Are there “incontrovertible” reasons to affirm a young Earth? What does it mean to be incontrovertible? Some YEC seem to believe that this means that it is claimed by any YEC author that they appreciate. It is easy to list claims that might sound impressive. What happens if we dig into those claims? Can they stand up to analysis?
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This particular claim is from Paul Humber’s “Reasons to Affirm a Young Earth” (Humber 2013)
16. Ocean Saltiness
Humber states: “The present amount of sodium in the sea strongly argues against an ocean age of billions of years and it is consistent with an age of thousands of years. Sodium accumulates over time, but the seas are not as salty as would be expected if they were really billions of years old. Using published values for the quantity of sodium in the sea and all of the known inputs and outputs, and assuming no sodium initially, an estimated age of the ocean was calculated to be less than 42 million years old. When these rates were adjusted within realistic limits to favor an older age, a calculated age of less than 62 million years resulted. This is still fifty times less than the alleged 3 billion years of the ocean. In fact, since this study was published, additional sources of sodium influx have been discovered. Of course, an initial sodium content greater than zero and an event like a global flood would make the ocean more salty sooner, consistent with its being thousands of years old.”
It is important to break this down to understand exactly what is claimed and what would have to be proven in order to consider this a reason to believe in a young Earth. This claim makes the case that the most likely reason that the sea is as salty as it is today is that the ocean waters are just a few thousand years old. The YEC case for this is dominantly from a 1990 article by Steven Austin and Russell Humphreys, titled “The Sea’s Missing Salt: A Dilemma for Evolutionists” (The Sea’s Missing Salt: A Dilemma for Evolutionists | The Institute for Creation Research (icr.org) ) (Austin and Humphreys 1990)
What key assumptions are involved?
- The volume of water remained roughly the same through Earth’s history or at least that which makes up what geologists call the Phanerozoic. (This would be roughly the last 540 million years to most geologists or alternatively to most YEC, the flood and post-flood periods of history.)
- If the earth is billions of years old, the input into the sea has been roughly the same for all of that time (in the amounts recognized by Austin & Humphreys, 1990).
The major contributor of sodium has been rivers and the amount of this input was well understood by Austin and Humphreys.
- If the Earth is billions of years old, the output (sodium leaving the seas) has been roughly the same throughout.
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Are these assumptions demonstrated or realistic? More modern data shows that these assumptions have good reason to be questioned. An important document on this is from Hay, et al., 2006, “Evaporites and the salinity of the ocean during the Phanerozoic: Implications for climate, ocean circulation and life”. (Hay et al. 2006)
Even the first assumption is huge. The amount of water may have been significantly different, perhaps larger in the past. I am not really going worry about that though. Relating to this discussion, a first important question might be, how well is the modern Na input understood? All agree that rivers are the dominant source of Na and Cl to the ocean.
Hay et al. observed “Meybeck’s (1979) global average for [Cl−] in rivers is dominated by those rivers which drain areas with large evaporite deposits in the continental interior. The total discharge of the rivers for which he had reliable data is only about 60% of the global discharge from land to sea, and the assumption that Cl− has the same average concentration in the other 40% of the world’s rivers, which drain more coastal areas mostly lacking evaporite deposits, may not be justified.”
Austin & Humphreys based their calculations on Meybeck’s article. This means that Austin and Humphreys may have overestimated the current amount of sodium supplied to the ocean by rivers. Meybeck’s original 1979 article was in French, but an English article came out in 1983. (Michel Meybeck 1983). A more recent summary of his view was published in 2003. (M. Meybeck 2003)
Did the rate of sodium input stay the same? Not according to modern geologists. It certainly should have been variable. The big inputs from minerals would have been albite plagioclase and pyroxenes. These are present in basalts and might have been high at first. Continental crust is dominated by K-feldspars and minerals with less sodium and as they come up, the amount of Na fed to the seas would have been reduced. Maybe it would have increased when there were big influxes of basalts such as the Columbia River basalts and the basalts in India. Even so, there were other important variables. One of the big ones would have been the arrangement of the continents. When they were high like today, erosion would have increased and fed more into the oceans. When they were lower, then less sodium should have made it there.
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It would also seem at least highly possible that rivers draining into the ocean, before the large evaporites deposits that are drained today were laid down, would not have had as much sodium in them, at least at times. Does this mean that geologists believe that the sea level salinity was lower back in the past as Austin & Humphreys claim that an old earth would say. The record that we have in the rocks shows quite the opposite. At times, the evidence tells us that the salinity was actually higher through most of the past, though it might have been less salty in the Cretaceous period. (Figure 1)
Figure 1. From Hay et al. 2006, figure 7. Notice that the figure is drawn with recent on the left, going back in time to the right. Notice that the ocean is interpreted to have been much saltier through most of the past 500 million years.
Now let’s look at the outputs. That is, how much sodium was being removed from the system due to deposition of salt and evaporites? I guess that writing based on published data in 1990, the best data Austin and Humphreys had to consider was from Meybeck’s 1979 data and a 1981 study by the Russian Zharkov. (Zharkov 2011) The picture is drastically different today. They said, “No major quantity of halite in the earth’s crust could have escaped our detection.” They report: “The Permian contains the world’s thickest and most extensive marine halite deposits. Of the 4.4 x 1018 kg of Na+ in the earth’s rock salt, 1.0 x 1018 kg (23%) resides in Permian rock salt.”
Here Austin and Humphreys are using the Zharkov, 1981 study. The study was good for its time, but apparently focused particularly on Russian salt occurrences. How the world has changed since that time! Extensive seismic and drilling in the deepwater regions around the world shows a very different picture. As shown in Figure 2 below, the Permian salt (about 250-300 mya in the figure) recognized is probably 4 times the amount that they reported and it is also dwarfed by the Cretaceous and Jurassic salt. Even the salt deposited about 5 million years ago in the Messinian dwarfs it. Currently we recognize that plate tectonics has at times allowed for rift basins that isolated or partially isolated sea water and allowed large amounts of evaporation and halite deposition. This kept the ocean salinity from exceeding concentrations that would have caused the oceans to be like the Dead Sea.
Figure 2. From Hay et al. 2006, figure 5. the figure is drawn with recent on the left, going back in time to the right.
More detail on salt deposition can be found here: More details about salt deposition are available from many sources such as: (Bąbel and Schreiber 2014). I find Austin and Humphreys conversion of the salt deposition into a rate per year unimpressive. The question I think is rather: has there been enough overall salt deposition to account for the salinity of ocean water today if the ocean’s development spanned billions of years? In that case, the answer is yes. In fact, I don’t think it is hard to see that this is yet another way that God fine-tuned Earth to be prepared for mankind. Scientists recognize that if we are looking for advanced life in space, the range of salinity must be limited. (Cullum, Stevens, and Joshi 2016; Olson et al. 2022) We live in a prepared place. It is not surprising that it is rare that planets can be habitable.
References Cited
Austin, Steven A, and D Russell Humphreys. 1990. “The Sea’s Missing Salt: A Dilemma for Evolutionists.” In Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Creationism, 1–13. Pittsburg, PA: Creation Science Fellowship, Inc.
Bąbel, M., and B.C. Schreiber. 2014. “Geochemistry of Evaporites and Evolution of Seawater.” In , 483–560. Elsevier. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-095975-7.00718-X.
Cullum, Jodie, David P. Stevens, and Manoj M. Joshi. 2016. “Importance of Ocean Salinity for Climate and Habitability.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 113 (16): 4278–83. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1522034113.
Hay, William W., Areg Migdisov, Alexander N. Balukhovsky, Christopher N. Wold, Sascha Flögel, and Emanuel Söding. 2006. “Evaporites and the Salinity of the Ocean during the Phanerozoic: Implications for Climate, Ocean Circulation and Life.” Palaeogeography Palaeoclimatology Palaeoecology 240 (1–2): 3–46. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.palaeo.2006.03.044.
Humber, Paul G. 2013. Reasons to Affirm a Young Earth. Vol. e-book revision. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/54235fb7e4b0dab08d8d81dd/t/57d6e6b3d482e999611d7888/1473701556828/ReasonsAffirmYE+CRS+e-book.pdf?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTAAAR0J_JCi_6zH1KuNlHYrgIJjTAhCgOm4zwio8ks44k5CGnJIAiETnqThXLI_aem_BA94GfB1gm5q86tQj_pW2w.
Meybeck, M. 2003. “5.08 – Global Occurrence of Major Elements in Rivers.” In Treatise on Geochemistry, edited by Heinrich D. Holland and Karl K. Turekian, 207–23. Oxford: Pergamon. https://doi.org/10.1016/B0-08-043751-6/05164-1.
Meybeck, Michel. 1983. “Atmospheric Inputs and River Transport of Dissolved Substances.” In . Hamburg: IAHS Publ, no. 141.
Olson, Stephanie, Malte F. Jansen, Dorian S. Abbot, Itay Halevy, and Colin Goldblatt. 2022. “The Effect of Ocean Salinity on Climate and Its Implications for Earth’s Habitability.” Geophysical Research Letters 49 (10): e2021GL095748. https://doi.org/10.1029/2021GL095748.
Zharkov, M. A. 2011. History of Paleozoic Salt Accumulation. Edited by A. L. Yanshin. Translated by R. E. Sorkina, R. V. Fursenko, and T. I. Vasilieva. Softcover reprint of the original 1st ed. 1981 edition. Springer.
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