Indicators of an "Old Earth"

The theory of evolution describes an earth that is billions of years old; Many creation scientists interpret the Genesis account of creation as requiring an earth that is only about 6,000 years of age; some stretch this to 10,000 years. It is impossible to prove that the earth was in existence billions of years ago; no human was alive at that time to observe. All we have are indicators that the world is of a great age.

There is one good indicator that our galaxy is very old:

The sun is one of countless numbers of stars in our galaxy. The galaxy is over 100,000 light years across. This means that light from some stars in our galaxy has taken many tens of thousands of years to reach earth. This would indicate that our galaxy is much older than 10 millennia.

There is one excellent indicator that the earth's age is in excess of 8000 years:

Some bristlecone pine trees in the White-Inyo mountain range of California date back beyond 2000 BCE. One, labeled "Methuselah" germinated in 2726 BCE. But their tree rings have been matched with those of dead trees; this shows that the latter germinated about 6000 BCE, which predates the year 4004 BCE by 2 millenia.

We have selected 13 indicators which show that parts of the earth, or the earth itself is much older than 10,000 years:

The Los Alamos National Laboratory has developed a method of measuring the length of time that surface rocks have been exposed to cosmic rays. Cosmic rays stream into the atmosphere from all directions in outer space and break neutrons free when they collide with air molecules. When these neutrons hit rocks on the ground, they react with a tiny number of mineral atoms which create radioactive isotopes. At sea level, a few hundred modified atoms are created each year in a gram of quartz which is near the surface of the ground. New measuring techniques can detect very small numbers of these atoms and thus estimate the number of years that the rocks have been exposed. Scientists have found ages of about 8,500 years for glacial moraines in Newfoundland and 830,000 years for extinct volcanoes in Nevada.
The "nuclide" argument is one of the best proofs of an "old earth". Nuclides are forms of matter that are radioactive. Each nuclide decays into another form of matter at a certain rate. After an interval of time equal to its half-life, only half of the original material is left. Scientists have found that:
- Every nuclide with a half-life over 80 million years can be found naturally occurring on earth
- All Nuclides with a half-life under 80 million years do not exist naturally
The only logical explanation for these observations is that the world formed billions of years ago. There are enough long-lived nuclides still around to be still detectable. The short-lived nuclides have long since decayed and disappeared. The only exceptions to the latter are short lived nuclides which are being continuously generated by the decay of long-lived nuclides.
Because of tides, the rotation of the earth is gradually slowing, by about 0.005 seconds per year. About 370 million years ago, each day would have been only 22.7 hours long! Studies of rugose coral fossils that were independently estimated to be 370 million years old revealed that when they were alive a day lasted about 22 hours. This relationship has been confirmed with other coral fossils. This is rather good evidence that the world was in existence a third of a billion years ago.
The coral reef at Eniwetok atoll in the Pacific Ocean has been measured to have a thickness of up to 1380 meters. Even the most optimistic coral growth rates would require that the atoll be over 130,000 years of age.
It takes thousands of years of below freezing temperatures to build a 100 foot layer of permafrost. But large areas in the north are permanently frozen to depths of almost one mile! This took many tens of millennia to accomplish.
Radio carbon dating of wood, which is accurate as far back as 50,000 years, has identified many wooden objects to be many tens of thousands of years old
Reversals of the earth's magnetic pole are recorded in the Atlantic Ocean sea bottom for the past 80 million years
Rate at which the continents are spreading apart from each other indicates that the Atlantic Ocean is about 200 million years old.
Radioactive dating of the oldest earth rocks gives an age of almost 4000 million years. Moon rocks and meteorites from outer space give dates in excess of 4000 million years.
If we assumed that all of the minerals which are carried by rivers into the oceans remains trapped in the oceans, then it would take 260 million years for the concentration of sodium to reach its present level. If plankton, fish or other plants adsorb sodium, then it would take much longer. We can conclude that the age of the earth is something greater than a quarter billion years, and is in all probability much longer.
Measurements by sensors attached to satellites shows that space dust accumulates on the moon at the rate of about 2 nanograms per square centimeter per year. (A nanogram is one thousandth of a million of a gram.) This rate would require 4.5 million years to reach a depth of 1.5 inches, which is approximately the depth experienced by the astronauts who walked on the moon. This agrees rather well with radioactive dating of moon rocks.
Estimates for the length of time for the galaxies to have spread apart to their present spacing are in excess of 10,000 million years.
Evolutionary principles applied to geology indicate that about 100 million years ago, the ancient supercontinent of Pangea was beginning to split apart so that land that would become South America and Africa were drifting apart. At first, the drift caused some shallow seas and a few land bridges. Later, the Atlantic Ocean opened up and became gradually wider until it became the ocean that we see today. This theory would have a logical consequence in the evolution of dinosaurs. Before this split in land mass took place, dinosaurs would have evolved into a variety of species which were found throughout Pangea. Since 100 million years ago, when the land bridges disappeared and the seas became too deep to cross, the dinosaurs would have evolved differently in Africa and South America, due to their isolation from each other. This is precisely what has been observed in the fossil record.
We have called these examples "indicators" rather than "proofs" of an old earth. One reason is that they make a basic assumption: that naturally occurring processes in the past behaved in the same way as they do today. For example, radiometric dating techniques assume that the speed of light has remained constant. The cosmic ray method assumes that the number of cosmic rays hitting the earth has not changed much over time. The coral reef argument assumes that the rate of growth of coral is similar in the past to what it is today. However, if you assume that coral growth was once ten times faster than today, the atoll is still over 13,000 years old. If you assume that the cosmic ray rate was once 80 times the current level, the hills in Nevada are still over 10,000 years old. If you assumed that space dust accumulated 1000 times faster in the past, then the moon would still be 5 million years old.
Any one of these examples eliminates the possibility of an earth that is only 10,000 years old, beyond reasonable doubt. Taken together, they are even more convincing.
Some of the examples can have reduced accuracy caused by contamination of a sample. For example, nuclide tests assume that no "parent" or "daughter" isotopes migrated in or out of the sample. Fortunately, these errors have been eliminated by testing of multiple samples from a variety of locations.

Return to the OCRT home page; return to the Evolution page.