Our planet, Earth, is the only place in the universe known to have liquid water.1 In fact, astronauts looking at Earth’s surface from outer space see mainly water. The ocean covers 71% of the total area, and contains enough water to cover the whole planet to a depth of 2.7 km (1.7 miles) if the surface were completely flat.
Salinity
The ocean is essential for life on Earth, and also helps make the climate fairly moderate. However, although the ocean contains 1,370 million cubic kilometres (334 million cubic miles) of water, humans can’t survive by drinking from it — it is too salty.
To a chemist, ‘salt’ refers to a wide range of chemicals where a metal is combined with a non-metal. Ordinary common salt is a compound formed when the metal sodium combines with the non-metal chlorine — sodium chloride. This contains electrically charged atoms, called ions, that attract each other, resulting in a fairly hard crystal. When salt dissolves, these ions separate. Sodium and chloride ions are the main ions in seawater, but not the only ones. The salty seas benefit man, because the ocean provides many useful minerals for our industries.
How old is the sea?
Many processes (see below) bring salts into the sea, while they don’t leave the sea easily. So the saltiness is increasing steadily. Since we can work out how much salt there is in the sea, as well as the rates that salts go into and out of the sea, we should be able to calculate a maximum age for the sea.
In fact, this method was first proposed by Sir Isaac Newton’s colleague, Sir Edmond Halley (1656–1742), of comet fame.2 More recently, the geologist, physicist and pioneer of radiation therapy, John Joly, (1857–1933) estimated that the oceans were 80–90 million years old at the most.3 But this was far too young for evolutionists, who believed that life evolved in the ocean billions of years ago.
More recently, the geologist Dr Steve Austin and the physicist Dr Russell Humphreys analysed figures from secular geoscience sources for the quantity of sodium ion (Na+) in the ocean, and its input and output rates.4 The slower the input and faster the output, the older the ocean could be.
Every kilogram of seawater contains about 10.8 grams of dissolved Na+ (about 1% by weight) This means that there is a total of 1.47 x 1016 (14,700 million million) tonnes of Na+ in the ocean.
Sodium input
Water on the land can dissolve salt outcrops, and can weather many minerals, especially clays and feldspars, and leach the sodium out of them. This sodium can be carried into the ocean by rivers. Some salt is supplied by water through the ground directly to the sea — called submarine groundwater discharge (SGWD). Such water is often very concentrated in minerals. Ocean floor sediments release much sodium, as do hot springs on the ocean floor (hydrothermal vents). Volcanic dust also contributes some sodium.
Austin and Humphreys calculated that about 457 million tonnes of sodium now comes into the sea every year. The minimum possible rate in the past, even if the most generous assumptions are granted to evolutionists, is 356 million tonnes/year.
Actually, a more recent study shows that salt is entering the oceans even faster than Austin and Humphreys thought.5 Previously, the amount of SGWD was thought to be a small fraction (0.01–10 %) of the water from surface runoff, mainly rivers. But this new study, measuring the radioactivity of radium in coastal water, shows that the amount of SGWD is as much as 40 % of the river flow.6 This means that the maximum possible age of the ocean is even smaller.
Sodium output
People who live near the sea often have problems with rust in cars. This is due to salt spray — small droplets of seawater escape from the ocean, the water evaporates, leaving behind tiny salt crystals. This is a major process that removes sodium from the sea. Another major process is called ion exchange — clays can absorb sodium ions and exchange them for calcium ions, which are released into the ocean. Some sodium is lost from the ocean when water is trapped in pores in sediments on the ocean floor. Certain minerals with large cavities in their crystal structure, called zeolites, can absorb sodium from the ocean.
However, the rate of all of this sodium output is far less than the input. Austin and Humphreys calculated that about 122 million tonnes of sodium leaves the sea every year. The maximum possible rate in the past, even if the most generous assumptions are granted to evolutionists, is 206 million tonnes/year.
Estimating the ocean’s age
Granting the most generous assumptions to evolutionists, Austin and Humphreys calculated that the ocean must be less than 62 million years old. It’s important to stress that this is not the actual age, but a maximum age. That is, this evidence is consistent with any age up to 62 million years, including the biblical age of about 6,000 years.
The Austin and Humphreys calculation assumes the lowest plausible input rates and fastest plausible output rates. Another assumption is that there was no dissolved salt to start with. If we assume more realistic conditions in the past, the calculated maximum age is much less.
Conclusion
The salinity of the oceans is a strong evidence that they, and the earth itself, are far younger than the billions of years required for evolution, and is consistent with the biblical age of about 6,000 years. It is also far younger than the evolutionists’ ‘dates’ for many marine creatures. In short, the sea is not salty enough to suit the taste of evolutionists! Of course, all such calculations depend on assumptions about the past, like the starting conditions and constant rates of processes. They can never prove the age of something. For that, we need an eye-witness. The point of such calculations is to demonstrate that even under the evolutionists’ own assumptions about the past, the earth is far younger than is usually claimed.
J. Sarfati, Creation Ex Nihilo 21(1):16–17 Dec 1998
1. Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons, is suspected to have liquid water under an icy crust, but this is not known for certain.
2. E. Halley, ‘A short account of the cause of the saltiness [sic] of the ocean, and of the several lakes that emit no rivers; with a proposal, by help thereof, to discover the age of the world’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, 29:296–300, 1715; cited in Ref. 4.
3. J. Joly, ‘An estimate of the geological age of the earth’, Scientific Transactions of the Royal Dublin Society, New Series, 7(3), 1899; reprinted in Annual Report of the Smithsonian Institution, June 30, 1899, pp. 247–288; cited in Ref. 4.
4. S.A. Austin and D.R. Humphreys, The sea’s missing salt: a dilemma for evolutionists, Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Creationism, Vol. II, pp. 17–33, 1990. This paper should be consulted for more detail than is possible in this article.
5. W.S. Moore, ‘Large groundwater inputs to coastal waters revealed by ‘Ra enrichments’, Nature, 380(6575):612–614, 18 April 1996; perspective by T.M. Church, ‘An underground route for the water cycle’, same issue, pp. 579–580.
6. M.T. Church, Ref. 5, p. 580, comments: ‘The conclusion that large quantities of SGWD are entering the coastal ocean has the potential to radically alter our understanding of oceanic chemical mass balance.’