The Age of the Earth, page 1

as i said in another topic, these points indicate that the earth is older than 6,000 years

-during each springtime, tiny, one-celled algae bloom in Lake Suigetsu in Japan. they die and sink to the bottom of the lake. they create a thin white layer. During the rest of the year dark clay sediments settle to the bottom. the result are alternating dark and light annual layers -- much like the annual growth rings on a tree. scientists have counted about 45,000 layers, they have been accumulating since about 43,000 BCE. this is far beyond the estimates of 6 to 10 thousand years claim by creationists.

-ice core samples have been taken in Greenland that show 40,000 annual layers of ice.

-the galaxy is over 100,000 light years across. this means that light from some stars in our galaxy has taken many tens of thousands of years to reach earth. this would indicate that our galaxy is much older than what creationist claim.

-Nuclides are forms of matter that are radioactive. each nuclide decays into another form of matter at a certain rate. after an interval of time equal to its half-life, only half of the original material is left. scientists have found that, every nuclide with a half-life over 80 million years can be found naturally occurring on earth. nuclides with a half-life under 80 million years do not exist naturally at detectable levels. the only logical explanation for these observations is that the world formed billions of years ago. There are enough long-lived nuclides still around to be still detectable. The short-lived nuclides have long since decayed and disappeared. The only exceptions to the latter are short lived nuclides which are being continuously generated by the decay of long-lived nuclides.

-Because of tides, the rotation of the earth is gradually slowing, by about 1 second every 50,000 years. about 380 million years ago, each day would have been very close to 22 hours long... There would have been about 398 days in the year. studies of rings on rugose coral fosils that were independntly estimated to be 370milion years old revealed that when they were alive, there were about 400 days in the year. this relationship has been confirmed with other coral fossils. This is good proof that the world has exsisted atleast 1third or a billion years.

-the thickness of the coral reef at Eniwetok atoll in the Pacific Ocean has been measured at up to 1,380 meters. even the most optimistic coral growth rates would require that the atoll be over 130,000 years of age.

-it takes thousands of years of below freezing temps to build a 100 ft layer of permofrost. But large area in the north are permanently frozen to depths of almost one mile, this took many thousands of years to accomplish.

-radiocarbn dating of wood usin acelerator mass spectrometry, is acurate as far back as 50,000 years. the method has many wooden and textile objects to be found tens of thousands of years old.

-reversals of the earth's magnetic pole are recorded in the Atlantic Ocean sea bottom for the past 80 million years.

-The rate at which the continents are spreading apart from each other indicates that the Atlantic Ocean is about 200 million years old.

- Measurements by sensors attached to satellites shows that space dust accumulates on the moon at the rate of about 2 nanograms per square centimeter per year. This rate would require 4.5 billion years to reach a depth of 1.5 inches, which is aprox the depth experienced by the astronauts who walked on the moon.(thats if they did, lets leave that to the other threads)

-Evolutionary principls applied to geology indicate that about 100 million years ago, the one land mass= Pangea was beginning to split apart so that land that would become South America and Africa drifted apart, at first the drift caused some shallow seas and a few land bridges. Later the Atlantic Ocean opened up and became gradually wider until it became the ocean that we see today. this theory would have a logical consequence in the evolution of dinosaurs. before this split in land mass took place, dinosaurs would have evolved into a variety of species which were found throughout Pangea. since 100 million years ago, when the land bridges disappeared and the seas became too deep to cross, the dinosaurs would have evolved differently in Africa and South America, due to their isolation from each other. This is precisely what has been observed in the fossil record.