I am going to strongly disagree with the idea that the cooling of batholiths
and volcanic intrusions are not evidence that the flood was much longer ago
than 4000 years. As I have mentioned several times, during the time I left
publishing, I played at programming all sorts of physics problems on my
computer. It was a lot of fun. I wrote a program for calculating how
rapidly an object would cool in a conductive situation. I just ran the
program placing a 3 meter thick/ 18 meter long dike 50 meters below the
surface. I ran the program in 50 year increments and even after 20,000
years, the heat wave had not reached the surface and the temperature profile
of the model was not at equilibrium. Hot things, even small hot things
take a long time to lose their heat when surrounded by rock. this is
because thermal conductivities are very, very small for earth materials.
Large batholiths can take 100,000 to 1,000,000 years to cool down. Often
the batholiths have cooked the rocks around them, then erosion, took off the
entire top of the batholith and sediments above it, and new uncooked
sediments were deposited on top. Such is the situation at a geologic
feature off New Jersey known as the Great Stone Dome. The sediments above
it are uncooked and the sediments immediately in contact with it were
cooked. A long interval separated the intrusion from the overlying sediments.
Similar examples abound in the south atlantic offshore Georgia. I am very
familiar with these examples because I used to be Area Geophysicist for the
Atlantic Offshore for Atlantic Richfield. Off Georgia, the Cretaceous
sediments lie on top of a major unconformity. Beneath the COST GE-1 Well
which was drilled to 13,000 feet, lies Devonian metamorphosed shales. This
means that the rock had been heated. Above the unconformity, the Cretaceous
rocks sho no sign of ever having been cooked. In fact that was the problem
along the East Coast why there was no oil. None of the organic rich
Cretaceous rocks had been cooked enough to generate oil. The older rocks
didn't have a high organic content and were no good for sourcing oil.
Not only do earth materials make it hard for heat to escape, they make it
hard for heat to get into the earth under some circumstances. Glacial
moraines with cores of relict glacial ice have been found in large numbers
around the world.Flint notes,
"In Scandinavian mountains as well as in other parts of the world small end
moraines consisting of drift concealing a core of ice have been found in
substantial nubmers. The basic reference on these ice-cored moraines is
Ostrem, 1964. In most of them the core consists of former banks of firn,
buried during advance of a glacier over an older moraine." Glacial and
Quaternary Geology, new York, John Wiley and Sons, 1971, p. 206
These glacial ices have been preserved by the low thermal conductivities of
dirt.
Thermal arguments are great for showing a huge age to the earth. The Deccan
volcanic field is up to 10,000 feet thick. If the flood was 4000 years ago
it should still be hot.
David Tyler wrote:
>If conductive cooling is dominant, it may take thousands of
>years, depending on the size of the intrusion. But most volcanic
>systems today have some convective cooling (because they are near
>the surface). The timescales then depend entirely on which
>characteristics are built into the model.
Convection only can occur within the lacolith (molten part of the magma
chamber) If that chamber is buried deeply, all the heat must escape via
conduction. Soconvection is only partly applicable.
glenn
Foundation, Fall and Flood
http://www.isource.net/~grmorton/dmd.htm