A volcano slides into the sea causing an 800 foot wave to crash onto into an adjacent island. As that wave crashes onto land it picks up 700-ton boulders and throws them uphill leaving them stranded far above their source. It sounds like a plot from a Hollywood movie but this is real. It happened in the Cape Verde Islands off of the west coast of Africa long ago.
You can learn a lot from a series of unfortunate events. Collapsed caves can leave entry holes on the surface that become hazards to local fauna. The image below is from inside a famous natural pitfall trap in Wyoming. The surface above is rather flat and prey running from a predator sometimes fall into this hole... Continue Reading →
The Ark Encounter theme park in Kentucky is literally built on trillions of dead things. This fact would seem to support Ken Ham's popular response to what we would expect had the world been subject to a global flood: "Billions of dead things in rock layers..." But the fossils that form the foundation of his Ark park... Continue Reading →
The sedimentary rocks of the Earth hold vast quantities of fossils. Hundreds of years of careful observations have shown that fossils are far from random in their distribution but rather they appear in the geological column in a distinct pattern or order referred to as fossil succession. How can we explain the observed distribution of fossils in the... Continue Reading →
Evidence that some features of earth's landscape are the product of processes acting over longer periods of time can be found everywhere we look. Some of this evidence, such as that from the Grand Canyon, may be familiar to us but other evidence is far less familiar but tells the same story. For example, high... Continue Reading →
Near the top of a 9000-foot-high mountain ridge lies a small reservoir dug out of an alpine meadow. Today, the Ziegler Reservoir acts as a water source for the ski village of Snowmass, Colorado, but long before this site was an alpine meadow, it was an ancient lake around whose shores lived mastodons, mammoths, camels—yes... Continue Reading →
Recently I shared evidence of an ancient forest preserved in amazing detail by volcanic ash (An Ancient and Alien Forest Reconstructed: A challenge for young earth creationism). I posed a number of challenging questions that this spectacular fossil discovery raises for those that hold to a young-earth creationist' (YEC) understanding of earth's history. Since then,... Continue Reading →
The NASA rover Curiosity has been making its way across the floor of Gale crater on Mars since 2012. It has closely examined a wide range of rock types which reveal that this location on Mars has experienced a long history of variable climates. From water-infused bedrock, water-deposited conglomerates, wind-formed fossilized dunes to active sand... Continue Reading →
On the Greek Island of Lesvos there is a World Heritage Site which includes hundreds of petrified trees and countless other fossils. Many of these petrified trees are found standing upright with root systems intact. A variety of tree species have been identified including a species similar to the giant sequoia trees found today in California.... Continue Reading →
The question posed in the title of the documentary-style film “Is Genesis History?” sounds provocative, but the answer was never in doubt in the mind of the filmmakers—or the primary audience. The producers surely hoped that non-Christians and Christians alike with questions about origins/natural history/science would be drawn in by the title query and subtitle... Continue Reading →
A remarkable trace fossil has given us a glimpse into the environmental conditions of a Jurassic seafloor. Ammonite fossils are common in Jurassic rocks but one particular ammonite is more unusual than most. In the horizontal layer of rock where it was found a 28 foot-long line of shallow grooves was found leading right up to the... Continue Reading →
Animal tracks preserved in stone are found in great abundance in many parts of the geological column. You might be asking yourself, aren't the chances incredibly small that any individual track made in mud would be preserved over long periods of time? You would be right. The vast majority of footprints won’t survive the ravages of... Continue Reading →
Billions of footprints are preserved in the rock record. While bones get all the attention, fossil footprints likely outnumber bones. How can we make sense of this observation? Surely, preserving a bone must be far more likely than preserving a footprint? I have written about how paleontologists use information from footprints and bones to reconstruct... Continue Reading →
Dinosaur tracks and eggshells are abundant findings within the geological column, capturing the attention of numerous dedicated paleontologists. Their relentless pursuit involves uncovering, studying, and interpreting these remnants of long-extinct creatures. However, is all this painstaking effort merely an illusion when considering the young-earth perspective? Could the majority of paleontological work be seen as fabricating... Continue Reading →
Can the act of breathing in a cave cause it to grow larger? Limestone caves are usually formed by dissolution of limestone as the result of the interaction of carbon dioxide dissolved in water seeping through cracks in bedrock. Typically this begins deep underground and as voids expand and reach the surface animals may enter... Continue Reading →
Naturalis Historia 