GEOSCIENCE REPORTS

Spring 1990 No. 11

CATASTROPHISM — Is It Scientific?
Ariel A. Roth, Director, Geoscience Research Institute

    Most of us were shocked by the disastrous earthquake that shook Mexico City on September 19, 1985, killing an estimated 8,000 people. We were equally shocked two months later when a mudflow resulting from a volcanic eruption destroyed the major part of the town of Armero, Colombia, burying at least 20,000people. Why were we surprised by these disasters? In both cases there had been warnings. Our reactions raise some interesting academic questions, but also, and more significantly, they raise questions indirectly related to belief or disbelief in the Genesis account of a worldwide flood.
    A brief historical review will help elucidate the issues involved. Around the end of the 18th century a number of geological controversies — some of them acrimonious — were in ferment.¹ Among them was the highly controversial proposal by the famous Scottish geologist James Hutton that the earth's crust had developed as a result of slow changes over long ages. His suggestion countered the then-prevailing concept that major catastrophes were the important agents of geologic change. (The number and type of catastrophes suggested varied with the theorist. Some considered the worldwide flood described in Genesis to be the prime catastrophe.) While Hutton!s writings have had a reputation for obscurity, it is clear that he wanted to explain geologic change on the basis of slow, normal processes. At one point he stated, "What more can we require? Nothing but time." In his most famous statement (first published in 1788), he pushed his emphasis on the normal to the limits of the past and future: "The result, therefore, of our present inquiry is that we find no vestige of a beginning — no prospect of an end."
    Several other scientists entered into the controversy over what rate of geologic change should be considered normative. Sir Charles Lyell, the most important among these, stressed even more strongly than his predecessor Hutton the importance of small, slow changes. In a letter to his fellow geologist Roderick Murchison he stated that "no causes whatever have from the earliest time to which we can look back, to the present, ever acted but those now acting and ... they never acted with different degrees of energy from that which they now exert."
    Lyell published a major treatise, Principles of Geology (1830-1833), that he called a polemic "to sink the diluvialists" (those who believed in a worldwide flood as described in Genesis). He was more successful than Hutton in gaining acceptance for the concept of slow changes. He was also more clever in his mode of argumentation. A letter he wrote to an active supporter reveals some of his methodology: "If you ... compliment the liberality and candor of the present age, the bishops and enlightened saints will join us in despising both the ancient and modern physio-theologians."
    S. J. Gould of Harvard University has also raised some questions about Lyell's methodology. He states: "Charles Lyell was trained as a lawyer, and his book is more a brief for gradualism than an impartial account of evidence.... Lyell denigrated catastrophism as an antiquated, last-ditch, effort by miracle-mongers trying to preserve the Mosaic chronology of an Earth only a few thousand years old.
    "I doubt that a more unfair characterization bas even been offered for a reputable scientific world view."²
    Lyell=s methods apparently worked, for soon thereafter the majority of geologists and other scholars adopted strict concepts of slow changes over eons. This new interpretation stood in stark contrast to the Bible's historical record, which proposes a recent creation and a worldwide flood that could have produced many of the geologic features under discussion.
    During Lyell's time the words unformitarianism and catastrophism came into use to describe the two contrasting modes of thought. Catastrophism refers to the concept that major catastrophes, usually of worldwide consequence, were the primary agents in shaping the crust of the earth. Uniformitarianism refers to the concept that the changes took place as a result of normal processes operating over long periods of time. The terms have recently undergone some confusing changes in meaning from their classical use, but the contrast between the two modes of thought still remains.

Catastrophism loses out

1. Catastrophism was sometimes associated with supernatural intervention, and during the time of the debate, science was emancipating itself from extraneous concepts and trying to explain everything within its own naturalistic framework. The theory of evolution, which was developing at that time, is a prime example. A little earlier Hutton himself expressed this tendency: "Therefore, there is no occasion for having recourse to any unnatural supposition of evil, to any destructive accident in nature, or to the agency of any preternatural [supernatural] cause, in explaining that which actually appears."
2. Catastrophic events are unusual, and we do not readily take them into our thinking.
3. In order to gain assurance that scientific conclusions are correct, it is highly desirable to test the underlying hypotheses. It is much easier to test for normal processes than for unusual, catastrophic events; hence the results of research are biased toward hypotheses which involve more easily accessible, normal event. Each of these three factors, and doubtless others as well, contributed to the rigorous application of uniformitarian interpretations in geology.

    Recently the picture has changed dramatically. The data from the rocks themselves have demanded a reinterpretation. The concept of the slow, constant rate of change is being challenged at many levels of geological interpretation, and catastrophes are again being considered as important geologic agents. Note the following authoritative statements, which highlight this recent shift in thought:
    W. Bahngrell Brown, Geology: "Of late there has been a serious rejuvenation of catastrophism in geological thought."³
    Derek V Ager, The Nature of the Stratigraphical Record. "The hurricane, the flood, or the tsunami may do more in an hour or a day than the ordinary process of nature have achieved in a thousand years."⁴
    Dag Nummendal, Geotimes: "The profound role of major storms throughout geologic history is becoming increasingly recognized."⁵
    Erle Kauffman, in Roger Lewin, Science: "It is a great philosophical breakthrough for geologists to accept catastrophe as a normal part of Earth history.@⁶
    Catastrophism was considered unscientific in the past but now geologists are finding similar concepts acceptable. At geological conventions discussions of major catastrophic events are now common. Some scientists have been particularly concerned that the new trend not be associated with the supernatural, as it often was in the 18th and 19th centuries. They have proposed new terms such as neocatastrophism, episodism, and convulsive events to distinguish the new approach but the terminology and definitions remain in a state of flux.
    While uniformitarianism is no longer dogma, there appears to be no trend toward shortening the billions of years assumed for the history of the crust of the earth. The theorists preserve the long ages by putting long periods of time between the catastrophic events. The new catastrophism does not posit one major event, such as the Genesis flood; nevertheless, current thinking often seriously considers events of worldwide significance.

The Missing Time Gaps

    The proposed time gaps between catastrophic events provide one more argument in favor of the authenticity of the biblical account of origins. The geologic record at these gaps offers no evidence similar to what the earth's surface now shows for the effects of long exposure to weathering agents. Evidence of erosion and soil development, and fossil evidence for the development of plant life are usually missing at these hypothetical major breaks. If long periods of time had intervened, such evidence should be apparent. Norman D. Newell, a leading evolutionary paleontologist, has admitted: "A puzzling characteristic of the erathem [one of the major fossil boundaries in the layers of the earth's crust] and of many other major biostratigraphic boundaries is the general lack of physical evidence of subaerial exposure. Traces of deep leaching, scour, channeling, and residual gravels tend to be lacking, even where the underlying rocks are cherty limestones.... These boundaries are paraconformities that are usually identifiable only by paleontological [fossil] evidence."⁷
    The paucity of time-dependent features at the so-called time gaps between many of the sedimentary layers of the earth poses a striking contrast with the irregular erosion on the earth's present surface. Since the boundaries between adjacent sedimentary layers usually do not show the physical evidence of the long time gaps, it does not appear that there ever were long periods between the depositions of these layers. These layers appear to have been laid down in rapid succession with little or no time between the events that precipitated their deposition. This is what we would expect of a single catastrophic event like such as the Genesis flood.
    A few samples of catastrophic activities will illustrate how rapid such action can be. In 1976 the great Teton Dam in Idaho gave way, and in less than two hours the waters had cut down through 300 ft of the earthen dam. In 1959 an earthquake in the Madison River canyon in southern Montana loosened material from as high as 1,000 ft above the canyon floor, forming a huge landslide that traveled with such momentum across the canyon that it rode 400 ft up the opposite side. Scientists estimated that the slide was traveling about, 100 mi/hr and that the whole process occurred in less than three minutes. Unfortunately 19 campers were buried beneath the slide.
    In 1929 the Grand Banks earthquake near Newfoundland loosened some mud on the edge of the continental shelf. Within 14 hrs that mud had traveled 500 mi into the North Atlantic and deposited a new, 2-4 ft-thick layer of sediment over 40,000 mi² of ocean bottom. It is estimated that the mudflow traveled at speeds up to 55 mi/hr⁸ and, interestingly, ran into the hull of the famous ship S.S. Titanic, which had sunk in this region on its maiden voyage in 1912.
    More significant than the simple recognition that changes can occur very rapidly, the new trend toward catastrophism has engendered the reinterpretation of several processes that once were thought to be slow. Tens of thousands of layers of sediment that scientists originally considered to have been deposited very slowly in shallow seas, are now interpret as having been deposited very rapidly in special underwater mudflows; called turbidites.⁹ A number of so-called reefs, composed of the skeletons of marine organisms, that were thought to require many hundreds to thousands of years to form are now considered to be the result of rapid debris flows.¹⁰ The Goosenecks area of the San Juan River in southeastern Utah has dramatic, deep meanders originally interpreted to have been eroded very slowly. New evidence indicates that they were cut by rapid currents.¹¹
    The southeastern portion of the state of Washington contains huge erosion channels, some of them scores of miles long. These were first thought to represent slow erosion, but after many years of controversy it is now agreed that they were formed by flood activity. Some geologists have postulated that one or more ice dams located upstream broke suddenly, releasing water over the area at the rate of 9.5 mi³/hr, which is 10 times the combined flow of all the rivers of the world.¹² Geology has moved a long way from the strict uniformitarianism of a few decades ago, and major catastrophes are again an acceptable part of scientific interpretation.

Paradigms Influence Science

    We can learn from the pattern of thought illustrated by the controversies over catastrophism. In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,¹³ Thomas Kuhn has pointed out that certain broad ideas, which he calls paradigms, dominate scientific interpretations. As long as these paradigms are normative, they are not questioned. One way or another, most data are interpreted to fit the accepted views.
    Classical uniformitarianism provides an outstanding example of how thinking can be influenced in this way. Hutton and Lyell so thoroughly established the concept of constant geologic change over long periods of time that major catastrophes were completely ignored for more than a century. The effect that this strict uniformitarian conditioning has had on the thought matrix of geology as a whole cannot easily be evaluated, but it is unquestionably considerable. The pattern of strict adherence to accepted ideas raises sobering questions regarding the validity of other dominant ideas in science (to say nothing of human intellectual activity as a whole — science is not alone subject to these episodic thought patterns).
    Because catastrophes are rare, we tend to ignore them and base our conclusions on the usual calm. The disaster caused by the Mexican earthquake and the Colombian volcano might not have seemed so devastating if we were more attuned to the reality of catastrophes, but the normal dominates our thinking. Likewise, because such an event is so unusual, we find it difficult to conceive of a worldwide flood as described in Genesis. But we must not fall into the trap of drawing our conclusions solely on the basis of the normal. In the case of geologic changes, the unusual catastrophe is much more important than the usual calm.
    Fortunately the possibility of catastrophes has important implications for anyone searching for truth regarding the history of this world. Since both the Bible and the book of nature have the same Author, they should agree if correctly interpreted. Much of the evidence of catastrophism found in the rocks does agree closely with what we would expect as a consequence of the worldwide flood described in Genesis. The present trend toward catastrophic interpretations in geology lends support to the authenticity of events described in the Bible.

[Pictures]

A view from Dead Horse Point, Utah. The striking contrast between the flat parallel layers of sediment and the deep gorge cut by the Colorado River illustrates the lack of evidence for time. Between several of the sedimentary layers major portions of the geologic column are missing. The lack of erosion at these assumed gaps suggests that the layers were laid down rapidly.

Aerial view of some of the unusual erosion channels of Eastern Washington which were produced by floods that broke through ice dams.

Turbidites in the Ventura Basin, California

Footnotes

1. For a more comprehensive discussion, see Chapter 2 of A. Hallam, 1983, Great Geological Controversies, Oxford University Press, New York. The quotations of Hutton and Lyell presented herein are from this text.
2. S. J. Gould, 1989, "An asteroid to die for," Discover, Oct., pp. 60-65.
3. W. Bahngrell Brown, 1974, "Induction, Deduction, and Irrationality in Geologic Reasoning, " Geology 2:456.
4. Derek V Ager, 1981, The Nature of the Stratigraphical Record, 2nd ed., John Wiley & Sons, New York, p. 54.
5. Dag Nummendal, 1982, "Clastics," Geotimes 27(2):23.
6. Erie Kauffman, 1983, quoted in Roger Lewin, "Extinctions and the History of Life," Science 221:935-937.
7. Norman D. Newell, 1984, "Mass Extinction: Unique or Recurrent Causes?" in W. W. Berggren and John A.Van Couvering (eds.), Catastrophes and Earth History; The New Unformitariansm, Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, pp. 115-127.
8. B. C. Heezen and M. Ewing, 1952, Turbidity Currents and Submarine Slumps, and the 1929 Grand Banks Earthquake,@ American Journal of Science 250:849-873.
9. R.G. Walker, 1973, "Mopping up the Turbidite Mess"in R. N. Ginsburg (cd.), Evolving Concepts in Sedimentology, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, pp. 1-37.
10. E. W. Mountjoy, H. E, Cook, L. C. Pray and P. N. McDaniel, 1972, "Allochthonous Carbonate Debris Flows-- Worldwide Indicators of Reef Complexes, Banks or Shelf Margins," Reports of the Twenty-Fourth International Geological Congress, Montreal, section 6, pp, 172-189.
11. R. G. Shepherd, 1972, "Incised River Meanders: Evolution in Simulated Bedrock," Science 178:409-411.
12. 1973, The Channeled Scablands of Eastern Washington: The Geologic Story of the Spokane Flood, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington D.C.
13. Thomas S. Kuhn, 1970. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed., The University of Chicago Press, Chicago.

Revised from an article in Ministry, July, 1986.

BOOK REVIEW

Gould, Stephen Jay. 1989. Wonderful Life. W W Norton & Company, NewYork. 347 pp.

    In a dream you are whisked into a wilderness where numerous strange and ferocious animals keep you on the run. Or you turn on the television and watch a thriller in which giant creatures, real or imagined, threaten terrified villagers. But could such an event actually happen in real fife?
    On a high mountain in the Rocky Mountains of eastern British Columbia, Canada, such a world has come to fight. Fortunately these animals are dead; in fact, they are fossils. But they reveal a microcosm of fantasy almost beyond imagination.
    Here is a ribbon-like worm with a mouth at one end surrounded by tentacles. There is a bizarre tuft of life that looks like a piece of bottle brush supported by stilts. That flying saucer with two strong pinchers in front and nut-cracker jaws; this wine goblet with a row of tentacles along the rim — what odd creatures!
    Wonderful Life describes these unusual creatures, the history leading up to their discovery, and the tedious work needed to reveal and describe them. Gould, a well-known scientist and science writer, attempts to interpret the meaning of these Middle Cambrian animals, found in the Middle Cambrian. They are not simple even though many have no modern representatives. Ancestors leading up to their appearance are not seen in lower or older rocks; therefore Gould considers them to have evolved suddenly — almost an explosive evolution. His philosophy is not the usual evolutionary gradualism; consequently, a creationist reads with interest because he also is not saddled with some of the usual preconceptions concerning origins.
    This window in the Cambrian opens up for us a small view of the marvelous diversity of God's original creation. We are slowly coming to the realization that life today, although probably consisting of more species, is impoverished relative to the numbers of basic body plans that have existed in the past. This appears to be true at least for marine benthonic organisms.
    A rich fauna that appears suddenly amplifies the position of creationists concerning the creation origin of the basic kinds of organisms. Evolutionists are being forced to postulate some kind of sudden evolution because transitional steps leading to these Cambrian animals are unknown.
    Gould gives little weight to survival of the fittest (natural selection) as a mechanism for progressive evolution. He suggests that survival was a random process, that if the tape of life could be rewound and played again, the results would be entirely different. For him humans are a most unexpected and fortunate end result of chance survival and evolutionary change that is almost unrepeatable.
    The research leading to the elucidation of the true morphology of this amazing collection of animals is dealt with in fascinating style. In this volume we have excellent examples of good science in operation and good science reporting. Any science student would be benefitted by reading it.

[Picture]

On the right is the quarry in the famous Cambrian Burgess Shale, high on a mountain side in Eastern British Columbia, Canada.

The Yellowstone Fires

    In the summer of 1988, giant forest fires in Yellowstone National Park attracted the attention of the world. Despite the efforts of 2 5,000 firefighters, 1.4 million gallons of fire retardant, ten million gallons of water, and 120 million dollars, 1,405,775 acres (793,880 within the park — 36% of the park area) were burned. These giant fires were the result of record drought, double the usual number of lightning storms, much accumulated plant litter on the forest floor, and strong winds.
    The natural-burn policy of the park (allowing natural fires to bum themselves out) was under much criticism by local residents and merchants because they feared for the safety of their own dwellings and structures and because they envisioned a sharp turndown of tourists because of the destruction of the park forests.
    Although more than a third of the park was burned, most of the burn involved only the floor of the forest and the grasslands. A little less than half of the 36% of the park that was burned involved the forest canopy. Very few large animals were killed because they were able to move away from advancing fires.
    With the removal of much dense litter from the forest floor, a variety of herbs and shrubs is growing up, much of it good fodder for the grazing animals. An increase in native wild animals is expected within the next few years. Great numbers of seedlings of lodgepole pine have begun to spring up as a result of the fires which are needed to release seeds from the cones.
    A hundred years will be needed to mask the charred stumps and burned snags. Yet the long-term results are positive for enrichment of the soil, renewal of forest trees, and elimination of accumulated plant litter — all part of a cycle of nature made necessary with the entrance of sin. Tourists may complain for a few years but the continued maintenance of wilderness beauty has a price that must be paid.

[Picture]

Hundreds of thousands of acres off forest go up in flames in Yellowstone National Park during the summer of 1988.

The Rapid Natural Production of Crude Oil

    One of the perplexing problems of geology concerns the origin of petroleum. The most popular scenario is that marine micro-organisms (mainly plant) gradually accumulate on the sea bottom, become buried, and eventually produce droplets of oil that coalesce into massive reservoirs of crude oil. This process was thought to require much time (geological ages).
    A recent publication in Nature^l gives a case study of the rapid natural production of oil. Sediments that are settling in Guaymas Basin in the Gulf of California are yielding oils that are indistinguishable from commercial crude oil. Carbon-14 dating of this oil gives an age of less than 5000 years. However, these oil-bearing sediments in Guaymas Basin have been acted upon by heat from rifts and vents in the sea floor. The assumption is made that this heat has been a factor in speeding up the process of changing buried organic matter into oil.
    Could the Guaymas Basin reflect on a small scale what happened worldwide during the Genesis flood? There is considerable evidence that much heat from massive submarine volcanic fissure and vent eruptions occurred during the flood when the earth's crust was broken up. Although we cannot be certain that the large reservoirs of oil now supplying our fuel needs were produced by this method, we note that this research paper gives a possible answer to the problem of the origin of oil — an answer compatible with Scripture.

Footnotes

1. Borys M. Didyk and Bernd R. T. Simoneit, 1989, "Hydrothermal oil of Guaymas Basin and implications for petroleum formation mechanisms," Nature 342:65-69.

The Tasaday Hoax

    The December, 1971 National Geographic contained an article about a newly discovered primitive tribe in southern Mindinao Island, the Philippines, called the Tasaday, They lived in caves, used crude stone tools and foraged for food from the surrounding jungle. They supposedly were stone-age people who had never contacted civilization. During the same month, a television feature on the Tasaday was shown to millions of North American viewers. Several anthropologists and linguists made studies of the tribe and their language.
    Fifteen years later, a Swiss journalist hiked to the caves which he found empty. The Tasaday were living in villages near the caves and wearing modern clothes. He declared in a Swiss newspaper that the whole Tasaday story was a hoax. Unfortunately the American bombing of Libya took the total attention of the news media. Outside of Europe, this new information about the Tasaday was largely unreported. This deception, perpetrated by an official under former President Alarco's administration might have remained unknown if a British film entitled "Trial in the Jungle" had not been scheduled for showing on U.S. television.
    The American Association for the Advancement of Science then called for an investigation (one among several) which is still in progress. However enough is known to convince many that the Tasaday story was a cleverly contrived fabrication. In brief a few of the salient points of the deception are as follows:

1. Only a few families were induced to dress scantily and live in the caves for a few days.
2. Scientists and journalists were brought in by helicopter to prevent their discovering the close proximity of villages and telltale trails.
3. Crude stone tools were prepared to enhance the deception, as was also fire production by spinning a wooden stick between the palms of the hands.
4. The language of these people is not distinct but is a dialect of Cotabato Manobo (as determined by a missionary Bible translater who lived in southern Mindinao for many years and talked the Manobo language).

    It appears that the presupposition that humans have a primitive stone-age origin led anthropologists and others into a deception from which they now cannot withdraw without embarrassment. But before creationists grin too broadly, let them remember the recent case of the Texas human footprints that have turned out to be those of dinosaurs.

References

• Marshall, Eliot. 1989. Anthropologists Debate Tasaday Hoax Evidence. Science 246:1113-1114.
• Taylor, Ian. 1989. National Geographic and the Stone Age Swindle? Creation Ex Nihilo 9:6-8.

A Video on the Genesis Flood

    A video entitled Evidences: The Record and the Flood has just been released by the Review and Herald Publishing Association. The 45-minute video, prepared under the direction of Dr. Ariel Roth, discusses the Genesis Flood from the following aspects:

1. Marine sediments on the Continents. Around the world, about half of the sediments on the continents today comes from the sea. How could so much marine material come to be on top of the continents by any process short of a worldwide flood? Marine sediments are thicker on the continents than on the ocean floor.
2. Unique Sediments Widely Distributed. Many geologically unique sediment layers cover such vast areas that it is difficult to believe that they were deposited slowly under noncatastrophic conditions. The Shinarump conglomerate in the southwestern United States, usually less than 100 ft thick, covers almost 100,000 mi², and the Morrison formation extends for 400,000 mi² from Kansas to Utah and from Canada to New Mexico.
3. Turbidites. Thousands of sedimentary layers once thought to have been deposited in shallow water during long ages are now recognized as the result of fast-moving underwater mud flows (turbidites).
4. Lack of Erosion at Assumed Time Gaps. If two adjacent layers (strata), that are said to be separated by millions of years, show no evidences of erosion between them, they probably were laid down rapidly one above the other.
       A model of what might have occurred during the Genesis Flood is presented in the video. The sinking of the continents with the accompanying deposition of transported sediment from both the continents and the oceans may explain the varied nature of the sediments we now see on the continents.

    The video was given a second place Silver Screen award by the United States Festivals Association in the Religion, Ethics, and Brotherhood category at the 23rd Annual International Awards Competition. It was selected from over 1500 entries from 29 nations.
    Orders for this video may be placed with Adventist Book Centers or directly with the Review and Herald Publishing Association.

Discussion at Goddard Space Flight Center

   Dr. Ariel Roth, Director of the Geoscience Research Institute, presented a lecture entitled: "Some Questions About the Geologic Tune Scale" at the Engineering Colloquium on April 30 at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Green Belt, Maryland.
    In his presentation, Roth questioned the validity of the billions of years postulated for the development of the fossiliferous layers of Earth's crust. While this view has considerable acceptance in scientific circles, a notable body of data can be presented which challenges it. The question has considerable interest for the creation-evolution controversy.
    The lecture engendered a good discussion with some participants affirming their belief in the biblical account of beginnings, while others attempted to find alternative interpretations for the data presented.
    A highlight of the visit for the speaker was a tour of the Goddard Space Flight Center. Of special note was the control area for the Hubble telescope and the huge equipment used to manufacture and test satellites before they are sent into outer space. Equipment includes environments providing vacuum, vibrations, loud sounds, and temperature changes. A huge centrifuge provides major variations in the gravitational environment. The satellites are thoroughly tortured and tested before being released into outer space.

MAY I ASK A QUESTION?

    "Species" is a man-made category. Nothing is said in the Bible about species. The word "kind" that is used in the Bible is a general term. It is not correct to equate species with kind. Perhaps kind is more like our present-day family, like the dog family, the horse family, the cat family, etc. What the Bible is saying is that God produced different kinds of beasts and different kinds of birds and different kinds of creeping things. Although animals reproduce after their kinds, the commands in the first chapter of Genesis are commands of creation are not commands governing future reproduction. God has allowed variation within kinds but there is no evidence that change occurs from one basic kind to another basic kind. We see a large variety of dogs. If these were found wild we would consider them different species. But they are all dogs and dogs have not changed into other basic kinds. The production of new species (or varieties) of dogs has not violated the creation command concerning kinds. Evolution (change) can be demonstrated to occur within kinds but it has never been demonstrated between kinds.

GEOSCIENCE REPORTS

Spring 1990, No. 11

Editor --- Harold G. Coffin
Associate Editor --- Katherine Ching

Subscription requests, correspondence, and notices of change of address should be sent to: Geoscience Reports, Geoscience Research Institute, Loma Linda University, Loma Linda, CA 92350.

Geoscience Reports is a newsletter published by the Geoscience Research Institute to present current happenings at the Institute as well as articles of general interest which deal with creation/evolution issues for secondary-school and college science classes. The views expressed are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the Institute.

Staff of the Institute are Ariel A. Roth - Director, Katherine Ching, Ben L. Clausen, Harold G. Coffin, L. Jim Gibson, and Clyde L. Webster.