mount st. helens

Proof of Biblical Creation?

We know for sure that we are here. How did we get here, and how

long ago did it happen are questions difficult to answer for certain,

at least in the scientific “only the facts ma’am” kind of way. Some

believe that the Earth was formed as a result of a cosmic big bang

billions of years ago, and others believe, that the Bible gives the

correct account of our beginnings. While there is much hysteria on

both sides, actual proof is somewhat difficult to find, as both events

happened prior to Walter Cronkite, Fox News, or other reliable

sources of information.

Every once a while an event happens that allows those observing, a

look into the past. One such event happened on May 18th of 1980,

when Mt Saint Helens in Washington State literally blew it’s top. It

had been rumbling and making noise, shooting ash into the air, causing earthquakes, and actually growing much taller for some months so the scientific community had a once in a life time opportunity to be at the right place at the right time, with all the instruments and data gathering equipment available to science.

When she finally blew, she blew sideways which was pretty lucky for the Cessna airplane that happened to be directly above the

summit with some monitoring equipment at the time. Several

thousand feet of the top of the mountain was blown completely off,

and it sent a pyroclastic flow of hot gas, superheated steam, dirt,

rocks, and other debris and material from the mountain barreling

along the forest floor at more than 600 miles per hour. This flow

knocked down an entire forest of pine trees in just minutes. Millions

of fully grown trees lying on the ground like grass after the lawn

mower had passed. Everything in its path was destroyed. Vehicles,

logging trucks, homes, almost 50 people – anything in front of this flow was destroyed, burned, and buried. One scientist was 14 miles away watching and saw the blast cloud coming directly at him. He ran to his car and raced the cloud down a logging road off the mountain. By the time the cloud caught him he was 20 miles from the blast, by that time the cloud was no longer super hot, so he lived but was covered in a mixture of ash, and dust that almost suffocated him and did kill his car.

Several miles from the summit was a picture perfect mountain lake called Spirit Lake, when this

huge flow of material hit the lake it caused a tidal wave that reached almost 700 feet up the

mountain on the other side of the lake. When the water returned to Spirit Lake it was now several

hundred feet higher and no longer had an in or out flow, it was a lake trapped by the debris

carried in the pyroclastic flow. The Toutle River no longer was able to feed the lake as it was fully

clogged by a huge debris dam. The surface of Spirit Lake was now covered with hundreds of

thousands of pine trees, and the water was now the color of dark tea.

That is how things stayed for about two years. The volcano did what volcanoes do. The lava

dome would grow and break, ash would shoot into the sky, the mountain would rumble and

talk, there were small lava discharges and all other things volcanoes do as they start to settle

down again.

Then, about 2 years later, there was a rather large steam eruption of the lava dome, melting all

the accumulated snow and ice and sending a tremendous mud flow right toward the debris dam

on the Toutle River. It broke through the debris damn and into the lake releasing billions of gallons of water and reconnecting the river with the lake. As this water flowed downhill at great speed, it cut into the several hundred feet deep debris flow left from the original pyroclastic event. In fact, in just one day, really just several hours, the flowing water cut a canyon and trapped the Toutle River. This canyon is one fortieth the size of the Grand Canyon and it was an almost exact replica. It is what is called an incised meander, which is a river with a meandering path but is cut into, or incised, into the ground. These are not supposed to be possible, as meandering rivers will always over flow their banks when they flood, like the Mississippi, and incised rivers are straight and deep like the Snake. But this was both incised and meandering just like the Grand Canyon, and was complete with the cup shaped side canyons and intricate layering and other features that make the Grand Canyon so unique.

The next day when scientists were able to make their way into this new canyon, they noticed something remarkable. This new canyon, now called “The Little Grand Canyon of the Toutle River” had exposed more than 600 feet of stratified layers of material. Now this was the area formed less than two years previous from the huge pyrocalstic flow from the original blast.

Science had always sort of guessed that this type of material would be homogenized or all mixed up. It was almost inconceivable that this material would have, or could have, been laid down in these different layers of material, some only one inch thick, some many feet think, some red, some brown, some yellow, thin on top of thick, on top of thin, red on top of brown, on top of red, on top of yellow. Some clay, some sandstone, some mixed, all exactly like the Grand Canyon. We had always thought that the layering exposed at the Grand Canyon must have taken millions of years to form, but now we could see that layers do not mean long periods of time. Everything we were looking at was formed in just a few minutes and cut in several hours.

Science had previously guessed that different layers could take many millions of years to form, hundreds of thousands to many millions of years for each layer, with layer on top of layer. Science had guessed that the different densities, colors, and materials found in each layer must relate to the weather or some other environmental factor active at the time the layer was formed.

We now have a new model for the formation of the geologic layers we see. There is no doubt that volcano’s many hundreds, and even thousands of times, larger than the Mt Saint Helen’s event have occurred throughout the history of Earth. We have seen pyroclastic flows so large they cover most of a continent, millions of square miles, turbidite flows under water so large they would swallow up the United States if they happened above the water.

Armed with the knowledge of what science witnessed in the early 1980’s in Washington all previous models of the age of the earth and the age of the various layers must be rethought. Once again science has to agree that the Bible may actually hold the best answers for how we came to be here and the things we see on earth.

CB