Rocks form rapidly yet can "date" as old
How long to harden: There are common and easily understandable methods for quickly turning loose material into rock-hard stone, some of these methods taking only minutes and hours. Vibration, for example, can force water out of mud and cause the grains to settle into an extremely rock-hard material. Gently curved rock-hard strata all over the world provides evidence that the many layers of strata were rapidly laid down and all soft at the time of compression, for if the lower layers had already been millions of years old and rock hard, they would not have gently bent, but would have broken. Of course, such rocks could be heated, and then bent, however, they would then become metamorphic rock, whereas many of the world's gently curved strata are sedimentary rock.
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Soil bacteria: Scientists at Murdoch University have turned experiments into an industrial product, after they proved that rocks don't need eons to harden. Rather, by spraying water containing soil bacteria onto "soft sand," in a couple hours the turn that sand into "something resembling marble more than sandstone." See also RSR's Oops show, Science Alert, and Creation magazine's Speedy Stone article.
Vibration: Anecdotally, Real Science Radio has been told of a demonstration conducted for mechanical engineering students at the Missouri School of Mines, now called Missouri Science & Technology. The class was taken outside where loose sediment was watered down, and then using a type of concrete vibrator, the wet sediments were turned rock hard within minutes. The mechanical engineer who related this account also spoke of his father using the same technique on his farm to set fence posts, not in concrete, but in mud, which the farmer then vibrated using a device that ran off the fifth wheel of his tractor, to set the fence posts.
Water: Miners in Australia have discovered that by spraying plain water onto soft limestone, they can turn it into hard rock.
Radiometric dating: The world's leading scientific journal, Nature, admitted in 2012 that, "Dating features on the moon and Mars is guesswork" and here on Earth, "Radiometric dates are some of the trickiest, most delicate and most disputed measurements on Earth." Using unproven and consequential assumptions, radiometric dating methods measure the quantity of certain elements that result from the radioactive decay of other elements, and thereby in geology attempt to date the time that has passed since a given material hardened into stone. Problems abound. For example, the rubidium-strontium method gives a 1.3 billion year age for lava atop the Grand Canyon, which indicates that the rock evidently younger than rock deeper in the canyon hardened into stone 300 million years before the Precambrian basalt at the bottom of the canyon. This anomaly, one out of thousands, was reported by acclaimed Mt. Saint Helens geologist Steven Austin, Ph.D. In a related observation, according to geologist Andrew Snelling, Ph.D., the same rock flow in the Grand Canyon's inner gorge gives contradictory dates 1.5 billion years apart, whereas reliable dating methods should indicate what is known by observation, that the entire flow is approximately the same age. The RSR program on the Origin of Earth's Radioactivity provides a framework for understanding such data.
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The Grand Canyon and Mount St. Helens are fact-laden natural laboratories. For example, note the "flat gaps" between most of the the strata in the Grand Canyon which indicate extremely rapid deposition, and that the utterly untenable claim by the old-earth geological community that tens of millions of years of erosion is completely missing in the uniform boundaries between stacked strata. At Mount St. Helens, the potassium-argon dating method incorrectly indicates that certain minerals hardened into stone 350,000 years ago, when in reality they solidified just recently, in 1986, from lava that flowed six years after the enormous 1980 eruption. And some of the mineral within the then ten-year old rock was wrongly dated as having solidified two million years earlier.
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Here's the point: Rocks can form rapidly, and radiometric dating results that contradict old-earth assumptions are systematically ignored, making the claims of old-earth proponents untrustworthy, whereas powerful observational evidence contradicts million- and billion-year dates.