Of all the young-earth creationist sites on the internet, NewCreation.blog is one of the few I genuinely look forward to reading. The writing is careful, the tone is gracious, and the authors are often willing to say “I don’t know” in places where the larger creationist organizations would simply assert an answer. I’ve talked about the “new creationists” on my YouTube channel and here on the blog as a hopeful sign — a younger generation more interested in following the evidence than in defending a brand. So it is in that spirit, as a fellow confessional Christian who wants this conversation done well, that I want to take a close look at one of their recent posts. Because this one, I’m afraid, is not one of their better efforts.
The post in question is Jake Ramgren’s “Leaping Lighthouses!”, a reflection prompted by his annual visits to Cape Cod. Ramgren describes watching sand tumble down the famous cliffs at Coast Guard Beach, recounts how the Nauset lighthouse has been relocated several times to escape the advancing Atlantic, and stands among the drowned, root-bared trees at Monomoy. From these observations he draws a large conclusion: that the rate of coastal erosion is “too fast for deep time,” and that North America therefore cannot have been here for hundreds of millions of years. It’s an intuitive argument, and an honest one. Ramgren is a zoologist by training — he says plainly, “I am no geologist” — and he has clearly done more homework than most. But the argument rests on a chain of geological assumptions that no working geologist would grant, and once those assumptions are examined, the whole structure comes apart. Let’s take a look.
First, what the post gets right
Let’s begin where Ramgren begins. The observations themselves are accurate. Cape Cod is eroding, and quickly. The National Park Service signage he read is correct that the outer cliffs retreat on the order of three feet per year. The Nauset lighthouse really was moved back from the brink in 1996, and the Highland (Cape Cod) Light was famously rolled some 450 feet inland in 1996 as well. The drowned trees at Monomoy are exactly what he says they are — a forest being eaten by a migrating shoreline. None of this is in dispute, and Ramgren describes it with a naturalist’s eye that I appreciate. Cape Cod is, in fact, one of the most dynamic coastlines in North America.
He is also right about something more important, and I want to want to recognize it because it’s the kind of intellectual honesty I keep hoping to see more of from this community. Ramgren does not stop at “erosion is fast, therefore the earth is young.” He goes on to ask the harder questions himself: Where did the erosion begin? Could other processes offset it? He explicitly raises both accretion (adding material to the continent) and continental uplift as candidate solutions, and tells his readers that creationists shouldn’t “disregard theories prematurely.” That is the right instinct. The problem is not that he failed to consider the counterarguments. The problem is that the version of those counterarguments he evaluated is not the one geologists actually hold — and the data he reaches I don’t think mean what he takes it to mean.
A beach is not a continent
The entire argument turns on a single number — three feet per year — and on what Ramgren does with it. He converts the 2,800-mile width of North America into feet, divides by three feet per year, and arrives at roughly five million years to erode the whole continent away. Since plate tectonics has North America rifting from Pangaea some 200 million years ago, he concludes the continent “should have eroded away forty times over.”
Here is where a geologist has plenty of material to gently stop him. The three-feet-per-year figure is a measurement of shoreline retreat at a very particular kind of coast: unconsolidated glacial sand and till, deposited by the Laurentide ice sheet only about twenty thousand years ago, sitting on one of the most wave-exposed headlands on the eastern seaboard. Cape Cod is not bedrock. It is a pile of loose sediment dumped by a melting glacier, and it is being reworked by the sea precisely because it was never solid rock to begin with. Using the erosion rate of a sandpile to calculate the lifespan of a continent is a little like measuring how fast an ice cube melts on your driveway in July and concluding that the Rocky Mountains can’t be more than a few summers old.
But the deeper error is conceptual, and it’s where I want to spend more time. Ramgren treats continental erosion as a horizontal process — as though the ocean were a saw cutting sideways across a 2,800-mile-wide block of land, and the only question were how long the blade takes to reach the far coast. That is not how geologists think about the erosion of continents at all. Erosion of a landmass is overwhelmingly a vertical process. Rain falls on the interior, rivers carry dissolved and suspended sediment off the high ground and down to the sea, and the land surface is lowered — everywhere, more or less at once — rather than nibbled inward from the edges. The relevant quantity is not how many miles of coastline retreat per year. It is how many millimeters of elevation the whole surface loses per year. Geologists have a word for this: denudation.
The argument geologists have actually been making for a century
Here is the part I find genuinely fascinating, and a little ironic. The puzzle Ramgren thinks he has discovered is one that geologists not only know about but have been teaching as a textbook problem for well over a hundred years. The average elevation of North America is roughly 600 meters. The average rate at which continental surfaces are lowered by denudation is on the order of a few centimeters per thousand years — call it conservatively 2 to 6 centimeters per millennium. Do the arithmetic that any introductory geomorphology text walks students through, and you get a startling result: at present rates, a continent like North America would be worn down to a flat, near-sea-level plain in something like ten to twenty-five million years. Not 200 million. Ten to twenty-five.
The mainstream geological literature openly states that if denudation were the only thing happening, the continents would have been planed flat many times over the span of geological history. This is not a creationist “gotcha” that someone forgot to address. It is a standard chapter heading. The classic textbook framing is literally the question, “Why, then, are all of the continents not just low-lying plains?” Ramgren has, in effect, rediscovered a problem geologists pose to undergraduates — and then concluded that geologists have never thought about it.
So why aren’t the continents flat? Because erosion is only half of a coupled system. As the surface is stripped away, the crust beneath responds. Continental crust floats on the denser, ductile mantle the way an iceberg floats in water, and like an iceberg it sits in isostatic balance. Remove mass from the top — strip away kilometers of rock over millions of years — and the lightened crust rises buoyantly to restore that balance, a process called isostatic rebound. A mountain range that loses a kilometer of rock from its peaks will float upward by most of a kilometer in response, continually exposing fresh rock to be eroded in turn. Layer on top of that the tectonic uplift supplied by plate collisions and the answer to the textbook puzzle is complete: continents persist not because erosion is slow, but because uplift and erosion are locked in a balance that has operated for billions of years. This is the actual mainstream model. It is not exotic, it is not ad hoc, and it long predates any creationist objection.
The “50-kilometer” and “400-kilometer” figures
This brings me to the most quantitatively dramatic claim in the post, and unfortunately the one that goes the further astray. Ramgren cites a calculation, attributed to creationist geologist Monte Fleming, that for uplift to offset erosion the crust “would have to be raised 50 kilometers,” and that the faster-eroding east coast “would require 400 kilometers” — which, he notes with evident astonishment, would put the starting surface as high as the International Space Station.
When a calculation produces an answer that absurd, the right response is not amazement but suspicion that something has gone wrong in the setup. And it has. The 400-kilometer figure can only be reached by taking that local Cape Cod shoreline-retreat rate, treating it as a continent-wide vertical erosion rate, running it for the full duration of deep time, and then asking how much total uplift would be needed to compensate. It is the original error — beach mistaken for continent, horizontal retreat mistaken for vertical lowering — now compounded and run through an additional multiplication. Real denudation rates, the ones I cited above, never demand anything remotely like this. Isostatic uplift on passive margins like the U.S. east coast is measured in fractions of a millimeter to a few millimeters per year, which is exactly the order of magnitude needed to keep pace with the actual denudation that occurs there. The crust does not need to start at the height of the space station. It needs to do what the data show it has in fact been doing all along — rising slowly and steadily as it is unloaded. The “400 kilometers” is not a finding about geology. It is an artifact of the wrong input, and a model is only as trustworthy as the number you feed into it.
Misreading the continental shelf
There’s a second geological misstep I want to address, because it’s subtle and it leads Ramgren somewhere quite wrong. Trying to find where erosion “began,” he turns to Google Earth and notices the band of light blue around North America which is the continental shelf that extends far out on the Atlantic side and much less on the Pacific side. He interprets the seaward edge of that light-blue band as the original coastline, the place “where erosion must have begun,” with the Atlantic having since eaten its way landward to the present shore. The east-west difference, he reasons, shows that the Atlantic coast has simply suffered far more erosion than the Pacific.
This is an understandable reading of the map, but it inverts the actual geology. The continental shelf is not land that erosion has removed. It is land that is still there as fully intact continental crust and merely sitting under shallow water. When you wade into the surf at Cape Cod, as Ramgren rightly notes, you do not step off the continent; the continent continues beneath your feet out to the shelf break. But that submerged platform was not carved inward from today’s beach. It is the gently sloping edge of the continent that gets alternately exposed and flooded as global sea level rises and falls. During the last ice age, with enormous volumes of water locked up in glaciers, sea level stood roughly 120 meters lower and most of that shelf was dry land — you could have walked far out onto it. As the glaciers melted over the last twenty thousand years, the sea rose and drowned it. The shelf edge marks the low-stand shoreline of the ice ages, not some primordial coastline being chewed away.
And the east-west contrast he points to has a well-understood cause that has nothing to do with differential erosion. The Atlantic coast is what geologists call a passive margin: it sits in the interior of the North American plate, far from any plate boundary, tectonically quiet, and so it has accumulated a broad, gently sloping wedge of sediment over the long stable interval since the Atlantic opened. The Pacific coast is an active margin, riding hard against plate boundaries, uplifted and faulted, with little room for a sediment shelf to accumulate. Wide shelf in the east, narrow shelf in the west: this is one of the most basic predictions of plate tectonics, taught in the first weeks of any oceanography course. Ramgren has noticed a real and striking pattern, and then reached for the one explanation — runaway erosion — that the pattern does not support, while the explanation it does support was sitting in the very framework he set out to challenge.
Accretion, deltas, and the “State of the World’s Beaches”
To his credit, Ramgren engages the accretion counterargument with the actual primary literature. He cites Luijendijk and colleagues’ 2018 paper in Scientific Reports, “The State of the World’s Beaches,” and correctly reports its headline finding that about 28% of the world’s sandy beaches are accreting against roughly 24% eroding. This is the kind of primary-source engagement I always want to commend, and I do. But here he runs into the same problem that sinks the whole post: the paper is about sandy beaches, and beaches are not continents.
The Luijendijk study is a satellite survey of the world’s sandy shorelines — a slim, ever-shifting ribbon of sediment at the very margin of the land. Whether a given beach is gaining or losing sand in a given decade tells you about the local sediment budget of that beach: where the longshore currents are carrying material, where a river is delivering it, where a seawall has interrupted the flow. It tells you essentially nothing about whether the continent behind the beach is being destroyed. Ramgren actually senses this and tries to turn it to his advantage, arguing that since accretion clusters at river deltas and along human-engineered coasts, it can’t represent a stable, continent-preserving system. But this gets the geology backward. The fact that accretion concentrates at deltas is not a flaw in the system. Rather, it is the system. Rivers are precisely the conveyor belts that carry the eroded interior of the continent to the coast and dump it at their mouths. The Mississippi has built a delta the size of a small state out of the eroded heartland of North America. Sediment removed from Wyoming and Ohio is not lost from the planet; it is relocated, and a great deal of it is deposited right back onto the continental margin, where over geological time it is incorporated into the growing edge of the continent. Erosion and deposition are two ends of one conveyor, and the existence of the conveyor is not in question.
Sea Level Change and the Exposure of Continents
I find that there is one more factor that the article does not raise but which is directly relevant to the question of how much erosion has actually occurred over geological time. Continents have not always been exposed at the surface in the way they are today. Throughout Earth history, large portions of the continental interiors have been covered by shallow epicontinental seas (apparently called epeiric seas which was a new word to me in reaching this topic) in which sediment was deposited rather than eroded. The interior of North America was covered by such seas for substantial portions of Paleozoic and Mesozoic time. During those intervals, the covered portions of the continent were not losing mass to erosion. They were gaining it.
This matters considerably for any attempt to calculate the cumulative erosion experienced by a continent over hundreds of millions of years. It is not a constant rate applied uniformly across all surfaces for all time. It is a spatially and temporally complex process in which different portions of the continent were alternately exposed and submerged, eroding and depositing, over timescales that dwarf anything in human experience. This is part of why geologists do not attempt to constrain continental age simply by dividing erosion rates into width. The system is far more complicated than that, and the tools geologists actually use—geochronology, thermochronology, geochemical tracers, seismic imaging—address that complexity directly.
The catastrophe card, and the cost of playing it
Ramgren’s post ends, as so many do, by reaching for catastrophe. Having argued that present rates can’t fit deep time, Ramgren proposes that the same Flood-driven “continental sprint” that supposedly drove the continents apart in a few thousand years also eroded the coasts far faster than they erode today, and that what we now observe is the slow tail end of a far more violent past. We shouldn’t assume present rates are constant, he says, because dramatic catastrophes can change them.
The principle itself is unobjectionable — geologists do not, in fact, believe rates have been rigidly constant. We have catastrophic floods, megaquakes, bolide impacts, and rapid sea-level changes woven all through the conventional record. Catastrophism is not the property of the creationist. But notice what has happened to the argument by the time we reach this paragraph. We began with a claim that the evidence — fast erosion — points decisively to a young earth. We have now arrived at the admission that the present evidence does not actually point there at all, and that to reach the young-earth conclusion we must instead posit a past episode of erosion so violent that it left the present rates as a faint echo. The evidence we can measure has quietly been replaced by an event we cannot. That is a very different kind of argument, and a much weaker one, than the post opened with.
And it carries a cost the post doesn’t reckon with. If we are free to invoke unobservable past rates thousands of times faster than anything measured today whenever the present data don’t cooperate, then the erosion argument can no longer be used as evidence for a young earth in the first place — because by that logic the erosion data are compatible with any age at all. The “continental sprint” doesn’t rescue the young-earth reading of the coastline; it concedes that the coastline, read at face value, doesn’t deliver it. You cannot simultaneously argue that observed erosion rates prove the earth is young and that observed erosion rates are a misleading remnant of a vanished catastrophe. One of those claims has to go.
Where I’ve seen this argument before
If this line of reasoning feels familiar, it should. It is structurally identical to the old “salty sea” argument — the claim that you can date the ocean by dividing its total salt content by the annual rate of salt delivered by rivers and arrive at an age of only a few thousand years. I wrote about that argument again here on the blog just last month, because it refuses to die despite having been answered for decades. The salt calculation fails for three reasons, and every one of them has an exact counterpart in the erosion argument: it assumes the present input rate has held constant through all of history; it assumes a known starting condition (an ocean with no salt); and, most fatally, it ignores the processes that remove salt from the system — evaporite formation, hydrothermal exchange at mid-ocean ridges, ion uptake in clays. Strip out the removal mechanisms, freeze the rate, assume a starting point, and any open system will yield a spuriously young “age.”
The erosion argument is the same machine with different parts. It assumes the present erosion rate (in fact, a wildly unrepresentative local one) has held constant; it assumes a known starting geometry (the shelf edge as original coast); and it ignores the process that offsets erosion (isostatic and tectonic uplift, plus redeposition). It is, in short, a flawed chronometer of exactly the type creationists have been building and geologists have been dismantling since the nineteenth century. The names change — salt, helium, sediment, erosion — but the error is one error, and it is worth learning to recognize it once so you can spot it everywhere it reappears.
A better way to read the coast
I don’t want to end on a purely negative note, because there is something genuinely good in this post that I’d hate to see lost in the critique. Ramgren went to a beautiful place, paid close attention, asked why the world is the way it is, and tried to follow the evidence honestly enough to consider the objections to his own view. That posture is exactly right. The natural world really is a book we are meant to read — Calvin called creation the “theater of God’s glory,” and the Belgic Confession speaks of the universe as a book in which every creature is a letter. Standing on an eroding cliff watching sand fall into the Atlantic is precisely the kind of attentive encounter with creation that ought to provoke exactly the questions Ramgren asks.
But reading that book well means reading all of it, including the chapters that are harder to see from a beach chair — the vertical lowering of whole landscapes rather than the lateral retreat of one cliff, the slow buoyant rise of unloaded crust, the drowned ice-age plains beneath the shallow seas, the great sediment conveyor that carries the continent’s interior to its margins and builds it back again. When you read those chapters too, the Cape Cod coastline stops being a stopwatch ticking down the days of a young continent and becomes something far richer: a window onto a dynamic, self-balancing system that has been rising and eroding and rebuilding itself for an almost unimaginable span of time. That is not a threat to a high view of Scripture. It is, I’d argue, a fuller and more honest reading of the other book God has given us to study.
The new creationists are, I still believe, the most promising voices in young-earth origins space, precisely because they are willing to go to the primary literature and reason in public. That’s why I’ve held them up as a hopeful sign, and why I’ll keep doing so. My hope is simply that the next time one of them stands on an eroding cliff, the geologists’ own century-old answer to the question — denudation balanced by uplift — will be in the conversation from the start, rather than rediscovered as a problem and then waved away. We all want the same thing here: to understand God’s creation more truly than we did yesterday. On that, at least, Ramgren and I are in complete agreement.
Blessings,
Joel
References and Further Reading
The post under discussion
Ramgren, J. (2026). “Leaping Lighthouses!” New Creation, April 29, 2026. https://newcreation.blog/coastal-erosion-challenges-ancient-age-of-the-continent/
Primary scientific literature
Luijendijk, A., Hagenaars, G., Ranasinghe, R., Baart, F., Donchyts, G., & Aarninkhof, S. (2018). The state of the world’s beaches. Scientific Reports, 8, 6641.
Wilkinson, B. H., & McElroy, B. J. (2007). The impact of humans on continental erosion and sedimentation. Geological Society of America Bulletin, 119(1–2), 140–156.
Willenbring, J. K., Codilean, A. T., & McElroy, B. (2013). Earth is (mostly) flat: Apportionment of the flux of continental sediment over millennial time scales. Geology, 41(3), 343–346.
Southard, J. (n.d.). “How Fast Are the Continents Worn Down?” In The Environment of the Earth’s Surface (Geosciences LibreTexts) — a standard introductory treatment of denudation rates and the isostatic-uplift balance.
Related posts at Naturalis Historia
Duff, R. J. (2026). “The Salty Sea Argument Is Still Wrong — And Still Being Taught.” https://thenaturalhistorian.com/2026/04/03/the-salty-sea-argument-is-still-wrong-and-still-being-taught/
Duff, R. J. — The Dead Sea Chronicles series (on sedimentation rates, evaporites, and why a single global flood cannot account for observed deposition), at thenaturalhistorian.com.
Naturalis Historia 
Well said!
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