Igneous and Metamorphic Time

Wise, Kurt P.  “How Fast Do Rocks Form?”  Proceedings of the First International Conference on Creationism 2:197–203.  Creation Science Fellowship, Pittsburgh.  1986.  A paper in the proceedings of the First International Conference on Creationism, a creationist meeting, on the speed at which rocks form.  The article uses it for Wise's statement that heating buried sediment would take many millions of years, and for his point that the objections to creationism come from regional metamorphism.

1. 1a.

   Page 199:  “The biggest problem, however, lies again in the problem of heat.  Rapid burial beneath many kilometers of sediment produces instantaneous pressure increases, but once again it takes too much time to heat the sediment.  In fact it would take many millions of years to heat up sediment buried 20 kilometers beneath the surface.” ↩ ↩

2. 1b.

   Page 198:  “It seems that any metamorphic reaction can be reproduced in the lab.  Each of these reactions can be made to occur in less than a few weeks.  The higher the temperature and/or pressure, the faster the reaction.  It turns out that any reaction which involves more than about 300 degrees Centigrade can be reproduced in the course of a single day or less.  Chemical equilibrium in the process of metamorphism is thus rather quickly reached once the thermal conditions are achieved.  It is, however, rather difficult to achieve those conditions.” ↩

Snelling, Andrew A.  “Radiohalos in Granites: Evidence for Accelerated Nuclear Decay.”  Radioisotopes and the Age of the Earth, Volume II, 101–207.  Institute for Creation Research (El Cajon) and Creation Research Society (Chino Valley).  Edited by L. Vardiman, A. A. Snelling and E. F. Chaffin.  2005.  Chapter 3 of a 2005 young-earth creationist research volume, in which Andrew A. Snelling of the Institute for Creation Research studies polonium and uranium radiohalos, the concentric darkened shells that alpha particles leave around tiny crystals in biotite, a black mica.  Its abstract concludes that granite plutons, large underground bodies of granite, cooled within 6 to 10 days, and that radioisotope decay must have been accelerated to form the uranium radiohalos.  The article uses it as the source of its 6 to 10 day cooling claim.

1. 2a.

   Page 145, section § 6.7 "The Heat Problem":  “Convective flows of hydrothermal fluids might be capable of moving and dissipating heat from granitic plutons, but an additional, as yet unknown mechanism would have been needed to remove the heat generated by the accelerated radioisotope decay.” ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩

2. 2b.

   Page 147:  “the timescale for the cooling of granitic plutons was extremely short, calculated at between six and ten days.  And it should be noted that this timescale is constrained by the half-lives of these isotopes, and not by the assumption that these granites formed during the Flood year.” ↩ ↩

Snelling, Andrew A., and John Woodmorappe.  “The Cooling of Thick Igneous Bodies on a Young Earth.”  Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Creationism, 527–545.  Pittsburgh: Creation Science Fellowship.  Edited by R. E. Walsh.  1998.  A creationist paper presented at the Fourth International Conference on Creationism in 1998, by Andrew Snelling, of Answers in Genesis, and John Woodmorappe.  It argues that water moving through cracks in a cooling pluton can cool a batholith in about 3,000 years, and the article treats it as the only young-earth thermal model of a batholith.  Its page numbers are those of ICR's 17-page reprint, not the original pages 527–545.

1. 3a.

   Page 6:  “An infinitely-long batholith that is 11 km wide, 16.5 km thick, and is buried 20 km below the surface of the ground, when at zero rock permeability (that is, conductive cooling only) needs a few million years to cool.  But with the intensity of convective cooling that is allowed by a permeability K of 10 millidarcies (easily exceeded—see below), the time to cool this batholith falls to a mere 3,000 years.” ↩ ↩ ↩

2. 3b.

   Page 6:  “the cooling in Figure 3 starts with solidus temperatures and ends at 25% of the difference between ambient temperatures and solidus temperature.  The remainder of the cooling to ambient crustal temperatures is not covered by Figure 3 …” ↩

3. 3c.

   Page 7:  “Thus far, we have discussed long-inert granites.  By contrast, the permeability of a granite in the actual process of cooling remains unknown.  The most recent models (Ingebritsen & Hayba, 1994) assume that an initially-impermeable granite does not become appreciably permeable until it cools below about 360 °C, at which time its ductile behavior gives way to brittle behavior, and thus jointing becomes possible.” ↩ ↩

4. 3d.

   Page 7:  “These rates of repeated creation of joints (under catastrophic tectonism) and the opposing rates of 'healing' in still-ductile rock need to be quantified.” ↩ ↩

5. 3e.

   Page 6:  “This discussion does not imply that all of the large batholiths had cooled by the time they were uplifted after the Flood.” ↩ ↩

Snelling, Andrew A.  “Radiohalos: Startling evidence of catastrophic geologic processes on a young earth.”  Creation Ministries International.  Apr 5, 2007.  A popular article for general readers, with photographs of uranium and polonium halos in granite.  It argues that the polonium halos show granites solidified and cooled in just 6 to 10 days, and that uranium decayed up to a billion times faster in the past; it cites Laney and Laughlin's 1981 study for the 150 °C annealing ceiling.  The article uses it as the plain-language version of the RATE argument.

1. 4a.

   “In other words, the radioactive decay of uranium was formerly up to a billion times faster than it is today!”  “polonium halos mean that the granites solidified and cooled in just 6 to 10 days!”  The same passage requires that the polonium.  “all had to concentrate within hours, or a few days at the most.” ↩ ↩

Lamur, Anthony et al.  “Disclosing the temperature of columnar jointing in lavas.”  Nature Communications 9:1432.  2018.  A laboratory study by seven authors of basalt from Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland as it cooled.  It found that stress built up and the rock failed between 890 and 840 °C, below the solidus (the temperature below which the rock is fully solid, here 980 °C), and that this window held whatever the imposed cooling rate.  The article uses it because the window stays put whatever the cooling rate, which leaves column width as the only variable that can record the rate.

1. 5a.

   Page 2, section Results:  “In the columnar jointing experiments, cooling resulted in tensile stress build-up from the solidus temperature down to temperatures of 890–840 °C, regardless of the imposed cooling rate and initial stress (Fig. 3).” ↩ ↩

Long, Philip E., and Bernard J. Wood.  “Structures, textures, and cooling histories of Columbia River basalt flows.”  Geological Society of America Bulletin 97(9):1144–1155.  Sep 1986.  A research paper on the structures, textures and cooling histories of Columbia River basalt flows.  Entablature is the zone of small, irregular columns in the middle of a thick flow.  The article uses it for two points: ordinary heavy rain cannot make entablature, so standing or flooding water is needed, and that water follows the cooling lava down rather than racing ahead of it.

1. 6a.

   Section Abstract:  “We have found that a water infiltration front can explain the presence of a thick, quenched, flow interior, provided that the infiltration front moves downward just behind the lava solidification front.” ↩ ↩

2. 6b.

   Section Abstract:  “The colonnade refers to the well-defined columnar structure of many flows, which appears in the lowermost 10% to 30% and, in places, the uppermost 10% to 20%.  Entablature refers to those parts of a flow that have smaller column diameters and more irregular pattern fractures than those of colonnade.  Entablature commonly occupies the central 60% to 70% of a flow.” ↩

Cathles, Lawrence M.  “Fluid Flow and Genesis of Hydrothermal Ore Deposits.”  Economic Geology Seventy-Fifth Anniversary Volume, 1905–1980, 424–457.  El Paso: Economic Geology Publishing Co.  Edited by Brian J. Skinner.  1981.  A chapter in a 1981 anniversary volume of Economic Geology, with a chart (its Figure 6) and worked examples of how fast an intrusion cools by conduction and by ground-water convection.  Figure 6 is the source of the chart that Snelling and Woodmorappe use as their Figure 3, and the article checks their numbers against it.

1. 7a.

   Page 440:  “Lister (1974) has pointed out that the permeability of a cooling intrusion can be very high due to the magnitude of thermal contraction which will occur in cooling assisted by pore fluid convection and the extent of thermal cracking expected.  Lister has estimated that intrusion permeabilities of about 10 darcies may occur after thermal cracking by interaction with ground water but before substantial sealing by mineral deposition, static fatigue, or collapse.  After static fatigue and collapse, the permeability may be reduced to a few millidarcies.  The rate of advance of the cracking front is rapid, about 30 m/year.” ↩ ↩

2. 7b.

   Page 440:  “The precise location of this upper bound (which depends most strongly on the chosen value of thermal diffusivity and here is about 4 m.y.) is not so important as the recognition that, for a limited depth range, an upper bound must exist.  For the conductivities chosen here, no 800 °C intrusion, no matter how large, can maintain against conduction an anomaly greater than 200 °C within 5 km of the surface for more than 4 m.y.” ↩ ↩

3. 7c.

   Page 440:  “Figure 6 shows that a dikelike plutonic intrusion 2 km wide, 3 km high, whose top is 3.66 km below the surface, will take about 100,000 years to reduce its temperature contrast relative to ambient at the time of intrusion to 25 percent its initial value if the intrusion and the rock it intrudes have zero permeability and cooling is entirely by conduction.  If the intrusion and intruded rock have a permeability of 0.25 millidarcies, cooling time will be about 20,000 years.  If the permeability of intrusion and host is 1 millidarcy, the time will be about 5,000 years.” ↩

Ingebritsen, Steven E., and Craig E. Manning.  “Permeability of the continental crust: dynamic variations inferred from seismicity and metamorphism.”  Geofluids 10(1–2):193–205.  2010.  A review of how easily fluid moves through rock, which is permeability, in the continental crust, using geothermal data and the progress of metamorphic reactions driven by fluid flow.  It finds that mean permeability in tectonically active crust falls with depth, and that the higher transient values inferred from seismicity and metamorphism follow a curve of the same form, shifted to higher permeability at a given depth.  The article uses the mean curve and the transient curve to test whether hot water could carry enough heat to the depth of a metamorphic belt.

1. 8a.

   Page 193, section Abstract:  “Compilation of such data yields a fit to these elevated, transient values of log k ≈ −11.5 − 3.2 log z, suggesting a functional form similar to that of tectonically active crust, but shifted to higher permeability at a given depth.” ↩ ↩

2. 8b.

   Page 193, section Abstract:  “Geothermal and metamorphic data combine to indicate that mean permeability (k) of tectonically active continental crust decreases with depth (z) according to log k ≈ −14 − 3.2 log z, where k is in m² and z in km.” ↩ ↩

Snelling, Andrew A.  “Radiohalos in the Cooma Metamorphic Complex, New South Wales, Australia: The Mode and Rate of Regional Metamorphism.”  Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Creationism, 371–387.  Creation Science Fellowship and Institute for Creation Research.  Edited by A. A. Snelling.  2008.  A 2008 conference paper by Andrew Snelling, then Director of Research at Answers in Genesis, a creationist organisation.  It counts polonium radiohalos in rock samples along a line from low-grade schists to high-grade gneisses and the central granodiorite, and finds the counts rise with metamorphic grade.  It attributes them to hot fluids from the cooling granite and claims the whole complex formed in 12–20 days, which the article treats as the only time estimate a young-earth author gives for a regional metamorphic terrane.

1. 9a.

   Page 371, section Abstract:  “Furthermore, generation of the regional metamorphic complex only required 12–20 days, based on the catastrophic granite formation of the adjacent Murrumbidgee Batholith whose heat and hydrothermal fluids generated the regional metamorphic zones of the complex from the mineral constituents of the original fossiliferous sediment layers, then the central granodiorite as a consequence.” ↩ ↩

2. 9b.

   Page 379:  On Gentry's created-granite model.  “Such an interpretation is inconsistent with the field and petrological evidence from the Cooma metamorphic complex and the Cooma granodiorite.  The granodiorite is in fact the product of the regional metamorphism of the fossiliferous (Flood-deposited) sedimentary rocks that host the granodiorite …” ↩

3. 9c.

   Page 384:  “According to this curve, the granodiorite and metamorphic complex supposedly took 45 million years to cool from 735 to 150 °C.  However, if as has been shown from several lines of evidence, radioisotope decay rates were grossly accelerated during the Flood event (Vardiman, Snelling, & Chaffin, 2005), while catastrophic plate tectonics were operating to produce catastrophic granite formation, then this cooling would have occurred within days”. ↩

Walker, Tas.  “Granite grain size: not a problem for rapid cooling of plutons.”  TJ (Journal of Creation) 17(2):49–55.  2003.  A 2003 article by the creationist Tas Walker in the creationist journal TJ (Journal of Creation).  It argues that coarse grain in granite does not show slow cooling, because crystal size depends on more than the cooling rate, and that water explains the rapid cooling of plutons.  The article uses it for the field examples it grants and for how Walker describes the Snelling and Woodmorappe answer.

1. 10a.

   Page 50:  Credits Snelling and Woodmorappe 1998 with having.  “soundly answered”.  how plutons could be.  “emplaced, cooled, and unroofed in a couple of months”.  The 1998 paper's own answer is 3,000 years, and it declines to claim cooling within the Flood. ↩ ↩

Snelling, Andrew A.  “Towards a Creationist Explanation of Regional Metamorphism.”  Creation Ex Nihilo Technical Journal 8(1):51–77.  1994.  A 1994 paper in a creationist technical journal, by a geologist who proposes a creationist explanation of regional metamorphism.  It argues that the mineral zones formed from the original sediment at only moderate temperatures and pressures, and that catastrophic burial and volcanic heat during the Flood could have produced them.  The article calls it Snelling's founding paper on the subject, and uses it for his statement of the mainstream model and his concession that heat is the biggest problem for creationists.

1. 11a.

   Page 72:  “As was noted at the outset, the biggest problem creationists face with the conventional scenario for regional metamorphism is the heat presumed to have been involved, given that even with rapid burial beneath kilometres of sediments time is needed to produce that heat within the sediment pile.” ↩

2. 11b.

   Pages 72–73:  The sentence turns the page.  “the evidence presented now indicates that composition is the primary factor in metamorphism”.  “we have now seen that only moderate temperatures may be needed to transform the precursors into the index minerals of the zones of regional metamorphism, and such moderate temperatures would have conceivably been generated in the short time-scale in the Flood event described above, both due to the thicknesses of the sediment piles catastrophically accumulated, and due to the increased heat flow from the mantle because of rapid plate tectonics.” ↩

Austin, Steven A. et al.  “Catastrophic Plate Tectonics: A Global Flood Model of Earth History.”  Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Creationism, 609–621.  1994.  A 1994 conference paper by six authors that presents catastrophic plate tectonics, a global Flood model of earth history.  The article uses it because its predictions section says Flood models claim to explain regional metamorphism, and cites Snelling's two 1994 papers for that claim.

1. 12a.

   Section Conclusion, "Predictions":  “Since Flood models are usually tied to young-earth creationism, they also claim that it is possible on a short timescale to explain the cooling of plutons and ocean plate material;  regional metamorphism (see, for example, Snelling);”.  The passage cites the two 1994 Snelling papers. ↩

Baumgardner, John.  “101 Questions and Answers Concerning Catastrophic Plate Tectonics.”  globalflood.org.  Apr 2012.  Answers by Baumgardner, who represented the catastrophic plate tectonics model in a peer review of Flood models that ran from early 2009 to the summer of 2011.  The review was run by In Jesus' Name Productions, a Christian film ministry, and each panelist put written questions to each model's author.  The article uses it because it treats the Franciscan blueschists of California as support for catastrophic plate tectonics.

1. 13a.

   Section Question 4:  “This difficulty, of course, disappears in the CPT framework because the subduction and exhumation velocities are orders of magnitude higher and the time scale is orders of magnitude shorter.” ↩

Oard, Michael J.  “Metamorphic rocks can form at shallow depths.”  Journal of Creation 29(2):13–15.  2015.  A short Perspectives article in the creationist Journal of Creation.  It reviews laboratory evidence that rocks form across a wide range of pressures and temperatures, then argues that stress from plate movement could let ultrahigh-pressure minerals form at less than half the depth usually assumed, possibly less than 50 km.  The article uses it because the author argues that directed stress, not the weight of overlying rock, could drive the reactions, so a pressure does not fix a depth.

1. 14a.

   Page 15:  “In the CPT model, plate movements of metres per second have the capability to create greater tectonic pressure at shallow depths and provide a better explanation of zones of UHPm. … As a result we are in a better position to explain how UHPm formed, possibly at depths shallower than 50 km.” ↩

Worraker, William J.  “Heat Problems Associated with Genesis Flood Models—Part 4: Heat Deposited by Magmatic Activity.”  Answers Research Journal 16:201–251.  2023.  A paper by a young-earth physicist in the Answers Research Journal on the heat that large igneous provinces (continental flood basalts and oceanic LIPs) deposit as they erupt, set against the heat that Genesis Flood models must remove.  It gives the heat needed to form new ocean floor under catastrophic plate tectonics as 1.4 × 10²⁹ J, derived from Furlong and Chapman's ~3.9 × 10¹⁴ J/m².  The article takes that 1.4 × 10²⁹ J figure as the heat catastrophic plate tectonics must remove, and it quotes the paper's view that the basalts' heat is small beside it.

1. 15a.

   Page 221:  “Although continental flood basalt provinces (CFBs) are more accessible to geological investigation than oceanic LIPs, the heat deposited in their formation is difficult to estimate because the total emplaced volume is often highly uncertain. … the total amount of heat involved (not exceeding 4.0 × 10²⁶ J) is insignificant in comparison with the heat deposition involved in forming the ocean floors (1.4 × 10²⁹ J).  Thus the heat released in the formation of LIPs adds relatively little to the overall problem of discerning the mechanism whereby the ocean floors must have cooled during and after the Flood.  However, the local impact of the heat from LIPs, which in many cases must have been released within a matter of days or weeks at most, would have been highly dramatic in the absence of some special, hitherto unrecognized, cooling mechanism.” ↩ ↩

Clarey, Tim.  “Devils Tower: Mysterious Columns and Engineered Lichens.”  Acts & Facts.  Institute for Creation Research.  Feb 28, 2023.  A short article in Acts & Facts, the magazine of the Institute for Creation Research.  It argues that the Tower formed during the receding phase of the Flood and was exposed about 4,500 years ago as the floodwaters drained, and it says that fast cooling makes less orderly fracture patterns.  The article uses it as the young-earth account of the Tower's cooling and exposure, and tests its claims against the mainstream evidence.

1. 16a.

   Section Columns from Cooling, paragraph 1:  “Studies suggest all of these columns cool from the top, with contraction forming regularly spaced fractures that propagate downward.  During the Flood, groundwater percolating along the open fractures likely caused the lower part of the magma to cool quickly.  Fast cooling makes less orderly fracture patterns.  We see this at the base of the tower where the columns become chaotic and disorganized.” ↩ ↩

2. 16b.

   Section Columns from Cooling, paragraph 2:  “ICR scientists determined that these magmas formed during the receding phase of the Flood after most of the sediments were deposited.” ↩

3. 16c.

   Section Why Devils Tower Is Young, paragraph 2:  “But if Devils Tower was exposed 5 to 10 million years ago, as conventional scientists claim, it probably would have completely eroded away in this amount of time.  At the very least, it should be entirely buried in its own debris of broken columns.  And the Belle Fourche River doesn't seem to be eroding away any broken columns since none are found within its waterway.  The relatively thin buildup of broken columns at the tower's base fits its recent exposure 4,500 years ago during the draining of the floodwaters.” ↩

Clarey, Tim.  “Entablature Reveals Flooding of Columbia River Basalts.”  Institute for Creation Research.  Oct 31, 2022.  A short article on the website of the Institute for Creation Research by Tim Clarey, a research scientist there who holds a Ph.D. in geology.  It argues that entablature, the irregular, wavy-fractured texture that makes up most of the Columbia Plateau lavas, forms when floodwater runs over a lava that has begun to cool.  The article calls it the strongest creationist observation about the basalts, and it places Clarey among the creationists who put the lavas inside the Flood's receding phase.

1. 17a.

   “Flood geologists have a better explanation.  The Columbia Plateau lavas erupted near the end of the Flood's receding phase (Miocene).  Floodwater likely hadn't fully drained from the region, and rapid creation of new ocean crust was ongoing, resulting in large earthquakes and tsunamis.  These massive waves were still crashing across Oregon and Washington and over the tops of the fresh lava flows, quenching the molten centers and forming entablature.” ↩ ↩

Snelling, Andrew A., and Mark H. Armitage.  “Radiohalos—A Tale of Three Granitic Plutons.”  Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Creationism, 243–267.  Creation Science Fellowship, Pittsburgh.  Edited by R. L. Ivey.  2003.  A conference paper, given in August 2003, that scanned biotite from three granite plutons (large bodies of cooled magma) for radiohalos.  Its abstract argues that the polonium halos were formed by hot fluids moving through the rock, and that neither they nor the granites could have been created all at once in finished form (fiat creation).  The article uses it as the young-earth movement's own 2003 rejection of Gentry's primordial model, in which the polonium was present from creation and was not produced by uranium decay.

1. 18a.

   Section Abstract:  “the observed fully-formed ²³⁸U and ²³²Th radiohalos imply at least 100 million years worth (at today's rates) of accelerated radioactive decay has occurred.” ↩ ↩

2. 18b.

   Table 1, page 11:  Column totals over 19 samples and 895 slides: ²¹⁰Po 1,857;  ²¹⁴Po 152;  ²¹⁸Po 2;  ²³⁸U 559;  ²³²Th 37.  Both ²¹⁸Po halos are from sample SMG-5, Stone Mountain.  The text gives the ratio of ²¹⁰Po to ²¹⁴Po halos as.  “to a high of 69 ²¹⁰Po halos for every ²¹⁴Po radiohalo”.  and about nine to one in the Cooma granodiorite.  The paper's text and its table disagree on two subtotals:  the text gives 1139 ²¹⁰Po radiohalos for the Stone Mountain samples where the table sums to 1,109, and 437 for La Posta where the table sums to 443.  The figures used here are the table's. ↩

3. 18c.

   Page 13:  “the hypothesis that the three different types of Po radiohalos found in biotites always represent the decay of primordial Po (original Po not derived by U-decay) (Gentry, 1979, 1980, 1982, 1983, 1984, 1986, 1988, 1993) has been falsified”. ↩

Snelling, Andrew A.  “Radiohalos through earth history — What clues can they provide us?”  Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Creationism, 540–560.  Cedarville University.  Edited by J. H. Whitmore.  2023.  A paper for a creationist conference, by Andrew Snelling of Answers in Genesis.  It counts radiohalos, the tiny darkened rings that alpha particles from uranium decay leave around a zircon grain in biotite (a black mica), in 147 granites and regional metamorphic rocks dated 33 to 3200 million years old.  It argues that the halos are likely due to accelerated uranium decay during the Flood, and that 100 million years' worth of that decay at today's rate is needed to make good visible halos.  The article uses it as the most recent young-earth statement on the heat problem.

1. 19a.

   Page 544:  “Hundreds of millions of years' worth of ²³⁸U decay must have occurred within days so enough daughter Po isotopes were produced rapidly to be transported by hydrothermal fluids to closely adjacent locations within the host crystals to form separate ('orphan') Po radiohalos (Snelling 2005a).  One major objection raised is the huge amount of heat (as well as radiation) that would seem to be generated by the pulse of accelerated ²³⁸U decay.” ↩ ↩

Austin, Steven A.  “The Declining Power of Post-Flood Volcanoes.”  Acts & Facts 27(8).  Aug 1, 1998.  A magazine article by a creationist writer, printed in Acts & Facts, which the Institute for Creation Research publishes.  The article uses it as the creationist source for placing the basalts in a post-Flood decline of volcanic power.  The article also says Austin gives the Laki figures accurately, and that his point that ancient eruptions were about a thousand times bigger than modern ones is correct.

1. 20a.

   “Thus, energies of ancient lava-flow volcanoes appear to exceed by a thousand times their modern counterparts.  Again, this evidence is consistent with the catastrophist interpretation of the declining power with time of post-Flood volcanoes.” ↩

Morris, John D.  “Were the Huge Columbia River Basalts Formed in the Flood?”  Acts & Facts 33(5).  Institute for Creation Research.  2004.  An article by John D. Morris, published by the Institute for Creation Research, that asks whether the Columbia River basalts were formed in the Flood.  It says the eruptions probably came in the last stages of the Flood or in the years of readjustment after it, and it gives the area as 65,000 square miles and the volume as about 40,000 cubic miles.  The Flood Basalts article uses it as the creationist answer on timing and as the source of the old volume figure.

1. 21a.

   “Occurring in layers stratigraphically below the Columbia River Basalts are thick layers of water-deposited, fossil-bearing, sedimentary rock, obviously deposited by the Flood itself.  Thus, Flood advocates interpret these mega-eruptions of basalt as probably occurring during the very last stages of the Flood or in the years of readjustment to follow, as Earth's systems regained the relative equilibrium in which we now find them.” ↩

Oard, Michael J.  “Devils Tower can be explained by floodwater runoff.”  Journal of Creation 23(2):124–127.  2009.  A journal article whose title states its claim that floodwater runoff can explain Devils Tower.  The article uses it for the young-earth argument that Flood runoff stripped the rock around the Tower and that the Tower cannot have stood for millions of years, and it tests that argument.

1. 22a.

   Page 125:  “Devils Tower should have been destroyed quickly, surely in less than 100,000 years.”  The preceding block quotation, a recollection of blocks crashing onto the talus in November 1954, is Oard's reference 6, Robinson and Davis 1995, p. 36. ↩

Petford, Nick et al.  “Granite magma formation, transport and emplacement in the Earth's crust.”  Nature 408(6813):669–673.  Dec 7, 2000.  A review article in Nature that goes through the physical processes that move granite magma from its source, through the crust, to where it is emplaced.  It concludes that granite magmatism is dynamic and fast, not the slow, multi-million-year process once assumed.  The article uses it as the source that retired the old picture of slow granite magma.

1. 23a.

   Page 673:  “The rate-limiting step in granite magmatism is the timescale of partial melting; the follow-on stages of segregation, ascent and emplacement can be geologically extremely rapid—perhaps even catastrophic.” ↩

Jaeger, J. C.  “The Temperature in the Neighborhood of a Cooling Intrusive Sheet.”  American Journal of Science 255(4):306–318.  Apr 1957.  A mathematical solution, published in 1957, for how a sheet of magma (a sill or dike) cools by conduction, with the heat released as it solidifies included.  Earlier solutions by Lovering and Larsen left that heat out, so the author says their times to solidify must be roughly doubled and their contact temperatures are too low by of the order of 100 °C.  The article uses it for the mainstream conduction figure, and the author states that the model assumes conduction alone.

1. 24a.

   Page 311:  “Solidification is complete after 0.016D² years instead of the 0.007D² years found from Larsen's less accurate calculation.”  For the granite case, liquidus 700 °C, solidus 500 °C, latent heat 80 cal/g, D in metres. ↩

Coleman, Drew S. et al.  “Rethinking the emplacement and evolution of zoned plutons: Geochronologic evidence for incremental assembly of the Tuolumne Intrusive Suite, California.”  Geology 32(5):433–436.  May 2004.  A geochronology paper that dates eleven samples from the Tuolumne Intrusive Suite in Yosemite by uranium-lead dating of zircon crystals, to test whether the suite grew from one large magma chamber or from many small intrusions.  It concludes that the suite was assembled over at least 10 million years, and that the Half Dome Granodiorite intruded over a period approaching 4 million years.  The article uses it for that timescale, which it says the creationist accounts leave out.

1. 25a.

   Page 433:  The abstract:  “New U-Pb geochronologic data indicate that the Tuolumne Intrusive Suite, California, was assembled over a period of at least 10 m.y. between 95 and 85 Ma, and that the Half Dome Granodiorite intruded over a period approaching 4 m.y.  Simple thermal considerations preclude the possibility that a magma chamber the size of the Half Dome pluton could have existed as a liquid at shallow crustal depths for that long.” ↩

2. 25b.

   Page 433:  “Samples of the Glen Aulin and Kuna Crest plutons yield indistinguishable ages of 93.1 ± 0.1 (Fig. 2A) and 93.5 ± 0.7 Ma (Fig. 2B), respectively,”.  and Half Dome Granodiorite samples at the contacts with them.  “yield ages of 92.8 ± 0.1”.  Ma.  Page 434:  The same paper gives 91.7 ± 0.2 Ma in Yosemite Valley, 91.1 ± 0.1 Ma at the top of Half Dome, and 88.8 ± 0.8 Ma at the contact with the Cathedral Peak Granodiorite. ↩

3. 25c.

   Page 433:  “large plutons could be filled on time scales of 10¹–10⁴ yr (Clemens and Mawer, 1992;  Petford, 1996).” ↩

Reiners, Peter W. et al.  “Zircon (U-Th)/He thermochronometry: He diffusion and comparisons with ⁴⁰Ar/³⁹Ar dating.”  Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta 68(8):1857–1887.  2004.  A laboratory study of how helium escapes from zircon crystals, tested against argon dating of slowly cooled granites.  It found that the zircon helium clock closes, meaning it stops losing helium, at about 170 to 190 °C for typical plutonic cooling, and it dated granite from the Speel River pluton, collected at sea level in Tracy Arm of Holkham Bay, about 200 km south of Juneau.  The article uses it for the five clocks read from that one granite, sample 8500-15.

1. 26a.

   Page 1865, section § 3.5 "Tracy Arm/Holkham Bay":  “Taken together these data suggest a remarkably smooth hyperbolic cooling history for this sample since crystallization at 60 Ma, with a strong deceleration of cooling between ~45–55 Ma, and final cooling through ~70°C at ~7–8 Ma.” ↩

Figures marked † in Part 7, and the conduction, permeability and heat figures in Parts 2, 3 and 8, are the child articles' own arithmetic, not published results, with every input printed there.  Granite Cooling works its slab table, its 28 to 70 darcies and its arc heat in its Parts 3, 4 and 6 from Jaeger 1957, Cathles 1981 and Ducea 2001.  Metamorphic Rocks prints every input in conduction-times.ts.  Flood Basalts states its textbook inputs for density, specific heat, latent heat and diffusivity in its Parts 2 and 5.  Devils Tower's cooling and erosion figures come from cooling-model.ts.  Polonium Radiohalos' supply rate is a round-number estimate in its Part 4. ↩ ↩

Ague, Jay J., and Ethan F. Baxter.  “Brief thermal pulses during mountain building recorded by Sr diffusion in apatite and multicomponent diffusion in garnet.”  Earth and Planetary Science Letters 261(3–4):500–516.  2007.  A research paper on the classic Barrovian zones of Scotland, which are rocks of rising metamorphic grade.  The authors measured how strontium in apatite and several elements in garnet had spread between the zones of garnet, staurolite and sillimanite, and used how much of that pattern survived to time the heat.  They found that the thermal peak lasted a few hundred thousand years, probably moved by magma and fluid rather than slow conduction.  The article uses it for the brief peak inside a 10 to 15 million year mountain-building event, and for the method of reading time from a sharp chemical step in a crystal.

1. 28a.

   Page 512:  “While a background (i.e., < ∼500 °C) regional conductive heating and cooling due to overthickening probably spanned nearly the entire 10–15 Ma orogeny, the thermal peak conditions lasted for only 200–300 kyr and were attained c. 465 Ma close to the end of the orogeny (Fig. 10).” ↩

Viete, Daniel R., and Gordon S. Lister.  “On the significance of short-duration regional metamorphism.”  Journal of the Geological Society 174(3):377–392.  2017.  A review that defines short-duration regional metamorphism as metamorphism on time scales short enough that its heated zone stays much thinner than the crust: under about 10 million years in a mountain-building crust, or under about 5 million years where oceanic lithosphere is pushed beneath another plate.  It says that thermal models cannot reach the peak temperatures of mountain-building collisions and subduction without exceptional heat sources, and that diffusion geospeedometry, which typically gives durations under 1 million years, must be checked by benchmarking the new high-precision petrochronology techniques against those results.  The article uses it for that definition and for the field's own doubt about the shortest durations.

1. 29a.

   Section Abstract:  “Short-duration regional metamorphism is a recently observed and poorly understood phenomenon in metamorphic geology.  In this review, it is defined as metamorphism on time scales that limit length scales (of the associated thermal anomaly) to significantly less than the thickness of the orogenic crust (<10 myr) or subducted oceanic lithosphere (<5 myr).” ↩

Williams, Ian S.  “Response of detrital zircon and monazite, and their U–Pb isotopic systems, to regional metamorphism and host-rock partial melting, Cooma Complex, southeastern Australia.”  Australian Journal of Earth Sciences 48(4):557–580.  2001.  A study of zircon and monazite grains in the Cooma Complex of southeastern Australia, a body of rock that was metamorphosed and partly melted to form granite.  It follows how the grains changed from low to high grade metamorphism, and dates the metamorphism and granite formation to 433.4 ± 3.1 Ma, with cooling of about 12 °C per million years.  The article uses it because Snelling relies on this paper for the Cooma cooling history, and its authors say that history fits the unroofing of a regional thermal high better than the cooling of an igneous intrusion.

1. 30a.

   Section Abstract:  “Cooling of the metamorphic complex was relatively slow (average ∼12°C/10⁶y from ∼730 to ∼170°C), more consistent with the unroofing of a regional thermal high than cooling of an igneous intrusion.” ↩

Thordarson, Thorvaldur, and Stephen Self.  “The Roza Member, Columbia River Basalt Group: A gigantic pahoehoe lava flow field formed by endogenous processes?”  Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth 103(B11):27411–27445.  Nov 10, 1998.  A research paper in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth on the Roza Member, a part of the Columbia River basalts that the title calls a gigantic lava flow field.  Its pages run from 27,411 to 27,445 in the journal.  The article uses it as the slowest published estimate of how long the Roza took to build, about 14 years, with its individual lobes taking months.

1. 31a.

   Section Abstract:  Page 27,411.  “The Roza Member represents a compound pahoehoe flood basalt lava flow field, with an area of ~40,300 km2 and a volume of ~1300 km3. … The results indicate that the emplacement of individual Roza lobes lasted for months to years and that the lava flow field was constructed over a period of at least 14 years.” ↩

Sheldon, Nathan D.  “Pedogenesis and geochemical alteration of the Picture Gorge subgroup, Columbia River basalt, Oregon.”  Geological Society of America Bulletin 115(11):1377–1387.  Nov 2003.  A research paper in the Geological Society of America Bulletin on pedogenesis, meaning soil formation, and chemical alteration in the Picture Gorge subgroup of the Columbia River basalt in Oregon.  The article uses it as the field test of whether the reddened layers between flows are fossil soils, which Woodmorappe and Oard deny.

1. 32a.

   Section Abstract:  “Reddened, clay-rich horizons between basalt flows have historically been identified as 'baked zones' or as zones of lateral groundwater movement.  The reddening has been attributed to thermal or chemical alteration of the permeable portion of the basalt flow.  Many of these red horizons are instead paleosols that record significant hiatuses in basalt flow emplacement.  Paleosols were identified in the field on the basis of features such as horizonation, ped morphology, and root traces.  Terrestrial gastropods, fossil plants, and peats also occur locally.” ↩

Höfig, Daianne et al.  “Annually resolved sediments in the classic Clarkia lacustrine deposits (Idaho, USA) during the middle Miocene Climate Optimum.”  Geology 49(8):916–920.  Aug 2021.  A 2021 research paper in Geology on the Clarkia lake deposits in Idaho, a lake dammed by a flood basalt flow.  It dates the ash beds in the mud to 15.78 million years by U-Pb zircon dating, and it argues that about 7.5 m of laminated mud, called varves (yearly layers of sediment), represents about 840 years; it reads the abundant leaves in the fine autumn layers as a sign of seasonal deposition rather than storms.  The article uses it as its counted lake, about 840 years in one gap between flows, more than twice the Flood year.

1. 33a.

   Section Abstract:  “The flood basalt dammed a local drainage system to form the paleolake, which preserved a plant fossil Lagerstätte in its deposits. … We present the first unequivocal U-Pb zircon ages from interbedded volcanic ashes at the P-33 type location, constraining the deposition to 15.78 ± 0.039 Ma. … Consequently, the ~7.5-m-thick varved deposit at the type location P-33 represents ~840 yr of deposition, coincident with the end of the main phase of Columbia River Basalt Group eruptions during the Miocene Climate Optimum.” ↩ ↩

Goehring, Lucas, and Stephen W. Morris.  “Scaling of columnar joints in basalt.”  Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth 113:B10203.  2008.  A 2008 physics paper on columnar joints, the cracks that split cooling basalt into columns.  It finds that the column radius and the stria size are proportional to each other and inversely proportional to the cooling rate of the lava, and it reports Pe = 0.3 ± 0.1.  The authors believe their conclusions apply to all igneous columnar joints.  The article uses it as the measurement that column width tracks cooling rate.

1. 34a.

   Paragraph 1, section abstract:  “We found that the column radius and stria size are proportional to each other and inversely proportional to the cooling rate of the lava.” ↩

Závada, P. et al.  “Devils Tower (Wyoming, USA): A lava coulée emplaced into a maar-diatreme volcano?”  Geosphere 11(2):354–375.  Apr 2015.  A 2015 paper arguing that Devils Tower is the remnant of a lava coulée, a lava flow, not of an intrusion as most earlier studies held.  Its three-dimensional thermal model of heat leaving the rock by conduction gives a total cooling time of about 4,000 years.  The article uses that figure as the published cooling estimate it tests.

1. 35a.

   Section Devils Tower and Missouri Buttes Phonolite Bodies:  Subsection Devils Tower, first paragraph.  “The area above the base, which is also called the shoulder (Fig. 1D), consists of columns of the lower tier with diameters of 2–3 m.  These columns taper to widths of only 1.5 m at the contact with the upper tier, where they frequently merge into one thick column (> 3 m wide) of the upper tier.” ↩

2. 35b.

   Section Discussion, thermal-modelling paragraph:  “The 3-D thermal model that was constructed for the geometry of model D-19 also revealed that the total cooling time in the center of the hot core at the suture between the cooling fronts above the feeding conduit (Fig. SI-1 [see footnote 1]) corresponds to ∼4000 yr.”  Model D-19 is the analogue coulée,  “positioned at the base of the tower within a hypothetical 1-km-wide crater at the level of the Sundance Formation”. ↩

Portenga, Eric W., and Paul R. Bierman.  “Understanding Earth's eroding surface with ¹⁰Be.”  GSA Today 21(8):4–10.  Aug 2011.  A compilation of 1,599 erosion rates measured with beryllium-10, a rare isotope that cosmic rays make in the top few metres of rock, so its amount shows how long the surface has been eroding.  The two University of Vermont geologists gathered the rates from 87 studies around the world and standardized them so they could be compared.  The article uses the median rate for bare rock outcrops, 5.4 m per million years, to test Oard's objection.  The erosion-rates article discusses this compilation.

1. 36a.

   Page 4:  From the abstract.  “Drainage basins erode more quickly (mean = 218 m Myr⁻¹;  median = 54 m Myr⁻¹) than outcrops (mean = 12 m Myr⁻¹;  median = 5.4 m Myr⁻¹), likely reflecting the acceleration of rock weathering rates under soil.”  Outcrops n = 450. ↩

Meier, H., and W. Hecker.  “Radioactive halos as possible indicators for geochemical processes in magmatites.”  Geochemical Journal 10(4):185–195.  1976.  A geochemistry paper by H. Meier and W. Hecker of the State Research Institute for Geochemistry in Bamberg, Federal Republic of Germany, which counted polonium halos in biotite mica from Norway and Ontario.  It tested the halo centres for uranium by fission tracks, and ranked the halo types by abundance: ²¹⁰Po, then ²¹⁸Po, then ²¹⁴Po.  The article cites it as independent confirmation that the halos exist; it is often miscited as a Nature paper, but it appeared in the Geochemical Journal.

1. 37a.

   Page 188:  “it can be stated that no or only small amounts of uranium are present in polonium halos, a result, which agrees with the lack of uranium ring-structures in these halos.”  The same page gives the sensitivity:  “fission track studies allow a determination of uranium contents down to the ppm range.” ↩

Gentry, Robert V. et al.  “Radiohalos in Coalified Wood: New Evidence Relating to the Time of Uranium Introduction and Coalification.”  Science 194(4262):315–318.  Oct 15, 1976.  A research report in Science by Robert Gentry and seven co-authors on radiohalos in coalified wood, which is wood that has turned to coal, from the Colorado Plateau.  They measured halo ring radii and analysed the halo centres with x-ray and ion microprobes, and reported polonium-210 halos that formed from uranium daughter products carried into the wood by uranium-bearing solutions.  The article uses it as Gentry's own evidence that polonium halos form by fluid transport.

1. 38a.

   Page 316:  “Of the thousands of Po halos seen in this matrix, only three show any trace of a ring that could possibly be attributed to ²¹⁴Po α-decay [that is, from the accumulation of the U-daughters ²¹⁴Pb (t½ = 27 minutes), ²¹⁴Bi (t½ = 20 minutes), or ²¹⁴Po (t½ = 164 µsec)], and none has been seen with a ring from ²¹⁸Po α-decay [that is, from the accumulation of short-lived ²¹⁸Po (t½ = 3 minutes)].” ↩

Wakefield, J. Richard.  “Gentry's Tiny Mystery — Unsupported by Geology.”  Creation/Evolution 8(1 (whole issue 22)):13–33.  1988.  A popular article in the magazine Creation/Evolution, from its winter 1988 issue, on the geology of three of Gentry's sample sites near Bancroft, Ontario.  It is the popular companion to Wakefield's refereed paper in the Journal of Geological Education.  The article uses it to show that Gentry's sites are not primordial granite.

1. 39a.

   Page 30:  “the samples of biotite that contain Gentry's polonium halos came from pegmatite dikes and calcite vein dikes which cross-cut metamorphosed volcanic, sedimentary, and igneous rock units.  The dikes are clearly the last to have formed, not the first.” ↩

Laney, R., and A. W. Laughlin.  “Natural annealing of pleochroic haloes in biotite samples from deep drill holes, Fenton Hill, New Mexico.”  Geophysical Research Letters 8(5):501–504.  May 1981.  Section Abstract:  “Examination of 46 thin-sections of Precambrian metamorphic and igneous rocks from three deep drill holes in northern New Mexico reveals a narrow depth-temperature range for annealing of pleochroic haloes in biotite.”  A 1981 study of biotite mica from deep drill holes in northern New Mexico, where the rock temperature is known at every depth.  Heat erases radiohalos, a process called annealing, and the study found that it happens across a narrow range of temperatures.  The full paper also has a depth-temperature table on p. 502, which the RATE authors cite.  The article uses it as the source of the 150 °C figure on which the short time scale of the RATE model depends.

1. 40a.

   Section Abstract:  “Annealing of the haloes is first observed in samples from a depth of 1850 m (134°C present temperature) and is complete in samples from a depth of 2120 m (151°C).” ↩

Snelling, Andrew A.  “Polonium Radiohalos: Still 'A Very Tiny Mystery'.”  ICR Impact (333).  Aug 1, 2000.  A short article in Impact, an Institute for Creation Research publication, by Andrew A. Snelling.  It predates the 2003 reversal.  The article uses it for the 67,000-to-1 ratio, which it names as the sharpest unanswered problem in RATE's fluid-transport model, and for a concession about uranium.

1. 41a.

   “there should be 67,000 ²¹⁰Po radiohalos for each ²¹⁸Po radiohalo.  Yet in a Norwegian biotite there are more than 1,000 ²¹⁰Po radiohalos, 90 ²¹⁸Po radiohalos and only one ²¹⁴Po radiohalo”.  138.4 days divided by 3.10 minutes is about 64,000, so the 67,000 implies a slightly shorter ²¹⁸Po half-life; the discrepancy does not affect the argument. ↩

This overview's division of each child's heat figure by Worraker's 1.4 × 10²⁹ J:  the California arc's 1.7 × 10²⁴ J gives 1.2 × 10⁻⁵;  the Barrovian type area's 1.2 × 10²² J, a scale-only figure, gives 8.6 × 10⁻⁸;  Worraker's 4.0 × 10²⁶ J for every large igneous province gives 2.9 × 10⁻³.  The Columbia River share is the flood-basalt article's own.  Against the solar constant of 1,361 W/m², 131,000 W/m² is 96 times and 2.1 × 10⁵ W/m² about 155 times. ↩

Ryan, Paul D., and John F. Dewey.  “The sources of metamorphic heat during collisional orogeny: the Barrovian enigma.”  Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences 56(5):525–545.  2019.  A review article, not a set of new measurements, on where the heat for metamorphic rock comes from in mountain belts.  It finds that conduction through a thickened crust cannot produce Barrovian rocks (medium temperature and medium pressure) in some short-lived mountain belts, such as Western Ireland and Timor.  The article uses it for the conduction time formula, for its admission that conduction fails in short belts, and for its calculation of heating from radioactive rock.

1. 43a.

   Lines 314–319:  “The known concentrations of K, U, Th for the Dalradian Supergroup in Ireland (O'Connor and Long 1985; Ahmed-Said and Leake 1990) would have raised temperatures by 17.5 - 30.0 °K.my⁻¹ (Figure 2B).  Assuming that the sedimentary pile was initially at 150 °C temperatures would have only reached 290 – 390 °C after 8 my.  The observed temperatures necessitated either heating rates of 50 – 75 °K.my⁻¹ (Figure 2B) or initial temperatures of approximately 400-500 °C before the onset of deformation.  There is no evidence that either of these conditions existed.” ↩

Humphreys, D. Russell.  “Young Helium Diffusion Age of Zircons Supports Accelerated Nuclear Decay.”  Radioisotopes and the Age of the Earth, Volume II, 25–100.  Institute for Creation Research and Creation Research Society.  Edited by L. Vardiman, A. A. Snelling and E. F. Chaffin.  2005.  Chapter 2 of the 2005 young-earth creationist research volume, titled as an argument that the helium diffusion age of zircons is young.  The helium argument itself is treated in the RATE and Helium in Zircons article.  The article uses it for the temperature assumption in Humphreys' helium model.

1. 44a.

   Page 69:  “Let us take as an example the x-value and temperature (197 °C = 470 K) of point 3 in Table 3, and a t of 6000 years.  Then for a Δt of 1 year, T_h would be about 90 °C above today's temperature.  For a Δt of 1 month, T_h would be about 140 °C hotter than today.  If the heat pulse had been much hotter or longer than those typical values, the diffusion age we calculate would have been significantly less than 4000 years”. ↩

House, Martha A. et al.  “Paleo-geomorphology of the Sierra Nevada, California, from (U-Th)/He Ages in Apatite.”  American Journal of Science 301(2):77–102.  Feb 2001.  A paper that dates Sierra Nevada granite by the helium trapped in apatite crystals, a mineral that records when a rock cooled through about 45 to 75 °C.  It uses helium ages from 40 to 85 million years to reconstruct the landscape of the Late Cretaceous.  The article uses it because this clock closes at low temperature, so it dates cooling near the surface rather than the crystallizing of the magma.

1. 45a.

   Page 82:  Page 82 and abstract:  “Helium ages from a new orogen-parallel, constant-elevation sample transect are relatively uniform (~60 Ma)”.  “A large range of helium ages (40-85 Ma) from samples collected along a single structural datum”. ↩

2. 45b.

   Pages 81–82:  “Presently exposed basement rocks are predominantly 125 to 80 Ma granite and granodiorite plutons of the Sierran magmatic arc”.  “Thermobarometric data suggest crystallization pressures of most of these plutons (~80-100 Ma) at 100 to 300 MPa or about 4 to 12 km depth.” ↩

Chenet, Anne-Lise et al.  “Determination of rapid Deccan eruptions across the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary using paleomagnetic secular variation: Results from a 1200-m-thick section in the Mahabaleshwar escarpment.”  Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth 113:B04101.  Apr 30, 2008.  A paper on the Deccan lava flows that reads the magnetic direction recorded in 1,200 m of flows at the Mahabaleshwar escarpment to work out how fast they erupted.  Its abstract says the large eruptive events lasted a few decades each, with volumes of 3,000 to 20,000 km³.  The Flood Basalts article uses it for the fastest Deccan figures and for the authors' remark that the eruptions were short compared with the gaps between flows.

1. 46a.

   Paragraph 56:  “We finally estimate coarse bounds on the total amount of time recorded in the section by both volcanics and intertrappean levels to be between 85 + 2000 = 2085 yrs and 850 + 100,000 = 100,850 yrs. … Lack of correlation between successive magnetic directions implies that at least a few centuries (say >500 years) must have elapsed, adding yet another minimum of [(49 − 24) + 6 − 1] × 500 = 15,000 years to the total duration.  The range of estimates then becomes 17,085 to 115,850 years, which we round up as 15 to 115 ka”. ↩

Kasbohm, Jennifer, and Blair Schoene.  “Rapid eruption of the Columbia River flood basalt and correlation with the mid-Miocene climate optimum.”  Science Advances 4(9):eaat8223.  Sep 19, 2018.  A research paper in Science Advances on how fast the Columbia River basalts erupted, linked in its title to the mid-Miocene climate optimum, a warm spell in the middle Miocene.  Its abstract says more than 95% of the Columbia River Basalt Group erupted between 16.7 and 15.9 million years ago, which the authors call twice as fast as earlier estimates.  The Flood Basalts article uses it for the fastest published figure for the eruption.

1. 47a.

   Section Abstract, page 1:  “Our data set shows that more than 95% of the CRBG erupted between 16.7 and 15.9 Ma, twice as fast as previous estimates.” ↩

Li, Yongquan.  “Columnar joints in intermediate and felsic volcanic rocks.”  Research Square preprint rs-3031790/v1.  Jul 7, 2023.  A preprint, not peer reviewed, on columnar joints in intermediate and felsic volcanic rocks, the lavas that are rich in silica.  It gives a simple formula for the cooling time, t = L²/α, where L is the side length of the column and α is the thermal diffusivity (how fast heat moves through the rock), and it works one example with a rhyolitic lava.  The article uses it for that formula and not as an authority.

1. 48a.

   Page 9:  “Therefore, cooling processes (slower or faster cooling rate) not affect the ordering behavior.” ↩

Robinson, Charles S.  “Geology of Devils Tower National Monument, Wyoming.”  U.S. Geological Survey Bulletin 1021-I, 289–302.  1956.  A survey of the Tower's geology, published by the US Geological Survey in 1956.  It gives the Tower's height, base width, column sizes and rock type, and suggests the Tower is intrusive rock, rock that cooled underground from magma, that was never much larger than its present base.  Robinson admits that no conclusive proof of how the Tower formed can be presented.  The article uses it for the Tower's measurements, its massive base, and its claim that several hundred feet of rock covered the Tower when it formed.

1. 49a.

   Page 293:  “At the base of the tower, below the bench, the rock is massive and jointing, poorly developed.  Here the joints form large irregularly shaped blocks rather than columns.” ↩

Henke, Kevin R.  “Cooling Magmas: More Distortions from Snelling and Woodmorappe.”  Greene's Creationism Truth Filter.  Feb 13, 1999.  A critique by Kevin R. Henke, Ph.D., originally posted to talk.origins on 13 February 1999, of Snelling and Woodmorappe's 1998 paper on how plutons (bodies of granite that cooled underground) cool.  He says the paper leaves out the long cooling times in the sources it cites, and he concedes that some granite may be emplaced by dikes in a few thousand years.  The article calls him their sharpest critic on this topic and uses his concession that fast emplacement is possible.

1. 50a.

   In the paragraph that opens with the words While geologists can accept rapid natural events:  “Precambrian granites have much the same mineralogies, textures and structures as Cretaceous and other Phanerozoic granites, yet YEC dogma arbitrarily insists that Precambrian granites had a miraculous origin within a few days or less while Phanerozoic granites supposedly formed naturally over a maximum of a few thousand years.” ↩