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Posted on 10/26/2009 12:17:08 PM PDT by Ernest_at_the_Beach
Really? I didn't know he was a proponent of a ~420 million + year old earth. I thought he was in the 6k earth argument. It seems a ~5 million year rate of change in a ~420 million year old age is a microscopic fraction of a difference than going from ~420 million years to ~6 thousand years.
Right...I saw that....and figured it was a sure sign for an upcoming grant request.
Thank you, that IS much better.
I actually considered that but I came back around to my first choice.
OK, I know the evos will say this doesn’t matter, that 100 million is still a long long time.
But if creationists said 6000 years, and evolutionists said 400 million years, and it turns out it was 100 million years, the evolutionists were off by more than 300 million years, the creationists off by less than 100 million years, so the creationists were a lot closer to being right than the evolutionists.
And if something as “basic” as the age of rocks could be off by a factor of 4, maybe it’s off by more.
And before anybody else attacks me (although they will anyway, yes, I know they said the 4-5 times factor off was only about something that supposedly took 20 million years.
I’m extrapolating that if they could get one 20 million-year period off by a factor of 4-5, they could also have gotten all the other 20-million-year periods off by the same amount.
Or, maybe it’s just that I find the whole thing funny (because mathematically speaking, being off from 100 million to 6000 is a greater degree of “offness” than 100 million to 400 million, even though in absolute numbers it would be less).
Its even smaller of a factor than you are seeing. The age of the rocks is still calculated at about ~420 million years, what changed was the rate of formation.
A good analogy would be that I originally calculated that a 67 Mustang took 8 hours to build on an assembly line, then through more detailed study, found out it only took 7.5 hours to build. It is still a 1967, the build time was just less.
What one of the other links above tries to extrapolate from this (which I find funny) is that, because my calculations on the rate of building the Mustang was initially incorrect, that proves the 67 Mustang was actually built in 2007.
I think what the import of this is that what was believed to have formed in 10 million years, they now say formed in 2 million years and therefore the speed at at which formations are laid down must be rethought.
Now my watch is eight million years off.
8 million years off over a span of ~420 million years is only 1.9% variance. In your watch analogy, that would be saying your watch is off 1.14 seconds / hour.
More like only two hours passed but the watch says ten, but no, changing the numbers on Ages, Eons or such is not going to affect my life much.
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Niagara Falls
When Lyell, on his trip to the United States, visited Niagara Falls, he talked with someone who lived in the vicinity and was told that the falls retreat about three feet a year. Since the natives of a country are likely to exag- gerate, Lyell announced that one foot per annum would be a better figure. From this he concluded that over thirty-five thousand years were necessary, from the time the land was freed from the ice cover and the falls started their work of erosion, to cut the gorge from Queenston to the place it occupied in the year of Lyell 's visit. Since then this figure has often been mentioned in textbooks as the length of time from the end of the glacial period.
The date of the end of the Ice Age was not changed when v subsequent examination of records indicated that since 1764 the falls had retreated from Lake Ontario to- ward Lake Erie at the rate of five feet per year, and that, if the process of wearing down the rock had gone on at the same rate from the time of the retreat of the ice cover, seven thousand years would have been sufficient to do the work. However, since hi the beginning, when the ice melted and a swollen stream carried the detritus abrading the rock of the gorge, the erosion rate must have been much more rapid, the age of the gorge must be further reduced. According to G. F. Wright, author of The Ice Age in North America, five thousand years may be regarded as an adequate figure. 1 The erosion and sedi- mentation of the shores of Lake Michigan also suggest a lapse of time reckoned in thousands, but not tens of thousands, of years since the beginning of the process. 2
In the 1920s, however, when borings were made for a railroad bridge, it was found that the middle part of Whirlpool Rapids Gorge of Niagara Falls contained a thick deposit of glacial boulder clay, indicating that it had been excavated once, had been filled with drift, and then partly re-excavated by the falls in post-glacial times. 8
While the question of the age of the falls thus becomes complicated, the discovery shows that the post-glacial period was of much shorter duration than generally as- sumed, even if the rate of retreat of the falls is reduced to the minimum figure of under four feet per year, as observed in more recent years. R. F. Flint of Yale writes: "We are obliged to fall back on the Upper Great Gorge, the uppermost segment of the whole gorge, which appears to be genuinely postglacial. Redeterminations by W. H. Boyd showed the present rate of recession of the Horseshoe Falls to be, not five feet, but rather 3.8 feet, per year. Hence the age of the Upper Great Gorge is cal- culated as somewhat more than four thousand years and to obtain even this [low] figure we have to assume that the rate of recession has been constant, although we know that discharge has in fact varied greatly during post-glacial times." 4 Jt due allowance is made for this last factor, the age of the Upper Great Gorge of Niagara Falls would be somewhere between 2500 and 3500 years. It follows that the ice retreated in historical times, some- where between the years 1500 and 500 before the present era.
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Niagara Falls has moved back 7 miles in 12,500 years and may be the fastest moving waterfalls in the world.
Who told you that?
sorry, I forgot to include the footnote:
G. F. Wright, “The Date of the Glacial Period,” The Ice Age in
North America and Its Bearing upon the Antiquity of Man.
Wow, that book was written in 1889.
Couldn’t find anything relevant written in, say, the last 50 years? Science has advanced a lot since 1889.
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