Part XI The Dead Sea’s Sedimentary Challenge to Young Earth Creationism

As we near the end our exploration of geological wonders of the Dead Sea region, we should reflect on the incredible story written in stone, salt, and sediment. Over the course of this series, we’ve explored a landscape most evidently shaped by millions of years of tectonic forces, climatic shifts, and the relentless power of water and wind. But more than just a scientific exploration, this journey has caused us to grapple with how this evidence intersects with questions of faith, particularly young-earth creationist (YEC) interpretations of Earth’s history.

Let’s recap some of the key geological features we’ve encountered and their conventional interpretation:

1. The Dead Sea Transform fault: A massive crack in the Earth’s crust, slowly tearing the landscape apart over millions of years.
2. Lake Lisan: The Pleistocene precursor to the Dead Sea, whose sediments tell a 70,000-year story of climate fluctuations.
3. Seismic history: A record of earthquakes stretching back over 220,000 years, preserved in the lake’s unique sediments.
4. Mount Sodom: A mountain of salt, slowly rising for hundreds of thousands of years.
5. Salt Deposits: 2000 feet of salt which we calculated would take hundreds of thousands of years to deposit via evaporation of salt water.

Each of these features presents a unique challenge to young-earth creationism, which are committed to an Earth of no more than 6000 to 10,000 years and most geological features forming during or shortly after a global flood around 4,500 years ago. Let’s look at how the timelines compare:

Event/Feature	Ancient Earth Timeline	Young Earth Timeline
Formation of Dead Sea rift	~20 million years ago	~4,500 years ago (during/after Flood)
Existence of Lake Lisan	70,000 – 14,000 years ago	Doesn’t fit in YEC timeline
Deposition of Dead Sea sediments	Continuous over >200,000 years	Mostly during year-long Flood
Formation of Mt. Sodom	Millions of years	<4,500 years
Cave formation in Mt. Sodom	Hundreds of thousands of years	<4,500 years
Seismic Record	~220 events over 220,000 years	All contained within <4,500 years of events
Number of annual sediment layers	10s of thousands	<4500
Major climate fluctuations recorded	Multiple over hundreds of thousands of years	One (post-Flood climate change)
Duration of Last Glacial Maximum	~26,500-19,000 years ago	Centuries immediately following Flood
Oldest radiocarbon dates	~50,000 years	<4,500 years
Uranium-Thorium dating results	Up to ~500,000 years	Rejected as unreliable

Table 1: Comparison of Ancient Earth and Young Earth Timelines for the Dead Sea Region This table presents a side-by-side comparison of timelines for various geological, archaeological, and environmental features related to the Dead Sea region, according to conventional scientific understanding (Ancient Earth) and Young Earth Creationist interpretations. The Ancient Earth column reflects the consensus view among geologists, archaeologists, and other scientists, based on multiple dating methods and lines of evidence. The Young Earth column represents the view held by some evangelical Christians who interpret Genesis literally, believing in a roughly 6,000-year-old Earth and a global flood about 4,500 years ago.

The discrepancies here are stark, and they highlight several key challenges that the Dead Sea evidence poses to young-earth interpretations. We can sum them up in the following broad categories:

1. The Problem of Time: Many of the processes we’ve observed, from the slow movement of tectonic plates to the gradual rise of Mount Sodom, require vast amounts of time. The current rate of salt uplift in Mount Sodom (about 3.5 mm/year) would require over 60,000 years to reach its present height – and that’s assuming a constant rate, which is unlikely.
2. Sedimentary Evidence: The Dead Sea sediments contain hundreds of thousands of annual layers (varves). These fine laminations, alternating between summer and winter deposits, far exceed the number possible in a young-earth timeline.
3. Dating Methods: Multiple independent dating techniques – including radiocarbon, uranium-thorium, and optically stimulated luminescence – consistently point to ages far beyond the YEC timeline. The agreement between these methods provides strong support for their reliability.
4. Climate Fluctuations: The Dead Sea record reveals numerous cycles of wet and dry periods, correlating with global climate events over hundreds of thousands of years. This long-term variability is difficult to reconcile with a young-earth model.
5. Tectonic Activity: The slow, steady movement along the Dead Sea Transform fault, measurable today by GPS, aligns with geological estimates of long-term motion. This consistency argues against models of rapid, catastrophic tectonic activity.

These challenges highlight a fundamental issue with young-earth interpretations: they require us to believe that either the evidence is massively misinterpreted, or that God created the Earth with an appearance of age that doesn’t reflect reality. Both of these options present theological and philosophical problems that, in my view, are far more difficult than accepting the scientific and biblical evidence for an old Earth.

A Creationist’s Response to an Evaporated Dead Sea. 

With these general challenges to the young-earth timeline we might wonder, the Dead Sea is such a conspicuous geological feature of the Earth and one that the biblical authors directly reference, what hypotheses have young-earth creationists proposed to explain its origins?   Thus far the response is rather meager, only a few hypotheses for how the Dead Sea could have formed in such a short time frame.  We have already examines Dr. Steve Austin’s examination of recent sediment layers that contain evidence of earthquakes over the past several thousand years. Now let’s take a close look at Brian Thomas’ article about the Dead Sea published by the Institute for Creation Research (ICR). 

In this article, “Dead Sea Sediment Core Confirms Genesis,” Thomas claims that the Dead Sea Drilling Project has produced evidence that “supports [that] the Bible as a trustworthy historical record.”

Thomas appears convinced by the scientific evidence presented in Part V that the Dead Sea dried up almost completely in the past.   He doesn’t question the conventional interpretation of the evidence but rather and asks the obvious question: Where does this dried-up lake fit into the biblical timeline? Does the Bible record a time when the Dead Sea was nearly dried up, or does this event fall well before the history of man, as recorded in the Bible?

For Thomas, a young-earth creationist, the biblical timeline must include a catastrophic flood that occurred no more than 4,350 years ago, so a completely dry Dead Sea must have occurred within the last five millennia. This is just a tad different than the estimated timeframe of 120,000 years ago reported by geologists.

So, either geologists or Brian Thomas is seriously mistaken about the age of this dry Dead Sea.

Thomas believes that the Dead Sea sediment core confirms his young-earth interpretation of the Genesis account. Let’s examine what he says in his article:

According to the Bible, in around 2000 B.C. what is now the Dead Sea used to be a plain that probably served as farmland for people of the nearby debauched city of Sodom. Genesis 14 first named the valley during the time of Abraham (then called Abram) as “the vale of Siddim, which is the salt sea.” So, the area was apparently a vale, or valley, but had been relabeled “the salt sea” by the time the original writings were edited and compiled, probably by Moses some 400 years after Abraham.

First, Thomas assumes that the city of Sodom was located underneath the waters of today’s Dead Sea, and that people were farming in the nearby plain that stood in its place. It’s unclear why he thinks the current Dead Sea had to be completely evaporated for there to be room enough for a city and farmland. Regardless, his explanation is nonsensical, both scientifically and biblically.

The news article that Thomas responds to clearly states that for the Dead Sea to have dried up, the entire region would have had to be much hotter and drier than it is today. Obviously, this would not be conducive to agricultural land or city living, not to mention that farmers at that time would have been farming on nearly pure salt deposits. How about some salty veggies!

Thomas continues:

“The researchers found the pebbles in the drill core beneath many storm and season-deposited layers of salt and mud that may represent a time before the Salt Sea’s existence—that is, before the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. This research demonstrating that the Dead Sea was indeed once a dry region supports the Bible as a trustworthy historical record.”

This interpretation is wrong in so many ways. Let’s examine a few of them, not just to correct Thomas but to help us better understand the history of the Dead Sea.

Here’s the scenario that Thomas and I are dealing with: Two thousand feet of water need to have completely evaporated; assume no rain, no natural springs, and the Jordan River has been shut off. If all of these conditions were met, then a five-feet-per-year rate of water evaporation might be possible. Even under this extraordinarily fast rate of evaporation, the Dead Sea would take 400 years to evaporate from its current levels, much less the levels of Lake Lisan that we saw in the previous post (See Origins of the Dead Sea, Part IV).

Yes, this fact flies in the face of Thomas’ and the YEC timeline. For him, Noah’s flood occurred around 2350 BC. Abraham and Lot looked at the Dead Sea around 2100 BC and saw a well-watered valley. In Thomas’s chronology, he has only 250 years to evaporate the Dead Sea down to approximately where we find it now after a global flood, much less all the way down to nothing.

After all this evaporation, which would have left a crust of salt, people decided to migrate to the lowest parts of this valley where there could be no “living” water. Here they built cities and began farming. How long would this urban and agricultural development have taken?

Yes, this means that the Dead Sea would have evaporated, and then people settled the valley. Thomas’ timeline for the Dead Sea’s evaporation must be smaller, maybe much smaller, than 200 years.

The natural conditions for the high rate of evaporation, which Thomas must assume, are unfathomable and impossible by any known natural mechanism. Dead Sea sediments show discrete bands deposited under changing conditions. In the image below, white bands are mostly sodium chloride while others are calcium carbonate (aragonite) with some clay and other fine particulate layers.

But this is just the beginning of the problems for Thomas’ Dead Sea story. Thomas doesn’t mention that below the 2,400-foot core produced by the Deep Sea Drilling Project lies another 10,000+ feet of additional layers of sediments and salts. All of those sediments had to have been laid down under a lake in this valley before the sea dried down. When did this happen?

Has Thomas considered where the 770 feet of sediment that now sits on top of the pebbles that formed that beach so long ago came from? Does he really think that Sodom and Gomorrah lie under hundreds of feet of sediments! These sediments represent thousands of thin layers of fine clays, halite and other precipitated minerals? These layers show no signs of disruption of deposition, but rather they show continuous accumulation of sales and clay from a placid lake undergoing minor climatic variations over time.

We have already seen that Dr. Steve Austin, accepts that the last 4,000 years of history are contained in just the top 18.5 feet of sediments of the Dead Sea. Austin also ignores the thousands of feet below these sediments, but he does have good reasons to believe that the 18.5 feet of sediments really do represent 4,000 years. He finds siesmites that correlate to recorded event in scripture that cover several thousand years. 

And yet Thomas, working for the same organization that published Austin’s paper two years earlier, makes a very different claim, while ignoring Austin’s paper. For Thomas, as we have seen, the sediments 770 feet below the bottom of the Dead Sea represent the same time period 4,000 years ago when Sodom was destroyed.

770 feet or 18.5 feet? One or both of these creationists must be absolutely wrong, and they can’t both be right. I think Austin has it right as I have already indicated.  The seismite evidence is strong and agreed upon by both biblical and secular scholars. 

This begs the question, did Thomas not read Austin’s better-researched paper?

I suspect he didn’t, because had he done so he would have realized how ridiculous it would be for him to suggest that the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah would be buried under 770 feet of layered sediments. His ideas are nothing more than knee-jerk speculation on a current geological story. He could have convinced himself that his speculation could not be true had he read a few papers on the geology of the Dead Sea region, and even his own colleague’s paper.

There are many archaeological sites around the rim of the Dead Sea valley. Most of these are near natural springs or periodic streams. This makes more sense than at the bottom of the depression which would always be very salty and prone to flooding. Agriculture would not be possible at the lowest points but it possible in these soils higher up that have had some of the salts leached out of them.

Thomas’s inability to recognize the inconsistency of his interpretation with other creationists doesn’t get much better when we consider the biblical evidence at his disposal that he seems to have ignored.

When Abraham comes to look over the Jordan Valley with Lot, what he sees is a well-watered valley. He doesn’t see a barren desert. If it was well-watered, why would Thomas expect that the Dead Sea dried up? There is nothing in the Bible that would give us any reason to believe that there was a time when the Dead Sea should be much smaller than it is now, much less completely dry.

Thomas’s view also seems influenced by fringe archaeological claims about finding the remains of Sodom under the Dead Sea. However, mainstream biblical archaeologists like Schaub and Chesson (2007) locate candidate sites for Sodom and Gomorrah on the plains near the Dead Sea, not buried under 700 feet of salt and other sediments. These former locations make more sense archaeologically and align better with the biblical narrative.

The Ice Age Contradicts the Young Earth View of a Dried-Up Dead Sea

Did Thomas forget about his very own articles on the Biblical Ice Age? Yes. Or at least he didn’t connect his view of the Ice Age with his interpretation of an evaporated Dead Sea. Let’s look at why this is.

Creationists, including Thomas, have promoted a singular Ice Age, which is said to have occurred over a few centuries after the global flood just 4,350 years ago. For that time, they have predicted cooler temperatures and higher precipitation. This would have included the Middle East, with biblical proof for the Ice Age claimed to be found in the book of Job.

In addition, the young-earth view also requires there to have been a much wetter time when the Sahara Desert was a vast productive grassland. This wet “desert” existed after a global flood, and it supported herds of cattle and thousands of nomadic peoples. For young-earth creationists, this period of wetness existed for several hundred years after the flood.

Given these premises, it is even more unlikely that the Dead Sea region would have experienced extreme drought during this time. Instead, creationists should expect the Dead Sea to have elevated water levels during this period.

Consider also that the young-earth model of the Dead Sea’s origin would predict that the entire Jordan Valley would have been filled with water after a global flood. How could all that water have evaporated down to nothing when temperatures were lower and precipitation higher than today? The lake levels should have been rising, not falling, during this time. It is especially hard to imagine that, as Thomas assumes, the Dead Sea Valley could dry up at an extraordinary rate during an age of increased rainfall and a lush Sahara Desert.

Furthermore, as we have seen previously, there is robust geological evidence for high water levels in the Dead Sea basin during the last glacial period. The existence of Lake Lisan, a precursor to the Dead Sea that was much larger and deeper, is well-documented in the geological record. Bartov et al. (2002) provide extensive evidence for Lake Lisan’s high stands during the period from about 70,000 to 14,000 years ago.

This evidence creates a significant chronological problem for young-earth models. The sediments associated with Lake Lisan are found above the pebble layer that Thomas associates with the time of Abraham. This means that in Thomas’ young-earth timeline the lake left in the post-Flood rifted valley  Lake Lisan must have completely dried up before the Abraham and Lot looked into the valley but then nearly filled up again to deposit another 700 feet of sediments and then dried up again leaving the present-day Dead Sea.  Such a scenario strains geological credibility to the breaking point and had no biblical support!

All the references to the Dead Sea from the Bible – both the Old Testament and New Testament – paint a picture of a Dead Sea that has not fluctuated more than a few hundred feet in level over several thousand years. I don’t know where Thomas thinks those 770 feet of sediments could have come from when the Dead Sea’s water level is known – based on biblical authority no less! – to have been quite stable for the last 4,000 years.

Finally…

We are drawing this series to a close. But there is one big challenge that many of you are waiting for me to address. How then should a Christian respond to this evidence. If the evidence from the Dead Sea region is incompatible with a young-earth worldview how can a Christian who take the authority of scripture interpret the origins of the Dead Sea and Jordan Valley?  It is that question I will tackle in our last post of this series. 

Stay tuned!

Next up:  Part XII Salt, Seismites, and Scripture: Reconciling the Dead Sea’s Deep History

References:

Austin, S.A. (2010). Greatest Earthquakes of the Bible. Acts & Facts, 39(10), 12-15.

Bartov, Y., Stein, M., Enzel, Y., Agnon, A., & Reches, Z. (2002). Lake levels and sequence stratigraphy of Lake Lisan, the late Pleistocene precursor of the Dead Sea. Quaternary Research, 57(1), 9-21.

Bookman, R., Enzel, Y., Agnon, A., & Stein, M. (2004). Late Holocene lake levels of the Dead Sea. Geological Society of America Bulletin, 116(5-6), 555-571.

Braterman, P.S. (2013). How science disproves young-Earth creationism. 3 Quarks Daily.

Ehrlich, A. (1985). The eco-biostratigraphic significance of the fossil diatoms of Lake Kinneret. Geological Survey of Israel Current Research, 5, 24-30.

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Katz, A., & Starinsky, A. (2009). Geochemical history of the Dead Sea. Aquatic Geochemistry, 15(1), 159-194.

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Neugebauer, I., Brauer, A., Schwab, M. J., Waldmann, N. D., Enzel, Y., Kitagawa, H., … & DSDDP Scientific Party. (2014). Lithology of the long sediment record recovered by the ICDP Dead Sea Deep Drilling Project (DSDDP). Quaternary Science Reviews, 102, 149-165.

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Schaub, R.T., & Chesson, M.S. (2007). Life in the Earliest Walled Towns on the Dead Sea Plain: Numeira and Bab edh-Dhra. In T.E. Levy, P.M.M. Daviau, R.W. Younker & M. Shaer (Eds.), Crossing Jordan: North American Contributions to the Archaeology of Jordan (pp. 245-252). Equinox, London.

Seely, P.H. (2003). The GISP2 Ice Core: Ultimate Proof that Noah’s Flood Was Not Global. Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith, 55(4), 252-260.

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