Missing billion years may be found, claim scientists, according to reports in ScienceDaily and UC Santa Barbara News, 7 May 2020, and PNAS published online 27 April 2020, doi: 10.1073/pnas.1913131117.
The rock layers covering the earth are considered to be a record of the evolution of life over many millions of years, but the record is interrupted by many gaps, or unconformities. A significant unconformity, known as the Great Unconformity, is found at the bottom of the Grand Canyon and is believed to represent a billion years of missing rock record. Francis Macdonald, a professor of earth science at University of California, Santa Barbara explained: “There are unconformities all through the rock record. Unconformities are just gaps in time within the rock record. This one’s called the Great Unconformity because it was thought to be a particularly large gap, maybe a global gap”. UC Santa Barbara News is now claiming, “A billion years is missing from the geologic record; one UC Santa Barbara scientist believes he knows where it may have gone”.
The Great Unconformity has been blamed on massive erosion of rock by melting glaciers at the end of a period known as Snowball Earth, dated as 720 to 635 million years ago. Francis Macdonald and colleagues from University of Colorado have studied samples of rock from just below the boundary of the Great Unconformity at Pikes Peak Colorado and used a technique called thermochronology to work out when the unconformity was formed. According to UC Santa Barbara News “The technique revealed that several kilometres of rock had been eroded from above this granite between 1,000 and 720 million years ago”. This puts it before the Snowball Earth period, so the unconformity could not be from erosion from melting glaciers. Instead, Macdonald and colleagues suggest the unconformity was caused by erosion related to tectonic activity associated with the breaking up of supercontinents.
Finding out what happened in the Great Unconformity is important to evolutionary biologists as well as geologists as it is linked to the Cambrian Explosion – the sudden appearance of fossils of complex life forms immediately above the Great Unconformity in the rock record. According to Macdonald, “The Cambrian explosion was Darwin’s dilemma. This is a 200-year old question. If we can solve that, we would definitely be rock stars”.
Links: Science Daily, UC Santa Barbara
Editorial Comment: This editor has traipsed countless hundreds of kilometres up and down the Great Unconformity around the globe and would advise the ‘experts’ of one simple truth: the ‘missing’ billion years of rock at Great Unconformity exposures is the result of mind games played by those who despite the ‘missing evidence’ already believe in the billions of evolutionary years, and who are trying to explain why it isn’t there.
Since the days when Darwin claimed the lack of fossil evidence for his theory was due to the “extreme imperfection of the geological record” (Darwin, Origin, 1859, p280), this problem has only loomed larger and larger. The extent of the geological “imperfection” was summed up well by National Geographic: “The fossil record is like a film of evolution from which 999 of every 1,000 frames have been lost on the cutting room floor”. (National Geographic November 2004, p.25) For those who don’t do maths quick, that means 99.9 % of the supposed evidence is missing.
Time alone makes neither rocks, fossils nor unconformities. These are all the results of the right processes happening through time, and in the case of fossils and unconformities, time is the least significant factor. To see some real evidence of how rock layers, including unconformities, are formed, see the surprising results produced by our Creation Research strata experiments here, and remember the key point: neither evolution nor billions of years have ever been based on geological evidence. The fossils point firmly to ‘reproduction after their kind’ and to catastrophic flood erosion and deposition.
Creation Research News
27 May 2020