[Potpourri: poh-pohr-ee. definition #4: any mixture, especially of unrelated objects, subjects, etc.]
I was checking my e-mail this morning and saw that I had a response from the USDA “ask a scientist” from the other week. It all started when I did my post on Photosynthesis and saw how much water gets broken apart to make our food. It set me to wondering why we haven’t run out of water yet and I wrote about it in my follow-up post on the Water of Life: Plants. Since I hadn’t been able to find anything that answered my questions exactly, I sent off an e-mail to Dr. Watts and now I know!
Turns out I was on the right track. The only way to get back to the original amount of water you had before Photosynthesis started is to burn all the food the plant had made. Now, I’m not talking about forest fires; you are a ball of burning energy yourself. It’s just a very carefully controlled process that allows us to live and move and work. Plants also use some of their stored food for energy to grow and live, but they don’t use it all up on their own. Well, how ’bout I let Don Orts, who leads the USDA Agricultural Research Service’s Global Change and Photosynthesis Research Unit in Urbana, Illinois, tell you himself:
“However, plants themselves are not balanced in this regard because plants [carry out] about twice as much photosynthesis as they do respiration. The rest of carbohydrate that plants produce is what feeds all other organisms on the planet so it takes animals and many kinds of non-photosynthetic microorganisms to respire the rest and create the overall balance between global photosynthesis and respiration. There is, however, one important caveat to this, which is that all of the extant organic matter on the earth (for example, organic matter in the soil, trees, peat moss bogs and fossil fuels) all represent photosynthesis that has been stored and not yet respired. But [you]needn’t worry about running out of water for these reasons as there was a great deal of water on the planet before there was ever life here. I hope this helps.”
Awesome! God is sure amazing and He is very fond of symbiotic relationships [you know, where two organisms help each other to survive]. Hmm, I should write some more on that some time! Notice that the Whole World Knows that Water came first. 😀
Also, there is a theory of Genesis 1 that’s called the “Day-Age Theory.” It claims that “and the evening and the morning were the fourth day” actually means “and the evening and the morning were the fourth age which lasted an amazingly long time, maybe millions of years.” Even if that was good Hebrew study (which it isn’t), it wouldn’t fit the facts. You would have a dried up planet if you left plants all alone for millions of years!
Circle of diatoms on a slide
Moving on to my other topics. If you’ve managed to stay awake during my posts on Limestone, you will remember that Chalk is made of tiny sea algae called Diatoms. Just have a look at the beauty and variety of these little things! They are truly amazing and, it turns out they are setting a pretty puzzle for Evolutionists who have to try to figure out how one of them turned into another which turned into… I know the article has some eye-crossing words, but I think you’ll get the point. Things aren’t nearly as boxed up as your school textbook would have you believe!
Remember the flat-topped mountain from the movie UP? Those kinds of places are very real and are helpful to scientists because they are amazingly hard to get to unless you’re a bird. I’ve heard that some of them have been visited less often than the Moon! These “180,000,000” years old highlands made of 2 billion year old rocks had been “successively inundated over some 200 million years by a series lakes and seas” (in English that means we know that water washed over them a LOT). Then they say the rest of the rock eventually eroded down until only these plateaus were left.
typical plateau landscape
Creation Evolution Headlines has an article on these “Islands in the Sky” and how they are NOT cooperating with the Evolutionary storyline. Having been separated for such a long time, they should have really weird animals on them. Well, they are very different from what we usually see, but not from the other animals living on nearby plateaus. Once you’ve read the article, think whether Creation Scientists have ever had a shock like this. Do our predictions turn out to be so far off as these scientists’?
I will speak of thy testimonies also before kings, and will not be ashamed. Psalms 119:46
They shall bow down to thee with their face toward the earth, and lick up the dust of thy feet; and thou shalt know that I am the LORD: for they shall not be ashamed that wait for me. Isaiah 49:23b
As it is written, Behold, I lay in Sion a stumblingstone and rock of offence: and whosoever believeth on him shall not be ashamed.Romans 9:33
For the scripture saith, Whosoever believeth on him shall not be ashamed. Romans 10:11
