Queen Elizabeth Hall, SE1 (Photo credit: Metro Centric)
To go with Limestone (and other) Cave Formations
Found on the Cave of the Winds Geology for Kids page, ” Millions of years of in the making… Caves don’t start as caves; they form in rocks over millions of years!… Speleothems form as the minerals in the water build up, one on top of the other, as the water drips and drizzles throughout the cave. It can take between 1-1,000 years for one cubic inch of a speleothem to form!”
That is worth an exclamation point. If you can’t tell whether it took 999 years or just 1 to form that much Tufa, how are you so sure these caves are really millions of years old?
From the Desert Caves Project, “Sixty million years ago, a thick layer of limestone was slowly formed at the bottom of a shallow sea. Today, that same rock formation lies beneath the vast deserts of Saudi Arabia. Alongside the Dahna sand dunes, not far from Riyadh, the Umm-Er-Radhuma limestone is riddled with countless holes known locally as Dahls.”
Why bother with the 60,000,000 years and “slowly formed” business? The rest is quite true, but you’re showing your Uniformitarian assumptions!
Speleothems in the form of coulmns at Sdom cave, the Judean Desert, Israel. עברית: נטיפים במערה בהר סדום, מדבר יהודה, ישראל. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
University of Texas, Austin: Cool Formations, “As the speleothems grow, they record atmospheric information such as climatic conditions and ocean levels. Scientists at the University of Texas have found speleothems in central Texas caves that are more than 350,000 years old (Musgrove, 2000). Growth rates are hypothesized to correlate to rainfall: the more rainfall the faster the formations grow. By examining growth rates scientists are able to reconstruct regional climactic conditions (Musgrove et al., 2001).”
Well, are they figuring out how much the climate has changed by the changing markings in the cave formations, or are the figuring out how old the cave formations are based on the consistent markings? Either things changed in the past, or they stayed the same. You can’t have it both ways!
The LORD by wisdom hath founded the earth; by understanding hath he established the heavens.
By his knowledge the depths are broken up, and the clouds drop down the dew. Proverbs 3:19,20
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