A river like no other
by Dr Emil Silvestru
‘No possible action of any flood could thus have modelled the land, either
within the valley or along the open coast.’1
So wrote Charles Darwin about the Santa Cruz River in southern Patagonia. He was
in the third year of his Beagle voyage, having visited many locations along
South America’s southeastern coast. He had identified step-like plains running
inland from the sea, and he thought they were caused by the slow subsidence and
elevation of the land over a very long time, with the receding sea repeatedly eroding
the flat surfaces.
Exploring the river during April 1834, Darwin saw similar step-like plains on both
sides and a layer of basalt, with very little basalt rubble down stream. He was
convinced that the river had insufficient strength to erode such large volumes of
basalt and grind the rubble to sand—it could only have been done by the sea.
He postulated an ancient sea strait cutting the entire continent from the Atlantic
to the Pacific! Darwin concluded, ‘[I]t makes the head almost giddy to reflect
on the number of years, century after century, which the tides, unaided by a heavy
surf, must have required to have corroded so vast an area and thickness of solid
basaltic lava.’1 His mentor, Charles Lyell, was the one who largely
introduced the ‘slow and gradual long ages’ concept to geology. Like
him, Darwin totally rejected any sudden, catastrophic agency.
The Santa Cruz River
Rio Santa Cruz is an unusual river, flowing out of a lake (Lago Argen tino) at a
rate that could comfortably supply the water needs of 15 cities the size of New
York.2,3 It snakes majestically across the Patagonian plain
for 385 km (240 miles), with no tributaries.2
Thirty km (20 miles) at its widest, the river valley narrows through three steps
to about 3 km (2 miles) at the bottom. However, the river is no wider than 200 m
(700 ft) in most places. Such a river is called underfit, i.e. much smaller
than the size of the valley it flows in. Darwin recorded a valley width of only
16 km (10 miles), indicating he never climbed to the top of the slope where the
real width is clearly visible.
What if Darwin had travelled all the way to the river’s source: Lago Argentino?
Presumably his astute mind and keen sense of observation would have led him to an
explanation consistent with his view: Lago Argentino is also a remnant of an ancient
arm of the sea. Ideally, he would have looked for a place at the lake’s westernmost
end where his ancient straits were still visible as a deep cut across the Andes.
If so, he would have been deeply disappointed to find, instead, a continuous mountain
range from which the beautiful Perito Moreno glacier (pictured above) descends directly
into the lake.
The Santa Cruz River and meltwater flooding
The water in Lago Argentino comes from the melting of the ice of the glaciers in
the Los Glaciares National Park of which Perito Moreno is the most important. As
the glacier advances into the lake, it sometimes separates it into two arms. Without
drainage, meltwater in the southern arm sometimes rises 30 m (100 ft) behind the
ice dam which it eventually breaches, releasing the water into the main lake. Such
breaching has been recorded at least 19 times in the last 90 years.4 Further south, a small glacial lake disappeared
overnight in 2007 because of a breached ice dam.5
During the final stages of the Ice Age,6
the Patagonian Ice Cap covered most of the Andes7
and at the end of the Ice Age, meltwater accumulated in lakes under the ice and
at the edge of the ice cap. A much larger Lago Argentino formed, probably dammed
towards the east by massive moraines and ice. When the dam breached, a first burst
cut a more shallow channel over 30 km (20 miles) wide—the uppermost step.
Then a second, deeper and narrower channel was cut which reached the basalt layer,
undermining and eventually cutting it. The flow diminished until a river roughly
the size of the present one remained.
The soft sediments could not preserve the usual landmarks such floods create. There
are however silent witnesses strewn across the valley: rounded blocks, some very
large, that display many scars of their collisions with other blocks as they were
hurled downstream by the floodwaters. These differ from blocks carried by ice.
The meltwater flood hypothesis
Geologists today believe that glacial meltwater floods carved unusual landscapes
like the Channeled Scablands in Washington State, USA. A larger flood in Canada
drained Lake Agassiz’s glacial meltwater and cut the Niagara Escarpment and
Gorge and the St Lawrence River. In Canada many floods also occurred underneath
the ice sheet. In Alberta, a massive subglacial flood probably shaped most of the
foothills and possibly the Rockies themselves.8
Catastrophic meltwater floods also cut the narrow land bridge connecting Europe
with Britain—ironically the home of the father of anti-catastrophist geology,
Charles Lyell.
The late Derek Ager, a British geologist and anti-creationist, wrote: ‘Just
as politicians rewrite human history, so geologists rewrite earth history. For a
century and a half the geological world has been dominated, one might even say brain-washed,
by the gradualistic uniformitarianism of Charles Lyell. Any suggestion of “catastrophic”
events has been rejected as old-fashioned, unscientific and even laughable.’9
Darwin and the glaciers
When Darwin left Europe in December 1831 on board the Beagle, the idea
of ice ages was in its incipient stages. He did not fully understand the power of
glaciers in eroding and transporting rocks, nor that glaciers extended far from
the mountains in the recent past. He had already seen and recorded many erratic
(i.e. glacier-transported) blocks on the surface of the South American Pampas but
strongly believed, following Lyell, that they had been transported there by icebergs
when the sea was covering the Pampas.
Darwin published his journal (The Voyage of the Beagle) in 1839, three
years after his return to England. At that time he was perfectly aware of the scientific
theory of ice ages put forward by the Swiss geologist, Louis Agassiz.10 In fact Lyell had openly opposed it in his presidential
address to the Geological Society of London in 1836.11
Darwin himself wrote a passionate critique of Agassiz’s ice age theory.11
His aversion to it may have been aided by the fact that by that time he had started
to think along evolutionary lines, whilst Agassiz, though a long-ager, was a staunch
anti-evolutionist. As we all know today, Agassiz was right about glaciers and the
Ice Age; Darwin was wrong.
Conclusion
The slow, uniform flow of time and geological processes that Darwin believed in
is now replaced by a new paradigm according to which most geological processes occurred
rather suddenly, often as catastrophic events.
Darwin’s Beagle voyage, in addition to his basic geological training
and Lyell’s book, Principles of Geology, made him an experienced
field geologist. Exploring the Santa Cruz River played an important role in developing
Darwin’s geological views. It reinforced his belief in deep geological time—and,
as few scholars today doubt, this played a key part in shaping his evolutionary
ideas in biology.11
Yet most of his interpretations of this area (and many others in South America)
were erroneous, according to modern geology. He assumed for instance that the entire
valley of the Santa Cruz River was once an arm of the sea. But it is believed today
that it was most probably cut by catastrophic meltwater flooding towards the end
of the Ice Age, a concept which Darwin opposed.12
The slow, uniform flow of time and geological processes that Darwin believed in
is now replaced by a new paradigm according to which most geo logical processes
occurred rather suddenly, often as catastrophic events. Though the Genesis Flood
is still utterly rejected by the evolutionary establishment—despite the massive
evidence—it was the most important catastrophe of all. If a sudden burst of
meltwater com ing from melting glaciers could cut the enormous Santa Cruz valley
so quickly, how much more would the global Flood, involving all the water in the
oceans, have done in terms of shaping the land?
References and notes
- Darwin, C., The Origin of Species and the Voyage of the
Beagle, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, London, Toronto, p. 193, 2003.
Return to text.
- Santa Cruz River (Argentina) <en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Cruz_River,_Argentina>,
16 June 2008. Return to text.
- Environmental issues in New York City, <en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_issues_in_New_York_City#Water_supply>
based on 2006 figures. Return to text.
- Perito Moreno Glacier, <en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perito_Moreno_Glacier>,
16 June 2008. Return to text.
- Chilean Lake disappears, Earth Observatory, <earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/NewImages/images.php3?img_id=17700>,
16 June 2008. Return to text.
- There is much evidence for an Ice Age triggered by, and straight
after, the Genesis Flood. See <creation.com/ice>. Return
to text.
- Thompson, L.G., Moselley-Thompson, E. and Henderson, K.A.,
Ice-core paleoclimate records in tropical South America since the Last Glacial Maximum,
Journal of Quaternary Science, 15(4):377–394, 2000.
Return to text.
- Silvestru, E., Wild, wild floods,
Journal of Creation 22(1):12–14, 2008.
Return to text.
- Ager, D., The New Catastrophism: the importance of the
rare event in geological history, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, p.
xi, 1993. Return to text.
- Louis Agassiz, <en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Agassiz>,
16 June 2008. The idea of glaciers beyond the Alps was first proposed in 1821 by
Venetz and further confirmed by de Carpentier, both Swiss. Return
to text.
- Herbert, S., Charles Darwin, geologist, Cornell
University Press, Ithaca and London, p. 255, 2005. Return to text.
- A shallow sea covered most of Southern Patagonia but the
marine erosion did little, mostly flattening the top layers of sediments. It is
thought that the sea temporarily invaded the land due to a sudden input of large
amounts of fresh water from the land. Return to text.
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