"Scientists recently studied the Drakensberg Range in South Africa, discovering that lightning likely damages mountain surfaces far more often than previously thought. Lightning also generates fulgarites, and these two finds call into question old age assignments for Earth's land features.
Publishing in the journal Geomorphology, Jasper Knight and Stefan Grab observed that just one lightning strike can gouge a huge divide through solid bedrock. Such a strike partially melts the rocks adjacent to cracks, causing the rock's magnetic minerals to reorient themselves to the direction of Earth's magnetic field.
The Drakensberg Range contains basalt rocks, which have plenty of magnetic minerals oriented to the apparently different magnetic field lines present at the rocks' original formation. By passing a compass over the Drakensberg's cracks and watching its needle spin and flip, Knight and Grab determined that the fractures in question resulted from lightning.
How might this finding affect overall erosion rates estimated for entire continents? Geologists have
But those studies never took into account these new lightning data, a factor which would only accelerate the erosion rate, making Earth's old age assignment even less credible.
Lightning-generated cracks may not be a well-known erosional process, but earth scientists are generally more familiar with fulgarites—long, branched tubes of quickly melted and re-solidified materials created when lightning strikes sand and other ground debris. Yet, Earth's surface does not display billions or even millions of years' worth of fulgarites.
Physicist Don DeYoung described this problem -"With approximately one hundred lightning strokes [sic] per second occurring across the earth, throughout the alleged 4.6 billion years of earth history….there should be…more than 1,000 fulgarites per square meter of land everywhere." And this is if only "1% of these land strikes resulted in fulgarite formation."
Where are all the missing fulgarites? Why are continents and high mountains still standing despite dramatic lightning damage and relatively fast erosion rates? The answers to these questions are the same—the world is only thousands, not billions, of years old." ICR
They are wet with the showers of the mountains,
Job 24:8
