Rock of Ages
Witnessing Tools
Wednesday, March 15, 2017
Wendy Wippel
You may remember that hubby and I went to England this year; one place we visited was the British side of the English Channel, famous for the White Cliffs of Dover. We paid $100 for a tour out to Dover, rather indulgent since the only motive was memories of my mom singing the famous WW2 song: There’ll be bluebirds over the white cliffs of cover, someday, just you wait and see….. As it turns out, however, it paid off in other ways. Because it’s actually an awesome proof of Noah’s flood.
According to science, limestone (which is what the White Cliffs of Dover are made of) is composed mainly of the skeletal fragments of marine organisms like coral and mollusks as well as microscopic algae. And it was first formed primarily in the shallow seas that were thought to exist during the earth's early years.
Here’s the problem with the historical explanation. Limestone makes up a huge part of all of earth’s rock, way too much to easily explain by microscopic skeletons, no matter how abundantly reproduced. And better research techniques with respect to the earth’s limestone deposits have shown that many of the deposits are not, after all made by organisms at all.
Which, when science is conducted honestly, should sound a call for a different hypothesis.
Fortunately, Doctor Walt Brown--a geologist who has spent much of his career working to give the Bible the scientific credibility it deserves-- has one, one that makes way more sense than that beloved of the Darwin Disciples. And this one relies on nothing more than basic chemistry.
The reactants in Dr. Brown’s theory are simple: water, carbon dioxide, and limestone (CaC03), otherwise known as calcium carbonate.
None of those ridiculously long chemical names like Ammonium hexachloroplatindicarbonate like I had to deal with in the lab.
So be grateful.
Actually I just read a rather interesting fact: namely, that the longest chemical name now (40 years after I was in college) is, in fact, more than 64,000 letters long. A fact that, incidentally, made me feel a whole lot better about my advanced age.
But I digress.
The fact that Dr. Brown’s theory involves only three basic molecules: calcium carbinate, water, and carbon dioxide should make this pretty easy to understand.
Because the fairly limited ways that these three substances can interact will keep it simple.
If you ever had a rock collection as a child, you probably remember that every rock had a test you could do to confirm its identity.
For limestone, you use acid. Like vinegar. And when you put vinegar on limestone the rock will fizz, and it fizzes because the limestone reacts with the acid to release bubbles of carbon dioxide (CO2).
If CO2, however, happens to dissolve into water, that forms an acid, and if that CO2-infused water comes into contact with limestone, it will dissolve the limestone that it touches. (That’s what generally makes sinkholes. And cenotes you may have seen in Central America).
You may remember from high school chemistry that any reaction can be driven in the opposite direction by the right conditions.
This one is no exception. The Bahamas are composed nearly completely of limestone, and (this is where it gets really interesting), occasionally in the Caribbean you will find spontaneous new outcroppings of limestone, the result? Totally the reverse of the equation above.
This happens, occasionally, when conditions bring carbon dioxide saturated ground water (water present beneath Earth's surface in soil pore spaces and in the fractures of rock formations near to shore, carbon dioxide escapes, causing the limestone to precipitate out.
Nothing more than chemistry!
We know that there were water deposits deep underground when the earth was new, and that there are still.
A huge amount of water, in fact, was discovered recently below Asia (called, from the radar that helped find it, the "Beijing Anomaly”).
Another giant deposit of water, containing enough water to equal water three times the volume of all our oceans, has been discovered between the lower and the upper mantles.
Why does this matter?
Subterranean water, obviously, also existed earlier in earth’s history. In great volume, as we see in, arguably, the most vilified section of the Bible. The story of Noah’s flood.
Huge subterranean vaults of water, existed when Adam and Eve walked the earth. And carbon dioxide, ubiquitous from the earliest days of earth history. And in those huge subterranean water reservoirs, the carbon dioxide that filtered in essentially is forced to infuse the water by the sheer weight of, rock, water, and atmosphere above.
And these huge subterranean reservoirs of waters went undiscovered ostensibly, by Adam and sons until one day, when God declared a judgement on the people He had created, a judgement in the form of a terrible flood.
A flood, that, according to Scripture, involved water that came from both falling rain and from “underground waters". And as the flood waters escaped from underground to the surface, the subterranean vaults, the laws of physics, would experience a staggering decrease in create a significant drop in water pressure, and escape of CO2 gas.
Conditions which would cause limestone to precipitate out. All over the world. And create things like the White Cliffs of Dover, currently 350 feet tall and 8 miles long, weathering at the rate of 1 cm/year.
And with similar stretches of chalk cliffs in Denmark, Scotland, Germany and France.
And deposits in the Bahamas nearly 5 miles deep.
Not convinced? There’s more. Carbon, as an element, is mostly tied up in carbon dioxide. And there is more carbon locked up in limestone than there is in all other sources put together.
No lie.
60 million grams in limestone, with a paltry 720 grams in earth’s atmosphere.
All that carbon a remnant of those early subterranean reservoirs, still around to testify to the veracity of Scripture.
Subject: Rock of Ages 
Thu Mar 16, 2017 7:23 am
