Tuesday, October 25, 2016

Creation Moment 10/26/2016 - Why isn't it Frozen?

Out of whose womb came the ice?
Job 38:29
"Secular speculations insist Earth coalesced into its current state over four billion years ago, leaving one huge problem: the young sun would have been so dim that Earth would have frozen. Secular astronomers have long invoked methane gas to defray this dilemma, called the "faint young sun
paradox." A recent study revealed two new reasons to totally reject methane as a rescuing device, leaving this paradox stronger than ever.

According to a University of California Riverside (UCR) news release, "For at least a billion years of the distant past, planet Earth should have been frozen over but wasn't." Life forms that left fossils fitted to these "ages" clearly show that Earth wasn't frozen, but perfectly suited for life from the time of its earliest rock deposits. A methane-packed atmosphere might have generated enough of a greenhouse effect to insulate the planet for life to survive those long ages.

Publishing in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, three researchers associated with the NASA Astrobiology Institute revealed a key oversight that decades-worth of methane-embracing models apparently overlooked. Their new and more realistic model of biogeochemical cycles in an early Earth's oceans revealed plenty of methane-destroying sulfate.
Lead author of the study and UCR graduate student Stephanie Olson told UCR Today, "You can't get significant methane out of the ocean once there is sulfate."

Without oxygen, Earth would have no ozone to shield even a faint sun's UV radiation. Radiation slaughters methane molecules and damages DNA. Since life thrived when currently fossilized creatures roamed Earth, oxygen was certainly around at the time.

But that means oxidation reactions occurred. On continents, these reactions would have turned iron into rust and pyrite into sulfate. Erosion would have transported loads of sulfate to oceans, where even a smidgeon of it would directly destroy methane. And insufficient methane in the oceans means too little methane for the atmosphere to warm things up.

At least 300 parts of methane per million parts of other gases might rescue an early-Earth scenario from the faint young sun paradox. But 10 parts per million falls woefully short. However, this analysis revealed a second reason to reject the idea that methane could rescue an early Earth from freezing over.

Single-celled marine life was around back then, supposedly making all the methane. But in today's oceans, tiny cells extract energy much more efficiently from sulfate than by processing complex organics to make methane. Ancient cells would have preferred sulfate and produced too little methane.

Methane to the rescue? Not anymore, according to this recent secular science."
ICR