Welcome to Earth Explained

This website has been designed as a gateway to some of the best science resources on the internet, in order to expose the laughable, dishonest and just plain wrong teachings of the Young-Earth Creationists (YECs). Despite all their protests to the contrary, these people have no respect for most of science, nor for the huge advances made in our understanding of the earth and universe over the last 300 years. To them, most of geology, geophysics, cosmology, palaeontology, archaeology, biology, zoology and astrophysics are wrong. If you are a YEC, get ready to learn about how you were totally duped by your teachers, and why Ken Ham's "Creation Museum" is no museum at all.

In this website you will encounter a range of different views about creation and evolution.  However they all have one thing in common: they prove that young-earth creationism (YEC) is flawed and contradicted by the evidence.

Cool Video Series

Check out these videos and see what you think.  It may take a moment for each successive video in a series to start playing.  If the next video in a series fails to start, click the > button on the right-hand side of the video frame.

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Ken Ham's Creation "Museum"

Ken Ham has made a career out of spreading misinformation and lies about evolution and the age of the earth. His creation "museum", a monstrosity dedicated to nonsense, was built for an astonishing $27 million, donated by uneducated individuals who couldn't think of anything better to support. Really, the mind boggles at the minds of so many Americans (and not a few Britons) who still think that the world is only 6,000 years old and that a worldwide flood laid down the rocks. What then of ancient civilizations and cave paintings dating back to 25,000 BC? Or ice cores going back 420,000 years? Or varve formations at least a few million years old? Ken Ham and his ilk do not adequately account for any of this, instead asserting that all the dating methods are wrong and that there is a huge conspiracy on the part of scientists to keep the general public from believing in God. Nothing could be further from the truth. Find out more about Ham here and here.

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Hydrocarbons in the Deep Earth?

ScienceDaily (July 27, 2009) - The oil and gas that fuels our homes and cars started out as living organisms that died, were compressed, and heated under heavy layers of sediments in the Earth's crust. Scientists have debated for years whether some of these hydrocarbons could also have been created deeper in the Earth and formed without organic matter. Now for the first time, scientists have found that ethane and heavier hydrocarbons can be synthesized under the pressure-temperature conditions of the upper mantle —the layer of Earth under the crust and on top of the core.

The research was conducted by scientists at the Carnegie Institution's Geophysical Laboratory, with colleagues from Russia and Sweden, and is published in the July 26, advanced online issue of Nature Geoscience.
Methane (CH4) is the main constituent of natural gas, while ethane (C2H6) is used as a petrochemical feedstock. Both of these hydrocarbons, and others associated with fuel, are called saturated hydrocarbons because they have simple, single bonds and are saturated with hydrogen. Using a diamond anvil cell and a laser heat source, the scientists first subjected methane to pressures exceeding 20 thousand times the atmospheric pressure at sea level and temperatures ranging from 1,300 F to over 2,240 F. These conditions mimic those found 40 to 95 miles deep inside the Earth. The methane reacted and formed ethane, propane, butane, molecular hydrogen, and graphite. The scientists then subjected ethane to the same conditions and it produced methane. The transformations suggest heavier hydrocarbons could exist deep down. The reversibility implies that the synthesis of saturated hydrocarbons is thermodynamically controlled and does not require organic matter.

The scientists ruled out the possibility that catalysts used as part of the experimental apparatus were at work, but they acknowledge that catalysts could be involved in the deep Earth with its mix of compounds.

"We were intrigued by previous experiments and theoretical predictions," remarked Carnegie's Alexander Goncharov a coauthor. "Experiments reported some years ago subjected methane to high pressures and temperatures and found that heavier hydrocarbons formed from methane under very similar pressure and temperature conditions. However, the molecules could not be identified and a distribution was likely. We overcame this problem with our improved laser-heating technique where we could cook larger volumes more uniformly. And we found that methane can be produced from ethane."

The hydrocarbon products did not change for many hours, but the tell-tale chemical signatures began to fade after a few days.

Professor Kutcherov, a coauthor, put the finding into context: "The notion that hydrocarbons generated in the mantle migrate into the Earth's crust and contribute to oil-and-gas reservoirs was promoted in Russia and Ukraine many years ago. The synthesis and stability of the compounds studied here as well as heavier hydrocarbons over the full range of conditions within the Earth's mantle now need to be explored. In addition, the extent to which this 'reduced' carbon survives migration into the crust needs to be established (e.g., without being oxidized to CO2). These and related questions demonstrate the need for a new experimental and theoretical program to study the fate of carbon in the deep Earth."

This research was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, the National Nuclear Security Agency through the Carnegie/DOE Alliance Center, the National Science Foundation, the W.M. Keck Foundation, and the Carnegie Institution.

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Plate Tectonics Started Over 4 Billion Years Ago, Geochemists Report

ScienceDaily (Nov. 27, 2008) — A new picture of the early Earth is emerging, including the surprising finding that plate tectonics may have started more than 4 billion years ago — much earlier than scientists had believed, according to new research by UCLA geochemists reported Nov. 27 in the journal Nature.

"We are proposing that there was plate-tectonic activity in the first 500 million years of Earth's history," said geochemistry professor Mark Harrison, director of UCLA's Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics and co-author of the Nature paper. "We are reporting the first evidence of this phenomenon."

"Unlike the longstanding myth of a hellish, dry, desolate early Earth with no continents, it looks like as soon as the Earth formed, it fell into the same dynamic regime that continues today," Harrison said. "Plate tectonics was inevitable, life was inevitable. In the early Earth, there appear to have been oceans; there could have been life — completely contradictory to the cartoonish story we had been telling ourselves."

"We're revealing a new picture of what the early Earth might have looked like," said lead author Michelle Hopkins, a UCLA graduate student in Earth and space sciences. "In high school, we are taught to see the Earth as a red, hellish, molten-lava Earth. Now we're seeing a new picture, more like today, with continents, water, blue sky, blue ocean, much earlier than we thought."

The Earth is 4.5 billion years old. Some scientists think plate tectonics — the geological phenomenon involving the movement of huge crustal plates that make up the Earth's surface over the planet's molten interior — started 3.5 billion years ago, others that it began even more recently than that.

The research by Harrison, Hopkins and Craig Manning, a UCLA professor of geology and geochemistry, is based on their analysis of ancient mineral grains known as zircons found inside molten rocks, or magmas, from Western Australia that are about 3 billion years old. Zircons are heavy, durable minerals related to the synthetic cubic zirconium used for imitation diamonds and costume jewelry. The zircons studied in the Australian rocks are about twice the thickness of a human hair.

Hopkins analyzed the zircons with UCLA's high-resolution ion microprobe, an instrument that enables scientists to date and learn the exact composition of samples with enormous precision. The microprobe shoots a beam of ions, or charged atoms, at a sample, releasing from the sample its own ions, which are then analyzed in a mass spectrometer. Scientists can aim the beam of ions at specific microscopic areas of a sample and conduct a high-resolution isotope analysis of them without destroying the object.

"The microprobe is the perfect tool for determining the age of the zircons," Harrison said.

The analysis determined that some of the zircons found in the magmas were more than 4 billion years old. They were also found to have been formed in a region with heat flow far lower than the global average at that time.

"The global average heat flow in the Earth's first 500 million years was thought to be about 200 to 300 milliwatts per meter squared," Hopkins said. "Our zircons are indicating a heat flow of just 75 milliwatts per meter squared — the figure one would expect to find in subduction zones, where two plates converge, with one moving underneath the other."

"The data we are reporting are from zircons from between 4 billion and 4.2 billion years ago," Harrison said. "The evidence is indirect, but strong. We have assessed dozens of scenarios trying to imagine how to create magmas in a heat flow as low as we have found without plate tectonics, and nothing works; none of them explain the chemistry of the inclusions or the low melting temperature of the granites."

Evidence for water on Earth during the planet's first 500 million years is now overwhelming, according to Harrison.

"You don't have plate tectonics on a dry planet," he said.

Strong evidence for liquid water at or near the Earth's surface 4.3 billion years ago was presented by Harrison and colleagues in a Jan. 11, 2001, cover story in Nature.

"Five different lines of evidence now support that once radical hypothesis," Harrison said. "The inclusions we found tell us the zircons grew in water-saturated magmas. We now observe a surprisingly low geothermal gradient, a low rate at which temperature increases in the Earth. The only mechanism that we recognize that is consistent with everything we see is that the formation of these zircons was at a plate-tectonic boundary. In addition, the chemistry of the inclusions in the zircons is characteristic of the two kinds of magmas today that we see at place-tectonic boundaries."

"We developed the view that plate tectonics was impossible in the early Earth," Harrison added. "We have now made observations from the Hadean (the Earth's earliest geological eon) — these little grains contain a record about the conditions under which they formed — and the zircons are telling us that they formed in a region with anomalously low heat flow. Where in the modern Earth do you have heat flow that is one-third of the global average, which is what we found in the zircons? There is only one place where you have heat flow that low in which magmas are forming: convergent plate-tectonic boundaries."

Three years ago, Harrison and his colleagues applied a technique to determine the temperature of ancient zircons.

"We discovered the temperature at which these zircons formed was constant and very low," Harrison said. "You can't make a magma at any lower temperature than what we're seeing in these zircons. You look at artists' conceptions of the early Earth, with flying objects from outer space making large craters; that should make zircons hundreds of degrees centigrade hotter than the ones we see. The only way you can make zircons at the low temperature we see is if the melt is water-saturated. There had to be abundant water. That's a big surprise because our longstanding conception of the early Earth is that it was dry."