OCEAN SEDIMENTS AND THE AGE OF THE EARTH
by Lenny Flank
(c) 1995
One of creationist Henry Morris's most oft-repeated arguments for a young earth centers around the flow of river sediments into the oceans. Morris's reasoning is as follows: if one measures the amount of certain minerals, such as nickel, sodium, tin or magnesium, being washed into the ocean basins by the world's rivers each year, and then measures how much of these minerals have already been deposited into the oceans, one can presumably calculate how many years it would take to accumulate these sediments, and therefore the age of the oceans (and presumably the earth). Morris presents the resulting data in a table:
Chemical Years to Accumulate in
Element Ocean from River Flow
Sodium 260,000,000
Magnesium 45,000,000
Silicon 8,000
Potassium 11,000,000
Copper 50,000
Gold 560,000
Silver 2,100,000
Mercury 42,000
Lead 2,000
Tin 100,000
Nickel 18,000
Uranium 500,000
(Morris, Scientific Creationism, 1974, p. 154)
In the paragraph immediately after this table, Morris also casually mentions that the figure for the element aluminum is only 100 years. (Morris, Scientific Creationism, 1974, p. 154) And what is Morris's conclusion? "The mere fact that the ocean's nickel content could have accumulated from river inflow in about 9,000 years seems to set an upper limit to the age of the ocean." (Morris, Scientific Creationism, 1974, p. 153)
But why nickel? Why not silver, which gives an age of 2.1 million years, or sodium, which gives an age of 260 million? The answer, of course, is that Morris already "knows" how old the earth is--God has told him that it is less than 10,000 years old. Thus he is free to select those dates from his table that he likes, and to reject the others that he doesn't like, without explanation. From the data that Morris has presented, one could just as easily conclude (from the river inflow figure for aluminum) that the earth is only 100 years old, and that the Declaration of Independence, the War of 1812 and the Civil War never really took place. (Presumably, all of the indications that these things DID take place are just part of the "appearence of age" which the creationists claim God gave to the universe.)
Given the wide disparity which results from Morris's "dating method" (it gives "ages" ranging from 260 million to just 100 years), it should come as no surprise that his reasoning is faulty and that the methodology he is following falls apart. It is true that there is a rate at which these various metals are deposited into the oceans by river inflow. But there are also a number of processes which remove these minerals from the oceans--not the least of which is subduction of the earth's ocean floors through plate tectonics. The figures that Morris cites therefore do not represent possible ages for the sea--they merely represent the average length of time that a metal stays in the sea before being removed by physical or chemical methods. Not surprisingly, the more inert substances like silver or magnesium stay the longest, while highly reactive elements like aluminum are removed quickly. Morris's river inflow data are simply irrelevant to the question of how old the earth is.