Material that bears on this topic but could not be verified against the source it is attributed to. Nothing here is deleted, and nothing here is printed in the article as established fact. Rejecting a quotation from publication and erasing it from the record are different decisions.
Holland 1978, Table 5-11, printed p. 199: "14 × 1010 kg/yr" of sodium removed at mid-ocean ridges
Claimed by: Glenn R. Morton, "Salt in the sea," ASA evolution list, 15 June 1996. "You must have missed the table in Holland (1978, p. 199). He says that the removal of sodium by the Mid-Oceanic ridge basalts is 14 × 1010 kg/yr. According to Holland, this is 23% of the sodium input."
Why it matters. It is the single largest sink in Morton's counter-budget and 37% of his total. It is also the number that decides whether the mid-ocean-ridge term is small enough for Austin and Humphreys' bound to exist. At 14 units the bound is 134 million years; at 16 it does not exist at all.
What was tried. The archive.org item chemistryofatmos0000holl is print-disabled, so no borrow is possible and every OCR derivative returns 401. Printed p. 199 is leaf 219 (leaf-to-folio offset a constant 20, from the item's own _scandata.xml). bin/iapdsearch.py returns whole paragraphs from this item, but that leaf is a full-page table and the search-inside index carries no paragraph text for it: three probe queries restricted to leaf 219 returned nothing while the same terms hit on leaves 217 to 220. _djvu.txt 403s. archive.org/download/<id>/page/n219_w1600.jpg 403s. BookReaderImages.php 403s.
Not yet tried: HathiTrust page-image search; Google Books snippets via bin/google-books-snippets.sh; a borrowable copy of the 1978 edition under a different archive.org identifier; a library copy.
A caution against assuming Morton is right. Holland's own commentary on p. 200 calls the Table 5-11 sodium removal "apparently rather minor." Fourteen units is 73% of the total river sodium flux, which nobody would call minor. So either Morton read a different column of a table that gives fluxes at several maximum temperatures, or a different unit (1012 g/yr and 1010 kg/yr differ by exactly a factor of ten), or the entry he read is a percentage rather than a flux. The article reports this as Morton's claim about Holland, never as Holland's figure.
Von Damm 1995, pp. 238 and 240, and the twenty-six-vent table on pp. 229-230
Claimed by: Morton, "salt in the sea," ASA list, 19 November 1997, quoting K. L. Von Damm, "Controls on the Chemistry and Temporal Variability of Seafloor Hydrothermal Fluids," in Humphris et al. (eds.), Seafloor Hydrothermal Systems, AGU Geophysical Monograph 91 (1995), pp. 222-247.
p. 238: "Sodium is by far the most abundant cation in hydrothermal fluids, and as such, its cycle is tightly tied to that of chloride. Sodium is not conservative in water-rock reactions as is chloride, but has a major sink in the albitization of basalt. The largest sodium deficits with respect to chloride are found in high chlorinity fluids. In a few cases the Na/Cl ratio is slightly greater than in seawater and the cause of this is not well understood."
p. 240: "Sodium, the most abundant cation, of necessity tracks chloride, but where it does not (i.e., the Na/Cl ratio is lower than the seawater value) provides our best evidence that albitization is an active process in hydrothermal vent systems."
Status. The Von Damm chapter was not obtained. Both passages, and the twenty-six vent analyses Morton tabulates out of pp. 229-230, are attested only by his transcription. Morton's own letter was read from the bytes and is quoted accurately, so what the article prints is a verified quotation of Morton, containing an unverified nested quotation, and it says so at that point. The global sodium flux Morton builds from the table, 3.44 × 1011 kg/yr, is his step and not Von Damm's; she draws only a qualitative conclusion.
Not yet tried: a library copy of AGU Geophysical Monograph 91; the AGU digital library; archive.org under any identifier.
Hardie 1996, Geology 24, p. 280, on seawater-basalt interaction
Claimed by: Morton 1996, quoting Lawrence A. Hardie, "Secular variation in seawater chemistry," Geology 24:279-283. The passage describes seawater-basalt interaction at greenschist and amphibolite facies transferring Na, Mg and SO4 from seawater to rock, and Morton uses it to argue that the high-temperature sodium sink Austin and Humphreys discounted has been restored.
Status. Hardie 1996 was not obtained. Unpaywall reports no open copy and IA Scholar has no record under the DOI. The quotation is deliberately absent from the article and no claim in the article depends on it. Hardie's secular-variation model reaches the article only through Lowenstein et al. 2001 and Berner 2004, both of which were read directly.
Steven Austin's reported concession of a 1.47 × 1019 kg rock-salt sodium inventory
Claimed by: Morton 1996. "However, I was pleased to see Steve (in his letter of May 10th) allow that the world-wide resource of sodium was 1.47 × 1019 kg in rock salt. This is a much more reasonable figure and much larger than the value cited in your paper of 4.4 × 1018 kg."
Status. Attested only by Morton's report of private correspondence. No published creationist statement of a revised inventory has been located in the ICR article archive, the Creation Research Society Quarterly, or the Journal of Creation. The article mentions it, flags it as unverifiable, and states that nothing in the argument depends on it, because Hay et al. 2006 makes the same point from a peer-reviewed compilation.
Fluid-inclusion sodium and chloride values across the Phanerozoic
Source: J. Horita, H. Zimmermann and H. D. Holland, "Chemical evolution of seawater during the Phanerozoic: Implications from the record of marine evaporites," Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta 66 (2002), pp. 3733-3756.
Status. Not obtained. Unpaywall reports no open copy; IA Scholar has no copy under the DOI or the title; Semantic Scholar reports openAccessPdf: CLOSED; OSTI has nothing under the title despite Horita's Oak Ridge affiliation. No number from this paper appears anywhere in the article. Its role was filled by Lowenstein et al. 2001, which was obtained and which states the sodium record qualitatively (relatively high or low by geological period) rather than numerically. Horita et al. would supply the actual concentrations and remains worth obtaining.
Glenn Morton's charge against Henry Morris, 1974
Claimed by: Morton 1996. "the article (Goldberg, 1965) that Morris (1974, p. 238-246) cites to support his original contention that the elements in the oceans prove that the oceans are young actually discusses the amazing ability of organisms to concentrate metals in their bodies. Morris makes no mention of this ability in his 1974 Impact article and yet he had to have read the article he cited."
Status. Still unchecked. Neither Morris, "The Young Earth," ICR Impact 17 (September 1974), nor Goldberg, "Minor Elements in Sea Water" (1965), has been obtained. The article makes no claim about either, and the charge is not repeated.
What changed on 30 August 2026, and why it does not settle this. Two neighbouring Morris items were obtained and read from bytes: Scientific Creationism (1974), pp. 153-155, and Morris's own CRSQ reprinting of the same table in 1975. The article now treats that family of arguments at length on the strength of those two. Neither cites Goldberg 1965 — the table in both is credited to Kuenen's chapter in Riley and Skirrow's Chemical Oceanography — so Morton's specific allegation is about the Impact article and remains open. What the two obtained items do show is that the underlying charge, that the source of the residence-time table is a book about removal mechanisms, is correct; that point is made in the article from Morris's own footnote rather than from Morton's letter.