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Dinosaurs and Dust

Climatic effects of the impact and volcanism scenarios for the extinction of dinosaurs are investigated in a modelling paper.

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Is There a Scientific Conflict Between the Theory of Darwinian Evolution and the Fossil Record?

Darwin saw evolution as a slow and steady process with species gradually transforming into new species over long time. He thought that the fossil record should provide evidence for his theory. However, the needed evidence proved to be elusive.

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What Do Fossils Tell Us?

Fossils are remains or other evidence of organisms that lived in the past and are preserved in the rocks. How did they form and what can we learn from them?

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Rapid Bedrock Incision by Water Stream Outburst: The Case of the Oroville Dam (California, USA)

New observational data on the phenomenon of rapid bedrock erosion became recently available after the well documented events that affected the Oroville Dam in February 2017.

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The Grand Staircase: a Case Study in Scientific Thinking from a Biblical Worldview

ARTICLE. In Utah and northern Arizona is a unique geological landscape feature, called the Grand Staircase. Imagine a staircase with each step a thousand feet or more high, and many miles wide. We will discuss hypotheses in regard to how this feature was formed. Published in Origins, n. 65.

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Pterosaurs of the Triassic: An Update

This post complements an article that was written in 2014. Since then, there have been some interesting developments in the area of Triassic pterosaurs that are worth mentioning, the most important being the recent description by Britt et al. (2018) of a Triassic pterosaur from the Nugget Sandstone of Utah.

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What Is the Evidence for a Large Asteroid Impact at the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) Boundary?

The hypothesis of a large meteorite impacting the surface of the Earth at the end of the Cretaceous was introduced almost four decades ago. In the ensuing years, the geologic community gathered a large body of data in support of this hypothesis, elevating it to the status of a universally accepted fact of Earth history. However, competing models and lively discussions are still unfolding over the dynamics and environmental consequences of this large impact.

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A Review of the Documentary Film “Is Genesis History?”

Is Genesis History? asks a question that many Christians struggle with. Is the first book of the Bible comprised of pious myths? Is it an allegory designed to teach important lessons about God, but not actually a record of the history of life on Earth? Or is it a reliable record of events that actually occurred in the past? In other words, is Genesis the oldest book of history available today, one…

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The Geological Story Told by Iceland

Iceland is a volcanic island in the North Atlantic Ocean, slightly below the Arctic Circle. The island is situated on a mid-ocean ridge at the boundary between the North American plate and the Eurasian plate. In Iceland, we find evidence of horizontal movements, in which two plates spread apart as the crust dilates with intrusion of new magma. Iceland, however, is also associated with a mantle plume (a narrow stem of upwelling of magma from deep in the mantle) that has maintained volcanism high and vigorous.

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The Paleozoic Rock Record: A Broad Overview of Features and Trends

The rocks of the Earth are like pages of a history book containing information about the past. Geologists who enjoy reading this “book” have found that it consists of two “volumes:” the first, named Precambrian, is mostly devoid of macroscopic fossils. The second, named Phanerozoic, contains layers and sediments providing a rich archive of past forms of animal and vegetal life. The Phanerozoic “volume”…

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The Precambrian: Part 3 of 3

This third part of a series on the Precambrian provides two perspectives suggested by creationists on how to interpret this portion of the rock record.

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Patterns in the Fossil Record, Part 2

A general note of caution is necessary in the discussion of patterns in the fossil record. As with many other aspects of the natural world, the complexity that we find in this field of study tends to transcend our idealized categorizations.

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The Role of Catastrophes in Scientific Thinking

The degree of importance of catastrophes for the geologic history of the earth has been the basis of a long scientific controversy that involves deep time questions.

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Lazarus Species

Lazarus species raise questions about how the geologic column formed. They are one good reason that we should be thinking about mechanisms other than deep time to account for the order we observe in the fossil record.

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Was There A Great Genesis Flood?

The first book of the Bible states that following a recent creation by God, there was an astonishing worldwide Flood. In that context, the Flood would have been responsible for most of the great fossil bearing layers of the earth. However, current scientific interpretations propose that these layers slowly accumulated over billions of years thus allocating more time for the slow gradual evolution of…

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Glaciations and the Geologic Record

Glaciations are defined as periods of temperature reduction in the Earth's climate which result in the onset or expansion of continental and polar ice sheets and alpine glaciers. Does the geologic record preserve evidence for the occurrence and extent of former ice ages? What kind of information is used to make these inferences? The answer to these questions has the potential for influencing our models…

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Baumgardner’s Modeling of Rapid Plate Tectonic Motion

To model the motion of Earth's plates, Baumgardner uses a Fortran program he developed called TERRA that must be run on a supercomputer. It is one of four models in the world capable of modeling Earth in a global manner.

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How Do Plate Tectonics Relate to the Bible?

Plate tectonic theory seems to be well-founded, but the science does not fit easily with a recent one-year flood. However, as is the case in many other areas of human investigation, when we study origins issues, we must trust the details to an all-wise God, since His “foolishness” is greater than our wisdom.

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Catastrophic Earth Science: A Realistic Science

A realistic science, not an actualistic one, is led through coherence and consistency of observation with hypothesis, even if it were an"outrageous hypothesis" such as a global planetary flood of the likes reported in ancient history.

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Catastrophism: Discussion of Its Current Status in Geology, and a Prediction

To consider a much more rapid, catastrophic geological past challenges the naturalistic origin of life and of major categories of life forms. Do we want to know if that naturalistic interpretation is really correct or not? As scientists, are we open to consider what really happened in the past, or are we satisfied to limit our explanations to fit a pre-determined set of assumptions?

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