July 20, 2000 NEGATIVE: Algal varves contradict biblical time scale?

Dear Mr Ham,

I am sending this email once again in the hope that it will be published on your site. I couldn't help but notice that your editorial team was quick to publish certain people's letters (in your negative feedback section) that make very rash or unsubstantiated arguments. I believe the following letter is reasonable and contains valid arguments that both sides of the creation-evolution issue should read.

I have heard you speak many times on the topic of the "Age of the Earth". The creationist point of view recognises that it is between 6,000 and 10,000 years of age. The traditional scientific point of view is that the earth is billions of years old. I am aware that you deem radiometric dating methods to be unreliable. This is understandable. However, there are many other methods of dating that do not require assumptions at all. One good example is given below:

Each spring, tiny plants bloom in Lake Suigetsu, a small body of water in Japan. When these one-cell algae die, they drift down, shrouding the lake floor with a thin, white layer. The rest of the year, dark clay sediments settle on the bottom. The alternating layers of dark and light count the years like tree rings.

Counting the thin white layers of dead algae, each less than a millimeter thick, researchers have counted approximately 45,000 layers. Therefore these layers have been accumulating since 43,000 BCE. This evidence definitely does not confirm that the earth is billions of years old, however it does seem to conflict with the creationist view that the world is only 6,000–10,000 years old.

Once again, I would appreciate it if you could post this message on your "web-feedback" page, as I believe it would interest the visitors to your site.

Kind regards,
M.B.
Gold Coast, Australia

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Ed. note: For more information on varves and other supposed evidence for an old earth, see Dr Tas Walker’s article Geology and the Young Earth.

Dear MB

Thanks for writing. This is Dr Carl Wieland, CEO of AiG in Australia. Ken Ham is away on a ministry trip in the US, so I have answered on his behalf. The example you give sounds interesting, but respectfully, you are not correct in stating that there are no assumptions involved, as can be clearly identified from the data you give.

For example, you assume that all of these 45,000 alternating bands are due to the same deposition that is going on now. I am not at this point passing judgement about whether the assumption is reasonable or not, but pointing out that it is an assumption.

In fact, this is of great interest to us, and we would appreciate getting as much in the way of scientific references on it as you are able to muster. This is because we have found, in the past, that there have been a number of similar ‘dating methods’ that, on close inspection, turn out to have vulnerable assumptions.

For instance, people have long pointed to the alternate light and dark bands in certain laminated rocks, and have said (just as you have here) that they are the result of seasonal cycling, with one dark-light band for each year. This looked so convincing, until a geosedimentologist ground up this laminated rock, and found that when it was passed into moving water continually, the laminae would reform just as before — it had to do with the physics, spontaneous sorting of two different-sized particles. In other words, the interpretation was incorrect. [Ed. note: see Sedimentation Experiments: Nature finally catches up!]

Similarly with varves laid down by glacial lakes — observation has shown that more than one layer can commonly form in one season. There are similar laminated rocks in the Green River Formation in Wyoming which were ‘pushed’ as ‘age markers’ — where one lamina allegedly equalled one year (another interpretation based inevitably upon assumption — hard to escape from these, philosophically) . An article in our Creation magazine,Green River Blues pointed out that there were two separate horizontal layers of volcanic ash, which therefore each represent a particular (but different) time period. The two layers are each separated by a substantial number of these ‘varve’ layers, i.e. by a number of years. But here is the rub — in one place, the ash layers (which are each horizontally continuous in themselves) are separated by “X” number of laminae, in another by “Y” laminae, but X is a quite different number from Y — i.e. the laminae cannot represent years, because the same two volcanic events cannot be separated by different time periods. I trust the point is obvious.

I certainly would not want us to dismiss this interesting Japanese situation without having researched it carefully, so if you can supply the relevant information, we hope that we can get to it in the next 18–24 months or so.

[Ed. note: after seeing this response, MB supplied the reference: H. Kitagawa and J. van der Plicht, ‘Atmospheric Radiocarbon Calibration to 45,000 yr B.P.: Late Glacial Fluctuations and Cosmogenic Isotope Production’, Science 279:1187–1190, 20 February 20 1998.

Sincerely,
Carl Wieland

 

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