World's Longest Mud Slide

BBC News: “Undersea Slide Set Off Giant flow” A team of researchers reporting in the journal Nature recently has described a catastrophic landslide that dumped 225 billion metric tons of sediment into the ocean in just a few days or less.

The underwater landslide, dated by the scientists to 60,000 years ago, produced “the longest flow of sand and mud” on earth—some 932 miles (1,500 km) en route to the final deposition.

The flow was nearly 100 miles (over 150 km) wide in places, and deposited some 225 billion metric tons of sediment into the ocean off northwest Africa in “a matter of hours or days.”

“At least as big as many volcanic eruptions,” according to the University of Bristol’s Peter Talling, the flow was nearly 100 miles (over 150 km) wide in places, and deposited some 225 billion metric tons of sediment into the ocean off northwest Africa in “a matter of hours or days.” Incredibly, that’s equivalent to the amount of sediment delivered by all the world’s rivers combined over a period of 10 years.

Despite that, the landslide is not the largest on record. The Storegga slip, off the coast of Norway, along with several slides off the coast of Hawaii, involved the transportation of more sediment.

Young-earth groups such as Answers in Genesis frequently point to catastrophic geological processes like this landslide that fly—or flow, perhaps—in the face of long-age, uniformitarian geological doctrine. Secular scientists repeat the dogma of “millions of years” and generally point to slow, day-to-day erosion as the major factor in shaping the surface of the earth. Yet geologists, time and time again, stumble over large-scale, fast-occurring geological catastrophes that they identify as having shaped particular features of the earth (such as the Channel Scablands in Montana).

Given all this and acknowledging the geological upheaval a worldwide flood would have brought, where are the scientific objections to geological catastrophism? The reality is, even secular geologists accept some catastrophic explanations (as mentioned above), but by balking at a global flood, they ignore the greatest geological catastrophe there ever was!

(Oh, and if you’re still skeptical that a canyon could be carved out catastrophically over a short period of time, look no further than the Canyon Lake Gorge. You can read about it in the October 13, 2007, News to Note, item #2.)

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