Mount St. Helens

"These unconsolidated deposits, as much as 20 m thick, are characterized by well-defined, chiefly plane-parallel bedding sets separated by erosion surfaces." — Peter Rowley and colleagues, GSA Bulletin, 1985, in the paper Austin cites for his lamination claim¹

"They are quite correct that the sediment layers at Mount St. Helens were still soft when the canyon system was carved into them" — Andrew Snelling, Answers in Genesis, 2020²

"It would appear that about ten percent of the deposited logs were in an upright position." — Steven Austin on the Spirit Lake stumps, 2010³

Summary

Mount St. Helens is the young-earth movement's best field site.  Steven Austin went there while the eruption was still going, measured what he saw, and published numbers that hold up.  The measurements are sound.  The problem is what they are asked to prove.

Nine conclusions, stated first.

1. Austin's quantities check out against the USGS, one by one. His 25-foot deposit that "accumulated in less than one day on June 12, 1980" is the USGS's "about 8 m" of pyroclastic fill in the big phreatic-explosion pit.⁴⁵ His 23 square miles of blocked valley is the USGS's own figure. His energy figure is the right order against the USGS's 1.34 × 10²⁵ ergs.⁶⁴⁵
2. The stratification claim restates mainstream sedimentology, then attacks a view nobody holds. Austin's own cited source, Rowley and colleagues 1985, reports beds "2 mm to >1 m" thick, calls the deposits "unconsolidated", and attributes them to antidunes and chute-and-pool structures in "high-flow–regime pyroclastic processes."¹ Its body puts single beds inside single flows.¹ Austin's claim that "conventionally, sedimentary laminae and beds are assumed to represent longer seasonal variations, or annual changes" has no citation in either 1986 paper.⁴
3. The Toutle canyon was cut in loose debris, and every young-earth source says so. Glicken measured the debris-avalanche deposit at 1.85 grams per cubic centimetre against 2.31 for the mountain it came from, "dilated by about 20 percent", with porosity near 32 per cent.⁷⁷ Austin's own technical page says the flood "downcut the rockslide and pyroclastic flow deposits". Snelling concedes the point outright.⁸²
4. The flow that cut it was modest, and this partly helps the creationist side. Waitt and colleagues put the flood at the foot of the cone at "at least 13,800 m3/sec", about 1,200 times below the Missoula flood's peak. It drained a temporary crater lake of 4 million cubic metres.⁹⁹¹⁰ The canyon holds three to ten million cubic metres of debris. That is roughly one volume of water per volume of rock, better than the three-to-one Austin needs for the Grand Canyon. The number favours the catastrophist. But it is a property of the loose bed.
5. The drainage network took three years. Rosenfeld and Beach, whom Austin's 1986 bibliography cites, mapped the new Toutle network six times between October 1981 and October 1982. They name its most significant single event a rainstorm on 20 February 1982, a month before the eruption Austin credits.¹¹⁴ Major and colleagues put the total at "nearly 3 years to fully integrate a new drainage network across the deposit surface."¹²
6. The upright-stump discovery is real, and a mainstream geologist made it first. William Fritz published transported upright stumps in Geology in December 1980 and drew the Yellowstone conclusion in his own abstract. That was three years before Harold Coffin's note and six years before Austin's paper.¹³ Coffin added floating upright stumps, and Fritz answered him in print the same year.¹⁴
7. Spirit Lake deposits stumps upright but cannot bury them. Shinneman and colleagues cored the lake in 2018. The entire post-eruption sediment column is 17 centimetres, accumulating at "roughly 0.25 cm per year."¹⁵ Austin's average upright stump is 20 feet tall, so burial takes centuries on any rate the cores allow.⁴ Every stump actually buried there was buried by a lahar or a pyroclastic flow, a second catastrophe.
8. The strongest number the young-earth side has published is Austin's own, and it points the wrong way. About ten per cent of the deposited logs stood upright.³ A living forest is close to a hundred per cent upright. So the Spirit Lake analogue predicts the wrong upright fraction for any fossil forest a geologist would mistake for one that grew in place.
9. The potassium-argon experiment shows a real limitation of the method. It is not evidence for a young earth. Five preparations of one rock disagreed by a factor of eight. Between 96 and 99 per cent of the argon measured was indistinguishable from air. Mainstream workers later found crystals in Mount St. Helens magma "extending back hundreds of thousands of years from eruption age."¹⁶

Part 1: What happened, and what Austin got right

The event

On 18 May 1980 the north flank of Mount St. Helens failed.  The USGS chronology: "a blast broke through the remainder of the flank, spewed ash and debris over a sector north of the volcano, overtook the massive avalanche, and devastated an area nearly 30 km from west to east and more than 20 km northward from the former summit of the volcano."⁵  Six hundred square kilometres "was blanketed by a deposit of hot debris carried by the blast."⁵

The landslide is one of the largest in recorded history.  Voight and colleagues measured its deposit as "unconsolidated, poorly sorted volcaniclastic debris" burying about 60 square kilometres to an average depth of 45 metres, 2.8 cubic kilometres in place.  Glicken's later mapping revised that to 2.5.⁵⁵⁷  Susan Kieffer put the lateral blast's thermal energy at 24 megatons.  Friedman and colleagues put the whole 1980 sequence at 320 megatons of TNT, about 21,000 Hiroshima bombs.⁵⁵

Eruptions continued.  Pyroclastic flows ran down the north flank on 25 May, 12 June, 22 July, 7 August and 16 to 18 October 1980.  Dome-building went on until 1986 through seventeen episodes with "hundreds of small explosions of gas and steam".⁵¹⁷  On 19 March 1982 an explosive eruption melted the crater snowpack and sent a flood and a lahar down the North Fork Toutle River.⁹

The numbers Austin published

Steven Austin, an ICR geologist with a PhD from Penn State, visited the mountain repeatedly.  He published his conclusions twice in the summer of 1986: as ICR Impact 157 in July and as a paper at the First International Conference on Creationism in August.¹⁸⁴  His bibliography lists USGS Professional Paper 1250, Rowley 1985, Waitt 1983, Rosenfeld and Beach 1983, Coffin 1983 and Fritz 1980.⁴  He had the primary literature in front of him and used it.

His four headline quantities against that literature:

Austin's timing is if anything too cautious.  The USGS table for 12 June records the 2111 PDT event as the "Main event, producing pyroclastic flows.  Eruptive activity ceased at about 0200 PDT of June 13".⁵  That is under five hours.  Snelling and Austin both later tightened it to three hours, and the primary supports them.²³

The erosion is extraordinary too, and the USGS says so.  Between the eruption and September 2018 the Toutle carried "about 405 million tons of sediment into the lower Cowlitz River—enough to bury downtown Portland, Oregon, to a depth of 300 feet".  Transport is "still 10 times greater than pre-eruption levels" four decades on.⁶  Volcanology accepts this.  Pierson and Major write that after an explosive eruption "postdisturbance unit-area sediment yields are among the world's highest", and attribute them to "large volumes of erodible fragmental material."¹⁹

Part 2: Claim one, stratification forms fast

What Austin says

In his own words: "Up to 600 feet thickness of strata have formed since 1980 at Mount St. Helens… These deposits include fine pumice ash laminae and beds from one millimeter thick to greater than one meter thick, each representing just a few seconds to several minutes of accumulation.  Conventionally, sedimentary laminae and beds are assumed to represent longer seasonal variations, or annual changes, as the layers accumulated very slowly.  Mount St. Helens teaches us that stratification does form rapidly by flow processes."⁴

The observation is correct.  Everything after the word "Conventionally" is the problem.

The source he cites already said it

Austin's citation for the fine lamination is the 1985 GSA Bulletin paper by Rowley, MacLeod, Kuntz and Kaplan on the finely bedded pyroclastic deposits of the north flank.  Its abstract:

"These unconsolidated deposits, as much as 20 m thick, are characterized by well-defined, chiefly plane-parallel bedding sets separated by erosion surfaces… Individual beds range in thickness from 2 mm to >1 m.  Cross-bedding, in which bedding sets dip gently to the north or locally to the south, is abundant.  Cross-bedding is generally associated with large longitudinal dunes, apparently antidunes.  Some cross-bedding sets, however, constitute small longitudinal anti-dunes (chute-and-pool structures) containing stoss-side beds that migrated south and dip steeply south toward the crater source.  We suggest that PBPF deposits, base-surge deposits, and ignimbrite-veneer deposits are products of a broad spectrum of high-flow–regime pyroclastic processes."¹

Austin's "one millimeter thick to greater than one meter thick" is Rowley's "2 mm to >1 m".  Austin's "just a few seconds to several minutes" is Rowley's high-flow-regime traction transport.  Antidunes and chute-and-pool structures form only in fast, supercritical flow.  A sedimentologist who sees them in an outcrop knows the bed was laid down in seconds.  Rowley's manuscript was accepted 24 May 1985 and printed that November, so the fast interpretation was in print before Austin wrote.¹

The body of the paper goes further and says how long a bed took.  The chute-and-pool structures were "formed during highest-velocity flow regimes".  The stoss-side beds, "inclined more steeply than the angle of repose, indicate rapid deposition".¹  The discussion puts single beds inside single flows: "Each set is probably the result of a different flow, whereas individual beds within bedding sets may result from changing conditions within single flows that alternatively eroded and deposited as they swept by."¹  A pyroclastic flow sweeps past a point in seconds.  That sentence is in the paper Austin's own bibliography cites.¹¹

Professional Paper 1250 says the same.  Rowley, Kuntz and MacLeod describe the 12 June pit wall as "four flow units that dip several degrees to the north and that have thicknesses, from base to top, of 2.3, 2.6, 1.2, and 19.2 m".  Each unit is one emplacement pulse.⁵  They read the internal grading in the scheme Sparks and colleagues published in 1973: "Each flow unit consists of poorly sorted shards, pumice fragments, and lithic fragments that are generally, but not everywhere, normally graded with respect to dense lithic clasts and reversely graded with respect to light pumice clasts".⁵  The framework for reading these beds as instantaneous was seven years old when the mountain blew.

The missing citation

Austin asserts that "conventionally, sedimentary laminae and beds are assumed to represent longer seasonal variations, or annual changes."  Neither the Impact article nor the conference paper gives a source.¹⁸⁴

There is no source because the claim is a category error.  Geologists do read some laminated sequences as annual.  Those are varves, laid down in still, deep, cold, oxygen-poor lake water.  They are identified by criteria a pyroclastic bed cannot meet: a graded silt-to-clay couplet, or a spring diatom bloom over a winter clay, in a fixed repeating order, checked against radiometric anchors.  Whether varves should be read as years is a real argument, made at length in Lake Varves.  It has nothing to do with a pumice bed on a volcano flank.  Volcanologists do not count years in an ignimbrite.  No creationist source surveyed here names a pre-1980 geologist who said they did.

What the claim does establish

A reader who pictures sedimentary rock as dust settling grain by grain has a wrong picture, and 600 feet of bedded deposit in six years is a good corrective.  Austin is right that a layer is not a clock.  He is wrong that anyone competent thought it was.

One detail in the June deposits helps the creationist case elsewhere.  Just south of Spirit Lake the USGS found that "largely uncharred wood fragments and logs are abundant between flow units;  flow units here were deposited in a fan at the lake edge on top of floating wood or floating wood swashed back on top of newly deposited flow units."⁵  Wood and sediment were interleaving on a scale of hours.  That belongs in any discussion of coal measures.  See Coal.

Part 3: Claim two, the "Little Grand Canyon" of the Toutle

The claim

This is the flagship image.  Austin: "the 'Grand Canyon' of the Toutle River breached by the mudflow of March 19, 1982.  This canyon system is a one-fortieth scale model of the real Grand Canyon."  The inference: "Geologists should learn that the long time scale they have been trained to attach to landform development may be misleading."⁴

Tas Walker's version for Creation Ministries International gives dimensions: side walls "up to 40 m (140 ft) high", width "up to 45 m (150 ft)", cut by the 19 March 1982 mudflow "in a single day.  So, the creek did not cause the canyon.  The canyon caused the creek."²⁰

The material, which nobody disputes

Harry Glicken mapped the debris-avalanche deposit for his doctorate and measured its bulk density in the field by sand-cone test.  His result: "The mean density of the samples from debris avalanche (1.85 g/cm3) is significantly less than the calculated mean density of the old mountain (2.31 g/cm3).  In fact, all the density measurements of the debris-avalanche deposit are significantly less than all the measurements of the material making up the old mountain.  This suggests that during the events of blast and the rockslide-debris avalanche, the material from the mountain was dilated by about 20 percent before the bulk of it was deposited as the debris-avalanche deposit."⁷  He reports the deposit at "a mean porosity of roughly 32 percent", a figure he takes from Voight and colleagues.⁷

So the 1982 flood cut pulverised rock.  It was one-fifth less dense than the mountain it came from, one-third empty space, with no cement and almost no cohesion.  The USGS definition in Professional Paper 1250 is "unconsolidated, poorly sorted volcaniclastic debris".⁵

The young-earth sources say the same thing.

• Austin's ICR research page: the flood "downcut the rockslide and pyroclastic flow deposits north of the volcano."⁸
• Austin's Figure 2 caption in 1986: "The rockslide and pumice deposited in the region of the headwaters of the river have been eroded to a depth of more than 100 feet forming a new dendritic drainage pattern."⁴
• Austin in 2010: "Individual canyons on the debris avalanche deposit have a depth of up to 140 feet and are cut through landslide debris and pumice from pyroclastic flows."³
• Snelling in 2020, answering critics directly: "They are quite correct that the sediment layers at Mount St. Helens were still soft when the canyon system was carved into them, but that's exactly the point with respect to the sediment layers in the Kaibab plateau through which the Grand Canyon was carved."²

That last sentence is the honest state of the argument.  The soft-substrate objection is granted.  The rescue is a different claim about the Grand Canyon's own strata, tested on its own ground in Folded Rocks.

How big the flow was

The number usually quoted against Austin is measured in the wrong place.

Kevin Scott's Professional Paper 1447-A is the USGS's treatment of every lahar in the Toutle-Cowlitz system.  On the 1982 event his abstract is dismissive: "The relatively small 1982 lahar also formed from a volcanically induced meltwater surge."²¹  The mechanism: "The main flood surge transformed to a lahar by sediment bulking as the flow left the crater and crossed the debris avalanche surface".²¹  His gauged peaks are 960 cubic metres per second at Kid Valley, 650 at Tower Road and 450 at Highway 99.²¹  Those gauges sit 58, 73 and 81 kilometres below the crater.⁹  None is near the canyon.

The figure for the canyon reach is in Waitt's Science paper.  Where the flood came off the bedrock steps at the foot of the cone it had "an estimated peak discharge of at least 13,800 m3/sec (about 4 m deep, 230 m wide, with a velocity of 15 to 20 m/sec)."⁹  That is fourteen times the Kid Valley figure, and it is the number that belongs in the comparison.

So the flow was not tiny.  It was about a thousandth of the Missoula flood and, in Waitt's own comparison, roughly a tenth of the 18 May 1980 lahars.⁹

The water-to-rock ratio, which favours the creationist side

Erosive efficiency is water against rock, and both numbers now exist.

The water came from a temporary lake in the crater, formed when the blast melted the snowpack.  Waitt's strandlines put its maximum volume near 4 million cubic metres.  Pierson and Scott's abstract prints the same figure with its exponent intact: "a 4 × 10⁶ m³ flood of water from the crater."⁹²²

The rock is the canyon.  A V-shaped section 45 metres wide and 43 metres deep is about 968 square metres.  Over three to ten kilometres of channel that is 2.9 to 9.7 million cubic metres.  The flood also cut channels "by 5 to 11 m" as far as 35 kilometres out, so the true total is larger.⁹

That gives a water-to-rock ratio between about 1.4 : 1 and 0.4 : 1.  A second route agrees.  The lahar ran at "75 to 90 percent (by weight)" solids.  At a rock density of 2,650 kilograms per cubic metre that is 0.9 to 0.3 volumes of water per volume of sediment.⁹

Now the numbers the young-earth model needs.  In Grand Canyon: Monument to Catastrophe Austin gives the Missoula flood about 500 cubic miles of water removing 50 cubic miles of rock, near 10 : 1.  He gives his own breached lakes about 3,000 cubic miles of water removing 1,000 cubic miles of rock, near 3 : 1.²³  The 1982 Toutle flood beat both by a factor of three to ten.

That result is real and should not be softened.  But it does not transfer, because the ratio is a property of the bed.  Material at 1.85 grams per cubic centimetre with 32 per cent porosity and no cement is already loose, so a flood carries away nearly as much of it as it has water to carry.⁷  Austin needs 3 : 1 in Kaibab Limestone, Coconino Sandstone and 1,700 metres of Vishnu Schist.  Mount St. Helens shows 1 : 1 in wet pumice.

The flank canyons

Because the Toutle feature is cut in debris, the harder claim has moved to Step Canyon and Loowit Canyon on the north flank, where there is real rock.  Answers in Genesis: "This amazing feature was cut through soft debris, but another eruption two months later (on May 19, 1982) melted a snowpack that cut through hard basalt bedrock.  The resulting Loowit Canyon was more than 100 feet (30 m) deep.  Nearby, the avalanche cut through lava and ash layers to form a third canyon, Step Canyon, up to 600 feet (180 m) deep."²  Austin 2010 says the same: "Bedrock was eroded up to 600 feet deep."³

Four things are wrong with this.  The corrections come from the USGS volume Snelling's own first footnote cites.

There was no eruption on 19 May 1982.  The explosive snowmelt event was 19 March 1982.  That is the date Austin gives, the date on the USGS photo caption, and the date in the Science paper Austin cites.⁹¹⁷  The 14 to 20 May 1982 episode was non-explosive and produced no flood.²⁴

The material is not basalt bedrock.  Rowley, Kuntz and MacLeod describe the flank channels as "incised in older 1980 pyroclastic flows and in pre-1980 volcanic rocks, which consist largely of moderately well consolidated breccias and much subordinate lava flows and tuff."⁵  Volcanic breccia is cemented rubble.  Walker at CMI says Loowit was gouged "in part through old, hard volcanic rock called andesite".  The words "in part" do real work, and Answers in Genesis drops them.²⁰

The channels were not new.  "Both these channels, as well as some smaller channels, largely coincide with stream channels that existed before the eruption of May 18.  Pyroclastic flows thus were partly directed down preexisting ravines and enlarged them."⁵  Deepening an old ravine is not creating a canyon.

They were not cut in a day.  Six separate 1980 eruptions sent flows down that flank, and lahars have worked on it every wet season since: "During the eruption of October 16-18, the walls of the stairsteps were further modified by local removal of more than several meters of bedrock."⁵  Walker again gets it right where AiG does not: "mudflows eroded the canyon in a few months in the second half of 1980."²⁰

One more USGS observation undercuts the "canyon" framing: "pit walls in pyroclastic material have gentle slopes because the deposits have such low strengths".⁵  Steep walls in loose material collapse until the slope is stable.  That is why the Toutle canyon has widened ever since.

The scale model, checked in more than one dimension

"One-fortieth scale model" has been repeated for forty years.  It scales in depth and in nothing else.  Take the Grand Canyon dimensions from Austin's own book and divide by forty.²³

The Toutle feature is a slot.  The Grand Canyon is a broad valley with a slot in the bottom of it.  A canyon cut in one day is narrow because nothing has had time to widen it.  Width is exactly the part that needs either time or a far wider flow.

The length row is the weakest.  Rosenfeld and Beach published maps rather than channel lengths.  What they fix is the outer bound, because the debris avalanche the canyon is cut into fills only "the upper 18 km of the North Fork Toutle River valley."¹¹  Nobody on either side has surveyed the length.

The volume comparison is worse.  The canyon holds 2.9 to 9.7 million cubic metres.  A true one-fortieth linear model of a canyon of order 4,000 cubic kilometres would have to remove 4,000 ÷ 40³ = 0.0625 cubic kilometres, or 62.5 million cubic metres.  The Toutle canyon is six to twenty times too small for its own claimed scale factor.

The erosion curve has already flattened

Major, Mosbrucker and Spicer gauged four Toutle-basin catchments from 1980 to 2015.  Yields started "several hundred times greater than probable pre-eruption yields" and then "declined sharply over the first 5 years following the 1980 eruption."¹²  Green River, which received ash on its hillsides but no valley fill, "declined rapidly and returned to pre-eruption level within about 5 years."¹²  Net erosion from the debris-avalanche deposit "from 1999 to 2009 was about 40% less than that from 1987 to 1999".  The kind of erosion changed too.  Since the mid-1980s "magnitudes of lateral erosion have generally outpaced those of incision."¹²¹²

Downcutting was a first-few-years event that ran until the loose material in its path was gone.  What continues is banks falling in, and the thing being consumed is a finite pile of rubble.

Austin records the same thing: "Erosion has occurred intermittently since then, but most of the streams were established in their present channel locations on March 19, 1982."³  His own 1986 Figure 3 caption dates the photographed exposure to August 1984.  That is four years of erosion.⁴

The drainage network took three years

Walker says the canyon caused the creek.²⁰  Austin says most of the streams were established on 19 March 1982.³  The study that mapped that network says otherwise, and Austin's 1986 bibliography cites it.⁴

Charles Rosenfeld and Gary Beach flew the upper North Fork Toutle for Oregon State from October 1981 to January 1983.  They drew six interpretative maps at 1:24,000, the last two dated 5 March and 13 October 1982.¹¹  They found a network built by winter storms, one storm at a time: "The development and headward migration of gullies and streams progressed rapidly throughout the study area during the winter observation period (November 1981 to March 1982)."¹¹  The largest single step was a storm.  "The most significant changes affecting the evolution of the drainage network occurred in February 1982.  A series of high-intensity, long-duration storm events culminated on 20 February with the inundation of Jackson Lake, a resulting flood surge downriver, and the failure of the spillway located on the northern sediment retention dam."¹¹

That rainstorm came twenty-seven days before the eruption Austin credits.  Their 5 March 1982 map already shows most of the network in place.¹¹  Major, Mosbrucker and Spicer put the total at "nearly 3 years to fully integrate a new drainage network across the deposit surface."¹²  Widening kept going after that.  Behind the south retention dam the floodplain went "from approximatley 275 m (900 ft) to 800 m (2,640 ft)" in a single year.¹¹

The report has limits.  Rosenfeld and Beach started flying in October 1981, so they say nothing about the first seventeen months.  Their maps jump from 5 March 1982 straight to 13 October, so they cannot isolate the 19 March event either.¹¹  Major's list of what built the network includes lake breakouts, controlled releases, pumping from Spirit Lake during tunnel construction and "subsequent meltwater lahars and floods in later eruptions" alongside rainfall.  The March 1982 flood is on that list.¹²

None of this touches the observation that a deep channel was cut fast on 19 March 1982.  It does dispose of "the canyon caused the creek."  The creek was there first.

Part 4: Claim three, the Spirit Lake log mat and the upright stumps

The observation is real

The blast flattened the forest across some 600 square kilometres and washed much of it into Spirit Lake.  There it formed a floating raft that still covers "20% of the lake's surface area".¹⁵  Many stumps in it float vertically, root end down.

Harold Coffin drove to the lake the first day the road opened in September 1982 and dived on the mat: "SCUBA divers examined the lower ends of many of the stumps.  They found that the root systems were either well above the lake bottom (truly floating) or that they were lightly grounded on the bottom… Some stumps that had been floating erect were now standing upright on the bottom, their tops well below the surface of the water."²⁵  His mechanism was the root ball: "Except for one example, all of the examined erect floating stumps had root balls.  In contrast, most of the horizontally floating logs were without roots."²⁵

Nobody disputes any of this.  Of Austin's four claims, it is the one that stands without qualification.

A mainstream geologist published it first

The usual story is that geologists assumed upright fossil stumps meant a forest that grew in place, until Mount St. Helens showed otherwise.  The history runs the other way.

William Fritz, a sedimentologist, published "Stumps transported and deposited upright by Mount St. Helens mud flows" in Geology in December 1980, seven months after the eruption.  His abstract already draws the conclusion: "Mount St. Helens mud-flow deposits serve as modern analogs for the depositional environment of Eocene 'fossil forests' in Yellowstone National Park."¹³  Coffin's note followed in May 1983 and reached the same application.  He does not claim priority, and his own Origins paper says erect flotation "has been observed many times".¹⁴²⁵  Fritz then published a Comment on Coffin's note that December, so the interpretation was contested inside the mainstream literature at once.²⁶  Austin's own bibliography cites Fritz's other 1980 Geology paper, the one reinterpreting the Yellowstone fossil forests as transported.⁴

Ten per cent

Austin's own figure undoes the picture the argument depends on: "It was estimated that 20,000 upright stumps existed on the floor of the lake in August 1985.  It would appear that about ten percent of the deposited logs were in an upright position."³

A living forest is close to a hundred per cent upright.  A Spirit Lake assemblage is one in ten.  So a deposit formed the Spirit Lake way looks like a log jam with occasional standing trunks.  It predicts the wrong upright fraction for exactly the fossil assemblages the argument is meant to explain.  No stump count in this literature gives a survey area, a method or an uncertainty.  No independent survey of the lake floor has been published in forty years.

The two creationist eyewitnesses also disagree about the mechanism.  Coffin says root balls make a stump float upright.  Austin says the opposite: "Many upright deposited logs possess roots attached to the log, but many have no root ball, and those without roots also show strong tendency to float upright."³  The contradiction has never been resolved in print.

Spirit Lake cannot bury what it deposits

This is the measurement that decides the claim, and it is new.  Shinneman and five colleagues took gravity cores from Spirit Lake in 2018 at two sites in six metres of water, and published in 2024.  Both cores were 17 centimetres long, and both bottomed out on eruption debris: "The length of both cores was constrained by eruption derived debris, including large pieces of pumice and wood that plugged the bottom of the coring device, indicating a complete retrieval of the post-eruption sedimentation from the lake."¹⁵  Dating the column against Larson's plankton records gives the rate: "if 1983 was marked at 8 cm it would indicate a sedimentation rate of roughly 0.25 cm per year."¹⁵

Seventeen centimetres.  That is everything Spirit Lake laid down in the thirty-eight years from the eruption to the coring.

Austin's average upright stump is 20 feet tall.⁴  At 0.25 centimetres a year, burying six metres of standing trunk takes about 2,400 years.

The early rate was faster.  If 1983 sits at 8 centimetres depth, the lower 9 centimetres went down between 1980 and 1983, about 3 centimetres a year, twelve times the modern figure.  At that rate a six-metre stump still needs two hundred years.  At the whole-column average of 0.45 centimetres a year it needs thirteen hundred.  Whichever rate is chosen, the answer is centuries.  Submerged conifer wood in a cold lake is not that durable, though nobody has published a Spirit Lake decay measurement.

Austin supplies one counter.  He reports that by 1985 some upright stumps were "solidly buried by sedimentation with more than three feet of sediment around their bases".  That is 18 centimetres a year, seventy times the cored rate.⁴  Both can be true.  Shinneman's cores came from mid-lake, at Duck Bay and the NW Arm in six metres of water.¹⁵  Austin's buried stumps sit where volcanic sediment washes in off the stripped slopes, as he notes himself when he says the peat forms only "in areas removed from volcanic sediment added from the lake shore."⁴  Near the shore burial is fast but partial.  Three feet is a seventh of a twenty-foot stump, and the shore supply is a finite pile of ash that is already running out.

So the Spirit Lake stumps show upright deposition and stop short of upright burial.  Every stump at Mount St. Helens actually buried standing was buried by a lahar or a pyroclastic flow, a second catastrophe.  In a Flood model second catastrophes are cheap, so the gap is closable in principle.  But closing it that way costs the argument its distinctiveness.  Repeated volcanic burial is exactly what the mainstream reading of the Yellowstone fossil forests invokes, and what Fritz proposed in 1980.

The peat

Austin's fourth 1986 claim was that a bark-rich peat was forming under the log mat: "a layer of peat several inches thick has accumulated… The Spirit Lake peat resembles, both compositionally and texturally, certain coal beds of the eastern United States which also are dominated by tree bark and appear to have accumulated beneath floating log mats".⁴

The arithmetic is short.  Peat compacts to coal at roughly ten to one by thickness.  A full metre of Spirit Lake peat becomes ten centimetres of coal, and a three-metre Pennsylvanian seam needs about thirty metres of peat.  The whole post-eruption lake sediment column is 17 centimetres.  Austin's own bark fraction is "about 25 percent, by volume, of the peat", so three-quarters of the layer is something else.³  The floating-mat model for coal, with its genuine strengths, is treated in Coal.

Part 5: Claim four, the dacite that dated 2.8 million years old

This claim has its own treatment in Radiometric Concordance.  It is summarised here only far enough to say which way it cuts.

In 1996 Austin sent five mineral preparations from the 1986 lava dome, then ten years old, to Geochron Laboratories for potassium-argon dating.  The results ran 0.35 ± 0.05 million years for whole rock, 0.34 ± 0.06 for feldspar, 0.9 ± 0.2 for amphibole, 1.7 ± 0.3 for a heavy non-magnetic fraction, and 2.8 ± 0.6 for pyroxene.²⁷

Three things follow.  None of them is "radiometric dating does not work."

Five preparations of one rock disagree by a factor of eight.  That is a real result, and a self-diagnosing one.  Numbers that scatter by 800 per cent get thrown out.  They do not get published as an age.  Almost all of the argon measured was air.  Austin's own table gives the radiogenic fraction of total ⁴⁰Ar as 0.0105 to 0.0360.  So 96.4 to 98.95 per cent of the argon in the machine was indistinguishable from atmospheric contamination, and the "age" is read off the last one to three per cent of the signal.²⁷  The crystals in that rock really are old.  Claiborne and colleagues found "complex zircon age populations extending back hundreds of thousands of years from eruption age", with crystals "stored for as long as hundreds of thousands of years" before being swept up by younger magma.¹⁶  A ten-year-old dome is ten-year-old glass carrying much older crystals.

The honest limit: hundreds of thousands of years is not 2.8 million.  Zircon inheritance explains the direction and part of the size.  The rest is excess argon in melt and fluid inclusions, plus noise at a one to four per cent signal.

Tas Walker's rebuttal deserves an answer.  He writes that "the plus-and-minus range (±) against each result cancels that objection.  This range indicates the precision of the laboratory measurement, and in every case the error range is much smaller than the calculated 'age'."²⁰  That confuses precision with accuracy.  The quoted uncertainties are mass-spectrometer precision run through the age equation.  They do not carry the systematic error in the atmospheric-argon correction.  Here that correction is 96 to 99 per cent of the signal, so a one per cent misestimate of the air component moves the radiogenic argon by 28 to 95 per cent.  Five preparations differing eightfold is the empirical proof that the ± is not the real error bar.

Part 6: The numbers that drifted

None of this is fatal or dishonest.  It is what happens when a claim is retold for forty years without anyone going back to the source.

Austin against Austin, in one summer.  ICR Impact 157 appeared in July 1986 and the conference paper in August.  Same author, same four claims, three different quantities.

Both sets have been quoted interchangeably ever since.¹⁸¹⁸⁴⁴  The "140 feet" every modern retelling uses is the Impact figure.  The conference paper, the one with a bibliography, says "over 100 feet".  Austin 2010 and Snelling 2020 both settle the stump count at 20,000.²

The peat grew by a factor of twelve.  Austin wrote "several inches thick" in both 1986 papers and "many inches thick" in 2010.⁴³  Snelling's 2020 article says "a layer of peat more than 3 feet (1 m) thick", and cites those same sources for it.²  Three of his four cited sources give a figure, and none gives that one;  the fourth, Morris and Austin's Footprints in the Ash, could not be obtained.  Snelling's own article shows what happened.  It states both figures four paragraphs apart: "many logs had become buried by more than 3 feet (1 m) of sediment" and then "a layer of peat more than 3 feet (1 m) thick."²²  The first is a burial depth around the stumps' bases.  The second is a peat thickness.  The three feet migrated from one to the other.

An eruption that did not happen.  Snelling's "another eruption two months later (on May 19, 1982)" has no counterpart in the record.²  The explosive event was 19 March 1982.  The May 1982 episode was non-explosive.²⁴  The same error appears in his 2010 article.

A concession from the other creationist organisation.  Walker, writing for CMI: "by volcanic standards, even in historic times, the Mount St Helens blast was relatively small, ejecting some 1 km3 (0.2 cubic miles) of ash.  The eruption of Vesuvius in ad 79 was three times larger, Krakatoa in 1883 was 18 times bigger, and Tambora in 1815 was 80 times larger.  The volume of lava in the Deccan Traps in India is some 5 million times more."²⁰  He offers it to argue that Flood volcanism was larger still, which is fair.  It also concedes that the flagship site is a small volcanic event whose products are being scaled up by a factor of millions.

Objections and responses

"Scale it up.  If a small eruption did this in hours, a global Flood did the rest." Scaling has to be argued, and it fails on the variable that decides the outcome.  Multiply the water by a thousand and the substrate does not change.  Limestone, sandstone, schist and granite have shear strengths that loose volcanic debris lacks, and incision rate depends on both.⁷  Walker's own scale comparison runs the wrong way too.  Mount St. Helens ejected about one cubic kilometre of ash, against eighty times that for Tambora.²⁰  Tambora in 1815 was directly observed.  It did not carve a Grand Canyon.

"The Grand Canyon's rocks were soft when they were cut, so the analogy holds." This is Snelling's actual position and it is the honest one.²  Two things have to be true for it.  The Palaeozoic section must have been unlithified when the canyon was cut, and the same must apply to the 1,700 metres of Vishnu Schist and Zoroaster Granite in the inner gorge.  The second is not available on any model, because no soft-sediment argument applies to metamorphic basement.  The first is tested at Folded Rocks.  There the microscope criterion Snelling uses to identify soft-sediment folding needs about 300 °C, and his own thermometry on those rocks returns 110 to 130 °C.

"Mainstream geology ignores catastrophism.  Mount St. Helens forced it to look." Check the dates.  Bretz's catastrophic Missoula floods were mainstream by the mid-1960s.  Turbidite catastrophism dates from the 1950s.  Derek Ager's The Nature of the Stratigraphical Record appeared in 1973.  The USGS authors writing up the 19 March 1982 flood cite Bretz 1956 on the Channeled Scabland, Baker 1973 on Missoula palaeohydrology and Waitt 1980 on the Missoula jökulhlaups.⁹  The claim can be tested cheaply: name a pre-1980 mainstream source stating that laminae in a volcaniclastic deposit require seasons, or that a canyon in loose debris requires millennia.  No creationist source surveyed here supplies one.

"This is a straw man.  No geologist ever said layers cannot form fast." Largely correct, and the strongest skeptical objection to this article.  But the claim is in print.  It is the headline on the pages a curious reader will find, and it is asserted about this deposit rather than about varves: "Conventionally, sedimentary laminae and beds are assumed to represent longer seasonal variations, or annual changes."⁴  Answering a printed claim is not a straw man.  Treating the young-earth position as though it depended on this claim alone would be, and it does not.

"Coffin and Austin were there with SCUBA gear.  Their critics were not." True, and it is why this article opens by confirming their measurements.  Field priority settles what was seen.  It does not settle what it means.  The strongest arguments against the inferences here come from other people who were also there: Glicken, who dug density pits in the deposit;  Rowley, Kuntz and MacLeod, who mapped the flow units;  Waitt, who gauged the 1982 flood;  Rosenfeld and Beach, who mapped the drainage network six times;  and Fritz, who published the upright stumps first and then wrote a Comment against Coffin's reading of them.

"The canyon still formed in a day.  That is remarkable and you are minimising it." It is remarkable, and this article prints the two numbers that make it so: 13,800 cubic metres per second at the foot of the cone, and about one volume of water per volume of rock removed.⁹⁹  What the day does not include is the drainage network the canyon sits in, which took three winters of rain.¹²  The day shows that landform shape alone does not date a landscape.  It does not show that a canyon in Palaeozoic limestone can form in a day, because the experiment was never run on limestone.

"You just conceded the water-to-rock ratio.  That is the Flood model's hardest number and Mount St. Helens beat it." Yes, and the concession is real.  The reply is to ask what the ratio is a property of.  The 1982 flood met a bed with 32 per cent porosity, no cement and a density one-fifth below the rock it came from.  That is why a small volume of water carried away a large volume of it.⁷  Austin needs the same efficiency against Kaibab Limestone and Vishnu Schist.  What a real flood achieves in real bedrock is treated in Rapid Canyon Cutting.  Mount St. Helens never ran that experiment.

"Even so, the erosion is still extraordinary forty years later." It is, and the USGS says so.⁶  The North Fork Toutle still runs high because 2.5 cubic kilometres of loose debris remains in its valley.  Green River, which got ash and no valley fill, was back to pre-eruption sediment yield within five years.¹²

Issues and unanswered questions

• The canyon system has never been surveyed, and the water-to-rock ratio depends on that. Rosenfeld and Beach published maps and no channel lengths. So the volume in Part 3 assumes a cut three to ten kilometres long inside an 18-kilometre valley fill. At twenty kilometres the ratio falls to about 0.2 : 1 and the result gets stronger for the catastrophist. Much under three kilometres and it weakens.
• Pierson and Scott 1985 was read only in abstract. It supplies the 4 × 10⁶ m³ of crater meltwater. The body holds the hydrograph, whose shape decides how long 13,800 cubic metres per second was sustained. What is said here about the duration of the peak is inference from the lake volume.
• Morris and Austin's Footprints in the Ash (2003) was not obtained. It is the one cited source for the "3 feet of peat" that has not been checked.
• Fritz's 1983 Comment on Coffin's note carries no abstract, and its content is unknown. What a mainstream sedimentologist objected to, three years after publishing the same argument himself, would be worth reading.
• No independent survey of the Spirit Lake floor has been published. Austin's "about ten percent" upright and his 15,000 to 20,000 stumps rest on one unrefereed extrapolation with no stated method, and this article's ten per cent argument inherits that weakness.
• No decay measurement exists for submerged wood in Spirit Lake. The claim that a stump rots before the lake can bury it is an inference from general wood-decay behaviour. Nobody has measured it at that site.

Verdict

Austin's measurements stand.  The 25-foot deposit in under five hours is real.  The forty-metre canyon in hours is real.  The upright stumps are real.  Each claim is then asked to carry something it cannot.

The stratification claim is true and restates what volcanology already held.  The paper Austin cites had already put single beds inside single flows.¹  The "conventional" view he refutes is uncited and belongs to a different depositional system.

The canyon claim splits.  Two of its numbers favour the catastrophist.  The flood at the foot of the cone was "at least 13,800 m3/sec", far above the 960 cubic metres per second usually quoted from a gauge 58 kilometres downstream.⁹⁹  And four million cubic metres of water removed three to ten million cubic metres of rock, a ratio near one to one that beats the three to one Austin needs for the Grand Canyon.⁹²³  Three facts go the other way and decide it.  The material was debris at 1.85 grams per cubic centimetre with 32 per cent porosity, so the ratio measures the bed.⁷  The feature is a slot eight and a half times too narrow for the scale model it is called.  And the drainage network took three years to integrate, its largest single mapped step a storm a month before the eruption that gets the credit.¹¹¹²

The Spirit Lake claim is genuine, was published first by a mainstream sedimentologist, and stops one step short.  Stumps float upright, ground upright, and are deposited upright.  The lake then buries them at 0.25 centimetres a year.¹⁵  Upright burial needed a lahar, a second catastrophe, which is what the mainstream reading of the fossil forests already invokes.  And Austin's own ten per cent figure means the analogue produces the wrong-looking deposit.

The dacite dates show that potassium-argon on a young, crystal-bearing rock whose argon is 96 to 99 per cent atmospheric gives meaningless numbers.  The method's own practitioners state that limitation.¹⁶

The site's general lesson is right.  Rates in geology are not constant.  Catastrophes do most of the work.  A landform's shape alone says nothing about its age.  All three are mainstream geology and have been since the 1960s.  What Mount St. Helens does not show is that lithified rock behaves like fresh pumice, and that is the step every version of the argument needs.

Further reading

• Rapid Canyon Cutting — what a flood can and cannot cut in real rock
• The Grand Canyon — the feature this site is a scale model of
• Folded Rocks — the "it was still soft" rescue, tested on its own thermometry
• Coal — floating log mats, bark-rich peat, and what it takes to make a seam
• Lake Varves — the laminae that are read as years, and whether they should be
• Radiometric Concordance — the dacite dates in full

Sources