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Sunday, October 5, 2008

A challenge to Ray

I posted this challenge to Ray and just to see whether he will ignore it:

Ray a challenge:

If there was this Great Flood, then explain Antartica!

A simple scientific fact: Ice floats on water. If Antartica would have been flooded the massive ice-sheet of this continent would have been lifted up. As the waters receeded this sheet would have been settled down again. The antartic ice-sheet consists of about 30 million cubic kilometers of water. A cubic meter of water weights about 1000kg. 30 million cubic kilometers of water therefor weight about 30 trillion tons.
(As comparison you could coat the USA 269 meters [882 feet] high in lead with an equivalent mass)

That poses some very interesting questions.

If you lift 30 trillion tons of ice from the antartic plate it will rise again. If you lift them all of a sudden the plate will rise quite quickly again. Why does the Bible not speak of the cataclysmic seaquakes that would have followed? Noah couldn't have possible missed the tsunamis that would have rushed through the oceans.
It wouldn't just be seaquakes. If you lift such a mass all of a sudden you would also trigger volcanism of cataclysmic strenght. It seems that Noah missed the massive amounts of ash in the atmosphere too.

Another interesting fact is that the ice-sheet doesn't portray to be lifted and settled again.
What happens you you let the sea levels rise: The outer rims of the sheet recognise first what's happening and move up. This would cause at least cracks in the ice that could still be seen. (I deem it more likely that the whole sheet would shatter and not just some cracks...)
But even if the sheet got uplifted without breaking: It would need to settle again. First of all: The sheet would not settle again to exactly the place it was lifted from. Secondly: The sea would change the underground. Therefor: If the ice-sheet wouldn't break during the lift it would certainly do when settled.

So: How do you explain that the antartic ice-sheet isn't shattered?

But there is another interesting characteristic to the antarctic ice: It comes in layers.
That is because the ice forms differently during the antartic day than it does during night. Since day and night last half a year in Antartica you can count those layers backwards like you can count the rings of trees. By simple counting you find that the inland ice of Antartica is older than 100,000 years. That neither fits your creation hypothesis nor the Flood.

How do you explain those layers?

12 comments:

  1. Ray's response:
    .........

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  2. Ken Ham had an article up a couple weeks ago (it has subsequently disappeared) that claimed he was looking at changing his young earth model to accomodate the fossil record and the geologic column.

    He also had an article at one time that stated that the flood "sorted the fossils" from basic to complex but he had no explanation whatsoever for how the flood did this.

    What really bothers me about this sometimes is that there are still people that believe his horseshit.

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  3. I believe that the layers of ice in antarctica actually go back something like 600,000 years! My! Oh! My! Ray would bust an artery in his brain if he had to deal with that kind of evidence. The same with the ice sheet over Greenland, I think.

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  4. You guys should know that ice layer's can't be trusted. Afterall, they found WWII Planes buried thousands of feet unter the 'annual' ice layers.

    This argument was repeated to a family member by one of their work colleagues, which is kind of sad.

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  5. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  6. I definitely agree with you, and think Ray's assertion that the Noahic Flood is provable is completely asinine, if not blatantly dishonest.

    But for the sake of nitpicking, the tsunamis shouldn't really be included with the other evidence. Tsunamis are shallow water waves, and really a marine world would be the safest place you could be were the tectonic activities of the ocean plates to suddenly spawn thousands: They rarely exceed one meter's height in the open ocean, gaining their height near land from shallow coastal waters on the continental shelf.

    That's the only thing that bothered me, though. Nice job; that's very cool. I would never even have considered that dimension.

    Sorry, reposted to fix a dumb phrasing mistake.

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  7. I'm glad Ray already established we're just a bunch of nitpicking, anti-theist ankle-biters, or I would feel a little bad about being so petty... :) The post is super cool.

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  8. Dear Cory,

    I looked those planes up. There are several things that the creationist who told you about those planes missed to tell:

    First of all: They landed in coastal regions. Those ice cores that are examined are taken from regions with continetal climate.

    but the blatant lie the creationist scientist told you (that those planes disprove annual layers) gets even worse.
    Do you remember that I told you that the polar day and night which last half a year are what makes those layers clearly spotable?

    You just have a polar day (a day during which the sun doesn't set during a year) north of the northern polar circle or south of the southern polar circe.

    The northern polar circle is 66.56083° North.

    Your planes crashed 65.20N 40.20W. 93.2 miles south of the northern polar circle.

    I tried to find the one who sat this lie into the world. And it seems that it was a 'Ph.D' Larry Vardiman. (Athmospheric Science)

    A scientist, who holds his degree in atmospheric science and misses the polar circle by 93.2 miles on a map, should get his Ph.D revoked.

    (if he calls me a nitpicker for 93.2 miles I invite him to walk this distance naked in Greenland to the polar circle, let's see whether 93.2 miles are nitpicking)

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  9. Never trust a person who wears Logic like an overcoat: useful when it's cold outside, but not otherwise necessary.

    The part that really gets me is WHY they even try to make their beliefs appear to be logical - that's really what they're doing here. They want to make it appear as if their faith is based in tangible fact.

    And yet, if you press them on the details, they walk right away from fact and logic, and back into their safe little corner of "You're going to Hell if you don't believe as I do".

    Personally, I think that a person who has faith in the inerrancy of the Bible would have no need to try to make it fit with History, Geology, Science or whatever. You either believe or you don't.

    Do the attempts of people like Ken Hamm reveal their lack of faith? By asserting science confirms Biblical scripture, aren't they simply trying to convince themselves of its inerrancy?

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  10. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  11. germanmike -

    My (honest) questions to you about the Greenland ice mast, in ref. to your post of October 6, 2008 3:37 PM, would be:

    1. Does the ice mass move, perhaps from the interior to the coastline?

    2. If it does move, about how far does it move each year (artic day?)?

    3.) Was the location of the crash site determined at the time of crash or at the time the planes were found?


    I am only asking. If you already have a source for the answers to these question, I'd appreciate it. Otherwise I'll be looking as well.

    TIA

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