Sandy Surprise

Originally published in Creation 21, no 1 (December 1998): 56.

Scientifically, it has never been a problem to explain that hard rock can form quickly, given the right conditions. However, the problem is that when most people look at huge sandstone cliffs, for example, they are conditioned in today’s culture to think in terms of millions of years.

Creation magazine has given many photographic examples to show that solid rock can form quickly—e.g. a huge “frozen” waterwheel encased in solid limestone in 65 years,1 fossilised modern fencing wire2 and pliers,3 a sizeable gasfield pipe clogged in months with solid calcite,4 and huge stalactites in just a few decades,5 to name just some. Here is one more.

Wheelbarrow with rock contents
Close-up of the sandstone fragments

Mike Miller of Ohio, USA explains that his father recently opened the drain cock on their ordinary swimming pool sand filter and nothing came out. Upon checking, he found to his surprise that the sand in the lower part of the filter had turned to solid rock since it was put in around five years ago. Mike says, “Not soft, crumbly stone, either—hard rock, indistinguishable from ‘normal’ sandstone. My dad spent a long time with a chisel breaking up the stone into the pieces you see in the wheelbarrow [photo 1]”.

Mike says that their pool is fed with underground water with a slightly higher than normal content of iron oxide, which would help the sand to harden into rock. Photo 2 shows a closeup view of the sandstone.

The Creator of the world has clearly shown in His Word, the Bible, that a global watery cataclysm was responsible for much geologic work, only a few thousand years ago. Today, most scoff at the Genesis flood, preferring instead to believe in millions of years of slow and gradual processes. Such scoffing was actually predicted in the Bible (2 Peter 3:3 ff.)—people are “willingly ignorant” of God having judged the world with water.

A worldwide flood would of necessity dissolve a lot of minerals, and deposit huge amounts of sand, as well as other sediments. Given the right chemicals in the water, hardening into the sandstone deposits we see today would take place quickly. Graphic demonstrations of rapid rock formation should remind us to think realistically (i.e. biblically) about the past, unclouded by the fog of fashionable worldviews which place millions of years of death and suffering before sin.

Footnotes

  1. Petrified waterwheel, Creation 16(2):25, 1994.
  2. Fascinating fossil fence wire, Creation 20(3):6, 1998.
  3. “Fossil” pliers show rock doesn’t need millions of years to form!, Creation 14(1):20, 1992.
  4. That Choking Feeling ..., Creation 20(4):6, 1998.
  5. Stalactites do not take millions of years!, Creation 20(2):27, 1998.

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