Previous topic   |   Next topic

Category 3: Rocks, bones and fossils

Claim 5: 'Rock strata represent eons of time'

Rock layers provide evidence of rapid soft earth deposit.

Some other evidence for the non-existence of the eons of time and for the rapid deposition of the layers are:

• Polystrate fossils – tree trunks, for example,running through strata supposedly representing many millions of years (these are common in coal) show that the strata must have been deposited in quick succession, otherwise the tops of the trunk would have rotted away.

• Delicate surface features preserved on underlying rock units – such as ripple marks and footprints – indicate that there was no long time gap before the next unit was deposited.

• Lack of fossilised soil layers in the rock strata,indicating no long time gaps.

• Lack of erosion features in the rock layers or between the rock units (any significant time break would result in channels being formed in the exposed strata from the action of water or wind)

• Limited extent of unconformities. Although unconformities (clear breaks in deposition) indicate time breaks, such unconformities are localised, with no break evident in rocks of the same strata elsewhere, thus indicating that any time break was localised and brief

• Clastic dykes and pipes – where a sand/water mixture has squeezed up through overlying layers. Although the underlying sand is supposed to be millions of years older than the overlying layers, it obviously did not have time to harden.

Uluru (Ayres Rock), in central Ausralia, is also supposed to have formed slowly over hundreds of millions of years, but the structure of the rock shows that it must have formed very quickly and recently.³

The existence of many ‘living fossils’ also challenges the supposed hundreds of millions of years of ‘Earth history’. For example, starfish, jellyfish, brachiopods, clams and snails, which are known as fossils dated by evolutionists as 530 million years old, look like those living today. Dr Joachim Scheven, a German scientist, has a museum with over 500 examples of such ‘living fossils’. Furthermore, some of these fossils are missing from intervening strata that supposedly represent many millions of years of evolutionary time, again indicating that there were no time gaps.

1. Austin, S.A., 1994.Grand Canyon: Monument to Catastrophe, Institute for Creation Research, San Diego, CA.

2. Morris, J., 1994. The young Earth, Creation-Life Publishers Inc., Colorado Springs, CO.

3. Snelling, A., 1998. Uluru and Kata Tjuta. Creation 20(2):36-40