Sunday Humor: Young Earth Creationists And Oxygen Levels

I get responses to my blog posts from students, geology and nature lovers and even journalists asking questions, requesting papers and sometimes just to chat.

Occasionally I get comments like this one recently left on my blog post Early Homo Leaves Modern Footprints:

hasn't anyone ever stopped to think that, maybe when that giant flood happened a long time ago (10,00 years?) that maybe, just maybe, due to the serious compression of heat, oxygen, and pressure, that that is why we have fossils and remains? also, before "the flood" the oxygen level in the air was significantly higher than afterward. so our modern "technology" that measures how much oxygen something has been exposed to, is merely based on the level of oxygen that is currently in the air. not what the levels were long ago. thus, those who claim the earth is billions or millions of years old...is mistaken due to the lack of knowledge of the oxygen levels before "the flood".

Feel free to dissect this nonsense :)

The four glaring problems:

1) There is no evidence of "the flood" which in young earth creationist language means a global flood which deposited all the rocks seen on the surface today.

2) rocks exposed to "serious compression of heat, oxygen and pressure" would destroy organic remains, not provide conditions for fossilization.

3) There is no evidence that oxygen levels a few thousand years ago were much higher than today.

4) We don't rely on the levels of oxygen in the atmosphere to figure out how old the earth is.

One good thing about comments like these is that I get tempted to dig into the literature to read more on the fundamentals. I found two good sources on the geologic history of atmospheric oxygen. Atmospheric oxygen over Phanerozoic time by Robert Berner and a chapter on Oxygen Through Time in Out of Thin Air: Dinosaurs, Birds, and Earth's Ancient Atmosphere.

Field Photos: Kumaon Himalaya Landscapes In The Shama Gogina Region

The location of the picture below is from near the village of Shama in the Kumaon Himalayas. Here  I am, dreamily looking north towards the Namik Glacier lying on the footwall of the north dipping Berinag Thrust and also the footwall of the north dipping Main Central Thrust! .. That is one of the structural characteristics of the Lesser Himalayan region.. it is made up of stacks of thrusts sheets.  ..but the geology will be up in another post as I need time to sort through some photographs and such (Update November 29 2012: See my new post on the geologic traverse!).

Meanwhile here is a location map of where I went on my trekking adventure followed by images of the scenic landscapes.


View Gogina, Uttarakhand in a larger map

Nanda Devi at sunrise from my camp near village Shama. This is the 2nd highest peak in India and the 23rd highest in the world.

View of the Panchchuli range from near the village Shama.

The pictureque village of Gyan Dhura where I camped for several days.

 Range after range. Himalayas leave you breathless.

 Red hot chilli peppers drying in the sun to be used in making a spicy chutney!

Children of the village Gyan Dhura. Roofing material is a graphitic slate and phyllite of the Deobang Formation.

Another beautiful village. In the background are the north-north east dipping Deobang Formation dolomites and graphitic phyllites.

Brilliant  yellow in the Himalayan sunshine. A house in the village of Gogina.

Ending with a teaser. There is a structural feature in this picture I will be writing about in my upcoming post.

I did an important traverse from the village of Shama to the village of Gogina and saw some very interesting geology, structure and metamorphic transitions. Annotated satellite images and cross section to follow soon.. stay tuned.

Update November 29 2012: See my new post on the geologic traverse!

Trekking Amongst The Stratigraphy And Structure Of Lesser Himalayas In Kumaon And Gharwal

(Update November 29 2012: See my new post on the geology I saw on this trek!).

Yes.. I know Geology Map Day was last week, but although late, I have put up this map and a schematic cross section... I'm leaving on a hiking trip to the Kumaon Himalayas and have been reading up on the geology of the area. After many years of being confused about the stratigraphy and structure, I finally got some clarity on Lesser Himalayan geology reading some recent work. The paper that helped me most was:

The Kumaun and Garwhal Lesser Himalaya, India: Part 1. Structure and stratigraphy- Julian Celerier et. al. 2009 GSA Bulletin

and its companion paper

 The Kumaun and Garwhal Lesser Himalaya, India. Part 2: Thermal and deformation histories

Two other papers also were quite useful:

1) Patel, R.C. and Carter, Andrew (2009) Exhumation history of the Higher Himalayan Crystalline along Dhauliganga-Goriganga river valleys, NW India: new constraints from fission track analysis. Tectonics 28

2) Revisiting Central crystallines in Pindar and Ramganga valleys, Kumaon Hills,Uttarakhand – an expedition based case study - Geological Survey of India Mapping Report. The report describes the lithologies very near my trek route along the Ramganga river sourced from the Namik glacier, near the village of Namik.

Base camp for the trek is going to be a campsite on a ridge across the small village of Tejam. Looking at geological maps I found out that I am going to be in the Lesser Himalayas, but very just south of the Main Central Thrust which structurally juxtaposes the Greater or High Himalayas over the Lesser Himalayas. The first paper I mentioned by Celerier et.al. explains quite well the stratigraphic and structural evolution of the Lesser Himalayas.

A quick recap:

Before Darwin: Dante Alighieri On Language Change

My Book Shelf  #21

I came across this passage in Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World by Nicholas Ostler. The topic is the change of Latin in to various Romance languages post demise of the Roman Empire in Europe:

The first theorist of these new linguistic developments is none other than the leading Italian poet, Dante Alighieri, who lived from 1265 to 1321. In his De vulgari eloquentia he recognized that Latin, grammatica, was in essence the preserved older form of the Romance languages. He seems to have had as much difficulty in convincing his audience that these ancestral differences were the predictable result of gradual change as Darwin was to find with a different subject matter and timescale, five centuries later.

Nor should what we say appear any more strange than to see a young person grown up, whom we do not see grow up: for what moves gradually is not at all recognized by us, and the longer something needs for its change to be recognized the more stable we think it is.  So we are not surprised if the opinion of men, who are little distant from brutes, is that a given city has existed always with the same language, since the change in language in a city happens gradually only over a very long succession of time, and the life of men is also, by its very nature, very short....

The italicized portion is Dante Alighieri's analysis.

So then how do we know that a particular language has descended from an older language or that two languages are sister languages, both having evolved from an older language? And the same could be asked of species. How do we know that two species are related and evolved from a common ancestor? 

Great Conversations: Edward Larson On History Of Evolution

I was going through my podcast collection over the weekend in preparation for a hiking trip to the Himalayas ( more on that later this week!) and found one of the great talks I have heard on evolution. This is Edward J Larson's superb exposition on the history of creationism in the United States and its transformation (or should I say evolution) into the intelligent design movement of recent  years.

Edward J Larson is Professor of History and Law at University of Georgia. His book Evolution: The Remarkable History Of A Scientific Idea is also an excellent summary of the history of the theory of evolution.

But his talk is really worth listening too. Goes straight into my Great Conversations collection.