Adventures in ACE VII: Ignorant About Igneous

You’d think something as basic as the three basic rock types would be hard to screw up. But if there’s one thing the authors of ACE excel at, it’s abject failure to get anything right. I mean, a stray fact here or there sneaks in, but the poor lonely things are isolated, surrounded by vast tracts of utter wrongness. One wonders what they’re doing there.

So. Igneous. After the violence done to volcanoes, I’m sure you can’t wait to see what they do to the related rocks.

If you ever want to make batholiths sound boring, quote ACE. They probably haven’t got a thesaurus in the office, judging from the number of times they use “large.” They say that “large amounts of magma” “may spread out sideways over a large area under Earth’s surface.” And the “largest area in the United States of such spread-out hardened magma is in central Idaho.” They don’t mention what these “layers” are actually called, and they make it seem like a huge sill. I don’t think they realize these are batholiths, that the huge mass of magma they came from is a diapir, and they don’t talk about them slowly cooling. I can guarantee they don’t want to discuss how long it takes for 15,000 square miles (not 16,000, ACE) of magma to freeze.

But it’s not like they understand the massive amounts of heat involved in things like batholiths. This is clear in the next paragraph, where they say “God used the volcanic action of breaking up the fountains of the deep, along with opening the windows of heaven, to bring about the Flood.” You know, a lot of creationists seem to go on about things like epic amounts of volcanic activity and even “runaway subduction” – which is probably a concept too complicated for ACE writers. Not one of the people espousing such extra-biblical claims have dealt with the heat problem. You know, the one that would have boiled Noah & Co.

Image shows a lake with a huge mass of water boiling out of it. Boiling lake in Yellowstone National Park.Once Churning Caldron was a cool spring covered with colorful mats of microorganisms. This all has changed after earthquakes in 1978-79 superheated the water and killed the microbes. This once cool pool now averages 164°F and in 1996, it began throwing water 3-5 feet. Image and caption courtesy Brocken Inaglory via Wikimedia Commons.
Boiling lake in Yellowstone National Park.Once Churning Caldron was a cool spring covered with colorful mats of microorganisms. This all has changed after earthquakes in 1978-79 superheated the water and killed the microbes. This once cool pool now averages 164°F and in 1996, it began throwing water 3-5 feet. Image and caption courtesy Brocken Inaglory via Wikimedia Commons.

ACE goes beyond that: they’re still babbling about the bloody vapor canopy. Creationists David Rush and Larry Vardiman knew by summer 1990 that a vapor canopy would create temperatures far too high for life on earth. Even Answers in Genesis doesn’t spout this shit anymore. But this ACE PACE, revised in 1996, is blissfully oblivious, going on about the wonderful greenhouse the earth was pre-Flood.

Then the numbskulls thoroughly bork their own “theory:”

“Abundant evidence from the past shows us that intense igneous and earth-shifting activity occurred. This evidence indicates that a rapid build-up of intense pressure took place within our earth, causing the walls and ceilings of the conduits to crack, crumble, and then possibly explode as the water in them was turned into steam. Volcanic explosions and eruptions occurring with these disturbances would have caused great quantities of magma from Earth’s mantle to rise, together with vast quantities of hot water and steam.”

This stuff, per their Flood story, happened all over the world. All the volcanism from 4.5 billion to 4,000 years ago supposedly happened all at once. They talk about enormous amounts of volcanic activity unleashing torrents of hot water and steam, and yet it never occurs to them that the ambient temperature within a wooden boat sailing the boiling Flood would cook everything in it. That’s assuming the heat doesn’t melt the caulk and sink the damn ship.

It’s amazing how very good at bad thinking they are.

Image is a demotivational poster showing a derpy-looking kid at a computer. Caption reads, "Ignorance: Opinions with a lack of knowledge."

It gets worse. While they’re vaguely aware of what pumice is, and definitely know it can be used in really powerful soap, awareness is a mere anomaly. Take the very next igneous rock they attempt to describe:

Lava that flows into water cools quickly and hardens to form a second variety of igneous rock – a dense, black, glasslike rock called “obsidian”…. Cliffs of obsidian in Yellowstone National Park are proof that this dry area was once underwater.

Um. No. Obsidian doesn’t form underwater, and the Obsidian Cliff at Yellowstone certainly didn’t. It was a subaerial (under air) flow of thick, hot rhyolite that flowed from an older rhyolite plateau and filled a valley. There may have been a stream it buried, and it was later planed down by a glacier, but it’s never in its life been completely underwater. Also, it’s around 180,000 years old, which is about 172,000 years older than the earth according to creationists. Rhyolite flows are generally subaerial features, so no, the pumice and obsidian formed from them are not “convincing pieces of evidence that God used subterranean forces of the inner Earth to overthrow the world because of man’s sin.”

Jeez.

They then go on to proclaim Mt. Ararat to be a volcano “formed early during the Flood.” Their evidence? They say there’s pillow lava upon it, and pillow lava forms underwater, ergo gigantic Flood. Checkmate, atheists! There’s a few problems with that, even ignoring the age of the rocks. For one thing, the only sources babbling about pillow lava on Ararat are YECs. Quelle surprise. There may indeed be something up there, but I’ll bet you a dollar it’s either a wee patch o’ pillows formed in a lake, or spheroidal weathering.

A discussion of igneous rocks that form underground follows the above nonsense. It consists of a description of granite suitable for 1st graders – in an 8th grade book. They spend more time babbling about the things you can carve out of it than they do discussing what it is. They don’t stop their granite art history at Mount Rushmore, either – they also want us to admire the Confederate leaders carved into Stone Mountain, GA, because treason is totes okay when it’s slave owners entrepreneurs trying to protect their right to own human beings state’s rights. Oh, yeah – Stone Mountain is quartz monzonite, not granite. And it’s not one big boulder, as they claim – it’s a monadnock. A pluton. A big fucking mass o’ magma that cooled underground, not a gigantic 700-foot high boulder. And the ACE people’ve cut it short by 125 feet. See what I mean? They can’t even get the minor details right.

This following bit of dumbassery, however, might cause the geologically-savvy members of this audience to lose the last of their shit. Don’t have anything in your mouth for this next gem o’ wisdom:

Another type of igneous rock formed beneath Earth’s surface when magma cools is basalt.

Image is an ecard showing a person with their face in their hands. Caption says, "Congratulations. Your stupidity has exceeded the limits of my expectations."

Try gabbro, you ignorant gits.

Also, can someone tell me where they’re getting this idea that 3-10 miles of basalt underlies the entire lithosphere, including the continents?

This section ends on a pathetic note, where they say that the basalt “foundation of the Earth is permanent.” I hate to break this to them, but Psalm 104:1,5 is either metaphorical or a lie. There’s this thing called subduction, y’see, that recycles those “permanent” foundations every few hundred million years.

After that mountain range o’ wrong, I’m sure you’re thinking, “It can’t possibly get any worse.”

Oh, it can. Wait ’til you see what they’ve done to sedimentary rocks.

 

Here is a lolcat to soothe your tortured mind.

Image is a demotivational poster showing a cat with glowing green eyes staring from a cone of newspaper. Caption says, "Volcano cat. Nowhere is safe."

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Adventures in ACE VII: Ignorant About Igneous
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9 thoughts on “Adventures in ACE VII: Ignorant About Igneous

  1. 1

    It occurs to me that the “vapour canopy” hypothesis could work. During the cataclysm the old mountains crumbled and new mountains arose, releasing huge amounts of energy. So much energy that the seas boiled dry and the resulting steam produced the vapour canopy. I’m not really sure how Noah and his crew would survive being autoclaved, but I’m sure with more “research” the answer can be uncovered.

  2. 2

    > Also, can someone tell me where they’re getting this idea that 3-10 miles of basalt underlies the entire lithosphere, including the continents?

    My tentative guess is they use some very old book, from the 19th century or so – a pre-uniformitarian one. Can you give us the quote for that?

    Or perhaps they just got things muddled up.

  3. rq
    5

    You’d think there was only so much stupid to go around in this world, but noooo, somebody’s always gotta prove me wrong.
    On the other hand, this corrective review you’re going through is doing wonders to reinforce my own knowledge of rocks and their types. You list their mistakes, and I start thinking to myself of why it’s wrong, and then you tell me if I’m right or wrong. Education! Of the real sort!
    Thanks, Dana.

    Also,

    “large amounts of magma” “may spread out sideways over a large area under Earth’s surface.”

    Um, which way was the magma supposed to go? Up with the vapour to form the Upper Lithosphere? Or just back down? I mean, it’s not like the possibilities are endless…

  4. rq
    7

    That book from 1992 has been planted for you to ‘remember’. It’s really a fake and it’s testing your faith!!!
    Uh… right?

  5. 8

    They got that obsidian thing from the Minecraft game, they must have!

    Which means it was revealed to them by divine revelation or time travel because Minecraft was released in 2011.

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