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Geologic catastrophe and the young earth
Tas Walker talks to Steve Austin about his research career in Flood geology
© iStockphoto/Chriscis
Geologist Dr. Steven A. Austin has rafted through Grand Canyon, helicoptered into
the Mount St. Helens volcano, and flown onto glaciers in Alaska. He is currently
Senior Research Scientist with the Institute for Creation Research where he has
worked for over 37 years. His geological adventures have taken him high into the
Sierra Nevada, deep underground into coal mines, over plateaus, through deserts,
and beneath the ocean.
For as long as he can remember, Steve has loved rocks.
“I saw my first geologic map when I was three. My dad often took me fishing,
which meant going over mountain ridges where I saw lots of rocks. Before I could
read I was classifying minerals and by five I had a large rock collection.”
Mt St Helens and geologic catastrophe
Steve is known for his remarkable research on the Mt St Helens volcano in Washington
State, USA, which erupted catastrophically in May 1980.
“I had just defended my PhD thesis at Penn State University on the floating
log-mat model for the origin of the Kentucky coal beds, which means the coal deposits
formed much faster than traditionally believed. Mt St. Helens exploded ten months
later and made Spirit Lake into a giant bath tub covered with floating logs. That’s
why I had to go there.”
What he saw was overwhelming. “It happened at the right time and in the right
place,” Steve said. “The volcano was so well monitored that it was indisputable
what catastrophic processes do to a landscape in super-quick time.” Steve
sees Mt St Helens as having application to geologic features everywhere: Yellowstone
National Park, petrified forests, coal layers and Grand Canyon. It transformed geological
thinking by showing dramatically how geologic features form quickly.1 It even illustrates how animals could have repopulated
the earth after the Flood.2
When Steve did his training in the 1970s, the idea of uniformitarianism held sway—the
belief that geological processes happened slowly and that the earth must be millions
of years old. But Mt St Helens helped blast that idea away. Geologists began to
see evidence for past catastrophe everywhere.
“That led to a change in thinking,” Steve said. “I could go back
to my professors and say, ‘I told you so.’ The fact is that geologic
features form rapidly and not over millions of years. The geologic evidence is entirely
consistent with the biblical timescale.”
Grand Canyon is now a creationist icon
Grand Canyon has figured prominently in Steve’s geological career. In 1994,
he published a creationist classic, Grand Canyon: Monument to Catastrophe.3
“That book came out of the guide books I produced for the tours we conducted,”
Steve said. “Grand Canyon is supposedly an icon for evolution but now it’s
an icon of Creation and the Flood.”
One spectacular evidence of catastrophe that Steve discovered in Grand Canyon was
a thick bed containing multitudes of fossil nautiloids.4 Shaped like a skinny dunce’s cap, nautiloid
shells came from an animal that was like an octopus, or cuttlefish.
The shells are exposed in the walls of Grand Canyon in a 2-metre layer of rock called
the Whitmore Nautiloid Bed. It’s a huge bed that extends over 300 km (200
miles), as far west as Las Vegas, Nevada.
“I believe the bed was formed by an underwater mud flow,” Steve said.
“The water was full of mud, what we call a slurry, and so was much denser
than the surrounding water. The slurry rushed down the steep slopes of the underwater
mountains, gathering speed like an avalanche. And it careered across the ocean floor
as fast as a semi on the freeway.”
There’s something like 40 or 50 cubic kilometres of sediment in that bed and
it was all deposited rapidly.
“As the avalanche swept past it trapped the nautiloids and carried them along.
I believe that these mud flows were highly pressurized and the fluid kept the sand
and mud in suspension. It works like a water cushion and has very low friction,
so the mud flow careers across the flat surface of the ocean floor for hundreds
of miles.”
“These flows can change suddenly. A high speed slurry can start out as a laminar
flow, where the fluid travels in regular, streamlined paths. Then, it can suddenly
turn turbulent where the fluid flow is curly and irregular. You can see the same
effect in the smoke from a candle that has just been put out.”
“Turbulent flow can’t carry the mud so it dumps its load suddenly across
the ocean floor.”
“And that is what happened to the nautiloid shells. They were deposited quickly,
frozen in time. One in every seven is standing vertical in the bed. The others tend
to point the same way indicating the direction of the slurry flow. It’s a
very interesting arrangement of fossils.”
For a long time geologists have thought that limestone rock, like the rock containing
the nautiloid fossils, takes many thousands of years to form. “But this bed
formed rapidly,” Steve said, “like in minutes. There’s something
like 40 or 50 cubic kilometres of sediment in that bed and it was all deposited
rapidly. This bed alone illustrates the title of my book, Grand Canyon, Monument
to Catastrophe.”
Radioactive dating research
One of the big obstacles to the idea of a young earth is radioactive dating. Steve
has researched this for many years, and found that there are lots of problems with
the methods. He said, “I don’t feel particularly fulfilled by having
people say that I debunked radioisotope dating. There is real science in measuring
amounts of radioisotopes, but age is an interpretation of these amounts.
My research shows it is a faulty interpretation. I’ve been trying to figure
out the real explanation for the radioisotope abundances. I don’t think things
have been successfully dated by radioisotope methods.”
There is real science in measuring amounts of radioisotopes, but age is an interpretation
of these amounts.
He spent 14 years analysing radioisotopes in samples from rocks known as the Cardenas
Basalt deep within Grand Canyon.5
This igneous rock is considered to be over one billion years old. “I was able
to ‘date’ samples from many different locations using different dating
methods based on potassium-argon and rubidium-strontium analyses. The methods gave
different ages. How can supposedly ‘infallible’ methods do that? Obviously
the assumptions are wrong.”
Steve has also ‘dated’ some lava flows from the young volcanoes at the
top of Grand Canyon. Once again, he used two different methods: rubidium-strontium
and potassium-argon. And again, the dates from the different methods did not agree.
Even one internationally known researcher on radioisotope dating admitted to Steve
that half of the ‘dates’ from whole-rock samples from Grand Canyon are
wrong.
Steve discovered a very concealed secret about potassium argon dating that further
challenges the basic assumptions of the method. From his rock samples he carefully
separated minerals such as pyroxene and olivine, which contain very little potassium,
and dated these with conventional potassium argon techniques. In one example, Steve
selected pyroxene crystals from samples of rock from the new lava dome on Mt St
Helens. The rock was only 11 years old when he collected them yet the pyroxene gave
dates of two million years and more.
He also collected rocks from one of the more recent lavas (geologically speaking)
that had flowed into the canyon, and separated a very pure extract of olivine. The
labs found it had virtually no potassium in it, but contained lots of argon. That
means the argon did not come from the radioactive decay of potassium but was trapped
within the mineral when the rock crystallized.
“That is a bombshell for potassium argon dating,” Steve said. “It
shows the fundamental assumption of the method (that there is no argon initially)
is flawed. It shocked the scientists doing the work in the labs.”
Large-scale Flood models
In 1994, Steve, along with five other PhDs from a variety of specialties, published
a paper about catastrophic plate tectonics, at the International Conference on Creationism
in Pitts burgh, Pennsylvania.6
CPT was a little controversial at that time, and still is. In that paper, the creationist
scientists described the Flood as a global tectonic event powered by the gravitational
pull of the sea floor as it plunged into the earth’s mantle. In their model
the plates moved during the Flood catastrophe, not at rates of centimetres per year,
but at metres per second. The CPT model explains many of the features of the earth
including the uplift of the mountains at the end of the Flood. These were pushed
up as a result of plate collision, again, rapidly.
“Before that paper,” Steve said, “there wasn’t really a
tectonic model for the Genesis Flood. Whitcomb and Morris in their classic work
The Genesis Flood did not have a tectonics emphasis. They didn’t
need to because they published in 1961 before global tectonics became popular. But
with the publication of our paper, plate tectonics is now a creationist option.
This means that Flood geology is in a very healthy situation, especially since there
are now other creationist theories out there as well.”
The race-track flume
Steve still has big ambitions for geological research.
“I want to build a race-track flume,” he said. “It will hold enough
water to fill two swimming pools. The channel containing the water will be like
an oval race track and I’ll circulate the water with lots of moving paddles.”
“I want to make shale with it,” Steve said.2
The standard thinking is that shale forms slowly over long periods of time in quiet,
still water, but Steve is convinced it forms in fast-flowing water.
“I want to create the boundary between the clean and muddy water. If we can
understand the hydrodynamics of the boundary we will know how the flow deposits
thinly laminated sediment. It needs to be big so it can run about three times faster
than flumes in use at present.”
Steve believes that lots of shale layers were built like this including the Marcellus
Shale in the Appalachians, the Pierre Shale in the Rockies and the Bright Angel
Shale in Grand Canyon.
“If I can show that fine strata can be formed rapidly that would account for
basically 70% of the stratigraphic record.3 I believe I can do it with
this type of machine.”
“It will make a talking point to the world to show how fine grain rocks form
rapidly. And I would like to do it by 2011, the 50th anniversary of the
publication of The Genesis Flood. It would be wonderful to honour Henry
Morris with a flume that illustrated his ideas on the Flood.”
References
- A flume is an artificial channel for water.
- Shale is clay rock that splits readily into thin layers along the bedding planes.
- Report on similar experiments on mud deposition: Walker, T.,
Mud experiments overturn long-held geological beliefs, Journal of Creation
22(2):14–15, 2008.
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References and notes
- Austin, S. and Morris, J., Footprints in the Ash: The
Explosive Story of Mount St Helens, Master Books, Green Forest, Arkansas, 2003.
Furthermore, the logs were stripped of branches and roots, like most fossil logs.
Even more surprisingly the root end absorbed water, so the logs slowly sank into
an upright position. This explains the “fossil forests”—they did
not grow in place but were transported by water. Return to text.
- Swenson, D. and Catchpoole D.,
After the devastation the recovery, Creation 22(2):33–37,
2000. Return to text.
- Austin, S., Grand Canyon: Monument to Catastrophe,
Institute for Creation Research, Santee, California, 1994. Return
to text.
- Austin, S., Nautiloid mass kill and burial event, Redwall
Limestone (Lower Mississippian), Grand Canyon region, Arizona and Nevada; in: Ivey,
R. Jnr., The Fifth International Conference on Creationism, Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania, pp. 55–99, 2003. Return to text.
- Austin, S. and Snelling, A., Discordant potassium-argon model
and isochron “ages” for Cardenas Basalt (Middle Proterozoic) and associated
diabase of Eastern Grand Canyon, Arizona; in: Walsh, R., The Fourth International
Conference on Creationism, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, pp. 35–51, 1998.
Return to text.
- Austin, S. and 5 others, Catastrophic plate tectonics:
A global model of earth history; in: Walsh, R., The Third International Conference
on Creationism, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, pp. 609–621, 1994.
Return to text.
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