7Wonders of Mount St. Helen’s

7. A new model for quicker coal formation. Dr. Steven Austin wrote his doctoral dissertation at Penn State University on a new model for coal formation based on his study of a coal field in Kentucky. While geologists have used a peat swamp model to explain coal formation for over 100 years, Austin argued that explanation doesn’t fit because coal is coarsely textured like bark, not finely textured like swamp peat. Roots of swamp trees homogenize the peat. Swamp peat rests on a layer of soil; coal often rests on a rock layer. No swamp peat has been found partly formed into coal.

   Austin advanced a floating mat model--that a watery catastrophe stripped away millions of acres of forest and tangled them into mats. The mats floated on an ocean over Kentucky, bumping against one another and dropping their bark to the bottom. Subsequent volcanic activity provided heat and pressure, the final ingredients used in laboratories to produce coal. The result was rich seams of coal in Kentucky and a Ph.D. for Austin.

   Just ten months later Mount St. Helens erupted, dumping vast amounts of vegetation into Spirit Lake including a million logs. Dr. Austin found the logs on the lake stripped of their bark. The bottom of the lake was strewn with up to three feet of bark mixed with other vegetation and sediment. To this day the material remains as merely slowly decaying vegetation. But if a catastrophe supplies the right amount of heat and pressure, the material will quickly change to coal. Dr. Austin’s research indicates that the idea of coal formation requiring millions of years is highly questionable.

Conclusion: Everyday earth processes would have taken countless years to form the above features, according to evolutionary geologists, 4.5 billion years to form all features in the earth’s crust. Yet these seven catastrophically produced formations cut the time to nothing. Globally, the unimaginable forces of the Biblical flood epoch would have destroyed nearly every feature on the earth’s surface and established new ones.

Changing the earth’s crust doesn’t take a lot of time if the rates, scales and intensities are large enough.

Scientific Resource:   Dr. Steve Austin, Institute for Creation Research

Questions? E-mail: LloydDoris@aol.com

Write:
Mount St. Helens Creation Information Center
Spirit Lake Highway
Silverlake, WA 98645

Phone:   (360) 274-5737
Web: www.creationism.org/sthelens/

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