biochemical reactions...

Boulder, CO, USA – Jerusalem's geology has been crucial in molding it into one of the most religiously important cities on the planet, according to a new study. It started in the year 1000 BCE, when the Jebusite city's water system proved to be its undoing. The Spring of Gihon sat just outside the city walls, a vital resource in the otherwise parched region. But King David, in tent on taking the city, sent an elite group of his soldiers into a karst limestone tunnel that fed the spring. His men climbed up through a cave system hollowed out by...

OKLAHOMA CITY — A new technique that tapped previously inaccessible supplies of natural gas in the United States is spreading to the rest of the world, raising hopes of a huge expansion in global reserves of the cleanest fossil fuel. Italian and Norwegian oil engineers and geologists have arrived in Texas, Oklahoma and Pennsylvania to learn how to extract gas from layers of a black rock called shale. Companies are leasing huge tracts of land across Europe for exploration. And oil executives are gathering rocks and scrutinizing Asian and North African geological maps in search of other fields. The global...

Crystal Cave of Giants Naica, Mexico - Sept 3 - 6, 2009 Air Temperature of 50C(122F) + Relative Humidity of over 90% = Humidex Value of 105C (228F) !! This is one of the most extreme places on the planet. The Crystal Cave of Giants was accidentally discovered in 2000 by miners working in the silver and lead mine at Naica, Mexico. It lies almost 300 meters (900 feet) below the surface of the Earth and it contains the largest crystals known in the world, by far. The largest crystals are over 11 meters long (36 feet) and weigh 55...

Since I probably won't be able to post next week (thought I might try to sneak one in Sunday) I'm putting up some colorful images. Hope you like. Another place I'm unlikely ever to visit: Akpatok Island, Ungava Bay, Canada: From space: Akpatok Island lies in Ungava Bay in northern Quebec, Canada. Accessible only by air, Akpatok Island rises out of the water as sheer cliffs that soar 500 to 800 feet (150 to 243 m) above the sea surface. The island is an important sanctuary for cliff-nesting seabirds. Numerous ice floes around the island attract walrus and whales, making...

"Using sophisticated seismometers and global positioning systems, scientists have been able to track minute movements along two massive tectonic plates colliding 25 miles or so underneath the Puget Sound basin. Their early findings suggest a mega-earthquake could strike closer to Tacoma and Seattle than earlier thought. [snip] Earlier calculations creating a virtual earthquake using a supercomputer indicated that such a mega-earthquake in the Northwest could result in ground motion of 1.5 feet per second in Seattle, nearly six inches per second in Tacoma, Olympia and Vancouver, and three inches in Portland. That would be more than enough to cause major...

Back in April Paul Sheehan, till then a member of the Church of Global Warming Hysterics and a writer for the Sydney Morning Herald read and reviewed Ian Plimer's latest book, Heaven and Earth, Global Warming: The Missing Science and emerged from the experience a changed man: Much of what we have read about climate change, [Plimer] argues, is rubbish, especially the computer modeling on which much current scientific opinion is based, which he describes as "primitive."… "Heaven and Earth is an evidence-based attack on conformity and orthodoxy, including my own, and a reminder to respect informed dissent and beware...

For decades, museums and textbooks confidently asserted that mud rocks—such as limestone, siltstone, mudstone, and shale—were formed over vast eons as super-fine sediments slowly settled to the bottom of shallow lakes or seas. But new flume studies are challenging old ways of thinking about mud rock formation...

The picture isn't that spectacular; the video (in Quicktime) is. When I saw this I knew it had to be a Geopic of the week (sorry I'm late). The movie is in real-time. Turn up the sound. If you're wondering what this is, it's a view down the throat of the Hale'maumau vent. I wonder if this will eventually rise and fill the crater floor, even if only briefly -- that would be a sight. http://hvo.wr.usgs.gov/kilauea/update/archive/2009/Jun/HMMvent_03June2009web3.mov

Enlarge ImageWe're all here. The newly official Quaternary period includes the span of our genus Homo as well as the comings and goings of the ice ages. Credit: Peter Hoey Geoscientists have cut the Gordian knot of geologic timekeeping. Ever since 19th century geologists divided the history of Earth into four periods—the Primary, Secondary, Tertiary, and Quaternary, oldest to most recent—their intellectual descendants have been dismantling that time scale. But the geologists, anthropologists, glaciologists, and paleoecologists studying the last couple of million years became quite attached to the Quaternary. They gave its name to their journals and even themselves—to...

Scientists have discovered a rare form of solid - a quasicrystal - in a rock sample from Russia's Koryak mountains. Quasicrystals have unusual properties and have previously only been made in the laboratory. The discovery could redefine the field of mineralogy and expand our understanding of how quasicrystals form, leading to new applications.Quasicrystals are a type of solid with structures in between those of crystals and glasses. They are often compared to Penrose tilings, where two different shapes of tile are tessellated in patterns with local symmetry but more complex overall periodicity. The materials have interesting properties, often being harder or...

Those who ignore the geologic perspective do so at great risk.  In fall of 1985, geologists warned that a Columbian volcano, Nevado del Ruiz, was getting ready to erupt.  But the volcano had been dormant for 150 years.  So government officials and inhabitants of nearby towns did not take the warnings seriously.  On the evening of November 13, Nevado del Ruiz erupted, triggering catastrophic mudslides.  In the town of Armero, 23,000 people were buried alive in a matter of seconds. For ninety percent of the last million years, the normal state of the Earth's climate has been an ice age. ...

Remember that huge tidal wave cresting over lower Manhattan in the 1998 asteroid-disaster movie "Deep Impact"? Well, it really may have happened, but long before any skyscrapers were built — around 300 B.C., in fact. Researchers from Columbia, Harvard and Vanderbilt universities first presented the hypothesis at a geologists' conference in December, and spoke more recently to the BBC. Vanderbilt's Stephen Goodbred explained that an unusual eight-inch-thick layer of sea sand and gravel 2,300 years old lies along the shorelines and riverbanks of the entire New York metropolitan area. Such a formation, containing chunks of rock as big as a...

News to Note, May 2, 2009A weekly feature examining news from the biblical viewpoint (Read the following stories, and much more by clicking excerpt link at the bottom) 1. LiveScience: “Swine Flu Is Evolution in Action”Swine flu—both the virus itself and the associated paranoia—seems to be sweeping the world. Is it evolution in action? 2. LiveScience: “Some Dinosaurs Survived the Asteroid Impact”The widely taught model of dinosaur extinction doesn’t line up with the latest fossil findings. 3. National Geographic News: “Baby Mammoth CT Scan Reveals Internal Organs”The preserved baby woolly mammoth shows that it died in an “oxygen-deprived environment” that...

IN the aftermath of the earthquake at L’Aquila, Italy, on Monday that killed nearly 300 people, splashy headlines suggested that these victims didn’t have to die. An Italian researcher, Giampaolo Giuliani, began to sound alarm bells a month earlier, warning that an earthquake would strike near L’Aquila on March 29. The prediction was apparently based on anomalous radon gas concentrations in the air; the region had also experienced a number of small tremors starting in mid-January. Mr. Giuliani was denounced for inciting panic by Italy’s Civil Protection Agency, and he was forced to take his warning off the Web after...

Mima Mounds: Scientists say new laser maps suggest glaciers as the architects of the mysterious humps, but one gopher proponent holds firm. From goofy to erudite, more than three dozen theories have attempted to explain the origins of grassy mounds that dot the prairies of Southwest Washington. The latest twist won't settle the debate, but it casts the mysterious hummocks in a different light. Laser light, that is. Scientists used airborne laser surveys to create topographic maps that reveal new details about the so-called Mima Mounds scattered across lowlands south of Olympia and Tacoma. The technique fires 23,000 pulses a...

Pictured: The spectacular eruption of an underwater volcano in the South Pacific By DAILY MAIL REPORTER 19th March 2009 Spewing clouds of smoke, ash and steam thousands of feet into the sky, these dramatic images and video (below) show the raw power of an undersea volcano erupting. The spectacular columns blasted out of the South Pacific yesterday six miles off the coast of Tonga's main island Tongatapu. The eruption can be seen clearly from the capital, Nuku'alofa, although residents only reported seeing smoke rising from the sea on Wednesday, two days after it is believed to have begun 'It's a...

Pictured: The spectacular eruption of an underwater volcano in the South Pacific ...The spectacular columns blasted out of the South Pacific yesterday six miles off the coast of Tonga's main island Tongatapu. The eruption can be seen clearly from the capital, Nuku'alofa... Towering above, the sheer power of the underwater volcano could be seen for many miles ...No warnings have been issued to the coastal villages...The situation...helped by trade winds which...blow gas and steam away from the island. The roiling seas beneath the full fury of the undersea volcano which is part of a cluster of 36 in the area...

SANTA ANA (CBS) ― Click to enlarge A shake and some rattled nerves. What was it? Who knows. The investigation continues. AP 1 of 1 Close numSlides of totalImages As mysteries go, it might not rank up there with "What happened to Amelia Earhart?" or "Did Oswald act alone?" but a strange rattling, shaking, and quaking got people in Orange County all shook up yesterday evening...and we can tell you this much, it wasn't an Elvis sighting either. We are used to earthquakes in the Southland, but this was no quake either! Or a sonic boom. We are used to...

News to Note, February 28, 2008 (go to link below to read stories) 1. CBC News: “Montreal Scientists Unlock Mystery of Early Molecular Mechanism”. Have Canadian scientists uncovered the key that makes an evolutionary origin of life plausible? 2. Forbes: “The Dangers of Overselling Evolution” Philip Skell, a member of the National Academy of Sciences for more than three decades, cautions against protecting Darwinism through censorship. 3. The Boston Globe: “Cod in the Act of Evolution” Another example of “evolution in action”—-need we even bother examining the reality to confirm this isn’t what Darwin predicted? 4. BBC News: “‘Ghost Peaks’...

Stunning New Evidence of a Higher Ancient Sea Level by Brian Thomas, M.S.* According to the record in Genesis, there was a time when the entire surface of the earth was inundated with water. This possibility has been ridiculed because of questions regarding the origin and destination of all the extra water that supposedly would have been required to accomplish this.1 But newly described fossils of marine creatures found in a rock quarry in Bermuda indicate that ancient sea levels used to be 70 feet higher than they are today, which presents a puzzle to standard geological thinking.2 Geologist Paul...

I guess I heard about this before, but I just read that voting reopened. Go to the linked site for more information, and you can vote if you want to. With all deference to all of the wonders of South America, is there anything that can beat this: An even more spectacular shot is at the site below; can't use a shared link. Find Angel Falls and click to see the big pic. Waterfalls of the World One more:

A Yellowstone earthquake update: 1) The rumbling continues, including 3.5, 3.0 and 3.2 quakes just today 2) Here is some more Jake Lowenstern (the Yellowstone volcano scientist) analysis (via TIME): Jake Lowenstern, Ph.D.,YVO's chief scientist, who also is part of the USGS Volcano Hazards Team, told TIME that it doesn't appear a supervolcano event is imminent. "We don't think the amount of magma exists that would create one of these large eruptions of the past," he said. "It is still possible to have a volcanic eruption comparable to other volcanoes. But we would expect to see more and larger quakes,...

Abundant tiny particles of diamond dust exist in sediments dating to 12,900 years ago at six North American sites, adding strong evidence for Earth's impact with a rare swarm of carbon-and-water-rich comets or carbonaceous chondrites, reports a nine-member scientific team. These nanodiamonds, which are produced under high-temperature, high-pressure conditions created by cosmic impacts and have been found in meteorites, are concentrated in similarly aged sediments at Murray Springs, Ariz., Bull Creek, Okla., Gainey, Mich., and Topper, S.C., as well as Lake Hind, Manitoba, and Chobot, Alberta, in Canada. Nanodiamonds can be produced on Earth, but only through high-explosive detonations or...

NEW YORK (CBS) ― [Click to zoom.] Click to enlarge Yellowstone remains very geologically active — and its famous geysers and hot springs are a reminder that a pool of magma still exists five to 10 miles underground. (File) CBS 1 of 1 Close numSlides of totalImages Related Stories * Yellowstone Earthquakes May Be 'Precursory' Events (12/30/2008) * Author: Yellowstone Park A Ticking Bomb (7/28/2008) * Wolves Of Yellowstone Spur Love And Hate (7/18/2007) * Yellowstone Bulge May Cause Thermal Unrest (3/2/2006) Related Links * Lowenstern Interview With Blogger * Yellowstone Earthquake Map The recent "swarm" of small earthquake tremors...

University of Oregon Scientists found microscopic diamonds in the black layer of rock at Murray Springs in Arizona. At least once in Earth’s history, global warming ended quickly, and scientists have long wondered why. Now researchers are reporting that the abrupt cooling — which took place about 12,900 years ago, just as the planet was emerging from an ice age — may have been caused by one or more meteors that slammed into North America. That could explain the extinction of mammoths, saber-tooth tigers and maybe even the first human inhabitants of the Americas, the scientists report in Friday’s...

Smivs writes "The BBC are reporting that drillers looking for geothermal energy in Hawaii have inadvertently put a well right into a magma chamber. Molten rock pushed back up the borehole several meters before solidifying, making it perfectly safe to study. Magma specialist Bruce Marsh says it will allow scientists to observe directly how granites are made. 'This is unprecedented; this is the first time a magma has been found in its natural habitat,' the Johns Hopkins University professor told BBC News. 'Before, all we had to deal with were lava flows; but they are the end of a magma's...

Enlarge ImageUnmasked. Aircraft LIDAR sweeps found this previously hidden impact crater in central Alberta, Canada. Credit: Herd et al., Geology Researchers have uncovered a pond-sized crater in the woods of central Alberta, Canada, carved out by a meteor that slammed into Earth about 1100 years ago. The technique they used to pinpoint the pit--a laser take on radar--figures to help scientists find evidence of hundreds of similar impacts that have remained hidden until now. Every 10 years or so, a sizable chunk of asteroid or comet crashes to Earth, leaving a crater about 40 meters wide. The remnants of...

I was picking up some field stone and found a very strange rock that could be an egg. It was broken open and there is something inside. I do not know how to put a picture on FR. I need the services of a Geologist. Is there one here?

A pinkish tract of bedrock on the eastern shore of Canada's Hudson Bay contains the oldest known rocks on Earth, formed 4.28 billion years ago, not long after the planet was formed, scientists said on Thursday. The rocks may be remnants of Earth's primordial crust, which formed on the planet's surface as it cooled following the birth of the solar system, according to Jonathan O'Neil of McGill University in Montreal.

Scientists have found the oldest known rocks on Earth. They are 4.28 billion years old, making them 250 million years more ancient than any previously discovered rocks. Earth formed about 4.6 billion years ago from a disk of gas and dust circling the sun. Remnants of crust from Earth's infancy are hard to come by because most of that material has been recycled into Earth's interior several times by the plate tectonics that continue to shape our planet's surface. In 2001, geologists found an expanse of bedrock, known as the Nuvvuagittuq greenstone belt, exposed on the eastern shore of Hudson...

An open letter geologist to geologist by Angus Kennedy We may look at the same facts–the rocks and fossils–-but our underlying presuppositions are different, therefore our interpretations are different. For evolutionists to insist that they have science on their side is for them to ignore the difference between operational science–dealing with measuring tangible things in the here and now (how the world works if you like) and historical science–trying to find out what happened in times past when none of us were present. The first employs fundamental principles and repeatable measurements and experiments and has led to the breadth of...

ELIZABETH CITY, N.C. The morning began with a brief but vigorous argument - call it a discussion - in the hotel lobby. The breakfast table was loaded with road maps, Google Earth printouts and colorful elevation images intended to help the three researchers locate a curious landscape feature. They were hunting for slight depressions in the earth, dimples almost invisible at ground level but so striking from the air that, for a number of years, they captivated the entire country. Scientists in the mid-1900s devoted careers to their study, debated furiously in print, were celebrated, vilified, laughed at and honored,...

The geysers of Yellowstone National Park owe their existence to the "Yellowstone hotspot"--a region of molten rock buried deep beneath Yellowstone, geologists have found... But how hot is this "hotspot," and what's causing it? In an effort to find out, Derek Schutt of Colorado State University and Ken Dueker of the University of Wyoming took the hotspot's temperature They found that the hotspot is "only" 50 to 200 degrees Celsius hotter than its surroundings. "Although Yellowstone sits above a plume of hot material coming up from deep with the Earth, it's a remarkably 'lukewarm' plume," said Schutt, comparing Yellowstone to...

The New York City area is at "substantially greater" risk of earthquakes than previously thought, scientists said Thursday. Damage could range from minor to major, with a rare but potentially powerful event killing people and costing billions of dollars in damage. A pattern of subtle but active faults is known to exist in the region, and now new faults have been found. The scientists say that among other things, the Indian Point nuclear power plants, 24 miles north of the city, sit astride the previously unidentified intersection of two active seismic zones. The findings are detailed in the Bulletin of...

Palisades, N.Y., August 21, 2008--A study by a group of prominent seismologists suggests that a pattern of subtle but active faults makes the risk of earthquakes to the New York City area substantially greater than formerly believed. Among other things, they say that the controversial Indian Point nuclear power plants, 24 miles north of the city, sit astride the previously unidentified intersection of two active seismic zones. The paper appears in the current issue of the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America at http://www.bssaonline.org/cgi/reprint/98/4/1696. Many faults and a few mostly modest quakes have long been known around New York...

UCSB Press Release: “OIL AND GAS SEEPAGE FROM OCEAN FLOOR  REDUCED BY OIL PRODUCTION” (Santa Barbara, Calif.) Next time you step on a glob of tar on a beach in Santa Barbara County, you can thank the oil companies that it isn’t a bigger glob. The same is true around the world, on other beaches where off-shore oil drilling occurs, say scientists, although Santa Barbara’s oil seeps are thought to be among the leakiest. Natural seepage of hydrocarbons from the ocean floor in the northern Santa Barbara Channel has been significantly reduced by oil production, according to two recently...

National Academy of Sciences completed “Oil in the Sea III”, its third examination of petroleum inputs into marinewaters worldwide. Although direct comparisons betweenthe 1975, 1985, and 2002 reports are difficult due to use ofdiffering computational techniques, it is clear that petroleum inputs from other than natural sources have decreasedsignificantly over three decades. Total petroleum input estimates decreased from 43 million barrels per year (MMbbl/yr) to 23 MMbbl/yr between the 1975 and 1985 reports, a 47-percent decrease. In the 2002 report, total petroleum inputs continued to decrease to 9 MMbbl/yr, a 61-percent decrease from the 1985 report estimate (Fig. 1.) In...

Scientists exploring caves in the bone-dry and mostly barren Atacama Desert in Chile stumbled upon a totally unexpected discovery this week: water. They also found hundreds of thousands of animal bones in a cave, possibly evidence of some prehistoric human activity. The findings are preliminary and have not been analyzed. The expedition is designed to learn how to spot caves on Mars by studying the thermal signatures of caves and non-cave features in hot, dry places here on Earth. Scientists think Martian caves, some of which may already have been spotted from space, could be good places to look for...

NEW YORK — Painfully high vehicle- and jet-fuel prices are propelling popular demands for extracting the estimated 18 billion barrels of petroleum beneath America's coastal waters. After rescinding previous executive-branch objections, President Bush said July 14, "The only thing standing between the American people and these vast oil resources is action from the U.S. Congress." Capitol Hill Democrats claim offshore drilling poses unacceptable ecological risks. This is yet another overblown worry. Democrats and other environmental naysayers cite the 80,000 barrels that spilled six miles off of Santa Barbara, inundating beaches and aquatic life. This hydrocarbon Hindenburg haunts the memories of...

U.S. offshore oil drilling is not perfectly tidy. It's only 99.999 percent clean. Indeed, since 1980 -- as MMS figures indicate -- 101,997 barrels spilled from among the 11.855 billion barrels of American oil extracted offshore. This is a 0.001 percent pollution rate. While offshore drilling is not 100 percent spotless, this record should satisfy all but the terminally fastidious. Ironically, in terms of oil contamination, Mother Nature is 95 times dirtier than Man. Some 620,500 barrels of oil ooze organically from North America's ocean floors each year. Compare this to the average 6,555 barrels that oil companies have spilled...

NEW YORK -- Painfully high vehicle- and jet-fuel prices are propelling popular demands for extracting the estimated 18 billion barrels of petroleum that rest beneath America's coastal waters. After rescinding previous executive-branch objections, President Bush said July 14, "the only thing standing between the American people and these vast oil resources is action from the U.S. Congress." Capitol Hill Democrats claim offshore drilling poses unacceptable ecological risks. This is yet another overblown worry. Democrats and other environmental naysayers cite the 80,000 barrels that spilled six miles off of Santa Barbara, Calif., inundating beaches and aquatic life. This hydrocarbon Hindenburg haunts...

The area north of the Arctic Circle has an estimated 90 billion barrels of undiscovered, technically recoverable oil and 1,670 trillion cubic feet of technically recoverable natural gas, the U.S. Geological Survey announced Wednesday. The USGS said technically recoverable resources are those produced using currently available industry practices and technology. The Arctic accounts for about 13 percent of the world's undiscovered oil and 30 percent of the undiscovered natural gas, the USGS reported.

Along with a surging interest in fuel-efficient automobiles and biking to work, the legend of Alaska’s Gull Island, a speck of land four miles or so offshore the North Slope in the middle of Prudhoe Bay, seems to have an uncanny ability to appear when the United States is facing soaring oil and gasoline prices. Back in 1981 when crude oil prices hit unimaginable highs in excess of $30 per barrel, a letter from U.S. Rep. Bob Stump of Arizona popped into the mail bag of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission in Anchorage, Alaska. “I have been contacted...

University of Alberta scientists contend they have the answer to mass extinction of animals and plants 93 million years ago. The answer, research has uncovered, has been found at the bottom of the sea floor where lava fountains erupted, altering the chemistry of the sea and possibly of the atmosphere.Undersea volcanic activity triggered a mass extinction of marine life and buried a thick mat of organic matter on the sea floor about 93 million years ago, which became a major source of oil, according to a new study. "It certainly caused an extinction of several species in the marine environment,"...