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The eruptions of Mount Saint Helens in the 1980s provided creation scientists with a geological laboratory to explore processes that may have been involved in the upheaval of Noah’s Flood. This presentation will tell the story of the 1980 eruptions and outline some of the lessons we have learned from Mount Saint Helens.

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Uranium atoms make helium atoms as they decay to lead. The RATE project found that such helium produced in radioactive zircon crystals in deep, hot granitic rock from New Mexico has not had time to escape, even though helium leaks out of most minerals fast. Though the zircons contain 1.5 billion years’ worth of nuclear decay products, we measured high rates of helium leakage from them. The rates show that the helium has been leaking for only 6,000 years (± 2000 years). This is not only evidence for the youth of the earth, but also for an episode of greatly speeded-up decay rates during the year of the Genesis flood, only 4500 years ago. That shrinks the “millions of years” (of radioactivity dates) down to months (during the year of the flood).

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A little known two-day flood event during the ice age carved canyons in solid basalt in in eastern Washington, forming the Grand Coulee (Banks Lake), Dry Falls (three times larger than Niagara Falls), destroying thousands of square miles of fertile land (the Scablands), changing the course of the Palouse River and forming the spectacular Palouse Falls, deepening and widening the Columbia River Gorge and depositing fertile eastern Washington soil in the Willamette Valley. The scale of the destruction is much more significant than the eruption of Mt. St. Helens. It doesn’t take millions of years to change the geology. Does this have a bearing on how features like the Grand Canyon formed? Does it take millions of years to significantly alter the surface of the earth? This talk explores the Missoula Flood event and demonstrates that science does match what we would expect the geology of the surface to be like after the Biblical worldwide flood of Noah’s time.

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One of the main ways Mount Saint Helens impacted our understanding of Flood geology is in the area of sedimentology - the way that rocks are formed from smaller particles like sand and mud. This presentation will focus on lessons in sedimentology that we have learned from Mount Saint Helens, including the log mat on Spirit Lake as a model for coal formation, and examples of rapid formation of rock layers.

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How does the biblical account of the great flood in Genesis connect to geology? How do modern young-Earth creationists think that this happened? What about plate tectonics and Pangaea? Here, you’ll encounter both the scriptural and geologic record of Noah’s flood and an up-to-date understanding of this fascinating time in Earth and human history.

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