Rocks That Formed Quickly
Few questions matter more in the creation–evolution debate than the age of the earth. Evolution depends on it heavily, and so does creationism. One of the main ways geologists estimate age is by studying sedimentary rock — rock laid down by water, as heavier particles settle out and harden into layers. Such rock can form in only two ways: slowly, as small amounts of water deposit thin layers of mud and sand over long ages; or quickly, as vast amounts of water lay down thick deposits in a short time.
Today we mostly see the slow process. Many geologists have assumed it was always so — that sediment has always built up at roughly today’s rate. This assumption is called “uniformitarianism,” and if it were true, thick rock layers would indeed need enormous spans of time.
But observation tells a different story. After the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens, finely layered deposits many feet thick formed in a matter of hours. Laboratory experiments have shown that particles of different sizes, carried by moving water, sort themselves into thin layers very quickly — layers like those seen in rock formations around the world. There is another explanation for thick sedimentary rock: a great catastrophe such as a worldwide flood.
Fossils Require Rapid Burial
Most sedimentary rock contains fossils. When a plant or animal dies, it decays quickly or is eaten by scavengers; within months even large bones fall apart. For a fossil to form, the creature must be buried quickly, sealed off by mud, sand or volcanic ash. The presence of fossils, often in huge numbers, points to rapid burial.
Some fossils were plainly caught in the moment: fish preserved in the act of giving birth, or in the middle of swallowing another fish. Most striking of all are upright tree trunks that pass through several layers of rock. If those layers had taken thousands or millions of years to build up, the tops of the trees would have rotted away long before they were buried.
Polystrate fossils and Derek Ager
Such fossils, which cross many layers, are called “polystrate” fossils. The British geologist Derek Ager, who was no creationist and often criticized creationism, wrote of them in The New Catastrophism (1993):
Polystrate fossils are observable evidence that these rocks formed rapidly, consistent with a young creation and with what the Bible has said all along.
Evidence of a Global Flood
Dr. Bert Thompson, a microbiologist and former professor at Texas A&M University, summed up the evidence this way:
Marine fossils have been found high in the mountains of the world, including the Himalayas. Hippopotamus bones have been dug up in England. Hundreds of dinosaurs have been found buried together with creatures that did not share their habitat. In the Cromer Forest-bed of Norfolk, England, fossils of cold-climate and warm-climate animals lie mixed together with temperate plants. How were creatures carried so far from their natural surroundings and buried together? A worldwide flood answers the question. Pillow lava, which forms only under water, has been reported high on Mount Ararat itself.
The Bible’s account of the Flood is not alone. Researchers have collected well over a hundred flood traditions from Europe, Asia, Australia, the islands of the Pacific, the Americas and Africa. Most agree on four points:
- The flood was universal and worldwide.
- All mankind perished.
- An ark, or boat, was the means of escape.
- A remnant survived to carry on the human race.
Radiometric Dating: The Hidden Assumptions
Radiometric dating is often presented as proof that the earth is billions of years old. It helps to begin by clearing up a common confusion. Carbon-14 dating is not used to date rocks. It is used only for things that were once alive, such as wood, bone and shell, and even then only for ages up to about 50,000 years, because carbon-14 decays fairly quickly. Rocks are dated with other radioactive “clocks,” such as potassium-argon and uranium-lead, which are claimed to reach back millions or billions of years.
The carbon-14 method was developed by Dr. Willard F. Libby in the late 1940s. It could be checked against objects of known age, such as Egyptian artifacts, going back only about 5,000 years; beyond that its results depend on assumptions.
All radiometric dating rests on three assumptions:
- The starting amounts are known. The method assumes we know how much “parent” and “daughter” element the rock contained when it formed. No one was there to measure it.
- The decay rate has never changed. Today’s decay rates are well measured and hardly affected by heat or pressure, but they have been observed only for about a century. Creation physicist Dr. D. Russell Humphreys and the RATE research team found far more helium (a product of uranium decay) still trapped in tiny zircon crystals than should remain after billions of years, which they took as evidence that decay was much faster at some time in the past. Geologist Kenneth L. Currie of the Geological Survey of Canada noted that “natural processes in general do not act at fixed rates. The assumption that an average rate taken over a long period of time can be extrapolated is generally unsatisfactory.”
- Nothing has been added or lost. The rock must have stayed a closed system, with no parent or daughter elements entering or leaving over its whole history.
The results speak for themselves. Lava flows from Mount Ngauruhoe in New Zealand, which erupted between 1949 and 1975 and are therefore less than 80 years old, gave potassium-argon “ages” from under 270,000 to 3.5 million years. At the same time, coal, fossil wood and even diamonds from layers said to be hundreds of millions of years old have been found to contain measurable carbon-14 — which ought to be completely gone after about 100,000 years.
Given such contradictions, it is no wonder many question the reliability of these methods.
Other Clocks That Point to a Young Earth
- The earth’s magnetic field. Measurements since the 1830s show the field steadily weakening. Creation physicists have calculated that it could not be more than about 10,000 years old.
- Salt in the sea. Salt flows into the oceans far faster than it leaves. Even using assumptions generous to evolution, creation scientists calculated that the oceans could be no more than 62 million years old — far less than the billions of years claimed.
- Soft tissue in dinosaur bones. In 2005 Dr. Mary Schweitzer reported flexible blood vessels and structures resembling red blood cells inside a Tyrannosaurus rex bone said to be 68 million years old. Proteins such as collagen and hemoglobin are not expected to survive anything like that long. For more, see Soft Tissue Discovered in Fossils.
Dinosaurs and Man
Dinosaur fossils keep pointing to rapid burial. In north-eastern China, a group of more than thirty young Psittacosaurus was found buried together with an adult. National Geographic, which promotes evolution, could not say for certain what buried them so suddenly; flooding was among the explanations offered.
There are also ancient images that appear to show dinosaur-like creatures. Cave paintings in the Gorozomzi Hills, about 25 miles from Salisbury (now Harare) in Zimbabwe, have been reported to show a long-necked creature resembling a sauropod. Such reports should be handled with care, since rock art is open to more than one interpretation. A clearer example is found at Ta Prohm, a Khmer temple near Angkor in Cambodia, built around A.D. 1186. Among its many carvings of familiar animals — monkeys, water buffalo, parrots and lizards — is a creature with a row of large plates along its back that looks remarkably like a stegosaurus. There were no museums or illustrated books of dinosaurs eight hundred years ago. If the carver was depicting the animals around him, as the other carvings suggest, then such creatures were known to man — which fits a young earth, thousands rather than millions of years old.
The book of Job describes “behemoth,” a huge plant-eater with a tail that “moveth… like a cedar” (Job 40:17), as a creature God made along with man. No elephant or hippopotamus has a tail like a cedar tree.
More Evidence from Recent Discoveries
Soft tissue was not a one-time find
When Dr. Mary Schweitzer reported soft tissue in a Tyrannosaurus rex bone in 2005, some assumed it was a freak case. It was not. In May 2009 the journal Science published a study, led by John Asara of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston together with Schweitzer, of a thigh bone from a duck-billed dinosaur, Brachylophosaurus canadensis, said to be about 80 million years old. The team reported that this bone was even better preserved than the T. rex, and they recovered the proteins collagen, laminin and elastin, along with short stretches of the collagen protein’s sequence. Those who hold to millions of years are still debating how such delicate molecules could last so long. They are far easier to explain if these animals died and were buried thousands, not tens of millions, of years ago. (See also Soft Tissue Discovered in Fossils and Dinosaurs Lived Recently: The Fatal Flaw for Evolution.)
Rock six years old, “dated” at 350,000 years
The lava dome that grew in the crater of Mount St. Helens finished forming on October 26, 1986, so its age is known exactly. In 1992 geologist Dr. Steven Austin collected a sample of the dome’s dacite rock and sent it to a commercial laboratory for potassium-argon dating. The whole rock came back with an “age” of 350,000 years, and minerals separated from it gave “ages” of up to 2.8 million years. The rock already contained argon when it cooled, which broke the method’s assumption that nothing was there to begin with. If the method gives a rock of known age an age hundreds of thousands of times too old, why should we trust it when the true age is unknown?
A young lava flow “older” than the rock beneath it
In the western Grand Canyon, lava flows on the Uinkaret Plateau poured out over the canyon rim and down into the canyon. Geologists regard them as some of the youngest rocks in the area. Yet when these flows were dated by the rubidium-strontium “isochron” method, considered one of the most reliable, they gave an age of 1.34 billion years. That is older than the Cardenas Basalt, deep in the canyon below, which by the same method is dated at 1.07 billion years, and which many evolutionists regard as the best date for the Grand Canyon’s rocks. The young lava came out “older” than the ancient rock beneath it.
A laboratory at Mount St. Helens
The 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens gave geologists a living laboratory. Up to 400 feet of new layered rock formed at the volcano, including one finely layered unit about 25 feet thick that was laid down in a matter of hours. Such fine layers were once thought to need a year apiece. After a smaller eruption on March 19, 1982, a mudflow of melted snow and ice cut a canyon up to 140 feet deep, sometimes called the “Little Grand Canyon” because it is about one-fortieth the scale of the real one. And in nearby Spirit Lake, where the eruption swept about a million trees into the water, more than 19,000 logs were estimated in 1985 to have settled upright on the lake floor, where they were being buried at different levels. That is just how polystrate trees in coal beds could have been buried: quickly, by water, at the same time.
Answering Common Objections
“Ice cores show hundreds of thousands of yearly layers.”
On July 15, 1942, a squadron of American warplanes made emergency landings on the Greenland ice cap. Fifty years later, in 1992, one of them, a P-38 Lightning later named Glacier Girl, was recovered from under 268 feet of ice — more than five feet of ice a year. Layers in the ice are counted as years, but creation scientists point out that a layer can mark a storm or a thaw as well as a season, and that deep in the ice the layers are squeezed thin and hard to tell apart. Counting every layer as a year assumes the very thing that needs to be proved.
“The different dating methods all agree.”
They do not always agree, as the Mount St. Helens dacite and the Grand Canyon lava show. Results that do not fit the expected age are usually explained away as “excess argon” or contamination, while results that fit are kept. A method that is trusted only when it gives the answer one expects is not an independent check.
“We can see stars billions of light-years away.”
This is a fair question, and creation scientists have taken it seriously. Several answers have been proposed. Dr. Russell Humphreys suggested that gravity slowed time on earth during creation, while light from distant stars had far more time to travel. Dr. Jason Lisle proposed that Scripture describes events as they appear from earth, so that starlight made on the fourth day was seen on the fourth day; in 2018 Tichomir Tenev, John Baumgardner and M.F. Horstemeyer published a refined form of this idea. Work continues. It is also worth knowing that the big bang model has a light-travel puzzle of its own, known as the “horizon problem.” Above all, God made the stars “to give light upon the earth” (Gen. 1:17), and the God who spoke them into being is not limited by the speed of light.
“The days of Genesis could be long ages.”
The text will not allow it. Each day of creation is marked with “the evening and the morning,” numbered one through six (Gen. 1:5). In the fourth commandment God grounded man’s six-day work week on His own six days of creation (Ex. 20:11), which makes sense only if they were ordinary days. Our Lord Himself said that “from the beginning of the creation God made them male and female” (Mark 10:6) — at the beginning, not billions of years after it. And Scripture teaches that death entered the world through Adam’s sin: “by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin” (Rom. 5:12). Millions of years of fossils, full of death, disease and bloodshed before Adam, cannot be fitted into the Bible’s account without undermining the reason Christ came: “For since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead” (1 Cor. 15:21).
For more on these questions, see Star Formations Challenge Evolution and Evidence for Noah’s Flood Presented.
Conclusion
Rapidly formed rock layers, fossils requiring sudden burial, polystrate trees, worldwide flood traditions, soft tissue in dinosaur bones, the hidden assumptions of radiometric dating and its failures on rocks of known age, and clocks such as the magnetic field and the ocean’s salt all fit a young earth and a global Flood. None of this is surprising to the Christian. God has told us how and when He made the world, and the evidence, rightly understood, agrees.
Sources for the November 2026 additions: J.M. Asara, M.H. Schweitzer and others, Science, May 1, 2009, as reported by the Harvard Gazette; S.A. Austin, “Excess Argon within Mineral Concentrates from the New Dacite Lava Dome at Mount St. Helens Volcano,” Creation Ex Nihilo Technical Journal 10:3 (1996); S.A. Austin, “Excessively Old ‘Ages’ for Grand Canyon Lava Flows” (Institute for Creation Research); T. Clarey, “Lessons from the Mount St. Helens Eruption,” Institute for Creation Research, September 29, 2023; P-38 National Association, Glacier Girl recovery history; T. Tenev, J. Baumgardner and M.F. Horstemeyer, “A Solution for the Distant Starlight Problem Using Creation Time Coordinates,” Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Creationism (2018).