Our perceptions of the age of a subject are frequently based on our common experience with similar subjects. Most people have some ability to guess the age of children with seemingly very little prior information.  We might call this ability to guess age our intuition but this "intuition" is the scientific method working automatically in our minds.  Our... Continue Reading →
Do places on Earth exist where annual records have been stored for tens of thousands of years and can be accessed today? Ice-cores and tree rings can preserve long records of yearly events but some of the best records come from layers of sediment underlying some lakes which,  if formed under the right conditions, can be read like the annual rings of... Continue Reading →
Guests at the Ark Encounter will observe many descriptions and artistic impressions of what happened before, during and just after Noah's Flood.  One set of images was especially interesting to me because it visualized different stages of the Flood.  One panel which explains how the Flood waters prevailed over the highest mountains was particularly perplexing because of... Continue Reading →
The pace of discovery of ancient human activities continues unabated. That alone should tell us that that there is much yet to discover and learn. The latest revelation come from deep—more than 1000 feet—inside a French cave.  In the blackness of a large opening there are peculiar "structures" constructed from fragments of stalagmites. Found many... Continue Reading →
The Grand Canyon is one of the most iconic geological features on Earth.  Its immensity of the canyon regularly causes those that have peered into its depths to wonder about its origins. How could such an awe-inspiring canyon have formed? This fascination with the Grand Canyon has fueled a long a history of geological research.  As a result there is a wealth... Continue Reading →
Countless numbers of footprints made by hundreds of kinds of organisms are preserved in hundreds of individual layers of the geological column.  Millions of these tracks have been identified from just the tiny fraction of the rocks that are exposed at the surface of the Earth.  But how were so many footprints preserved? In conversations with... Continue Reading →
Two years ago Ken Ham very publicly promoted what he believes is a biblical model of evolution to explain the diversity of life on Earth.  I have a book before me that provides compelling evidence that his model of evolution is wrong. That book is the Bible. For those that follow young earth creation literature nothing that Ken... Continue Reading →
Modern young-earth creationism has deep roots. The essential elements of flood geology were established in the 17th century though much of what passed as flood geology at that time might be difficult to recognize today. One thing that hasn't changed is the style of rhetoric frequently used to promote flood geology to the general public.... Continue Reading →
What happened to dinosaur eggs that were either abandoned or broke prematurely?  You might think that this is a question that is impossible to answer, but dinosaur eggs have been discovered with intriguing evidence of scavenging of many forms.  By studying the remains of organisms that are preserved in preserved dinosaur eggs paleontologists have discovered compelling evidence that a complex ecology... Continue Reading →
While reading literature by young earth creationists, I am frequently struck by how often authors seeking to resolve one problem are unaware of how many new problems their explanations create. I recently read an article by Dr. Snelling of Answers in Genesis in which he provides a young-earth hypothesis for the recent origin of oil and coal. He has... Continue Reading →
The Mars Curiosity Rover continues to make its way through the basin of Gale Crater on Mars.  I’ve provided periodical updates on its progress as it makes its way toward a large mountain in the center of the crater. For the past six months the rover has not moved much, spending its days using the... Continue Reading →
The Amazon basin isn't all a lush tropical forest.  In large portions of western Amazonian wet seasonally flooded grasslands - not trees - are the norm.  The upper branches of the Amazon River wind themselves across massive flood plains like snakes writhing across a sandy surface. One feature of these nearly featureless flat plains that... Continue Reading →
News of evidence that Mars was once host to a volume of water equivalent of the Arctic ocean on Earth has been hitting the newswires. This might sound like new news but this is really just a more comprehensive analysis of work that has been ongoing for several years. Preliminary analysis had already suggested that... Continue Reading →
In November of 2013, over 600 miles south of Tokyo, a volcanic eruption formed a new island. That new island continued to grow for over a year, eventually joining itself to the neighboring island of Nishino-shima, a volcanic island formed long ago. Today, volcanic activity continues to cause this new ocean-island to expand bringing it... Continue Reading →
Diatoms with their symmetrical highly-photogenic glass houses may get most of the attention but the foraminiferans (forams) present some formidable competition. In my recent article (Life in a Glass House) I revealed that the glass-house remains of diatoms are conspicuously absent from the bottom two-thirds of the geological column. This raised a rather uncomfortable question... Continue Reading →
Naturalis Historia 