If the earth is more than say, 10,000 years old, how do you explain the topsoil and helium levels?

Question

Please read before answering.

Bless you all,
Love David.

Based on physical indications, the earth could be much younger than evolutionists think. Measurable amounts of helium gas are continually gathering in our outer atmosphere. The decay of the earth's uranium is one of the sources of helium. This helium cannot escape into outer space. If the earth was billions of years old, there would be as much as a million times more helium than is there now. Given the amount of helium in our outer atmosphere, the earth is estimated to be 10,000 to 15,000 years old.

Topsoil and Erosion Consistent With Younger Earth

The earth's topsoil has an average depth of seven or eight inches. Top soil is produced at an estimated rate of six inches in 5,000 to 20,000 years. If the earth is billions of years old there should be a lot more topsoil -- 300,000 inches or more! Because of erosion, the amount of sediment in the ocean is gradually increasing. If the ocean had existed for a billion years, there should be at least thirty times more sediment in it than there is.

Answer 1

There are lots of evidence supporting the young Earth theory. You would probably find http://www.drdino.com an interesting site. If you're interested in a series of DVD's about creation, evolution, dinosaurs, etc... email me [e-mail]

Just a side note about dinosaur bones... there are dinosaurs still alive on earth today, so the finding of dinosaur bones doesn't prove the earth to be billions of years old.

Frankly, there's a lot more evidence supporting the young earth theory and what the bible says about creation than there are evidence supporting evolution. So, David, keep questioning.

Answer 2

To Karen "the dino bones were created by man years ago!" with what I'll never know, I didn't stick around that question to find out.

How do you explain the earliest civilizations being at least twenty thousand years old? Or the movement of the earth's crust? The stuff we're currently on, it might be ten thousand years old but that's just the crust. See, take an earth science course, but I'll try to explain. The earth has teutonic plates. Yeah? A plate is sorta like the equate of a continent. The plates are moving. Under other plates, over other plates. The plates that go under other plates are pulled back into the earth's core and turned into lava. Lava which then erupts back out, at some place or time, to form new land which topsoil must once agian begin collecting atop. Yeah?

As for the helium bit, you'll have to wait for someone else. But is it not at all possible that the helium turned into hydrogen which in turn combined with oxygen to create water which created the great flood that so many ancient civilizations say happened?

Answer 3

Actually helium and other gases do 'escape' from the outer atmosphere constantly. Gases like helium which are called 'inert' gases do not readily form compounds like hydrogen and oxygen and nitrogen , so they tend to reach the highest altitudes where they are literally blown away by solar winds.

http://www.du.edu/~jcalvert/phys/helium.htm

The earth's topsoil is a great deal deeper in some areas than in others. Additionally soil is being continuously eroded over the same time period as it is being built up, so the average depth at a given moment in time does not mean much. That being said; where soil does exist under steady conditions, it does not always build up continuously; there is a maximum depth to it determined by climate, ground composition, slope, and local biological activity/ecology. The depth of the soil says very little about its age. Assuming that the soil in your area was built constantly for the last 10000 years I suspect that you simply lived in a place where glaciation had removed it almost completely during the last Ice age - which ended a bit more than 10-12 thousand years ago - so that fits. Where I grew up the topsoil is more than 40 feet deep! for that matter it is commonly much deeper (up to 150 feet) in river valley basins like the Mississippi, where water erosion has created a cache-pocket that covers most of the middle states - contributing to the great productivity of the 'bread-basket' of America.

Keep asking great questions - we learn nothing if we do not question everything.

Answer 4

haha 'topsoil' builds up (and erodes away) at different (and changing) rates everywhere. But do you really think that the ground surface you are on now is the same surface which existed a billion years ago? Open your eyes to the rocks around you, they tell you a lot of interesting stuff. I'll start you off with a basic geology lesson - there is a thing called plate-tectonics - oceanic crust (and the sediment on top of it) is constantly being subducted under the continents and new oceanic crust is constantly extruded at the mid-ocean ridges.

Oh and helium escapes the atmosphere all the time.

Thanks for the laugh.

Answer 5

Both claims are erroneous. There is no significant helium in the atmosphere for the same reason that there is no hydrogen: the escape velocity of the earth is too low to retain the molecules, which (in the case of helium) move nearly three times as fast as do nitrogen and oxygen, which are only marginally stable. Study Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution in any textbook on gas dynamics for details.
Soils reach an equilibrium depth, because deep organic matter decays, is eroded away, or is destroyed by fire.

The age of the earth is established by many means, all of which give consistent data:
- Radioisotope dating.
- Dating technologies using different stable isotopes.
- Tree ring data.
- Snow layers in Arctic and Antarctic regions.
- Sea floor spreading, capturing changes in earth's magnetism.
- Ice ages.
- Fossil records.
- Dating of special events, such as natural nuclear fission in Africa 1.8 billion years ago.
There are no doubt other methods as well, which escape me at the moment. The bottom line is that geochronology is an established science, the earth is 4.6 billion years old, and if you don't believe it, you are a fool.

Answer 6

http://www.skepticfiles.org/evolut/helium4c.htm

quote:

"Banks and Holzer (12) have shown that the polar wind can
account for an escape of 2 to 4 x 10^6 ions/cm^2.sec of
[4]He, which is nearly identical to the estimated production
flux of (2.5 +- 1.5) x 10^6 atoms/cm^2.sec. Calculations
for [3]He lead to similar results, i.e., a rate virtually
identical to the estimated production flux. Another possible
escape mechanism is direct interaction of the solar wind with
the upper atmosphere during the short periods of lower
magnetic-field intensity while the field is reversing.
Sheldon and Kern (112) estimated that 20 geomagnetic-field
reversals over the past 3.5 million years would have assured
a balance between helium production and loss."

Answer 7

I'm not a master on this subject, but the Earth hasn't always had an atmosphere. Until the atmosphere came the helium could have escaped into space. Our atmosphere started forming when life started exhaling oxygen. I can't disprove this statement because I don't know much about it, but there is a lot more evidence for Evolution than against it. A theory like this doesn't put a dent in it.

Answer 8

well...

In response to your point about helium, studies have found a balance between the production and loss of helium in the atmosphere. Check out http://www.tim-thompson.com/resp3.html

With regard to topsoil and erosion, that argument is just ludicrous, topsoil accumulation is a cyclic system. Check out http://www.skeptictank.org/hs/matson-v.htm

Answer 9

The ages of Earth and Moon rocks and of meteorites are measured by the decay of long-lived radioactive isotopes of elements that occur naturally in rocks and minerals and that decay with half lives of 700 million to more than 100 billion years to stable isotopes of other elements. These dating techniques, which are firmly grounded in physics and are known collectively as radiometric dating, are used to measure the last time that the rock being dated was either melted or disturbed sufficiently to rehomogenize its radioactive elements.

Ancient rocks exceeding 3.5 billion years in age are found on all of Earth's continents. The oldest rocks on Earth found so far are the Acasta Gneisses in northwestern Canada near Great Slave Lake (4.03 Ga) and the Isua Supracrustal rocks in West Greenland (3.7 to 3.8 Ga), but well-studied rocks nearly as old are also found in the Minnesota River Valley and northern Michigan (3.5-3.7 billion years), in Swaziland (3.4-3.5 billion years), and in Western Australia (3.4-3.6 billion years). These ancient rocks have been dated by a number of radiometric dating methods and the consistency of the results give scientists confidence that the ages are correct to within a few percent.

Answer 10

Too previous due. talk origins have already debunked this (Suprise!). perhaps creationists might want to commence searching talk origins previously posting. (From the archive) generating a thousand million years of radioactive decay in a "creation week" or 365 days-lengthy flood ought to have produced a thousand million years properly worth of warm temperature from radioactive decay besides. this can somewhat a lot vaporize the earth. because the earth curiously has not been vaporized presently, lets be confident that the speeded up decay did not ensue. (Humphreys (the author of the unique paper) recognizes this "warmth situation" yet is presently unable to grant a answer.)