Examples of great age of parts of the Earth from the book "Creation & Evolution" by Alan Hayward

River Mouth Deposits
page 83: "In regions around the delta [mouth] of the Mississippi geologists working for oil companies have measured the thickness of the sedimentary covering as more than seven miles [deep]. Other measurements have shown that in this area the crust is slowly sinking at a rate of about an inch a year - presumably under the weight of the two million tons of sediment per day that the river deposits there. It is rather obvious that this enormous stack of sediment could not possibly have been laid down by the Mississippi in a few thousand years." [7 miles = 36,960 feet = 443,520 inches which equates to 443,520 years of delta sedimentation at the present rate of one inch per year although each previous year had less depth of sedimentation which means less weight and a lesser rate of deepening per year which means this delta is even older than 443,520 years old.]

Coral Reefs
page 84: "A coral reef is an enormous underwater structure built by countless generations of a strange kind of shellfish, the coral polyp. Instead of building himself a detached house like a normal shellfish the coral prefers to live in a huge apartment block. So he builds his tube-shaped house of calcium carbonate firmly upwards. And so the reef grows and grows. Nature imposes strict limits on the growth rate of a reef. The coral polyp has to extract his building materials from the sea, and since there is only a very little calcium carbonate in seawater it is a slow process. The hollow branching tubes of coral built by the former occupants are quite brittle, and so the lower levels of the reef have to turn into solid hard limestone before they can support the weight of the new growth above. This means that a great deal more calcium carbonate has to precipitate from the seawater and cement everything into a solid mass - another slow process. Holes drilled in the Eniwetok reef in the Pacific have revealed a depth of 4,600 feet. Now if the world is only 10,000 years old, and that reef began growing on Creation Day 5, it would have had to develop at an average rate of 5 and a half inches a year. But a great deal of research has been done on the growth rates of coral reefs, and such rates have been shown to be quite impossible. Under ideal conditions a growth rate of about half an inch a year would be good going." [4,600 feet = 55,200 inches = 110,400 half inches which equates to 110,400 years of growth for that reef]

Shale Deposits
page 87: "Shale and claystone are rocks which were formed from clay, deposited on the bottom of some ancient lake or sea. In some places these rocks are made up of many thin layers, which sometimes alternate between lighter and darker color. The English name for these alternating bands is 'varves', which comes from a Swedish word meaning 'layers'. Varves, like tree rings, are annual growth bands. When geologists in the nineteenth century studied the clay settling to the beds of lakes, they found that often it was one color in summer, and another in winter. This led them to conclude that varves were yearly growth layers. Were they right? Modern studies of microfossils in varves, and especially of the fossil pollen which is found in the summer layers but not the winter ones, have shown that they undoubtedly were. This means that we can tell how long it took a varved deposit to form in just the same way as we can tell the age of a cut-down tree - by counting the total number of growth bands. The current world record is held by the Green River shale deposits in Wyoming, Utah and Colorado, where there are up to several million of successive bands. Once again we have an indication of great age that simply cannot be explained away.

Indicators that the earth is much older than 10,000 years of age

  1. Indicator: The Los Alamos National Laboratory has developed a method of measuring the length of time that surface rocks have been exposed to cosmic rays. Cosmic rays stream into the atmosphere from all directions in outer space and break neutrons free when they collide with air molecules. When these neutrons hit rocks on the ground, they sometimes react with a tiny number of mineral atoms which create radioactive isotopes. At sea level, a few hundred modified atoms are created each year in a gram of quartz which is near the surface of the ground. New measuring techniques can detect very small numbers of these atoms and thus estimate the number of years that the rocks have been exposed. Scientists have found ages of about 8,500 years for "recent" glacial moraines in Newfoundland and 830,000 years for extinct volcanoes in Nevada.
  2. Indicator: The "nuclide" argument is one of the best proofs of an "old earth". Nuclides are forms of matter that are radioactive. Each nuclide decays into another form of matter at a certain rate. After an interval of time equal to its half-life, only half of the original material is left. Scientists have found that:

    The only logical explanation for these observations is that the world formed billions of years ago. There are enough long-lived nuclides still around to be still detectable. The short-lived nuclides have long since decayed and disappeared. The only exceptions to the latter are short lived nuclides which are being continuously generated by the decay of long-lived nuclides. 

  3. Indicator: Because of tides, the rotation of the earth is gradually slowing, by about 1 second every 50,000 years. About 380 million years ago, each day would have about 20 hours long! There would have been about 398 days in the year. Studies of rings on rugose coral fossils that were independently estimated to be 370 million years old revealed that when they were alive, there were about 400 days in the year. This relationship has been confirmed with other coral fossils. This is rather good evidence that the world was in existence a third of a billion years ago.  More information.
  4. Indicator: It takes thousands of years of below-freezing temperatures to build a 100 foot layer of permafrost. But large areas in the north are permanently frozen to depths of almost one mile! This took many tens of millennia to accomplish.
  5. Indicator: Radiocarbon dating of wood, using accelerator mass spectrometry, is accurate as far back as 50,000 years. The method has identified many wooden and textile objects to be many tens of thousands of years old.
  6. Indicator: Reversals of the earth's magnetic pole are recorded in the Atlantic Ocean sea bottom for the past 80 million years.
  7. Indicator: The rate at which the continents are spreading apart from each other indicates that the Atlantic Ocean is about 200 million years old.
  8. Indicator: Accelerator mass spectrometry measures particles of high atomic mass. Surface rocks have had their ages measured up to 10 million years old by detecting their level of Beryllium-10 and aluminum-26 isotopes.  Other elements like Potassium and Argon are used for older rocks. Radioactive dating of some earth rocks gives an age of almost 4 billion years. Some moon rocks and meteorites from outer space give dates in excess of 4 billion years.
  9. Indicator: If we assumed that all of the minerals which are carried by rivers into the oceans remains trapped in the oceans, then it would take 260 million years for the concentration of sodium to reach its present level. If plankton, fish or other plants adsorb sodium, then it would take much longer. We can conclude that the age of the earth is something greater than a quarter billion years, and is in all probability much longer.
  10. Indicator: Measurements by sensors attached to satellites shows that space dust accumulates on the moon at the rate of about 2 nanograms per square centimeter per year. (A nanogram is one thousandth of a million of a gram.) This rate would require 4.5 billion years to reach a depth of 1.5 inches, which is approximately the depth experienced by the astronauts who walked on the moon. This agrees rather well with radioactive dating of moon rocks.
  11. Indicator: Estimates for the length of time for the galaxies to have spread apart to their present spacing are in excess of 10 billion years.
  12. Indicator: Evolutionary principles applied to geology indicate that about 100 million years ago, the ancient super continent of Pangea was beginning to split apart so that land that would become South America and Africa  drifted apart. At first, the drift caused some shallow seas and a few land bridges. Later, the Atlantic Ocean opened up and became gradually wider until it became the ocean that we see today. This theory would have a logical consequence in the evolution of dinosaurs. Before this split in land mass took place, dinosaurs would have evolved into a variety of species which were found throughout Pangea. Since 100 million years ago, when the land bridges disappeared and the seas became too deep to cross, the dinosaurs would have evolved differently in Africa and South America, due to their isolation from each other. This is precisely what has been observed in the fossil record.
  13. Indicator: The human genome project has mapped all of our genes. Arthur Caplan of the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Bioethics has written:
    "The genome reveals, indisputably and beyond any serious doubt, that Darwin was right -- mankind evolved over a long period of time from primitive animal ancestors...The core recipe of humanity carries clumps of genes that show we are descended from bacteria. There is no other way to explain the jerry-rigged nature of the genes that control key aspects of our development...The theory of evolution is the only way to explain the arrangement of the 30,000 genes and three billion letters that constitute our genetic code...The message our genes send is that Charles Darwin was right."
    Eric Lander of the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, Mass., said that if you look at our genome it is clear that "evolution...must make new genes from old parts." Since evolution of the species must have taken billions of years to evolve from bacteria to humans, the earth must be very old.
  14. During each springtime, tiny, one-celled algae bloom in Lake Suigetsu, Japan. They die and sink to the bottom of the lake. Here, they create a thin, white layer. During the rest of the year, dark clay sediments settle to the bottom. The result are alternating dark and light annual layers -- much like the annual growth rings on a tree. Scientists have counted about 45,000 layers; they have been accumulating since about 43,000 BCE. This is far beyond the estimates of 6 to 10 millennia made by many creation scientists.
  15. Ice core samples have been taken in Greenland that show 40,000 annual layers of ice.