Below is the online edition of In the Beginning: Compelling Evidence for Creation and the Flood, by Dr. Walt Brown. Copyright © Center for Scientific Creation. All rights reserved.

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[ The Fountains of the Great Deep > The Origin of Earth’s Radioactivity > Evidence Requiring an Explanation ]

Evidence Requiring an Explanation

Experimental Support.  Good theories must have experimental support.

1. HP: Every phenomenon involved in the hydroplate explanation for earth’s radioactivity is well understood and demonstrable: the piezoelectric effect, poling, nuclear combustion, electron capture, flutter with high compressive and tensile stresses, neutron production by bremsstrahlung radiation, Z-pinch, neutron activation analysis, rapid decay of artificially produced superheavy nuclei, and increased decay rates resulting from high voltages and concentrated electrical currents.

We know radioactive nuclei have excess energy, continually vibrate, and are always on the verge of “flying apart” (i.e., decaying). Atomic accelerators bombard nuclei; adding that energy produces radioisotopes and rapid decay.

2. CE: The various scales (such as time, temperature, and size) required—for example, in and around stars hundreds of thousands of times more massive than earth—are so large that experimental support for chemical evolution is necessarily limited. Experiments using particle colliders allow investigation of the interactions of subatomic particles traveling at very great speeds. By using computer simulations and extrapolating the results of experiments to larger scales, we can draw conclusions about the kinds of elements that would have been produced at extremely high temperatures inside huge stars billions of years ago.

Quartz Alignment in Continental Crust.  Why are quartz crystals aligned in most quartz-rich rocks?⁸¹

3. HP: As explained in Figure 192 on page 361, electric fields, from centuries of cyclic compression and tension (twice a day) before the flood, increasingly aligned quartz crystals in granite—a process called poling. Amazingly, laboratory tests have shown that alignments still exist even after the compression event and thousands of years.⁸¹

4. CE: Electrical fields must have been present as earth’s rocks solidified from a melt. The electrical fields would have aligned the quartz grains.

[Response: Granite consists of a mixture of millimeter-size mineral grains. Isolated quartz crystals, as seen today, would not have formed if the granite crust slowly cooled and solidified from a melt—even if a strong electrical field had been present. As the melt slowly cooled, each type of mineral would solidify once its freezing temperature was reached. Then, that solid mineral would sink or float (depending on its density), thereby sorting into thick layers and very large crystals, such as pegmatites. Rapid cooling would have produced a rock called rhyolite. Granite cannot form from a melt.]

Radioactivity Concentrated in Continental Crust.  Why is earth’s radioactivity concentrated in the continental crust?

5. HP: Earth’s radioactivity was produced by powerful electrical discharges within the fluttering granite crust during the flood. Therefore, earth’s radioactivity should be concentrated in the continental crust.

The ocean floors and mantle have little radioactivity, because they did not flutter and they contain little to no quartz, so they could not produce strong electrical discharges. Also, the subterranean water absorbed most of the neutrons generated in the fluttering crust, so little radioactivity was produced below the chamber floor.

6. CE: Stars produced radioisotopes. Later, earth formed from the debris of exploded stars—“starstuff.” Why earth’s radioactivity is concentrated in the continental crust is unclear.⁴²

[Response: If earth formed from the debris of exploded stars, radioactivity should be distributed evenly throughout the earth, not concentrated in the crust.]

Correlation of Heat Flow with Radioactivity. The heat flowing out of the earth at specific continental locations correlates with the radioactivity in surface rocks at those locations.

7. HP: Electrical discharges within the crust generated both heat and radioactivity. The greater the electrical current at a location, the more radioactivity and heat produced. Therefore, the upward heat flow through the earth’s surface should correlate with radioactivity at the earth’s surface.

8. CE: This correlation may be explained as follows:

If so, radioactivity goes only 4.68 miles down.¹⁰⁶ If it went much deeper, the heat coming out at the surface, after just a few million years of radioactive decay, would be much more than is coming out today.

Although it is unlikely that all radioactivity is concentrated in earth’s top 4.68 miles, radioactivity may decrease with depth, allowing even more time (consistent with the great age of the earth) for that deeper heat to flow to the surface. Millions of such variations could be imagined, but all visualize radioactivity as being concentrated near the surface.

[Response: Millions of years would be required for the heat to flow up 4.68 or more miles.¹⁰⁷ If that much time elapsed, some locations would have eroded more than others. Arthur Lachenbruch has shown that millions of years of surface erosion would destroy the correlation unless radioactivity decreased exponentially with depth.¹⁰⁸ If so, too much time would be required for the deeper heat generated to reach the surface. However, Germany’s Deep Drilling Program found that variations in radioactivity depended on the rock type, not depth.¹⁰⁹]

Ocean-Floor Heat.  Continental (granitic) rocks have much more radioactivity than the ocean floors, so why is slightly more heat coming up through the ocean floors than through the granite continents?

9. HP: Because of deep frictional deformation below the ocean floors, slightly more heat comes up through them. This began during the flood and continues today. [See “Magma Production and Movement” on page 154.] The granite crust contains almost all earth’s radioactive material, because piezoelectric effects in the fluttering crust released powerful electrical discharges within granite and generated unstable isotopes.

10. CE: Much of the heat coming up from within the earth is produced by radioactive decay. Yet, Stacey has admitted:

The equality of the continental and oceanic heat flows is puzzling in view of the great disparity in the total amounts of the radioactive elements uranium, thorium, and potassium in the continental [granitic] and oceanic [basaltic] crusts.¹¹⁰

[Response: Stacey’s data actually show that the oceanic heat flow is slightly greater than that coming up through the continents.]

Argon-40 (⁴⁰Ar). Today, ⁴⁰Ar is produced almost entirely by the decay of potassium-40 (⁴⁰K). Earth appears never to have had enough ⁴⁰K to produce all the ⁴⁰Ar in our atmosphere—even if the earth were twice as old as evolutionists claim. Saturn’s moon, Enceladus, also has too much ⁴⁰Ar but not enough ⁴⁰K.

11. HP: Calcium is the fifth most abundant element in the earth’s crust; 97% of that calcium is calcium-40 (⁴⁰Ca). Most calcium came from the subterranean chamber, the source of earth’s vast limestone (CaCO₃) deposits. [See “The Origin of Limestone” on pages 244–249.] If a ⁴⁰Ca nucleus captured an electron during an electrical discharge, ⁴⁰K would be produced. If a second electron were captured, ⁴⁰Ar would be produced. Alternatively, if any fission produced magnesium-40, aluminum-40, silicon-40, phosphorus-40, sulfur-40, or chlorine-40, then argon-40 would be created within minutes by beta decays. Because argon is an inert gas, most of it would have been expelled as free argon from the subterranean chamber.

12. CE: Crustal rocks contain little potassium-40, but the mantle may contain much more. Furthermore, if about 66% of the mantle’s 40Ar escaped into the atmosphere, both the atmosphere’s ⁴⁰Ar and the needed ⁴⁰K in the earth’s crust and mantle could be explained.¹¹¹

[Response: This 66% proposal is ridiculous, because argon, a large atom, is easily trapped between mineral grains and within crystal structures. Indeed, the potassium-argon dating method is used, because solids retain argon over long periods of time.]

The argon on Enceladus needs to be remeasured.

Oklo Natural “Reactor.”  Can Oklo be explained? Why haven’t other uranium deposits become nuclear reactors?

13. HP: Today, a region near Oklo receives more lightning strikes than anywhere else on earth. [See See Figure 197.]  For centuries after the flood, warm oceans and heavy precipitation (explained on page 132) probably generated thunderstorms that were even more frequent and severe. As lightning strikes passed down through the thin layer of uranium ore, free neutrons were produced by bremsstrahlung radiation,¹¹² as explained on page 361. Those neutrons then fissioned ²³⁵U and initiated brief, subcritical chain reactions. Their consequences are now seen in isolated zones within 30 kilometers of the Oklo mine.

Lightning strikes would also explain why the ratio of ²³⁵U to ²³⁸U at Oklo varied a thousandfold over distances of less than a thousandth of an inch.⁵⁴ Lightning branches successively into thousands of thin, fractal-like paths, some quite close together.

14. CE: Today, 0.72% of natural uranium is ²³⁵U. Because ²³⁵U decays faster than the more abundant ²³⁸U, a higher percentage of uranium would have been ²³⁵U in the past. About 2 billion years ago, 3.7% of all uranium worldwide would have been ²³⁵U, enough for uranium deposits to “go critical” if other factors were favorable. One important factor is having water saturate the uranium ore. If the ore “went critical” and heated up, the water would evaporate, so the reactor would shut down and cool off. This cycle may have repeated itself many times. When the earth’s crust solidified at least 3.8 billion years ago, even more ²³⁵U was concentrated. Why hundreds of other uranium ore deposits did not become natural reactors is a mystery.

[Response: Such cycles would not produce temperature variations and power surges as extreme as Harms found them to have been.⁵⁵ Certainly, we would not expect to see thousandfold variations in the ratio of ²³⁵U to ²³⁸U over distances of less than a thousandth of an inch, especially after 2 billion years.

Disposal of radioactive waste from nuclear reactors is a serious environmental problem. Few believe that any geological formation can contain radioactive waste for 100,000 years—even if held in thick, steel containers encased in concrete. However, at Oklo, most products of ²³⁵U decay have not migrated far from the uranium deposit,¹¹³ despite 2 billion years of assumed time.]

Helium-3 (³He). ³He is apparently produced only by nuclear reactions, so why is so much of it inside the earth, and why does the ratio of ³He to ⁴He vary so widely inside the earth?

15. HP:  During the flood, fission and neutron production inside the earth produced ³He. It escapes to the earth’s surface along faults in the crust, so the amount of ³He at different locations varies widely.

16. CE: The earth grew and evolved by meteoritic bombardment. Therefore, ³He must have been produced in outer space and brought to the earth as it evolved by meteoritic bombardment.

[Response: Never explained is how helium, a light, inert gas, could have been trapped in meteoritic material or in a supposedly molten earth, where it would bubble to the surface. Even if helium became trapped in an evolving earth, why would the ratio of ³He to ⁴He vary so widely from location to location?

One theory, which has gained little support, claims that a natural uranium reactor, 5 miles in diameter, has been operating at the center of the earth for 4.5 billion years. The lighter fission products from that reactor, such as ³He, supposedly migrated up 4,000 miles, primarily through solid rock. One problem with this idea is that any ³He produced near a neutron source would readily absorb a neutron and become ⁴He. The hypothetical reactor would itself provide those neutrons, as would any fissioning material (such as uranium or thorium) near the ³He’s 4,000-mile upward path. Likewise, ³He atoms that somehow fell to the earth 4,500,000,000 years ago would have to avoid free neutrons for a long time.]

Zircon Characteristics. Why do zircons found in western Australia contain strange isotopes and microdiamonds?

17. HP: Inside these zircons, more uranium and thorium decayed than almost anywhere else on earth. If that decay always occurred at today’s rates, as evolutionists maintain, then those zircons formed back when the earth was probably too hot to form zircons—a logical contradiction. Therefore, at some time in the past, decay rates must have been much faster.

The high pressures required to form microdiamonds were likely produced by the compression event and/or “Shock Collapse,” explained on page 362. Minerals and isotopes in these zircons show that water and granite were also present.³⁷ The extremely low ratio of ¹³C to ¹²C suggests that all these carbon isotopes were not originally present. Therefore, at least some carbon isotopes had to be produced or consumed, and that implies nuclear reactions. These zircons and their contents probably formed in the plasma channels “drilled” by the electrical discharges at the beginning of the flood.

18. CE: Organic matter contains low ratios of ¹³C to ¹²C. Therefore, the presence of water and the low ratio of ¹³C to ¹²C could imply that life was present on earth long before we evolutionists thought.

Although the earth was extremely hot 4.0–4.4 billion years ago, some regions must have been cool enough to crystallize zircons. This could have been above ocean trenches, where the geothermal heat flow is up to 17% lower than normal.¹¹⁴ If so, plate tectonics operated two billion years before we thought, although ancient trenches have never been found. [See “‘Fossil’ (Ancient) Trenches” on page 170.]

Helium Retention in Zircons. Based on today’s slow decay rates of uranium and thorium (in zircons), some rocks are claimed to be 1.5 billion years old, but their age based on the diffusion of helium out of those same zircons was only 4,000–8,000 years.³⁹

19. HP: About 5,000 years ago, electrical discharges within the crust produced accelerated decay (1) during the weeks the crust fluttered at the beginning of the flood and (2) during the sudden compression event near the end of the flood. Helium produced by the decay of uranium and thorium in zircons, which are relatively porous, is still diffusing out; very little helium has escaped from zircons, because little time has passed. [See "Helium" on page 39.]

20. CE: Only a few helium diffusion rates in zircons have been measured. Besides, those few measurements were not made under the high pressures that exist 1–2 miles inside the earth. Helium cannot escape rapidly through cracks in zircons under high pressures, so closed cracks could explain why so much helium has been retained in 1.5-billion-year-old zircons. If the diffusion rates measured in the laboratory are 100,000 times too high, the discrepancy would be explained.

[Response: Such large errors are unlikely, and hard, tiny zircons have few cracks, even at atmospheric pressure.]

Isolated Polonium Halos. Polonium-218, -214, and -210, (²¹⁸Po, ²¹⁴Po, and ²¹⁰Po) decay with half-lives of 3.1 minutes, 0.000164 second, and 138 days, respectively. Why are their halos found without the parents of polonium?

21.  HP:  During the early weeks of the flood, electrical discharges throughout the fluttering crust produced thin plasma channels in which superheavy (extremely unstable) elements formed. Then, they quickly fissioned and decayed into many relatively lighter elements, such as uranium. Simultaneously, accelerated decay occurred.

Near the end of the flood, the compression event crushed and fractured rock, producing additional electrical discharges. Hot SCW (held in the spongelike voids in the lower crust) and ²²²Rn (an inert gas produced in plasma channels) were forced up through these channels and fractures. As the mineral-rich water rose hours and days later, its pressure and temperature dropped, so minerals, such as biotite and fluorite, began forming in the channels. Wormlike myrmekite also formed as quartz and feldspars precipitated in the thin, threadlike channels “drilled” by the powerful electrical discharges and by SCW (a penetrating solvent).

In biotite, for example, what concentrated a billion or so polonium atoms at each point that quickly became the center of an isolated polonium halo? Why didn’t each halo melt in minutes as hundreds of millions of alpha particles were emitted? In a word, water.

Biotite requires water to form. Within biotite, water (H₂O or HOH) breaks into H⁺ and OH^-, and the OH^- (called hydroxide) occupies trillions upon trillions of repetitive positions within biotite’s solid lattice structure. Other water (liquid and gas) transported ²²²Rn (which decayed with a half-life of 3.8 days) between the thin biotite sheets as they were forming.

Radon gas is inert, so its electrical charge is zero. When ²²²Rn ejects an alpha particle, 5.49 MeV of kinetic energy are released and ²²²Rn instantly becomes ²¹⁸Po with a -2 electrical charge.     

Because both energy and linear momentum are conserved, 2% of that energy was transferred to the recoiling polonium nucleus, sometimes embedding it in an adjacent biotite sheet. That recoil energy was so great and so concentrated that it released thousands of hydroxide particles, each with one negative electrical charge.¹¹⁵ Flowing water cooled the biotite and swept away the negatively charged hydroxide. The large number of positive charges remaining quickly attracted and held onto the newly formed polonium flowing by, each with a -2 electrical charge. Minutes later, the captured polonium decayed, removed more hydroxide, and repeated the process. Within days, these points with large positive charges became the centers of polonium halos. Again, we see that the subterranean water is the key to solving this halo mystery.¹¹⁶ [See "Frequency of the Fluttering Crust" on page 543.]

Similar events happened in other micas and granitic pegmatites. Likewise, the newly formed uranium atoms readily fit in the mineral zircon as it grew, because uranium’s size and electrical charge (+4) substitute nicely in the slots normally filled by zirconium atoms (after which zircons are named). Thorium also fits snugly.

Figure 187’s caption (on page 358) states that both the ²³⁵U decay series and the ²³²Th decay series produce other polonium isotopes that decay in less than a second: ²¹⁵Po and ²¹¹Po in the ²³⁵U decay series and ²¹⁶Po and ²¹²Po in the ²³²Th decay series. However, those isotopes produce few, if any, isolated polonium halos. Why are they missing, when isolated halos from ²¹⁸Po, ²¹⁴Po, and ²¹⁰Po in the ²³⁸U decay series are abundant?

Again, radon and water provide the answer. Today, radon (²¹⁹Rn) in the ²³⁵U decay series decays with a half-life of 3.96 seconds, and radon (²²⁰Rn) in the ²³²Th decay series decays with a half-life of 55.6 seconds—82,900 and 5,900 times faster, respectively, than the 3.8 day half-life of ²²²Rn from the ²³⁸U series. Therefore, ²¹⁹Rn and ²²⁰Rn can’t be widely scattered, looking for growing sheets of biotite (or similar minerals) that need to absorb the recoil from just one radon atom to begin forming isolated polonium halos.

Indeed, as explained on page 358, Henderson and Sparks discovered that the isotopes that produced the isolated halos did flow through channels between the thin biotite sheets, because halo centers tended to cluster in a few sheets but were largely absent from nearby parallel sheets. Therefore, it again appears that certain biotite sheets took on increasing positive charges at specific impact points. Those points then rapidly attracted negatively charged polonium still flowing by. The electrical clustering of polonium, perhaps over days or weeks, produced isolated polonium halos. Later, the high-pressure water escaped, and adjacent sheets were compressed together and weakly “glued” (by hydroxide, a derivative of water) into “books” of biotite.

Collins’ limited deductions, mentioned on page 359, are largely correct, although they raise the six questions on page 359. The hydroplate theory easily answers those questions (italicized below).

22. CE: Polonium halos are strange—but only a tiny mystery. Someday, we may understand them.

Elliptical Halos.  What accounts for an overlapping pair of 210Po halos in coalified wood in the Rocky Mountains—one halo elliptical and the other spherical, but each having the same center?

23. HP: Some spherical ²¹⁰Po halos formed in wood that had soaked in water for months during the flood. (Water-saturated wood, when compressed, deforms like a gel.) As the Rocky Mountains buckled up during the compression event, that “gel” was suddenly compressed. Within seconds, partially formed spherical halos became elliptical. Then, the remaining ²¹⁰Po (whose half-life today is 138 days, about the length of the flood phase) finished its decay by forming the spherical halo that is superimposed on the elliptical halo.

24. CE: Only one such set of halos has been found. Again, we consider this only a tiny mystery.

Explosive Expansion. What accounts for the many random fracture patterns surrounding minerals that experienced considerable radiation damage?

25. HP: Radiation damage in a mineral distorts and expands its lattice structure, just as well-organized, tightly-stacked blocks take up more space after someone suddenly shakes them.⁷⁵ Ramdohr explained how a slow expansion over many years would produce fractures along only grain boundaries and planes of weakness, but a sudden, explosive expansion would produce the fractures he observed.

Accelerated decay during the flood produced that sudden radiation damage—and heating.

26. CE: Ramdohr’s observations have not been widely studied or discussed by other researchers.

Uranium-235 (²³⁵U). If the earth is 4.5 billion years old and 235U was produced and scattered by some supernova explosion billions of years earlier, 235U’s half-life of 700 million years is relatively short. Why is 235U still around, how did it get here, what concentrated it in ore bodies on earth, and why do we not see much more lead associated with the uranium? (Observations have never shown a supernova that has produced or released any of the 75 heaviest chemical elements—including uranium!)

27. HP:  During the flood, about 5,000 years ago, electrical discharges (generated by the piezoelectric effect)—followed by fusion, fission, and accelerated decay—produced ²³⁵U and all of earth’s other radioisotopes.

28. CE: We cannot guess what happened so long ago and so far away in such a hot (supernova) environment.

[Response: Evolution theory is filled with such guesses, but usually they are not identified as guesses. Instead, they are couched in impressive scientific terminology, hidden behind a vast veil of unimaginable time, and placed in textbooks. Radioactive decay can be likened to rocks tumbling down a hill, or air leaking from a balloon. Something must first lift the rocks or inflate the balloon. Experimental support is lacking for the claim that all this happened in a distant stellar explosion billions of years ago and somehow uranium was concentrated in relatively tiny ore bodies on earth.]

Ratio of ²³⁵U to ²³⁸U.  Why is the ratio of  ²³⁵U to ²³⁸U in uranium ore deposits so constant worldwide? One very precise study has shown that the ratio is 0.0072842, with a standard deviation of only 0.000017.¹¹⁷

29. HP: Obviously, the more time that elapses between the formation of ²³⁵U and ²³⁸U and the farther they are transported to their final resting places in uranium ore bodies, the more varied the ²³⁵U to ²³⁸U ratio should be. The belief that these isotopes formed in a supernova explosion billions of years before the earth formed and somehow collected in small ore bodies in a fixed ratio is absurd. Powerful explosions would have tended to separate the lighter ²³⁵U from the heavier ²³⁸U.

Some radioisotopes produce two or more daughters. When that happens, the daughters have very precise ratios to each other, called branching ratios or branching fractions. Uranium isotopes appear to be just another example. In other words, all uranium isotopes are daughter products, derived from some even heavier element. Recall that the Proton-21 Laboratory has produced superheavy elements that instantly decayed.

30. CE: Someday, we may discover why the ratio of ²³⁵U to ²³⁸U is almost constant.

Carbon-14 (¹⁴C).  Where comparisons are possible, why does radiocarbon dating conflict with other radiometric dating techniques?

31.  HP:  Radiocarbon resides primarily in the atmosphere, oceans, and organic matter. Therefore, electrical discharges through the crust at the beginning of the flood did not affect radiocarbon. However, those discharges and the resulting “storm” of electrons and neutrons in the crust produced almost all of earth’s other radioisotopes, disturbed their tenuous stability, and allowed them to rapidly decay—much like a sudden storm with pounding rain and turbulent wind might cause rocks to tumble down a mountainside.

This is why very precise radiocarbon dating—atomic mass spectrometry (AMS), which counts individual atoms—gives ages that are typically 10–1000 times younger than all other radiometric dating techniques (uranium-to-lead, potassium-to-argon, etc.).

32. CE: That radiocarbon may be contaminated.

[Response: Before radiocarbon’s precision was increased by AMS, some attributed this thousandfold conflict to contamination. Studies have now ruled out virtually every proposed contamination source.²⁴]

40 Missing Radioisotopes  Today, 40 radioisotopes (with half-lives less than 50,000,000 years) are not being produced except in nuclear experiments. Why are all of them missing in nature?

33. HP: One must first understand the chaotic events that occurred as earth’s radioisotopes formed. Their atomic nuclei continually vibrate so violently that they eventually decay. An ocean of electrons and neutrons surged through the fluttering crust at the beginning of the flood. This flux bombarded the more unstable radioisotopes that were forming, causing them to quickly decay. Therefore, they are not found in nature.

34. CE: If earth were less than 10,000 years old, those 40 radioisotopes should still be here, because they would not have had enough half-lives to completely disappear. However, if the earth were billions of years old, they should all have decayed away. This shows that the earth is billions of years old.

[Response: The explanation does not address accelerated decay or how radioisotopes formed.]

Chondrules How did chondrules form?

35. HP: See “Chondrules” on page 376.

36. CE: Because chondrules are in meteorites that have even older radiometric ages than earth, chondrules are the oldest solid material in the solar system. Although chondrules evolved in outer space where temperatures are almost -460°F (492°F below freezing), they required sudden melting temperatures of at least 3,000°F. It is hard to look back that far and determine what could have formed pieces of rock a few millimeters in diameter, quickly melted that rock, and then encased those liquid droplets in other rock.

[Response: The mystery is solved when one understands the origin of earth’s radioactivity.]

Meteorites.  Radioactive decay products in some meteorites require more time to accumulate—at today’s decay rates—than any other rocks ever found in the solar system.

37. HP: Electrical intensity, not time, produced the high concentration of decay products in some meteorites.

During the flood, pillars within the subterranean chamber experienced the most compression and electrical discharges, which, in turn, produced the greatest number of radioactive decay products. Most meteorites originated from crushed pillars, so meteorites should have more decay products.

38. CE: Meteorites have the oldest known radiometric ages in the solar system, so meteorites must have evolved first. This is how we know the earth evolved from meteorites and the solar system began 4.5 billion years ago.

[Response: How can gas and dust compact themselves into dense black rocks (asteroids and meteoroids) in the weightlessness of space? See “The Origin of Asteroids and Meteoroids” on pages 322–348.]

Close Supernova?  Today, half of iron-60 (⁶⁰Fe) will decay into nickel-60 (⁶⁰Ni) in 1,500,000 years. In two meteorites, ⁶⁰Ni was found in minerals that initially contained ⁶⁰Fe.¹²⁵ How could ⁶⁰Fe have been locked into crystals in those meteorites so quickly,¹²⁶ that measurable amounts of ⁶⁰Ni formed?

39. HP: Accelerated radioactive decay began at the onset of the flood, not only in the fluttering crust but in the pounding and crushing of pillars. As explained on page 324, iron was a common element in pillar tips. During the electrical discharges, bremsstrahlung radiation produced a sea of neutrons throughout the crust. Those neutrons converted some stable iron (⁵⁴Fe, ⁵⁶Fe, ⁵⁷Fe, and ⁵⁸Fe) into ⁶⁰Fe which, because of accelerated decay, quickly became ⁶⁰Ni. Days later, pillar fragments were launched from earth; some became meteorites.

40. CE: Iron was produced inside stars. A relatively few stars were so massive that they exploded as supernovas and expelled that iron as a gas into interstellar space. A few ten-millionths of that iron was ⁶⁰Fe. Before the ⁶⁰Fe could decay, some must have cooled and merged into dense rocks and crystallized. One of those supernovas had to be “stunningly close” to our solar system for the Sun to capture those rocks so they could later fall to earth as meteorites.¹²⁷

[Response: How does gas from a supernova explosion, expanding at almost 20,000 miles per second, quickly merge¹²⁶ into dense rocks drifting in the vacuum of space? Why did a “stunningly close” supernova not distort, burn, or destroy our solar system? Why can’t we see that nearby supernova’s remnant?]

Deuterium (²H).  How did deuterium (heavy hydrogen) form, and why is its concentration in comets twice as great as in earth’s oceans and 20–100 times greater than in interstellar space and the solar system as a whole?

41. HP: Deuterium formed when the subterranean water absorbed a sea of fast neutrons during the early weeks of the flood. (Powerful bremsstrahlung radiation produces free neutrons, as explained beginning on page 361.) Comets later formed from some of the deuterium-rich water that was launched from earth by the fountains of the great deep. Traces of that deuterium have been found on the Moon. [See Endnote 61 on page 314.] Most of the deuterium-rich, subterranean water mixed about 50–50 with earth’s surface waters to give us the high deuterium concentrations we have on earth today. Meteorites are also rich in deuterium.¹²⁸

42. CE: The big bang produced deuterium 3–20 minutes after the universe began, 13.7 billion years ago. During those early minutes, most deuterium was consumed in forming helium. Billions of years later, deuterium that ended up in stars was destroyed. Some deuterium must have escaped that destruction, because comets and earth have so much deuterium.

Oxygen-18 (18O).  What is the origin of ¹⁸O and why is it concentrated in and around large salt deposits?

43. HP: Before the flood, the supercritical subterranean water steadily “out-salted” thick layers of water-saturated minerals onto the chamber floor. This included salt crystals (NaCl). [See Endnote 49 on page 139.] The water trapped between those salt crystals absorbed many neutrons during the early weeks of the flood. Later, some of those salt deposits (including their trapped waters) were swept up to the earth’s surface as thick deposits or rose from the “mother salt layer” as salt domes. Therefore, water in and near thick salt deposits is rich in ¹⁸O.

44. CE: Presumably, ¹⁸O was produced before the earth evolved. But why ¹⁸O is concentrated around large salt deposits is unknown (if the measurements are correct).

Lineaments.  How did lineaments form?

45. HP: Because rocks are weak in tension, fluttering hydroplates sometimes cracked along their convex surfaces when they arched up. This is why lineaments are generally straight cracks, dozens of miles long, parallel to a few directions, found all over the earth, and show no slippage along the cracks. (Faults show slippage.) Powerful stresses probably converted some long, deep lineaments into faults that produce earthquakes.

   

46. CE: While we can’t be sure what produced lineaments, two possibilities have been discussed.

We may speculate about their [lineament] origins. One widely suggested hypothesis is that they reflect continuing flexure of the crust in response to the tidal cycles. ... Another view is that the fractures may stem from subtle back-and-forth tectonic tilting of the crust as it responds to gentle upwarping and downwarping on a regional basis, although the cycles of back-and-forth tilting would necessarily be vastly longer than the twice-daily cycle of the tides.¹²⁹

[Response: No one has observed rocks breaking because of tides or back-and-forth tilting.]

Cold Mars. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has shown that the Martian polar crust is so rigid that seasonally shifting loads of ice at the poles produce little flexure. This implies that Mars’ interior is extremely cold and has experienced surprisingly little radioactive decay.¹³¹ (The evidence explained in "Mountains of Venus" on page 31 shows that the interior of Venus is also cold.)

47. HP: The inner earth is hot, because the flood produced large-scale movements, frictional heating, electrical activity, and radioactivity within the earth. Similar events never happened on Mars or Venus, so the interiors of Mars and Venus should be colder.

48. CE: The solar system formed from a swirling dust cloud containing heavy radioisotopes billions of years ago. Therefore, with further measurements, Mars’ interior will be shown to be hot, similar to Earth’s.

Distant Chemical Elements.  Stars and galaxies 12.9 billion light-years away contain chemical elements heavier than hydrogen, helium, lithium—and nickel. If those elements evolved, it had to have happened within 0.8 billion years after the big bang (13.7 billion years ago) in order for their light to reach us. This is extremely fast, based on the steps required for chemical evolution. [See “How Old Do Evolutionists Say the Universe Is?” on page 417.]

49. HP: Almost all chemical elements were created at the beginning, not just hydrogen, helium, and lithium. [See "Heavy Elements" on page 34.]

50. CE: If the first stars to evolve were somehow extremely large, they would have exploded as supernovas in only a few tens of millions of years. That debris could then have formed second-generation stars containing these heavier chemical elements—all within 0.8 billion years. This would allow the 12.9 billion years needed for their light to reach us.

Rising Himalayas.  How were sediments mixed so uniformly and steadily (over 3,200,000,000 years) in a 1,250-mile-wide band (thousands of feet thick) at the southwestern base of the Himalayas?

51. HP: Toward the end of the flood, the compression event pushed up the Himalayas in hours. The overlying flood waters rushed off the rising peaks in all directions, carrying well-mixed, deeply-eroded sediments. In that brief time, the compression event and the resulting electrical activity produced the radioactive decay products that some erroneously believe have always been produced at today’s extremely slow rate.

52. CE: “Well-mixed sediments were dispersed across at least 2000 km [1,250 miles] of the northern Indian margin. ... The great distances of sediment transport and high degree of mixing of detrital zircon ages are extraordinary, and they may be attributed to a combination of widespread orogenesis associated with the assembly of Gondwana, the equatorial position of continents, potent chemical weathering, and sediment dispersal across a nonvegetated landscape.”¹³²

[Response: This explanation may sound scientific, but is vague and speculative. Furthermore, such “extraordinary” mixing could not have gone on for 3.2 billion years—a vast age based on evolutionary assumptions.]

Forming Heavy Nuclei.  How do nuclei merge?

53. HP: Both shock collapse and the Z-pinch produce extreme compression in plasmas that can overcome the repelling (Coulomb) forces of other nuclei. When two nuclei are close enough, the strong force pulls them together. If the merged nucleus is not at the bottom of the valley of stability, it will decay or fission.

It is a mistake to think that fusion requires high temperatures (>10⁸ K) for long times over large, stellarlike volumes. As the Ukrainian experiments have shown, with small amounts of energy, significant fusion (and fission) can occur in 10^-8 second with a self-focused (Z-pinched) electron beam in a high-density plasma.¹⁰³

54. CE: Supernovas provide the high temperatures and velocities needed for lighter nuclei to penetrate Coulomb barriers. Those temperatures must be hundreds of times greater than temperatures inside stars, so most chemical elements (those heavier than 60 AMU) cannot form on earth or inside stable stars.

In 1957, E. Margaret Burbidge, Geoffrey R. Burbidge, William A. Fowler, and Fred Hoyle published a famous paper in which they proposed how supernovas produce all the heavy chemical elements between iron and uranium.¹³³ Since then, many supernovas have been seen with powerful telescopes and instruments that can identify the elements and isotopes actually produced. So many elements and isotopes are missing that the supernova explanation must be reexamined.¹⁰¹

[Response: Supernovas present a more obvious difficulty. Their extreme explosive power should scatter and fragment nuclei, not drive nuclei together to form heavy elements.]

⁶Li, ⁹Be, ¹⁰B, and ¹¹B.  Why do we have these light, fragile isotopes on earth if small impacts will fragment them?

55. HP: Light, fragile isotopes are too fragile to be created by impacts at the atomic level. Either they were created at the beginning or were produced by extreme compression (shock collapse and the Z-pinch).

Yes, in gases and plasmas, high temperatures produce high particle velocities which might allow nuclei to penetrate the Coulomb barrier. However, if those velocities are slightly larger than necessary, impacted ⁶Li, ⁹Be, ¹⁰B, and ¹¹B nuclei will fragment. Therefore, high temperatures, instead of fusing those nuclei together, will destroy them.²²

56. CE: Some ⁶Li, ⁹Be, ¹⁰B, and ¹¹B might be explained by interstellar cosmic rays colliding with carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen, producing ⁶Li, ⁹Be, ¹⁰B, and ¹¹B fragments.

[Response: Studies of the abundances of these elements and isotopes in stars are inconsistent with this means of producing ⁶Li, ⁹Be, ¹⁰B, and ¹¹B.¹³⁴]

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