Impact Craters and the Flood

"I had to gulp hard after the calculations, and although I had not yet done the energy calculations, I knew that the impacts provided way too much energy." — Michael Oard, replying to a reader of Journal of Creation, 2010¹

"Based on the current record, synchronous multiple impacts on Earth are rare, with no robust evidence for a large multiple impact event". — Osinski and colleagues, Earth-Science Reviews, 2022²

"As creationist geologist Steve Austin has pointed out, Genesis records Noah's Ark, not Noah's bunker." — Danny Faulkner, Answers Research Journal, 2014³

Summary

The Moon is covered in craters. The Earth, a larger target in the same neighbourhood, has about two hundred. Young-earth writers have asked why, and their answer since 1984 has been that the Earth was hit as often as the Moon, that the Flood destroyed most of the evidence, and that the impacts happened during the Flood year. Michael Oard put the number at 36,000 craters larger than 30 km in 2009; Wayne Spencer raised it to 58,000 in 2013. This article tests that claim against the crater record, the lunar record, the energy, and the young-earth literature itself. The heat side is summarised from The Heat Problem, which is the parent of this article.

The findings, stated first.

The young-earth crater count was never derived from Earth. Every published figure is a scaling from the Moon. Oard's arithmetic for that scaling is essentially right; an independent recomputation for this article lands near his number. The count is wrong about time, not about sums.
The Moon's craters are calibrated against dated rock, and the calibration spans four billion years. Fourteen mapped lunar surfaces carry crater densities that rise step by step with fourteen laboratory ages on samples from those surfaces, from 26 million years at Cone crater to 4,247 million at the South Pole–Aitken basin.⁴ A one-year bombardment predicts one density and one age. No young-earth author discusses the table.
Craters a few kilometres apart formed hundreds of millions of years apart, and the evidence is not only radiometric. Suvasvesi North and South in Finland, 7 km apart, formed at least 630 million years apart. Clearwater East and West in Quebec, 28 km apart, differ in argon and helium ages, in the direction of the magnetic field frozen into their melt rocks, in the age of the rock fragments they contain, and in whether the meteorite's chemistry is present.² No young-earth paper mentions either pair.
Buried craters are clocks. The Chesapeake Bay crater lies under eight named, fossil-bearing marine formations and the Quaternary, laid down in order and faulted as the crater fill settled beneath them. The Australasian crater lies under lava flows whose 37 argon dates sort into 14 older than the impact and 21 younger. The Manson crater's ejecta sits between dated ash beds in the Pierre Shale that agree with the crater's own age.
Fossil meteorites carry a clock that runs in space. Ordovician limestone in Sweden holds over a hundred meteorites from one asteroid breakup. Their cosmic-ray exposure ages increase upward through the rock, giving a sedimentation rate that matches the zircon dates in the same beds.⁵ Exposure ages are made by spallation in space, not by decay on Earth. Accelerating decay cannot produce a gradient in them.
On their own numbers the impacts melt the surface and boil the ocean, and the authors say so. Oard in 2010: "I knew that the impacts provided way too much energy." His answer was that God "orchestrated the catastrophe so as to avoid the crust turning into a magma ocean, the ocean boiling away, and a direct hit on the ark".¹ Baumgardner, running Oard's inputs, found enough energy to melt 1.1 km of rock over the whole planet.⁶
The confirmed record is not a heat problem, and the article concedes it. Summing the kinetic energy of every confirmed crater on Earth gives about 7 × 10²⁴ J, enough to warm the ocean by about one degree.⁷ The problem exists only if the Earth was hit like the Moon, which is the young-earth side's own claim.
The position has been retreating for fifteen years without new data. 36,000 in 2009, 58,000 in 2013, "must have been fewer" in 2014, "possibly in the thousands" in 2019. Faulkner and Spencer both moved the impacts out of the Flood into Creation Week. The longest cratering paper at the 2023 International Conference on Creationism argues the craters are not impacts at all. Two of the three major ministries have never adopted a Flood-year count, and the two of them disagree in print about whether Chicxulub is an impact.

The verdict. The Earth's craters record three and a half billion years of occasional impacts, and the record says so in ways that do not depend on any single dating method: in the ordering of what buries them, in the magnetic field frozen into paired craters, in the size-sorted arrival of asteroid dust, and in the neon made by cosmic rays in meteorites before they fell. The Flood-year bombardment is an inference from the Moon, priced by its own authors as fatal to the Earth's surface and answered by a miracle that Genesis does not record. The young-earth writers who found the problem published it honestly, and the honest reading of their literature is that the claim has been abandoned by most of them.

Part 1: What the record on Earth is

The count. The 2022 review by Osinski and eleven colleagues, the group that maintains the terrestrial crater database, lists "188 hypervelocity impact craters and 13 impact craters (i.e., impact sites lacking evidence for shock metamorphism)."² Schmieder and Kring's 2020 age compilation counts "Only 200 proven impact structures ... and 46 individual horizons of proximal and distal impact ejecta ... counting layers with the same age at different localities as one."⁸ A handful have been added since. Every creationist author checked for this article reports the count correctly for the date of writing: Oard's "about 170" in 2009, Spencer's 184 in 2013, Clarey's "about 190" in 2017, Oard's "approximately 200" in 2019.

Where they are. "approximately two-thirds of impact craters and hypervelocity impact craters are located in the ancient cratonic areas of Australia, Europe, and North America, where (relative) tectonic stability and low rates of erosion favour preservation."² That is partly a search bias, and the review says so. The oldest surviving structure is Yarrabubba in Australia at 2,229 million years; "there are no impact structures from the first two-and-a-half billion years of Earth's existence".² Before that the only record is spherule beds, the fallout layers of impacts whose craters are gone.

Two craters side by side, ages apart. This is the single hardest fact in the record for a one-year model, and it does not depend on trusting a radiometric clock. Suvasvesi North and South, in Finland, "are located ~7 km from each other, formed at least 630 Myrs apart".² Clearwater East and West, in Quebec, sit 28 km apart and were long assumed to be a double impact. Nine dating attempts over five isotopic systems since 1963 put West at 286 million years and East near 465 million. The review continues: "These combined results confirm that East and West Clearwater did not form at the same time, as further supported by palaeomagnetic studies ... stratigraphic considerations (Ordovician clasts have been found in West, but not in East ...), and no meteoritic signature has been detected in Clearwater West, while Clearwater East shows a clear chondritic signature".² The melt rocks of the two craters record different directions of the earth's magnetic field. One contains fragments of Ordovician limestone that had not yet been deposited when the other formed. One carries the chemical fingerprint of a stony meteorite and the other does not. A Flood-year swarm puts both pairs within days of each other. The review's summary of the whole record: "synchronous multiple impacts on Earth are rare, with no robust evidence for a large multiple impact event".² No young-earth paper on impacts mentions either pair.

Buried craters are clocks, not casualties. Spencer's answer to the missing craters is that "Impact craters on the continent would have been frequently buried under sediment, buried by lava, or could be destroyed by hydrothermal" alteration.⁹ Craters are indeed buried. What buries them is the problem. The Chesapeake Bay crater, 90 km across under Virginia's coastal plain, is covered by "about 1,300 to 1,600 ft of sediment. The seismic data show that most of these post-impact deposits dip concentrically into the crater, especially across the outer and inner rims. The post-impact deposits are commonly offset by numerous compaction faults".¹⁰ Those deposits are eight to nine named marine formations, each with its own fossils, in order, from the upper Eocene Chickahominy Formation that "caps the Exmore tsunami-breccia" upward to the Quaternary.¹⁰ The compaction faults mean the crater fill was still settling while each formation was laid down. The Australasian tektite field, glass from an impact that "extends across about 1/10 of the Earth's surface",¹¹ had no known crater for a century. In 2019 Sieh and colleagues found it under the Bolaven lava field in Laos. Their test was superposition: lavas burying the crater must be younger than the impact, and basalt inside the tektites requires flows older than it. Thirty-seven argon dates: "Fourteen samples antedate the impact, 21 postdate it, and 2 are contemporaneous with the impact, within error. All 12 dates from lavas in the summit region and directly above the proposed crater are distinctly younger than the date of the impact."¹¹ The Manson crater in Iowa threw shocked quartz into the sea that covered the Great Plains. That layer sits inside a named member of the Pierre Shale between volcanic ash beds whose argon ages "get older from top to bottom as they should", and the ash bracketing the ejecta agrees with the crater's own melt age.¹²

Crater lakes have lids. Bosumtwi in Ghana, dated to 1.07 million years by fission tracks and argon on both its glass and the Ivory Coast tektites,¹³ holds about 310 m of lake sediment, laminated because the deep anoxic water "limiting bioturbation and allowing for the preservation of laminated sediment varves".¹³ Lake El'gygytgyn in the Russian Arctic, "formed after a meteorite impact 3.58 ± 0.04 Ma ago",¹⁴ was cored through 320 m of fill in 2009, "recovering the Quaternary almost completely".¹⁴ If both craters formed in the Flood year, each has since accumulated about 7 cm of fine, undisturbed lake mud per year.

Inside the largest Phanerozoic crater. In 2016 the International Ocean Discovery Program drilled the peak ring of Chicxulub. Gulick and colleagues reconstructed the first day from the core: about 130 m of melt rock and breccia deposited within hours, "accumulation rates among the highest known in the geologic record (130 m/d)",¹⁵ then a thin cap "deposited over subsequent weeks to years".¹⁵ That cap contains charcoal delivered "years after the event ... probably from atmospheric rainout of fire-generated particles from wildfires around the globe."¹⁵ Above it is ordinary pelagic limestone. Lowery and colleagues found burrows of Planolites and Chondrites in the top of the transitional unit, "unequivocal evidence for benthic life in the crater within years of the impact",¹⁶ and the planktic foraminifer that marks the base of Zone Pα in the limestone above, "30 kyr post-impact".¹⁶ The same event left one ejecta layer worldwide: "a single ejecta-rich deposit compositionally linked to the Chicxulub impact is globally distributed at the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary."¹⁷ One layer, above it quiet water, then life. Not thirty-six thousand.

A clock that runs in space. In the Ordovician limestone quarries of southern Sweden, more than a hundred fossil meteorites have been found, all but one of one type, L chondrites, the debris of a parent asteroid that broke up. Meteorites of that type falling today carry argon clocks reset at "470 ± 6 Ma".⁵ A zircon date from an ash bed inside the meteorite-bearing limestone gives 467.50 ± 0.28 Ma.⁵ And the fossil meteorites themselves carry a third clock. Cosmic rays make neon-21 in a rock while it travels through space; the longer the flight, the more neon. "the meteorites have young 21Ne CRE ages (c. 0.1–1 Ma) that increase upward through the meteorite-bearing interval."⁵ Meteorites higher in the rock flew longer before landing. The sedimentation rate from that gradient, 3.3 mm per thousand years, matches the zircons' 3.1.⁵ Cosmic-ray exposure is not radioactive decay; it is production by spallation in space. Accelerating decay on earth cannot create a gradient in it. The dust from the same breakup arrived sorted by size, as orbital physics requires: micron dust in about ten thousand years, coarser chromite grains "on the order of 0.3 to 2 Ma", and the rock records the fine fraction first.¹⁸ No young-earth source found for this article mentions the exposure ages or the sorting.

The oldest record is chemically sorted too. The Archean spherule beds of the Barberton belt in South Africa are separate layers with separate impactor signatures: "carbonaceous chondrite-like material, amounting to ~1%, 50–60%, and 15–30% in spherule layers S2, S3, and S4, respectively."¹⁹ Different projectiles, separated by sediment, in order.

Erosion sorts them as well. The review grades every crater on a seven-level erosion scale. Level 1, ejecta blanket and rim intact, is Barringer in Arizona and Bosumtwi. Level 7, everything gone down to the substructure, is Lawn Hill and Tunnunik.² One year of bombardment followed by one Flood gives every crater the same erosional history. The record has seven.

Part 2: The Moon, and why Earth has fewer craters

The Moon's clock is dated rock. Crater counting on the Moon is not a free-floating assumption. It is calibrated against samples returned by Apollo, Luna and, since 2020, China's Chang'e missions, each from a mapped surface whose crater density can be counted. Stöffler and Ryder set out the method in 2001: "The absolute ages of cratered surfaces in the inner solar system, including Mars, are derived by extrapolation from the impact flux curve for the Moon which has been calibrated on the basis of absolute ages of lunar samples."²⁰ The 2026 refit by Yue and colleagues, using the Chang'e-6 farside samples, lists fourteen calibration points from Cone crater at 26 million years to the South Pole–Aitken basin at 4,247 million, dated by uranium-lead, lead-lead, argon-argon and krypton-krypton, with crater density rising with age at every step.⁴ The farside samples fall on the same curve as the nearside ones, "This suggests that the farside impact flux is similar to that of the nearside."⁴ That last point matters below, because Faulkner's 1999 model rested on the nearside being different.

The flux fell, and the fall is measured. "The frequency of impact events that produce craters 1 km or larger likewise exhibits an exponential decline before ~3.0 Ga and attains an almost invariant value afterward."⁴ Whether the early bombardment was a spike or a decline is a live dispute. Bottke and Norman argue for "a discrete episode of elevated impact flux between ∼3.5 and ∼4.0–4.2 Ga";²¹ Boehnke and Harrison argue that "a monotonic decrease in impactor flux explains all existing 40Ar/39Ar data".²² Oard cites this controversy as if it made room for a forty-day compression. It does the opposite: the narrowest live proposal is five hundred million years wide, and the direction of revision has been to spread the bombardment out. Nor has the flux been constant since. Mazrouei and colleagues dated 111 lunar craters by the rock abundance in their ejecta and found "the impact rate increased by a factor of 2.6 about 290 million years ago", with the terrestrial record showing the same break.²³ That is a real, published departure from uniformity, and it is a factor of 2.6, not a factor of a hundred thousand.

Why Earth has two hundred. Earth is a poor keeper of craters: seventy per cent of it is ocean floor that is recycled, and the rest erodes, buries, and is only partly searched. The question is how much of the deficit that explains. Hughes tested it on the most stable and best-explored continental areas. Crater counts there rise in a straight line with age back to about 125 million years, which means "the erosion they suffered has been so limited that nearly all the craters larger than 2.4 km, formed in the last 100 to 150 Myr, are still detectable, datable and measurable."²⁴ After 350 million years, about 66 per cent of craters over 2.4 km survive; after 150 million, 97 per cent.²⁴ Bland and Artemieva: "the terrestrial crater record on stable, well-explored cratons for the last ∼120 Ma is essentially complete for craters larger than 2–3 km".²⁵ Mazrouei and colleagues checked the erosion escape directly and found "no evidence for size bias in retention of terrestrial craters", thermochronology limiting cratonic erosion to "a maximum of 1.6 km vertical erosion (or deposition) over the past 650 Ma", and kimberlite pipes only a kilometre or two deep surviving throughout the Phanerozoic.²³ Craters over 20 km are about 2 km deep. Erosion that leaves the pipes leaves the craters.

The mainstream side has a deficit of its own, and it should be stated. On Hughes' flux the Phanerozoic should have produced about 700 to 830 craters over 22 km on the whole Earth, about 200 to 240 of them on land. Thirty-eight to forty-four are known.²⁶ The mainstream accounts for the factor of five with ocean-floor loss, burial, unsearched ground, and a genuinely lower pre-290-million-year flux. Oard's deficit is 36,000 against 44, inside one year. The mainstream gap is a factor of five; his is nearly a thousand, and his has to be closed by one year of erosion that, on the same cratons, has to leave Barringer's ejecta blanket intact.

Oard's scaling checks out. His 2009 method scales the lunar count over 30 km by the ratio of surface areas and a gravitational focusing factor of 1.4. Recomputed for this article, the area ratio is 13.45 and his focusing factor is defensible, if anything low. He does make one error, comparing craters of equal diameter instead of equal impactors, since the same body makes a crater about 30 per cent smaller on Earth; that would halve his figure. But his lunar count of 1,900 craters over 30 km is about half of what Robbins' 2018 database of over two million lunar craters implies, and the two errors cancel.²⁷ The number near 36,000 survives. What it counts is the Earth's whole impact history, which on the calibrated lunar clock took four billion years.

Faulkner's 1999 evidence was a category error. His first model put the lunar impact basins at the Flood, made by "a narrow, intense, swarm of meteoroids travelling on parallel paths", because "The side of the moon that faces the earth is about evenly split between maria and highlands, but the lunar backside is nearly all (about 95%) highlands."²⁸ The maria are lava, not craters. They fill basins where the crust was thin enough for lava to reach the surface, which is the nearside. The largest impact basin on the Moon, South Pole–Aitken, is on the farside, and the farside impact flux matches the nearside. Faulkner named the test himself: "The existence of two cratering episodes would be difficult to explain with this model."²⁸ Mercury records the same early bombardment on the same chronology.²⁹

Part 3: The young-earth literature

The claim has a forty-year history and it should be told in the words of the people who made it, because they have done most of the work of testing it.

1984 to 2000. David Unfred started it in the Creation Research Society Quarterly: scaling the lunar maria gives "400 to 500 such impact scars on Earth", and "Evidence exists which supports the hypothesis that a major episode of impacts was concentrated within the time of the Flood-Judgment."³⁰ Froede and DeYoung in 1996 supplied a source: an exploding planet "at minimum the size of Earth" between Mars and Jupiter, whose debris arrived months before the Flood, "Due to causes beyond scientific testability".³¹ Spencer's two 1998 conference papers made the count "on the order of 10 to 20 thousand for Earth", again from the Moon, adding that "Only an event of the magnitude of the world-wide Flood of Genesis could be able to wipe out evidence of so many impacts on Earth."³² He rejected the exploding planet; Faulkner rejected it too, because planets do not explode. No replacement source has been agreed since. Faulkner's 1999 model is described above. Spencer's reply to it in 2000 contains the objection that would later sink both their positions: "The event at the time of the Flood as Danny suggests would be of very short duration, less than a month certainly. But I see no way of reconciling the astroblemes on Earth with such a short-lived event, since impacts are found on Earth in strata of all types, all through the Geologic Column".³³ Faulkner's reply conceded the point that matters most for this article: "I would go further and conclude that there are no biblical reasons to invoke impacts at the Flood."³⁴

Oard, 2009 to 2019. Oard's 2009 paper gave the number that circulates: "the earth should have 36,000 impact craters, with about 100 over 1,000 km and a few with diameters of 4,000 to 5,000 km. Such a great bombardment would pulverize a large portion of the earth's surface."³⁵ The energy, he wrote, was "beyond the scope of this paper to estimate".³⁵ A reader, Rod Bernitt, estimated it in a letter the next year and asked how the Earth avoided becoming a magma ocean. Oard's reply is the first pull quote above, and continued: "I would say that God was in charge of the Flood and likely orchestrated the catastrophe so as to avoid the crust turning into a magma ocean, the ocean boiling away, and a direct hit on the ark by an asteroid or by a huge tsunami in shallow water."¹ In 2012, answering Bernitt again, he endorsed a rule from the Flood Science Review that "for an author to invoke a miracle, it must be referenced in the Bible or it must be solidly backed up by evidence that it happened", adding "I believe these are wise words",³⁶ and, asked where the leftover impactors went, "I do not have an answer to this question."³⁶ His 2013 paper making the impacts the engine of Flood tectonics concedes in a footnote that "the amount of vapor and superheated water generated by 36,000 impacts would likely turn the earth's atmosphere into something akin to a pressure cooker and 'cook' everything on the earth's surface alive under normal conditions."³⁷ Baumgardner's reply in the same issue supplied the number, 4.4 × 10¹² J per square metre, and the objection that "I am aware of no physical mechanism by which such a massive bombardment of the earth might result in a large, spatially coherent isostatic imbalance".⁶ By 2014 the count was "must have been fewer",³⁸ and by 2019 "possibly in the thousands, but not the number that Spencer and I had earlier calculated using the Moon as an analogue."³⁹ No new crater data drove any step of that.

The reversals. Faulkner's 2014 paper moved the impacts to Day Four of Creation Week, on the grounds that "the appeal to a miraculous cooling mechanism at the time of the Flood ought to be less palatable than miraculous cooling during the Creation Week",³ and that the Ark is not a bunker. Spencer followed within months: "I am now prepared to change my perspective regarding impacts on earth in a young-age creation view. ... This is only possible due to God's intelligent supernatural intervention to protect earth."⁴⁰ Each man now holds the position the other refuted in 2000. Nothing was measured in between.

The institutions. Snelling's 1,100-page Earth's Catastrophic Past, the standard young-earth geology reference, has no chapter on impacts and names Chicxulub once, in a footnote.⁴¹ ICR's Clarey argues that "it's entirely possible there was never an impact at Chicxulub in the first place. All of the data can have non-impact explanations."⁴² Answers in Genesis's Snelling writes "There's no denying this Chicxulub impact occurred during the flood",⁴³ and that "many impact craters have been found at all different levels in the rock record of the flood".⁴³ CMI's current article says only "We don't rule out meteorites at the time of the Flood".⁴⁴ None of the three states a Flood-year count. The 36,000 figure belongs to Oard and Spencer, and this article attributes it to them.

2023. The longest cratering paper at the most recent International Conference on Creationism, Stenberg's 55 pages, argues that the craters are not impacts at all but steam explosions driven by accelerated-decay heat, that Barringer Crater is a volcanic maar, and that shock features are "not necessarily impact signatures" because underground nuclear tests produce them.⁴⁵ If he is right, every young-earth Flood crater identification since 1996 is void. The only pro-impact item at the same conference was a one-page poster.

Part 4: The energy, the effects, and the Ark

The energy. This is worked in full in The Heat Problem and summarised here. Converting Oard's 2009 inventory through the standard crater-scaling equations gives about 10²⁹ J, nearly all of it in the hundred craters over 1,000 km, each of which carries about 5 × 10²⁶ J.⁷ Boiling the whole ocean away takes 3 × 10²⁷ J. Kring and Cohen, the mainstream source the Biblical Creation Trust relies on, put "over 22,000 impact craters with diameters larger than 20 km" on the early Earth with "At least 10²⁸ J", spread over 20 to 200 million years, at "an average rate of once per 10²–10⁴ years", and conclude that the largest "may have vaporized the Earth's oceans".⁴⁶ Thirty-six thousand impacts in forty days is one every 96 seconds.

The concession. Summing every confirmed crater on Earth, Vredefort at 250 km down to a generous 20 km for the tail, gives about 7 × 10²⁴ J, of which Vredefort alone is 59 per cent. That is about 1.3 K of ocean warming. Chicxulub is a quarter of a degree. A Flood with a few hundred impacts has no impact heat problem, and Clarey's minimal position is thermally coherent. The problem is the lunar extrapolation, which is the young-earth side's own.

Beyond heat. Toon and colleagues' 1997 review scales the environmental effects by energy. Between 10⁶ and 10⁷ megatons, "dust and sulfate levels would be high enough to reduce light levels below those necessary for photosynthesis" and re-entering ejecta "would set fires over regions exceeding 10⁷ km²". Above 10⁷ megatons, "Tsunami cresting to 100 m and flooding 20 km inland could sweep the coastal zones of one of the world's ocean basins. Fires would be set globally. Light levels may drop so low from the smoke, dust, and sulfate as to make vision impossible."⁴⁷ One 100 km impactor, the size Oard uses as his example, is about 7 × 10¹⁰ megatons, sixty times past the top of that scale, and his inventory has about a hundred of them. A modern simulation of Chicxulub's tsunami, from an impactor a seventh the diameter, gives a 4.5 km wave at the crater, a 1.5 km wave 220 km out ten minutes later, open-water heights over 100 m across the Gulf of Mexico and over 10 m offshore along North Atlantic coasts, and seafloor scouring beyond 10,000 km.⁴⁸ And the impact winter Oard needs elsewhere is real: his 2019 Ice Age paper wants Chicxulub alone to cool the planet "by over 26°C for three to 15 years".³⁹ The same events cannot both warm the ocean to drive the Flood and darken the sky for a decade.

The Ark. Oard ran the Earth Impact Effects Program on his own example, a 100 km asteroid at 20 km/s, and published the output: "the most significant aspect would be the seismic shaking with a Richter scale energy of 11.8, which moves beyond 10,000 km from the impact!" and "At a distance of 10,000 km, there would also be a wind blast with a velocity of about 170 m/sec. At 5,000 km, the maximum wind would be about 470 m/sec. At 3,000 km away, the wind would be nearly 900 m/sec with about 6.5 m of ejecta falling on the surface. Even closer, the fireball would reach about 600 km high and be 44 times as intense as the sun."⁴⁹ Ten thousand kilometres is a quarter of the way round the planet; no point on Earth is more than twenty thousand from any other. The only published argument that the Ark survives is one paragraph of Spencer's from 1998: 100 impactors, an asserted 161 km danger radius, and so "a 3 percent probability of the Ark being within one of the 'at risk' zones".⁵⁰ It omits the other ten to twenty thousand impacts his companion paper asserts, and it takes the danger radius as 161 km where his own side's later run gives hurricane winds at 10,000. Samec's 2008 conference paper hands the Ark question back to that paragraph;⁵¹ nobody has redone it in twenty-eight years. The rest of the literature answers with a miracle: Oard's "orchestrated", Spencer's "It may be necessary to propose God somehow intervened to protect the Ark",⁹ Faulkner's "Noah's Ark, not Noah's bunker." Three authors independently note that Genesis records no impacts.

One point runs the young-earth way and should be stated. Lowery and colleagues found burrowing animals back inside the Chicxulub crater within years and "a thriving, high-productivity ecosystem was established within 30 kyr".¹⁶ Impacts are more survivable, for some organisms, than the older literature assumed. What came back within years was marine burrowers in a flooded basin. Noah's cargo was air-breathing land animals that had to find a working ecosystem on a burned, dark, acidified surface, after an event a hundred and eighty times Chicxulub's energy, repeated a hundred times.

Objections and responses

"Erosion and the Flood destroyed most of the craters." On stable cratons, 97 per cent of craters over 2.4 km survive 150 million years of erosion, kimberlite pipes a kilometre deep survive the whole Phanerozoic, and there is no size bias in retention. The same Flood year also has to leave Barringer's ejecta blanket intact.

"Over half the impacts hit the ocean and were subducted." Subducting the whole pre-Flood ocean floor is the 1.4 × 10²⁹ J heat load of catastrophic plate tectonics. The two escapes cannot both be used. And every crater that has been found buried is buried under ordered, dated, fossil-bearing sediment.

"The mainstream can't explain Earth's crater deficit either." It has a deficit of about a factor of five for large Phanerozoic craters, stated here, and explains it with ocean loss, burial, unsearched ground and a lower early flux. Oard's deficit is nearly a thousandfold inside one year.

"The Late Heavy Bombardment is disputed, so the lunar chronology is unreliable." The dispute is between a five-hundred-million-year spike and a smooth decline. Neither is a year, and both sit on the same fourteen-point sample calibration.

"Radiometric dates are the only thing separating the crater pairs." Clearwater East and West differ in palaeomagnetic direction, in the presence of Ordovician clasts, and in impactor chemistry. The fossil-meteorite exposure ages and the size-sorted dust arrival are orbital and cosmic-ray clocks, not decay clocks.

"This attacks a claim most creationists never made." Correct, and the article says so. The 36,000 figure is Oard's and Spencer's; ICR, AiG and CMI have never adopted a Flood-year count. What they have all published is that God protected the Ark from whatever impacts there were, and Snelling's claim that craters occur at every level of the Flood record concedes the stratigraphic ordering this article rests on.

"Chicxulub may not be an impact at all." That is ICR's position, and AiG's is the opposite. The 2016 drilling recovered 130 m of impact melt and breccia on the peak ring, shocked basement, and a global ejecta layer compositionally matched to the crater. Clarey's iridium argument, that the crater itself is iridium-poor, is the mainstream expectation: the vaporised impactor was dispersed worldwide, which is why the layer is global.

Issues and unanswered questions

Nobody has recomputed Spencer's Ark survival probability with a derived danger radius and the full impactor count. It is a short calculation and its result would settle the point.
Stenberg's claim that maars and underground nuclear tests reproduce shatter cones and planar deformation features has not been checked petrographically by either side.
The expected spacing of ejecta horizons in a single cored section under a 36,000-impact model has not been computed against the 46 observed.
Worraker's announced Part 6 on impact heat remains unpublished.
The mainstream explanation of the near-absence of craters older than 650 million years invokes a Neoproterozoic erosion event; it has independent support but is disputed, and a fair article should watch that literature.

Verdict

The Earth's crater record is a record of time. Craters lie at seven erosional levels, under ordered and dated sediment, in pairs that formed ages apart, with ejecta layers that are few, distinct and separately dated, and with fossil meteorites whose cosmic-ray clocks ran in space before they fell. The lunar record that the young-earth count is built on is itself dated, fourteen times over, across four billion years.

The Flood-year bombardment was never derived from Earth. It was scaled from the Moon, correctly, by authors who then discovered that their own number would melt the crust and boil the ocean, said so in print, and answered with a miracle that their own rule of evidence forbids. Two of the three principal authors have since moved the impacts out of the Flood. The ministries never adopted the count. The most recent conference paper on the subject denies that the craters are impacts.

What would change this verdict. A pair of adjacent craters shown by palaeomagnetism and clast content to be contemporaneous where the isotopes say otherwise. A cored Flood-attributed section with ejecta horizons every few metres. A mechanism by which meteorites falling in one year acquire cosmic-ray exposure ages that increase with height in the rock. A survivability calculation for the Ark that uses the full impactor count and a derived hazard radius. None exists.

Sources

1.
Bernitt, Rod. “How many impact craters should there be on the earth?” Journal of Creation 24(1):48–49. 2010. A reader's letter to the journal, with Michael Oard's reply under it. Bernitt estimated the energy of the impacts and asked how the Earth avoided becoming a magma ocean, which makes it the first published objection to the 36,000 figure. The article uses it for Oard's admission that the energy was too much.
1. 1a.
  Page 48: Oard's reply: “I am in total sympathy with the concerns of Mr. Bernitt. … I had to gulp hard after the calculations, and although I had not yet done the energy calculations, I knew that the impacts provided way too much energy.” ↩
2. 1b.
  Page 49: “I would say that God was in charge of the Flood and likely orchestrated the catastrophe so as to avoid the crust turning into a magma ocean, the ocean boiling away, and a direct hit on the ark by an asteroid or by a huge tsunami in shallow water. He did this only for the earth because of His creation, while he allowed the full assault on the other solid bodies of the solar system because there was no life on those bodies.” ↩ ↩
2.
Osinski, G. R. et al. “Impact Earth: A review of the terrestrial impact record.” Earth-Science Reviews 232:104112. 2022. An invited review by twelve authors, who maintain the Impact Earth database, successor to the Earth Impact Database. It lists 188 hypervelocity impact craters, made by very fast impacts, and 13 impact sites that lack evidence of shock metamorphism, which is rock changed by the force of an impact. The article uses the review's count of these craters and its figures on where they lie.
1. 2a.
  Section Abstract, page 1: “Based on these definitions and criteria, we list 188 hypervelocity impact craters and 13 impact craters (i.e., impact sites lacking evidence for shock metamorphism).” ↩
2. 2b.
  Page 15: “approximately two-thirds of impact craters and hypervelocity impact craters are located in the ancient cratonic areas of Australia, Europe, and North America, where (relative) tectonic stability and low rates of erosion favour preservation.” ↩
3. 2c.
  Page 29, section 7.3: “the oldest preserved hypervelocity impact structure on Earth is the Yarrabubba impact structure in Australia, which is dated at 2229 ± 5 Ma (2σ, 0.2%) as determined by U-Pb of monazite and zircon in impact melt rocks (Erickson et al., 2020). Thus, there are no impact structures from the first two-and-a-half billion years of Earth's existence”. ↩
4. 2d.
  Page 29: “Similarly, the Suvasvesi North and South structures, which are located ~7 km from each other, formed at least 630 Myrs apart (Schmieder et al., 2016).” ↩
5. 2e.
  Page 29: “These combined results confirm that East and West Clearwater did not form at the same time, as further supported by palaeomagnetic studies ... stratigraphic considerations (Ordovician clasts have been found in West, but not in East ...), and no meteoritic signature has been detected in Clearwater West, while Clearwater East shows a clear chondritic signature”. The ages given there are Clearwater West 286.2 ± 2.6 Ma and Clearwater East about 460–470 Ma. ↩ ↩
6. 2f.
  Page 29, section 7.3, last paragraph: “Based on the current record, synchronous multiple impacts on Earth are rare, with no robust evidence for a large multiple impact event”. ↩ ↩
7. 2g.
  Table 6, page 25: The seven-level "degree of erosion" scale after Dence 1972. Level 1, at Barringer and Bosumtwi, reads: “ejecta blanket, rim and crater-fill impactites predominantly preserved”. Level 7, at Lawn Hill and Tunnunik, reads: “ejecta blanket, rim and crater-fill impactites eroded; substructure exposed”. ↩
3.
Faulkner, Danny R. “Interpreting Craters in Terms of the Day Four Cratering Hypothesis.” Answers Research Journal 7:11–25. 2014. A creationist journal article that proposes most craters on the Moon and other solar system bodies formed when those bodies were made on Day Four of Creation Week, before the Fall, with a smaller cratering event at the Flood. The Earth, which already existed on Day One, was not part of that bombardment. The article counts it as a reversal, because the author places most craters on Day Four and argues that Flood impacts would need protection for the Ark that goes far beyond what Genesis describes.
1. 3a.
  “So, the appeal to a miraculous cooling mechanism at the time of the Flood ought to be less palatable than miraculous cooling during the Creation Week.” ↩
2. 3b.
  Section Applying the Day Four Cratering Hypothesis: “Furthermore, one must invoke extraordinary protection of the occupants of the Ark from the impacts during the Flood that goes far beyond the biblical description of God's provision of an ark. As creationist geologist Steve Austin has pointed out, Genesis records Noah's Ark, not Noah's bunker.” ↩
4.
Yue, Zongyu et al. “Lunar chronology model with the Chang'e-6 farside samples and implications for the early impact history.” Science Advances 12:eady9265. Feb 4, 2026. A research paper that refits the lunar chronology, the calibration that turns crater counts into ages, using samples that China's Chang'e-6 mission returned from the Moon's far side. The authors report that the far side is struck at about the same rate as the near side, and that the early impact rate declines smoothly with no abrupt changes. The article uses it for the calibration table and for the measured decline in impacts.
1. 4a.
  Table 1: Heading "Chronology calibrations in this study": fourteen surfaces with measured crater density N(1) and a laboratory age on a returned sample, including Cone crater 26.0 ± 0.8 Ma, North Ray 50.3 ± 0.8 Ma, Tycho 109 ± 4 Ma, Copernicus 800 ± 15 Ma, Chang'e-5's Oceanus Procellarum basalt 2,030 ± 4 Ma, Chang'e-6's Mare Apollo basalt 2,807 ± 3 Ma, Fra Mauro 3,922 ± 12 Ma, and the South Pole–Aitken basin 4,247 ± 5 Ma, by U-Pb, Pb-Pb, Ar-Ar and Kr-Kr. ↩ ↩
2. 4b.
  Page 2: “Figure S2 shows the two radiometric ages and corresponding N(1) values from the farside are within 95% confidence region of the lunar CF that were derived from the nearside data (Table 1). This suggests that the farside impact flux is similar to that of the nearside.” ↩
3. 4c.
  Page 2: “The frequency of impact events that produce craters 1 km or larger likewise exhibits an exponential decline before ~3.0 Ga and attains an almost invariant value afterward.” ↩
5.
Lindskog, A. et al. “Refined Ordovician timescale reveals no link between asteroid breakup and biodiversification.” Nature Communications 8:14066. 2017. A research paper that tightens the timescale of the Ordovician period, a stretch of Earth's history recorded in rock, and finds no link between an asteroid breakup and a burst of new species. The article uses it for the clock built from fossil meteorites in Swedish limestone and the zircon dates in the same beds.
1. 5a.
  Page 1: “A common resetting of the 40Ar/39Ar chronometer in recently fallen meteorites at 470 ± 6 Ma has been interpreted to reflect the breakup of the L chondrite parent body.” ↩
2. 5b.
  Section Abstract, page 1: “Here we report a zircon U-Pb date of 467.50 ± 0.28 Ma from a distinct bed within the meteorite-bearing interval of southern Sweden that, combined with published cosmic-ray exposure ages of co-occurring meteoritic material, provides a precise age for the L chondrite breakup at 468.0 ± 0.3 Ma.” ↩
3. 5c.
  Page 2: “Previous studies have shown that the meteorites have young 21Ne CRE ages (c. 0.1–1 Ma) that increase upward through the meteorite-bearing interval. As such, CRE analyses provide a relative timescale spanning the meteorite-rich rock interval that translates into sedimentation rates.” ↩
4. 5d.
  Page 2: “The sedimentation rates derived from CRE ages of fossil meteorites and U-Pb dates are in excellent agreement despite a tenfold difference in both stratigraphic and temporal resolution between the two data sets. The minimum sedimentation rate implied by the CRE data (3.3 mm ka−1) is close to the average rate implied by U-Pb data (3.1 mm ka−1)”. ↩ ↩
6.
Baumgardner, John. “Global tectonics — clarity, not confusion.” Journal of Creation 27(1):99–105. 2013. “2,675 J/kg to vaporize 0°C water”. A reply to Oard's impact model, which works out the energy that model needs and finds it would melt the top kilometer of rock and vaporize the ocean. The reply has one unit slip: its figure of 2,675 J/kg to vaporize water at 0°C should be 2,675 kJ/kg, so its statement that the impacts would vaporize all the ocean water overstates its own figure by 1,000; the rock-melting result is unaffected. The article uses it for the 1.1 km of rock that the impact energy would melt over the whole planet.
1. 6a.
  Page 105: “Hence, the impact energy density is sufficient to melt a layer of rock (4.4 x 10¹² J/m²)/[(1.3×10⁶ J/kg) (3,000 kg/m³)] = 1.1 x 10³ m = 1.1 km thick over the entire earth. This would obviously turn the earth's surface into a transient magma ocean.” ↩
2. 6b.
  Page 105: “Moreover, I am aware of no physical mechanism by which such a massive bombardment of the earth might result in a large, spatially coherent isostatic imbalance between the continental portion of the earth and that which had been deep ocean basin.” ↩
7.
Computed for this article in ../heat-problem/research/impacts.md with the crater-scaling equations of Collins, Melosh and Marcus, "Earth Impact Effects Program," Meteoritics & Planetary Science 40:817–840 (2005), at 20 km/s and 45°, validated against their own Chicxulub entry to 6 %. Oard's 2009 inventory totals about 10²⁹ J; a 1,000 km crater needs 4.8 × 10²⁶ J. The confirmed record (Vredefort 250 km, Chicxulub 180, Sudbury 130, and so on, with the remaining structures assigned 20 km each) totals about 7 × 10²⁴ J, of which Vredefort is 59 %; against the ocean's 5.5 × 10²⁴ J/K that is 1.3 K. Chicxulub's 1.6 × 10²⁴ J is 0.27 K. One 100 km impactor at 1.9 × 10²³ J is 4.5 × 10⁷ Mt on Collins' 4.18 × 10¹⁵ J/Mt; Oard's own example run gives a larger figure because his final crater is over 800 km. ↩ ↩
8.
Schmieder, Martin, and David A. Kring. “Earth's Impact Events Through Geologic Time: A List of Recommended Ages for Terrestrial Impact Structures and Deposits.” Astrobiology 20(1):91–141. Jan 2020. A list of recommended ages for the 200 proven terrestrial impact structures and 46 impact deposits, which are layers of ejecta, the debris an impact throws out, drawn from the primary literature as of September 2019 by Martin Schmieder and David A. Kring of the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston. The article uses its counts of 200 structures and 46 ejecta layers.
1. 8a.
  Section Introduction: “Only 200 proven impact structures (counting fields of small impact craters produced during the same event as one) and 46 individual horizons of proximal and distal impact ejecta (again, counting layers with the same age at different localities as one) have thus far been recognized on our planet.” ↩
9.
Spencer, Wayne. “Impacts and Noah's Flood — how many and other issues.” Journal of Creation 27(1):85–89. Apr 2013. An article in the Journal of Creation in which Spencer argues that impact craters on the continents would have been frequently buried by sediment or lava, or destroyed by alteration. He admits that counts of 36,000 or 58,000 impacts are difficult for creationists to accept, and he suggests God may have protected the Ark. The article uses it for both points, the buried craters and the crater counts.
1. 9a.
  Page 86: “Crater numbers such as 36,000 or 58,000 are difficult for creationists to accept. It is a perplexing question because creationists believe Noah, the Ark, and the animals survived the Flood. It may be necessary to propose God somehow intervened to protect the Ark.” ↩
2. 9b.
  Page 88: “These ocean impact craters could have been destroyed by the subduction in CPT. Impact craters on the continent would have been frequently buried under sediment, buried by lava, or could be destroyed by hydrothermal" alteration.” ↩
10.
Powars, David S., and T. Scott Bruce. “The Effects of the Chesapeake Bay Impact Crater on the Geological Framework and Correlation of Hydrogeologic Units of the Lower York-James Peninsula, Virginia.” Professional Paper 1612. U.S. Geological Survey. 1999. A U.S. Geological Survey professional paper on how the Chesapeake Bay impact crater shaped the rock layers that hold groundwater on the York-James peninsula in Virginia. The article uses it for how much sediment covers the crater.
1. 10a.
  Page 9: “Post-impact deposits from numerous marine transgressions across the lower mid-Atlantic Coastal Plain have buried the crater with about 1,300 to 1,600 ft of sediment. The seismic data show that most of these post-impact deposits dip concentrically into the crater, especially across the outer and inner rims. The post-impact deposits are commonly offset by numerous compaction faults”. ↩
2. 10b.
  Section Abstract, page 1: “The post-impact upper Eocene Chickahominy Formation caps the Exmore tsunami-breccia within the disruption boundary, and the upper Oligocene Old Church Formation is the first post-impact unit preserved across the disruption boundary west of the crater.” ↩
11.
Sieh, Kerry et al. “Australasian impact crater buried under the Bolaven volcanic field, Southern Laos.” PNAS 117(3):1346–1353. 2020. A paper on an Australasian impact crater that lies buried under the Bolaven volcanic field in southern Laos, and that dates the lava erupted over it. The article uses it for the field of glassy clasts called tektites that this impact scattered across about a tenth of Earth's surface, and for lava dates that place the impact among the eruptions of the field.
1. 11a.
  Section Introduction: “The Australasian strewn field, a horizon of glassy clasts ('tektites') quenched from molten ejecta of a bolide impact about 0.79 Ma, extends across about 1/10 of the Earth's surface — from Indochina to East Antarctica and from the Indian to western Pacific Oceans.” ↩
2. 11b.
  Section Volcanic field: “The dates show that eruptions occurred over a sustained period of time — from ∼16 Ma to ∼27 ka. Fourteen samples antedate the impact, 21 postdate it, and 2 are contemporaneous with the impact, within error. All 12 dates from lavas in the summit region and directly above the proposed crater are distinctly younger than the date of the impact.” ↩
12.
Dalrymple, G. Brent. “Radiometric Dating Does Work!” Reports of the National Center for Science Education 20(3):14–19. 2000. A short paper that describes a few typical radiometric dating studies to answer creationist claims that the method is unreliable. It argues that a few verified wrong ages do not prove the method invalid, because the methods are not infallible. The article uses it for the age of the Manson impact and the ash beds around its shocked-quartz layer.
1. 12a.
  Section The Manson Meteorite Impact and the Pierre Shale: “the radiometric ages agree, within analytical error, with the relative positions of the dated ash beds as determined by the geologic mapping and the fossil assemblages; that is, the ages get older from top to bottom as they should.” The Manson melt is dated at 74.1 Ma by argon-argon and its shocked-quartz layer lies in the Crow Creek Member of the Pierre Shale between bentonites of matching age. ↩
13.
Koeberl, Christian et al. “An international and multidisciplinary drilling project into a young complex impact structure: The 2004 ICDP Bosumtwi Crater Drilling Project—An overview.” Meteoritics & Planetary Science 42(4/5):483–511. 2007. An overview of a 2004 drilling project into the Bosumtwi crater, a young complex impact structure, by a team of twelve authors. The article uses it for the crater's age and for the lake sediment that fills it.
1. 13a.
  Page 488: “Precise fission track and step-heating 40Ar-39Ar dating on both Ivory Coast tektites and Bosumtwi impact glass established a reliable and currently accepted age of 1.07 ± 0.05 Myr for the Bosumtwi impact event (Koeberl et al. 1997a).” Page 492: “The maximum post-impact lacustrine sediment thickness above the annular moat is ~310 m”. ↩
2. 13b.
  Page 489: “the steep crater wall and deep lake basin limit wind-wave mixing of the water column, resulting in the accumulation of anoxic deeper parts of the lake ..., thereby limiting bioturbation and allowing for the preservation of laminated sediment varves”. ↩
14.
Sauerbrey, M. A. et al. “Mass movement deposits in the 3.6 Ma sediment record of Lake El'gygytgyn, Far East Russian Arctic.” Climate of the Past 9:1949–1967. 2013. A study of layers laid down by mass movements, such as slumps and slides, in the 3.6-million-year sediment record of Lake El'gygytgyn in the Russian Arctic. The article uses it for the lake's impact age and for the core drilled through its sediment.
1. 14a.
  Page 1950: “Lake El'gygytgyn (67°30′ N, 172°5′ E), formed after a meteorite impact 3.58 ± 0.04 Ma ago (Layer, 2000), is situated in the Far East Russian Arctic, 100 km north of the Arctic Circle.” ↩
2. 14b.
  Section Abstract, page 1949: “Three partly overlapping holes were drilled into the 320 m long sediment record at International Continental Scientific Drilling Program (ICDP) Site 5011-1 in the lake basin, recovering the Quaternary almost completely, and the Pliocene down to 3.6 Ma with 52 % recovery.” ↩
15.
Gulick, Sean P. S. et al. “The first day of the Cenozoic.” PNAS 116(39):19342–19351. 2019. A paper by the scientists of Expedition 364, a drilling expedition, on the rock deposited on the first day of the Cenozoic. The article uses it to reconstruct the first day of deposits in the Chicxulub crater, which the article calls the largest Phanerozoic crater.
1. 15a.
  Page 19348: “Generation of a deep crater, with a large opening in the rim that allowed rapid flooding of the crater by seawater, produced accumulation rates among the highest known in the geologic record (130 m/d).” ↩
2. 15b.
  Section Abstract, page 19342: “Site M0077 includes ∼130 m of impact melt rock and suevite deposited the first day of the Cenozoic covered by <1 m of micrite-rich carbonate deposited over subsequent weeks to years.” ↩
3. 15c.
  Page 19348: “The upper layers of charcoal were delivered to the crater years after the event (near top of Unit 1G) (61), probably from atmospheric rainout of fire-generated particles from wildfires around the globe.” ↩
16.
Lowery, Christopher M. et al. “Rapid recovery of life at ground zero of the end-Cretaceous mass extinction.” Nature 558:288–291. 2018. A research paper in Nature on how quickly life came back at ground zero of the end-Cretaceous mass extinction. The article states this finding openly, as a point that runs the young-earth way, and says that burrowing animals were back inside the Chicxulub crater within years.
1. 16a.
  Section Abstract: “We show that life reappeared in the basin just years after the impact and a thriving, high-productivity ecosystem was established within 30 kyr, faster than many sites across the globe.” ↩
2. 16b.
  Section Main text: “Clear, discrete trace fossils, including Planolites and Chondrites, characterize the upper 20 cm of the transitional unit (above 54 cm) (Fig. 1, Extended Data Fig. 2), providing unequivocal evidence for benthic life in the crater within years of the impact.” ↩
3. 16c.
  Section Main text: “The lowermost sample taken in this limestone (34 cm) contains the planktic foraminifer Parvularugolobigerina eugubina, which marks the base of Zone Pα ... we conclude that the base of the limestone lies very near the base of this zone, 30 kyr post-impact”. ↩
17.
Schulte, Peter et al. “The Chicxulub Asteroid Impact and Mass Extinction at the Cretaceous-Paleogene Boundary.” Science 327(5970):1214–1218. Mar 5, 2010. A research paper by Peter Schulte and 40 co-authors on the rock layer that the Chicxulub impact left at the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary, the line between the Cretaceous and Paleogene periods. The article uses it for the claim that one layer of ejecta, rock blasted out of the crater, is found worldwide at that boundary.
1. 17a.
  Section Abstract, page 1214: “Notably, a single ejecta-rich deposit compositionally linked to the Chicxulub impact is globally distributed at the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary.” ↩
18.
Schmitz, Birger et al. “An extraterrestrial trigger for the mid-Ordovician ice age: Dust from the breakup of the L-chondrite parent body.” Science Advances 5(9):eaax4184. 2019. A research paper by Birger Schmitz and fifteen others, arguing that dust from the breakup of an asteroid, the L-chondrite parent body, set off the mid-Ordovician ice age. The article uses it for how long dust from that breakup takes to reach Earth, which sorts the dust by size.
1. 18a.
  Page 3: “Large micrometeoroids (>0.1 mm) containing >32-µm chromite grains would normally require on the order of 0.3 to 2 Ma to reach Earth through Poynting-Robertson light drag from a breakup in the inner asteroid belt. Their first appearance in the strata may thus not reflect the precise time of the LCPB breakup. The most fine-grained, micrometer-sized dust from a breakup will have much shorter transfer times, in the order of 10 thousand years (ka).” ↩
19.
Özdemir, Seda et al. “Meteoritic highly siderophile element and Re-Os isotope signatures of Archean spherule layers from the CT3 drill core, Barberton Greenstone Belt, South Africa.” Meteoritics & Planetary Science 54(10):2203–2216. 2019. A research paper that reads the chemical signatures of meteorite material in spherule layers, which are layers of tiny round rock beads, from the Archean, the early part of Earth's history. The drill core comes from the Barberton Greenstone Belt in South Africa. The article uses it because the layers carry different impactor signatures, one layer after another.
1. 19a.
  Page 2204: Reporting Kyte et al. 2003 and Shukolyukov et al. 2000, whose findings the quotation gives. “The authors reported the presence of carbonaceous chondrite-like material, amounting to ~1%, 50–60%, and 15–30% in spherule layers S2, S3, and S4, respectively.” ↩
20.
Stöffler, Dieter, and Graham Ryder. “Stratigraphy and Isotope Ages of Lunar Geologic Units: Chronological Standard for the Inner Solar System.” Space Science Reviews 96:9–54. 2001. A paper that sets out the chronological standard for dating surfaces in the inner solar system, calibrated on the ages of lunar rock units. The article uses it for the method of counting craters on the Moon against dated samples.
1. 20a.
  Section Abstract: “The absolute ages of cratered surfaces in the inner solar system, including Mars, are derived by extrapolation from the impact flux curve for the Moon which has been calibrated on the basis of absolute ages of lunar samples.” ↩
21.
Bottke, William F., and Marc D. Norman. “The Late Heavy Bombardment.” Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences 45:619–647. 2017. A review article that re-examines the evidence for a burst of impacts on the early Moon and the inner planets, using lunar melt rocks, meteorite shock ages and computer models of where the impactors came from. The article uses it as one side of the live dispute over whether the early bombardment was a spike or a steady decline.
1. 21a.
  Section Abstract, page 619: “Lunar melt rocks and meteorite shock ages point toward a discrete episode of elevated impact flux between ∼3.5 and ∼4.0–4.2 Ga, and a relative quiescence between ∼4.0–4.2 and ∼4.4 Ga.” ↩
22.
Boehnke, Patrick, and T. Mark Harrison. “Illusory Late Heavy Bombardments.” PNAS 113(39):10802–10806. 2016. A research paper that models how argon gas leaks out of lunar rock samples, to test whether the argon ages that point to a spike in impacts could instead come from a steadily declining impact rate. The authors find that such a decline can produce apparent age peaks at about 3.9 billion years ago, and they admit that treating each sample as one diffusion domain is an oversimplification, though they think it unlikely to change the result. The article uses it as the other side of the dispute over the early bombardment.
1. 22a.
  Section Summary (last paragraph), page 10805: “Until such evidence is gathered, we conclude that a monotonic decrease in impactor flux explains all existing 40Ar/39Ar data from both lunar and meteoritic samples.” ↩
23.
Mazrouei, Sara et al. “Earth and Moon impact flux increased at the end of the Paleozoic.” Science 363(6424):253–257. Jan 18, 2019. A research paper that finds the impact rate on Earth and the Moon rose by a factor of 2.6 about 290 million years ago, at the end of the Paleozoic era. The article uses it to show that erosion has been too slight to erase large craters on stable continents.
1. 23a.
  Section Abstract: “We found that the impact rate increased by a factor of 2.6 about 290 million years ago. The terrestrial crater record shows similar results”. ↩
2. 23b.
  Page 256: “We found no evidence for size bias in retention of terrestrial craters”. “Thermochronologic data suggest that stable continental terrains experience low erosion or burial rates of up to 2.5 m Ma−1 (12), which equates to a maximum of 1.6 km vertical erosion (or deposition) over the past 650 Ma. This would likely be insufficient to eradicate craters with D ≥ 20 km, given that crater depths are approximately equal to ~10% of their original diameter (13).” “kimberlite pipes are relatively common throughout the Phanerozoic Eon (541 Ma ago to the present). Their spatiotemporal distribution (Fig. 4B) suggests only modest erosion (<1 km) on most cratons since 650 Ma ago, favoring the survival of D ≥ 20 km impact craters.” ↩
24.
Hughes, David W. “A new approach to the calculation of the cratering rate of the Earth over the last 125 ± 20 Myr.” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 317(2):429–437. 2000. A research paper that proposes a new way to calculate how fast Earth has been struck by craters over the last 125 ± 20 million years. The article uses it for the finding that crater counts on the most stable, best-explored continents rise in a straight line with age.
1. 24a.
  Page 431: “The linearity and the data fit are interpreted as indicating that the three regions in question are geologically stable, and that the erosion they suffered has been so limited that nearly all the craters larger than 2.4 km, formed in the last 100 to 150 Myr, are still detectable, datable and measurable.” ↩
2. 24b.
  Page 431: “So only about 66 per cent of the craters formed in the European region during the 0 < T < 350 Myr time period are still detectable. After exposures of 300, 250, 200 and 150 Myr, these percentages are 73, 81, 89 and 97 per cent, respectively.” ↩
25.
Bland, Philip A., and Natalya A. Artemieva. “The rate of small impacts on Earth.” Meteoritics & Planetary Science 41(4):607–631. 2006. A research paper that estimates how often small objects strike Earth. The article uses it for the claim that the crater record on stable continents is nearly complete for craters larger than 2 to 3 km.
1. 25a.
  Pages 626–627: “the terrestrial crater record on stable, well-explored cratons for the last ∼120 Ma is essentially complete for craters larger than 2–3 km, as has been suggested by Hughes (2000), although with some erosion of the smallest craters.” ↩
26.
Computed for this article in research/moon-flux-and-effects.md from Hughes 2000 Table 3 (production rate per whole Earth surface per 100 Myr, by diameter bin), Earth's 5.11 × 10⁸ km², a land fraction of 0.292, and the 541 Myr Phanerozoic: about 700 to 830 craters over 22 km on the whole Earth, 205 to 242 on land, against 38 (Mazrouei et al.) to 44 (Oard 2014) known. ↩
27.
Computed for this article in research/moon-flux-and-effects.md. Area ratio (6,371/1,737.4)² = 13.45. Gravitational focusing ratio [1 + (11.19/v∞)²]/[1 + (2.38/v∞)²] equals Oard's 1.4 at v∞ = 17 km/s and is 1.6 to 1.8 at 12 to 15 km/s. The same impactor makes a crater about 30 % smaller on Earth than on the Moon (Collins et al. equations 21 and 27, D ∝ v^0.44 g^-0.22, then D_final ∝ D^1.13), which would halve Oard's count; Robbins' 2018 database (6,972 lunar craters at or above 20 km) scaled to 30 km gives about 3,400 against Oard's 1,900, which doubles it. ↩
28.
Faulkner, Danny R. “A biblically-based cratering theory.” Creation Ex Nihilo Technical Journal 13(1):100–104. Apr 1999. A creationist article that proposes the Moon's craters formed in two episodes: small craters around the Fall or Creation Week, and the large basins and maria at the Flood. The article uses it as the young-earth model it examines in detail.
1. 28a.
  Section Summary: “The large impact basins and resultant maria were formed at the time of the Flood by a narrow, intense, swarm of meteoroids travelling on parallel paths.” Section A proposal for lunar and terrestrial impacts: “The side of the moon that faces the earth is about evenly split between maria and highlands, but the lunar backside is nearly all (about 95%) highlands.” ↩
2. 28b.
  Section Conclusion: “It will be necessary to examine other bodies in the solar system for evidence of two distinct episodes of cratering similar to that exhibited by the moon. The existence of two cratering episodes would be difficult to explain with this model.” ↩
29.
Marchi, S. et al. “Global resurfacing of Mercury 4.0–4.1 billion years ago by heavy bombardment and volcanism.” Nature 499:59–61. 2013. Section Abstract, page 59: “the oldest surfaces were emplaced just after the start of the Late Heavy Bombardment (LHB) about 4.0–4.1 Gyr ago”. A research paper that dates the oldest surfaces of Mercury to 4.0–4.1 billion years ago, when heavy bombardment and volcanism resurfaced the planet. The article uses it to show that Mercury records the same early bombardment on the same chronology. ↩
30.
Unfred, David W. “Asteroidal impacts and the Flood-Judgment.” Creation Research Society Quarterly 21(2):82–87. Sep 1984. A 1984 article in a creationist journal, the earliest source in the article's account of the young-earth impact idea. It scales the Moon's impact scars up to Earth and argues that a major episode of impacts came with the Flood-Judgment.
1. 30a.
  Page 83: “Dachille calculated asteroidal impacts based on the observed number of lunar maria. Proportionately there should be 400 to 500 such impact scars on Earth.” Page 86: “Evidence exists which supports the hypothesis that a major episode of impacts was concentrated within the time of the Flood-Judgment. This provides an energy source and a trigger for other geodynamic phenomena.” ↩
31.
Froede, Carl R. Jr., and Don B. DeYoung. “Impact events within the young-earth Flood model.” Creation Research Society Quarterly 33(1):23–34. Jun 1996. A 1996 article by two creationists in a creationist journal, proposing a source for the Flood's impacts: a single large planet that exploded and sent its debris through the solar system. The article uses it as the source of that exploding planet, which the authors say would be at least the size of Earth.
1. 31a.
  Page 27: “at this time the authors support the explosion of a single large planet composed of rock and ice (i.e., terrestrial, not gaseous like Jupiter). … Due to causes beyond scientific testability, the hypothetical planet disintegrated, exploded, and sent debris (asteroids and comets — i.e., rock and ice), throughout the solar system.” “it would appear that the planet would be at minimum the size of Earth.” ↩
32.
Spencer, Wayne R. “Catastrophic impact bombardment surrounding the Genesis Flood.” Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Creationism, 553–566. Pittsburgh: Creation Science Fellowship. Edited by R. E. Walsh. 1998. A paper in the proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Creationism, arguing for an impact bombardment surrounding the Genesis Flood. It gives a count of the Flood's impacts on Earth and calls the figure a very rough one. The article uses it for that count.
1. 32a.
  Page 556: “I would suggest tentatively that the total number of impacts would be on the order of 10 to 20 thousand for Earth, with impacts producing global effects being in the range of 40 to 100. This is only a very rough figure. Only an event of the magnitude of the world-wide Flood of Genesis could be able to wipe out evidence of so many impacts on Earth.” ↩
33.
Spencer, Wayne R. “Response to Faulkner's 'biblically-based cratering theory'.” Creation Ex Nihilo Technical Journal 14(1):46–49. Apr 2000. A short reply by Wayne Spencer, who wrote the two 1998 conference papers on impacts at the Flood, to Danny Faulkner's cratering theory, printed on the same page as Faulkner's answer. The reply says Spencer's papers argue for an impact bombardment surrounding the Flood, and holds that a short Flood event cannot explain impacts found through the whole geologic column. The article cites it for Spencer's side of the debate that followed his two 1998 conference papers.
1. 33a.
  “The event at the time of the Flood as Danny suggests would be of very short duration, less than a month certainly. But I see no way of reconciling the astroblemes on Earth with such a short-lived event, since impacts are found on Earth in strata of all types, all through the Geologic Column, unless all these strata are Flood deposits.” ↩
34.
Faulkner, Danny R. “Danny Faulkner replies.” Creation Ex Nihilo Technical Journal 14(1):47–49. Apr 2000. Faulkner's reply to Wayne Spencer's response, printed after it on the same Answers in Genesis page. The article uses it for Faulkner's own view of impacts and the Bible, in the 2000 exchange with Spencer.
1. 34a.
  “I agree with Wayne that there are no biblical reasons to invoke major impacts at the Fall. I would go further and conclude that there are no biblical reasons to invoke impacts at the Flood.” ↩
35.
Oard, Michael J. “How many impact craters should there be on the earth?” Journal of Creation 23(3):61–69. Dec 2009. A creationist article that estimates how many impact craters Earth should have by scaling up the Moon's crater counts. It counts about 1,900 craters over 30 km on the Moon and, allowing for Earth's greater gravitational cross-section, scales that to 36,000 craters over 30 km on Earth. The article uses it as the source of the 36,000 figure that circulates.
1. 35a.
  Section Size of the craters: Closing paragraph of the section. “Thus, it is safe to conclude that the earth should have 36,000 impact craters, with about 100 over 1,000 km and a few with diameters of 4,000 to 5,000 km. Such a great bombardment would pulverize a large portion of the earth's surface.” ↩
2. 35b.
  Section Impacts likely caused the Flood: “It is beyond the scope of this paper to estimate the effects of this energy, but regardless, the amount would have been devastating.” ↩
36.
Bernitt, Rod. “An impact Flood submodel — dealing with issues.” Journal of Creation 26(3):45–46. 2012. A reader's letter to the journal, with Michael Oard's reply under it. In the reply, Oard welcomes Bernitt's point about the trillions of asteroids from outside the solar system, but admits having no answer to one of Bernitt's questions. The article cites it in its account of Oard's 2009 to 2019 work.
1. 36a.
  Page 45: Oard quoting Joe Bardwell of the Flood Science Review, and adding "I believe these are wise words." “for an author to invoke a miracle, it must be referenced in the Bible or it must be solidly backed up by evidence that it happened … The cardinal sin should be to propose a supernatural event that cannot be backed up by a body of evidence that it actually happened”. ↩
2. 36b.
  Page 46: “I am glad Mr Bernitt sees the merit of the trillions of asteroids originating from outside the solar system, but I do not have an answer to this question.” ↩
37.
Oard, Michael J. “What do impacts accomplish in the first hour?” Journal of Creation 27(1):90–98. Apr 2013. A journal article by Oard that asks what the impacts do in their first hour. The article uses it in its account of Oard's 2009 to 2019 work, for the warning about heat from the impacts.
1. 37a.
  Page 98: Reference 44. “This creates a heat problem, in that the amount of vapor and superheated water generated by 36,000 impacts would likely turn the earth's atmosphere into something akin to a pressure cooker and 'cook' everything on the earth's surface alive under normal conditions.” ↩
38.
Oard, Michael J. “Precambrian impacts and the Genesis Flood.” Journal of Creation 28(3):99–105. Dec 2014. A Journal of Creation article arguing that the Precambrian rocks hold many impacts that have not been recognized, and that these rocks were laid down during the Flood. Of the 182 impacts reported as of 2011, 27 are in Precambrian rocks, and the article suggests many more are hidden by erosion and later geology. The article uses it for Oard's point that 58,000 impacts, the figure Spencer later reached, would have devastated Earth, so the real number must have been smaller.
1. 38a.
  Paragraph Second paragraph of the body: “However 58,000 impacts would have devastated Earth. Since it does not appear to have suffered that extent of damage, the number of impacts must have been fewer on Earth.” ↩
39.
Oard, Michael J. “Flood impacts reinforce volcanic cooling to start the Ice Age.” Journal of Creation 33(3):77–84. Dec 2019. A Journal of Creation article arguing that volcanic aerosols and meteorite impacts could cool the climate straight after the Flood and start the Ice Age at once, rather than hundreds of years later. It says climate models are simplifications of the actual climate. The article uses it for Oard's 2019 estimate of the cooling from the Chicxulub impact.
1. 39a.
  Section Great cooling inferred from the Chicxulub impact: “I believe there were many more than 200 impacts during the Flood, possibly in the thousands, but not the number that Spencer and I had earlier calculated using the Moon as an analogue.” ↩
2. 39b.
  Section Conclusions: “Just the late Flood Chicxulub impact, itself, could have cooled the global climate by over 26°C for three to 15 years with residual effects to 30 years.” ↩
40.
Spencer, Wayne. “Evaluating the Day Four Cratering Hypothesis.” Answers Research Journal 7:323–330. Sep 10, 2014. An evaluation of Faulkner's Day Four proposal by Wayne Spencer, the author who had argued that impacts began with the Flood. He now accepts the Day Four idea as a valid option, and he concludes that God must have protected the Earth from impacts whenever they happened. The article counts it as the second half of a reversal, because the Flood-impact author now accepts the Day Four view.
1. 40a.
  Section Discussion, paragraph final: “I am now prepared to change my perspective regarding impacts on earth in a young-age creation view. Rather than assuming impacts began at approximately the beginning of Noah's Flood, I would suppose solar system impacts took place on the fourth day of Creation but not on earth. This is only possible due to God's intelligent supernatural intervention to protect earth.” ↩
41.
Snelling, Andrew A. Earth's Catastrophic Past: Geology, Creation and the Flood. Institute for Creation Research, Dallas. 2009. A young-earth book in 2 volumes and 1,102 pages on geology and the Flood, whose first volume defends the Genesis record of creation and the Flood as history. It has no chapter, section or heading on impacts or craters, names Chicxulub once (footnote 31, p. 358), and mentions impacts as a Flood mechanism only in a list of speculations about the fountains of the deep (pp. 684–685). The article uses it as the standard young-earth geology reference, and it points out that the book has no chapter on impacts. ↩
42.
Clarey, Timothy L. “Chicxulub crater theory mostly smoke.” Acts & Facts. Institute for Creation Research. May 31, 2017. A popular version of Tim Clarey's 2017 paper in the Answers Research Journal, written by Clarey, Ph.D., for the Institute for Creation Research. It argues that the Chicxulub crater, blamed for killing the dinosaurs, has no significant amounts of iridium in its ejecta, and that its melt-rich layers are 330 to 990 feet thick, far thinner than the 5,000 to 10,000 feet expected. The article uses it as ICR's case against Chicxulub.
1. 42a.
  “An impact may have occurred at Chicxulub during the Flood, but if so, it seems to have been much smaller than commonly claimed, creating a mere fraction of the postulated effects. And it's entirely possible there was never an impact at Chicxulub in the first place. All of the data can have non-impact explanations.” ↩
43.
Snelling, Andrew A. “Dinosaur Killer: Chicxulub Asteroid Impact.” Answers magazine 15(1). Jan 1, 2020. A popular magazine article by Andrew A. Snelling, asking whether the asteroid that hit Chicxulub, which it puts at 7.5 miles wide, really killed the dinosaurs as secular scientists claim. It describes the crater as 125 miles (almost 200 km) wide. The article uses it as the Answers in Genesis statement that the Chicxulub impact happened during the Flood.
1. 43a.
  Section The Creation-Flood Model Perspective: “There's no denying this Chicxulub impact occurred during the flood.” ↩
2. 43b.
  Section The Creation-Flood Model Perspective: “And many impact craters have been found at all different levels in the rock record of the flood, along with some fossilized meteorites.” ↩
44.
Sarfati, Jonathan, and Joel Tay. Did a Chicxulub impact wipe out dinosaurs? If not, what did? Creation Ministries International. Apr 10, 2021. A question-and-answer article by Jonathan Sarfati and Joel Tay, answering a reader who asked whether the Chicxulub impact explains the dinosaurs' extinction. It argues that the iridium evidence is less well defined than once thought, and it asks how plants, bees and frogs could have survived a nuclear winter. The article uses it as the Creation Ministries International answer to Chicxulub, and the page was updated on 11 September 2026.
1. 44a.
  “We don't rule out meteorites at the time of the Flood, because they are consistent with the biblical Flood model, which speaks of the windows of the heavens being opened (Genesis 7:11, 8:2).” ↩
45.
Stenberg, Don. “Craters and cracks caused by accelerated nuclear decay heat throughout the solar system.” Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Creationism, 11–65. Cedarville University. Edited by J. H. Whitmore. 2023. A conference paper published in the proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Creationism in 2023. The article uses it as the longest cratering paper at the most recent International Conference on Creationism.
1. 45a.
  Page 17: “However, every one of these features is also present in underground nuclear explosions, as in the Sedan nuclear test crater and other craters formed by nuclear explosions. So these features are not necessarily impact signatures, but rather signatures of high energy explosions that generate high local pressures more generally.” ↩
46.
Kring, David A., and Barbara A. Cohen. “Cataclysmic bombardment throughout the inner solar system 3.9–4.0 Ga.” Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets 107(E2). 2002. A journal paper, on pages 4-1 to 4-6, about the impacts that struck the inner solar system 3.9 to 4.0 billion years ago, with figures for the Earth. It is the source behind the Biblical Creation Trust's impact-heat figure, and the article uses it as the mainstream source the Biblical Creation Trust relies on.
1. 46a.
  Pages 4–4: “it is clear that over 22,000 impact craters with diameters larger than 20 km were produced on the Earth, including 40 impact basins ≥1000 km in diameter ... At least 10²⁸ J (3 × 10¹² MT) of energy were delivered to the surface of the Earth.” “impact events producing craters ≥20 km diameter were occurring at an average rate of once per 10²–10⁴ years”. “The largest impact events, producing >1000 km diameter craters, may have vaporized the Earth's oceans”. ↩
47.
Toon, Owen B. et al. “Environmental perturbations caused by the impacts of asteroids and comets.” Reviews of Geophysics 35(1):41–78. 1997. A review article on how impacts by asteroids and comets could change the environment, with the damage scaled by the impactor's energy in megatons. It concludes that impacts below about 10 megatons are a negligible hazard. The article uses it to scale the environmental effects of an impact by its energy.
1. 47a.
  Section Abstract, page 41: “Between 10⁶ and 10⁷ Mt (intervals up to 1.5 × 10⁷ years, corresponding to comets and asteroids up to 4 and 6.5 km diameter), dust and sulfate levels would be high enough to reduce light levels below those necessary for photosynthesis. Ballistic ejecta reentering the atmosphere as shooting stars would set fires over regions exceeding 10⁷ km², and the resulting smoke would reduce light levels even further.” “At energies above 10⁷ Mt, blast and earthquake damage reach the regional scale (10⁶ km²). Tsunami cresting to 100 m and flooding 20 km inland could sweep the coastal zones of one of the world's ocean basins. Fires would be set globally. Light levels may drop so low from the smoke, dust, and sulfate as to make vision impossible.” ↩
48.
Range, Molly M. et al. “The Chicxulub Impact Produced a Powerful Global Tsunami.” AGU Advances 3(5):e2021AV000627. 2022. A 2022 paper in the journal AGU Advances about the tsunami that the Chicxulub impact made. The article cites it in its discussion of what a Chicxulub-size impact did beyond heat, next to Toon and colleagues' 1997 review.
1. 48a.
  Page 2: “About 2.5 min after contact of the projectile, a curtain of ejecta pushing water outward from the impact produced a 4.5-km-high wave (Figure 1a). ... At 10 min, after all the ejecta had fallen, a 1.5-km-high wave, known as a rim wave, located 220 km from the point of impact was left propagating throughout the deep ocean.” Page 7: “The tsunami heights in open waters of the Gulf of Mexico are generally higher than 100 m. Along many North Atlantic coastal regions and some South America Pacific coastal regions the models show over 10 m offshore amplitudes.” Section Abstract: The abstract says the tsunami. “likely scoured the seafloor and disturbed sediments over 10,000 km from the impact origin.” ↩
49.
Oard, Michael J. “An impact Flood submodel — dealing with issues.” Journal of Creation 26(2):73–81. 2012. A journal article by Oard that sets out the impact submodel, which starts the Flood and drives its early tectonics, sediment and deposition. Oard calls the whole model impact vertical tectonics (IVT), and the article works out the effects of a 100 km asteroid hitting Earth at 20 km/s with a computer program. The article uses it in its section on the Ark.
1. 49a.
  Page 74: “But the most significant aspect would be the seismic shaking with a Richter scale energy of 11.8, which moves beyond 10,000 km from the impact! This seismic shaking is about three orders of magnitude more severe than the largest earthquakes on Earth, and it is this seismic shaking that is the most devastating effect far from the impact site.” “At a distance of 10,000 km, there would also be a wind blast with a velocity of about 170 m/sec. At 5,000 km, the maximum wind would be about 470 m/sec. At 3,000 km away, the wind would be nearly 900 m/sec with about 6.5 m of ejecta falling on the surface. Even closer, the fireball would reach about 600 km high and be 44 times as intense as the sun.” ↩
50.
Spencer, Wayne R. “Geophysical effects of impacts during the Genesis Flood.” Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Creationism, 567–579. Pittsburgh: Creation Science Fellowship. Edited by R. E. Walsh. 1998. A paper in the same proceedings, on what impacts would do to the Earth's surface during the Flood. It works out the chance that the Ark lay inside one of the zones at risk from 100 large impacts. The article uses it in its section on the Ark.
1. 50a.
  Page 577: “We could assume there were 100 large impacts of projectiles 1 Km diameter and greater. … Assume that a circle of 161 Km radius (100 miles), measured from the impact center, would define an 'at risk' area. The Earth's surface area is approximately 5.1 X 10^8 Km². The total area of 100 circular zones 161 Km in radius would be 1.6 X 10^7 Km². Dividing these areas implies a 3 percent probability of the Ark being within one of the 'at risk' zones.” ↩
51.
Samec, Ronald G. “Is the Moon's orbit 'ringing' from an asteroid collision event which triggered the Flood?” Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Creationism, 255–261. Creation Science Fellowship, Pittsburgh. Edited by A. A. Snelling. 2008. A conference paper in the proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Creationism, asking whether an asteroid collision set the Moon's orbit ringing and triggered the Flood. The article cites it in its discussion of whether the Ark could survive an asteroid impact.
1. 51a.
  Pages 259–260: “At first these figures would suggest devastating effects (Toon, Zahnle, & Morrison, 2008) that would imperil even the Ark of Noah. However, Wayne Spencer (1998a) gives evidence that such an event (the collisions of 10 km class asteroids) could have triggered the flood and that such collisions would have been survivable by Noah and the occupants of the Ark (Spencer, 1998b).” ↩