Remembering Mount St. Helens 35 Years Later

Institute for Creation Research ^ | 5-26-2015 | Brian Thomas

[fishtank]

Remembering Mount St. Helens 35 Years Later

by Brian Thomas, M.S. *

The volcano’s main 1980 eruption filled in an entire valley with hundreds of feet of sediment. Another smaller eruption event deposited more material on top of that, and then a third deposition occurred in 1982. Later, a catastrophic flood of snowmelt water and muddy debris tore a gash through those fresh deposits, revealing sharp and flat contacts between each earlier deposit. It also showed that fast-flowing currents can lay down multiple layers thinner than a finger width.

Mount St. Helens revealed to the world that both thick and thin layering can happen fast. Millions of years are not needed to form sedimentary rock or stratigraphic layering.

Sedimentary layers hundreds of feet thick formed within hours during the eruption itself, and then hardened into rock soon after the water drained from them. Could other layered sedimentary rocks in Earth’s crust have formed rapidly?

[fishtank]

ICR article image.

[humblegunner]

Sedimentary layers hundreds of feet thick formed within hours during the eruption itself, and then hardened into rock soon after the water drained from them.

No.

Could other layered sedimentary rocks in Earth’s crust have formed rapidly?

Probably not.

[JoeProBono]

[PROCON]

I was stationed at Fort Lewis at the time; only a little ash fall there, but in Yakima, where my future wife lived, they were covered in 6 inches of ash.

A nasty clean-up chore.

[hadaclueonce]

mother erf burped. grains made it to my window of my car in Denver.

[logi_cal869]

The mountain also provided a clear reason to distrust radioisotope dating.

And they (warmists) assert that they can accurately measure C02 within an ice core sample.

Uh-huh.../s

At least this article admits its errors in a good ol fashioned 'scientific' way (open debate, transparency, w/o ridicule) in THEIR field...

[ETL]

Nice! (the animated graphic)

[TigersEye]

Are there different kinds of animal remains in each layer with more primitive types at the bottom?

[gorush]

[knarf]

Being a born again Christian, I believe in a young earth

This;

"The mountain also provided a clear reason to distrust radioisotope dating. Geologist Steve Austin sampled new rock from atop the mountain that formed in 1986. If the K-Ar radioisotope method really works, then it should have revealed the rock’s true age of only ten years. Instead, three rock “ages” ranged from 340,000 to 2,800,000 years.1 What other rocks from around the world have been dated incorrectly by following those same questionable age-dating protocols?"

.. is an interesting paragraph

I think Mt St Helens was God's last message to the earth daters regarding how it came to be.

[SamAdams76]

It's amazing how little footage we have of this volcano from 1980. It was a different world back then. Only professionals had access to a video camera and it was still an era where most news stations had to deliver their film to the studio for processing, before it could be shown on television. Satellite links that could provide live video were still few and far between and very rudimentary.

If such a volcano went off today, we'd have dozens of high quality videos posted to YouTube within minutes of eruption and there would be a number of live cams to log onto.

[humblegunner]

Being a born again Christian, I believe in a young earth

It's a free country.

[dainbramaged]

Thanks, Joe - haven’t seen that piece of film in a while. I was in Tacoma when she blew, it was spooky to say the least.

[ETL]

Radiometric dating (often called radioactive dating) is a technique used to date materials such as rocks or carbon, usually based on a comparison between the observed abundance of a naturally occurring radioactive isotope and its decay products, using known decay rates.[1] The use of radiometric dating was first published in 1907 by Bertram Boltwood[2] and is now the principal source of information about the absolute age of rocks and other geological features, including the age of the Earth itself, and can be used to date a wide range of natural and man-made materials.

Together with stratigraphic principles, radiometric dating methods are used in geochronology to establish the geological time scale.[3] Among the best-known techniques are radiocarbon dating, potassium-argon dating and uranium-lead dating.

By allowing the establishment of geological timescales, it provides a significant source of information about the ages of fossils and the deduced rates of evolutionary change. Radiometric dating is also used to date archaeological materials, including ancient artifacts.

Different methods of radiometric dating vary in the timescale over which they are accurate and the materials to which they can be applied.

Contents

1 Fundamentals of radiometric dating
1.1 Radioactive decay
1.2 Accuracy of radiometric dating
1.3 Closure temperature
1.4 The age equation
2 Modern dating methods
2.1 Uranium-lead dating method
2.2 Samarium-neodymium dating method
2.3 Potassium-argon dating method
2.4 Rubidium-strontium dating method
2.5 Uranium-thorium dating method
2.6 Radiocarbon dating method
2.7 Fission track dating method
2.8 Chlorine-36 dating method
2.9 Luminescence dating methods
2.10 Other methods
3 Dating with short-lived extinct radionuclides
3.1 The 129I – 129Xe chronometer
3.2 The 26Al – 26Mg chronometer
4 See also
5 References

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiometric_dating

[TexasGator]

“Geologist Steve Austin sampled new rock from atop the mountain that formed in 1986. If the K-Ar radioisotope method really works, then it should have revealed the rock’s true age of only ten years.”

---

Because Austin admits that his separations were impure, how can he, Swenson and other YECs justify their claims that these dacite samples were a fair test of the validity of the K-Ar method? Why did Austin waste precious time and money analyzing samples that were known to contain mineral and glass impurities? As a geologist, Austin should have known that minerals, especially zoned minerals, take more time to crystallize than quenched disorder glass. How could he expect the relatively large and sometimes zoned minerals to be as young as the glass?!!

http://www.noanswersingenesis.org.au/mt_st_helens_dacite_kh.htm

[Terry L Smith]

In 1997, I stood outside the johnson ridge observation point,
and touched what once was one of the many tall Douglas
fir trees, baked, and toppled, and half buried in ash,
four miles across the valley, from the disquieting silent
maw of Mt. St. Helens.

No birds, no bugs, nothing, except that eerie silence,
BOHICA!

Four miles, and that maw was big enough to fill a
50 inch tv screen at ten feet distance!

A mile to my left, there was a small semicircle of a
hillside, where baked trees still stood upright, in a sea of gtey.

Old earth, new earth, nuts!
When this blew, it was not a good day, nor a good way,
for those who were here, and are no more!

[JimSEA]

1. Potassium isotopes are not accurate in rock less than 100,000 years old due to the relatively long half life.

2. Sampling protocol includes measurement of background argon levels.

3. Steve Austen is notorious for misstating sampling protocol and has tried C14 dating on coal millions of years old while knowing that the limit on C14 dating is 50,000 years at the outside.

4. Layering of volcanic ash is a special case and in no way similar to limestones, mudstones, sandstones, salt(which has the tendency to rise above the layer of its initial deposition), granite, metamorphic rock in total, etc.

[knarf]

I REALLY made an attempt to read all of that, but it is way beyond what I care to spend time on

I did, however, come away with this;

"Considering that the dacite probably erupted in 1986 AD, Austin should have known that at least some of the samples would have given dates that were younger than 2 million years old and that Geochron Laboratories could not have provided reliable answers. Therefore, it's not surprising that some of Austin's dates, such as the result for the amphiboles, etc., 'fraction,' have large +/- uncertainties. "

Which seems to say ... "Well of COURSE we couldn't give you a correct answer ... you didn't tell us anythiong about it" ...
Which is, I think, the point of an anonymous sample

Again ... I won't take the time to read so much technical material

[Rebelbase]

I drove through Yakima 3 months after the boom. There was still 3” of ash sitting like snow on fence posts.

[21twelve]

Just to be clear - those images are individual camera photos - not some computerized recreation. The images of similar type from an airplane are pretty cool too. The plane was pretty close. It erupted, and the pilot put it into a dive to gain some speed, while curving around towards the other side of the mountain. A man and wife had chartered the small plane - amateur geologists.

And yes, lots of stuff on earth probably was deposited very quickly (catastrophism). Most of it though did take billions of years. I'm in the earth sciences and also believe in creation. Just not the 6,000 year old creation.