The Creation Debate-Part 18

By: Dr. John Ankerberg and Dr. Steve Austin; ©2002

Dr. Austin explains some of the observations he made at Mt. St. Helens following the 1980 eruption, and why they caused him to rethink his position on the evolutionary model…

Editor’s note: In June 1990 The John Ankerberg Show taped a series of interviews with men from several branches of the sciences regarding the evidence for creation. For technical reasons we were unable to air these interview. Nevertheless, we have decided to re­lease portions of these interviews in a series of articles so you could read the arguments that were being made at that time—more than a decade ago.

Considerable effort has been made to quote the gentlemen correctly. We have at­tempted to find the correct spelling of the scientific terms used. However, the reader should keep in mind that this is a transcription of oral interviews. Mistakes in spelling and in the technical language should be laid at the feet of the editor.

The Creation Debate – Part 18
Mount St. Helens – Part 1

Dr. John Ankerberg: are talking about the scientific evidence: Does it support the theory of evolution, does it support the theory of creation? We have as our guest a man who is an expert in the area of geology, and specifically, Mount St. Helens and what hap­pened before the 1980 eruption, what happened during, what happened afterwards. You have done some research that has great implications concerning the theories around geology and then the evolution/creation debate. Tell us about it, Steve.

Dr. Steve Austin: On May 18, 1980, a catastrophic event occurred that not only shocked the world because of its explosive power, but it challenged evolution theory, I believe, at its foundation. That event was the eruption of Mount St. Helens there about ten years ago. I believe the thorough exploration of some these catastrophic events will help us understand a little bit more about how the earth formed and help resolve this discussion of creation/evolution that we find ourselves in.

We see the amazing stratification that was produced rather rapidly at Mount St. Helens. The deposit from the nine-hour eruption on May 18, was covered by 25 feet of a pumice flow on June 12, 1980. Then we had the March 19, 1982, mud-flow deposit. Each of these layers at Mount St. Helens has a date and the spectacular thing is to look at what the volcano did in very short order.

Ankerberg: Before we go any further, from the top to the bottom, how many feet is that? Austin: Oh, it must be 30 to 40 feet in thickness.

Ankerberg: Thirty to 40 feet and how long did it take for that to be laid down. Austin: That was deposited over a two-year period.

Ankerberg: Just 24 months?

Austin: Yes, and individually the middle third formed in less than a day at Mount St. Helens, on June 12, 1980.

Now I thought, my normal way of thinking about strata, is that each strata, each stratum level, represents a long period of time, and an alteration between summer and winter, or between wet year and dry year and long breaks between strata perhaps, and so I was amazed to find that a catastrophe formed layered deposits. I had thought that a catastro­phe would homogenize the coarse and the fine and instead it deposited out as strata. And that challenges my notion of stratification because I used to believe very strongly that the stratification in the earth suggested great periods of time for those formations. I talked a little bit about that in our last session.

Then we have another mind-boggler at Mount St. Helens. We had new canyon formation after 1980. A new canyon mysteriously appeared after the summer of 1980. Some mysteri­ous process gouged out this canyon from solid rock. You could see a waterfall coming in from the upper left, an ancient lava flow of solid rock was gouged out along with some volcanic ash layers underneath. And I had thought that canyon formation takes a long period of time.

That canyon formation shows a little bit about the implications of Mount St. Helen for other geologic features of the earth. For example, the Grand Canyon. Geologists have long been enamored with the notion that the Colorado River cut the Grand Canyon over a pe­riod of tens of millions of years. And yet, most geologists that are familiar with the geology of northern Arizona, have pretty much discarded that explanation, that the Colorado River cut the Grand Canyon. It may sound like heresy, but it is nevertheless true.

Most geologist are going to an amazing accident, some type of runaway gully erosion, or a breaching of a lake, this could be a spillway or something like that. Geologists realize that the Grand Canyon appeared in a geological instant, not over an extended, long period of millions of years.

That brings us to the question of canyon formation generally. Of course, Darwin based his ideas of biological evolution on his thinking of geological evolution, and his ideas of geological evolution came from his study of canyons, like the Santa Cruz River valley in southern Argentina. So the earth is foundational to our views of origins.

Another thing we discovered at Mount St. Helens was the amazing destruction in a lake north of the volcano. About 4-square mile area Spirit Lake was devastated by enormous landslide. The landslide went into the lake and propelled the water of the lake up onto a slope north of the volcano, the water sloshed back into the basin, bringing all these logs into the lake.

About 2 square miles of the 4 square mile area lake is covered with logs. And that’s amazing as we’ve been watching this over 10 years what’s been happening. They float prone on top of the lake; there’s about a million logs floating today on the surface of Spirit Lake north of Mount St. Helens. They go into upright position, or what are upright floating logs, and they fall to the bottom of the lake, we believe, and have some geologic evidence that such a thing does occur, and fall to the bottom of the lake and in standing position.

Sedimentation is going on rapidly around Mount St. Helens and the logs are having their root ends buried at different levels in the bottom of the lake. Right before our eyes, logs are becoming buried at different levels and have the appearance of being multiple forests. If we had cut through the rock strata layers of the earth observing the strata and the upright petrified logs, we might assume that each layer represents a forest with thousands of years of soil development than a mature forest. That forest was later buried and a second forest grew on the next level over hundreds or even thousands of years. Later grew another forest. So repeated levels in the strata levels of the earth with upright petrified logs might be suggested that require many thousands of years, maybe even millions of years of earth history. Yet at Mount St. Helens this thing seems to be going on very rapidly in the last ten years.

We took a sonar survey of Spirit Lake and under the water of the lake, on the bottom of the lake, we see evidence of standing trees. You could see the sonar shadows being cast over the bottom by standing objects. We did this sonar survey in 1985 and we would sug­gest that there were about 20,000 upright objects standing on the bottom of this lake. What would Spirit Lake look like if you drained it? It would look like a forest standing there. It’s a redeposited forest and since it’s falling out at different times, it might be assumed to require many thousands of years.

In order to investigate, we had to go diving in Spirit Lake, there next to the active vol­cano. There on the bottom we saw standing trees, very abundant, standing there getting buried in the bottom of the lake. I got my diving buddy on one side, we were scuba diving the lake and we tried to dislodge these trees. I was on the other side. Some of these logs are solidly buried in the bottom of the lake, others have just recently landed. And we have all the conditions set up here to have a petrified forest in the making.

You have the Petrified Forest there at Yellowstone National Park. What more natural interpretation than to say there is the modern forest growing in one spot, then look nearby you will see the eroded strata layers there at northern Yellowstone National Park. You see these upright penetrating logs and fossilized position. There’s the Ancient Forest, there’s a series of forests that grew there millions of years ago. It comes naturally to think that way. In fact, evolutionists have said that we creationists are ignorant and uninformed because we don’t understand that in this one hill in Yellowstone, we have proof positive of millions of years.

And yet, creationists now are saying, well, wait a minute, we think that Mount St. Helens provides an explanation for fossil forests elsewhere, such as at Yellowstone. And many realize the significance of this, and there are even creationist that have published in the geologic literature on this particular phenomena. Upright logs might represent rapid and catastrophic agents. One of the strongest proofs I would suppose of an old earth, would be these petrified forest deposits.

(to be continued)

Dr. Steve Austin received his B.S. (Geology), University of Washington, Seattle, WA, 1970; M.S. (Geology), San Jose State University, San Jose, CA, 1971; Ph.D. (Geology), Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, 1979.

Read Part 19