Erosion

Not long ago some scientific papers were published on the rates at which soils were being carried away by erosion. The final tally, after all the different measurements were taken, was that, at present rates of erosion, all land masses above sea level will be gone in about 10 million years.

This figure raised many eyebrows, because it brought into question many assumptions about evolution and the age of the Earth.

If, for example, evolution needed 400 millions years, then the land on which it happened would not be there at least 40 times - at present rates of erosion! There is also some strong evidence to show that rainfall was much greater globally in the past - i.e. great dried up lake beds in Australia and elsewhere. Perhaps the land is being pushed up out of the sea at about the same rate it is being washed away? There is no evidence to support this theory, so evolutionists are stuck with a problem.

This figure raised many eyebrows, because it brought into question many assumptions about evolution and the age of the Earth.

Another statistic came in recently, based on average sediment movements in the Yellow river, China. Every year some one billion tonnes of sediment makes its way to the sea. Where does all this sediment end up? At the river mouth, and then further out as the river produces a 'fan' under the sea. But if the Yellow river deposits 1 billion tones every year, and has been doing that for say, 100,000 years, where is all the sediment? There should be an enormous fan under the sea - but there isn't. Does this mean that the Yellow river deposited a very small amount of sediment for 100,000 years and then, within just the last roughly 10,000 years it really started to 'chew through the dirt'? That would be absurd. Does it mean ocean currents have been constantly sweeping the sediments away? There is no evidence for that either.

The only reasonable explanation which matches the evidence is that the Yellow river has been washing sediment away for just a few thousand years. It is as if the land and the sediment just appeared, very recently - and this fits exactly with what the Bible says in Genesis.

All around the world, wherever there are rivers dumping sediment, the river fans are so small they could only have begun forming some 4-5000 years ago. This is hard, real-time evidence and not theory.

If one visits the mountains of New Zealand, where the rock faces soar into the sky, one may notice the steady, never-ending sound of little stones tumbling and bouncing down from the heights. This is caused by erosion, as gravity and weather, ice and rain and wind, chip away at the stone. When the air heats up, as in Europe during the last few years, the rate at which the rock crumbles can become quite dangerous. 50 people died in the Alps in 2003, due to falling rock, and many mountain paths were closed because of the danger. The magazine Geophysical Research Letters vol. 31 said, "Our model suggests that higher summer temperatures will heat some rock face to such an extent that the permafrost, which glues the cracks and joints together, will melt and decrease the stability of the rock face."

Another aspect of erosion is the question of what exactly is eroded? Obviously, the softer the material, the more easily it is eroded, but considering that about 80% of all land above sea level is sedimentary rock, we have another problem. How did all that sediment get there? Sometimes the series of layers are over a mile thick, sometimes they contain vast amounts of fossilized trees (coal) and other times they cover small oceans of fossilized plant material in another form (oil and gas). These deposits are evidence of enormous floods, and not the result of slow, incremental build up of materials.

Again, the evidence points to the Bible. Many of the rivers in the world have left behind banks that show that at some time in the past they were perhaps 1000 times larger, but have since dwindled to their present volume. This is all evidence of a global flood. Erosion is one of many indicators, not of an ancient planet, but of a young Earth and a reliable Bible.