The Northern Rocky Mountains are a land of beauty and treasure with colorful skies, high majestic mountains, glacial-carved features, plentiful lakes, life giving aquifers, abundant forests, big game, and rich mines of silver, zinc, lead, copper, gold, cobalt, iron and other metals and nonmetals. These mountains include an area about the size of the state of Minnesota. We live in or near these mountains.
Very briefly, my background includes loving science since I was a child of 7 (1949). As a teenager and into my twenties I had my own science lab, donated by my grandparents. My father was an engineering geologist in ability. Dad’s pumice building blocks from his quarries in the California Coast Ranges were used in the San Francisco Golden Gate International Exposition of 1939. I first was introduced to the Darwinian evolutionary philosophy at the University of California as a student and at San Jose State University as a graduate student. For the U.S. Geological Survey, I did marine geology in the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans and in the Bering Sea; and geologic mapping in the Pacific Northwest. I also did geology in Canada, Scotland and England. Yes, I understand radiometric age dating having done potassium-argon age dating at the U.S.G.S. I have been giving talks on Earth and Planetary science for about 38 years.
For those who love the outdoors, including teenagers, Dads, Moms, hikers, hunters, fishermen, with degrees, without degrees, atheists, theistic evolutionists, pantheists, those who have “had-a-bad-church-experience” (I am truly sorry about that); you have a wonderful opportunity to enter your own science laboratory—our own Northern Rocky Mountains.
Please consider stepping away from your computer keyboard at times and take a drive up Highways 90 or 95 and enter into the hundreds of miles of national forest roads around us. Also, consider picking up a geologic pick, a hand lens, a topographic map of the area you are interested in, a compass (or brunton compass, for bedding orientation), sample bags or a digital camera. It is good to have a partner who is motived to understand earth history as you are; and to have some survival training. If you advance in your studies, buying a used polarizing microscope and making rock thin sections, can take you into a fascinating micro universe!
Question: Are the most ancient sediments and interbedded basalts of the Belt Supergroup Formations of the Northern Rocky Mountains, the result of an evolutionary model or a catastrophic model or some other model?
You will have a steep learning curve; but if you have the motivation and are interested in earth history you will be fine. At least by 1893 (A.C. Peale), the evolutionary model has been used to understand these laminated (thin bedded) fine-grained sediments (~90% of the rocks), basalts, granites, and metamorphic rocks. But the evolutionists make comments like, “Belt rocks are not simple to map” (Belt Symposium I, 1973); or “How many have a handle on Belt stratigraphy!” (Belt Sym. IV, 2003). Maybe you can help solve some of the puzzles of these sometimes beautifully colored gray, green, purple, pink, red, black, and white formations in unweathered outcrops! Also, notice the ancient ripple marks common in these Mountains—see if you can get paleocurrent directions with your compass or brunton. Have some fun!
Because I did potassium-argon age dating (K-Ar) at the U.S.G.S., I get asked a lot about evolutionary-age dating schemes. Potassium-40 has a half-life of 1.3 billion years and tends to give high ages, which often range greatly in the same sample. For example, one sample dated at the U.S.G.S. gave ages of 67, 92, and 144 million years. Another sample gave an age of 30 million years, but the geologist wanted 55 million years, so he discarded the sample. This problem continues in dating our own Northern Rocky Mountains. The current age for the deposition of the fine-grained sediments is 70 million years, and deposited between 1.47 to 1.40 billion years ago (Belt Sym. IV, 2003). Earlier dates for deposition were 400 m.y. (NW Geol. 23, 1994) and 200 m.y. (Belt Sym. III, 1993). In a 35-year period (1968 to 2003) the evolutionary ages ranged from 700+ to 70 million years. Most people do not realize this.
Red shifted light from the galaxies does not demonstrate that the universe is 14-billion years old. Many experiments show that light is slowing down over time. Why? Because space is not really a vacuum, even at absolute zero (-2730 C). Light photons are being slowed up in their travels to earth by the huge amounts of electromagnetic energy contained in each cubic centimeter (cm3) of space–called zero-point energy. Australian physicist Barry Setterfield has been studying the decay of light speed for over 30 years. Since his preliminary research for Stanford Research Institute International (1987), Setterfield has expanded his work–start there.
Regarding soft tissue evidence in ancient animals: 1) 551-million-year old (Precambrian) worm fossils still have flexible walls (Jour. of Paleontology, 2014); 2) 508-million-year old Burgess Shale (Canada) has highly complex and diverse phyla (Cambrian Explosion of life!) with fossils including amino acids, proteins, and gut parts (H.B. Whittington, 1985); 3) 190-million-year old sauropod dinosaur egg bones (China) contain protein remnants (Nature, 2013); 4) 8-inch long sheets of soft tissue inside a 22-inch long triceratops dinosaur horn found in the Hell Creek Formation in Montana (Acta Histochemica, 2013); 5) In 1908 Charles Stenberg found mummified hadrosaur dinosaur remains with skin preserved with scales in Wyoming; 6) 80-million-year old Mosasaur fossil has purple “retina” residue in eyeball area. Also, still-red blood tissues were found where organs were located (PLoS ONE, 1998); 7) 65-million-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex fossil has soft, transparent and flexible tissue (Science, 2005); 8) 150-million-year old squid ink sac (UK), whose ink was so fresh that scientists could write with the ink (Archaeology Daily News, 8/18/2009). Dozens of more cases of soft tissue in fossils are found in the literature. Evolutionists are trying to do damage control by saying these are only bacteria and bacteria films—repeatedly proven untrue.
There are thousands of scientists who were trained at major universities in biology, geology, astronomy, physics, archeology, and paleontology, who no longer support Darwinian evolution. For biology see Sanford, J.C., “Genetic Entropy & Mystery of the Genome” (2005); and Meyer, S.C., “Signature in the Cell” (2009) and “Debating Darwin’s Doubt” (2015).
The poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote, “And Nature, the old nurse, took the child upon her knee, saying ‘Here is a story book Thy Father hath written for thee.’ ‘Come, wander with me,’ she said, ‘Into regions yet untrod, and read what is still unread in the manuscripts of God.’”