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 science, nor for the huge advances made in our understanding of the earth and universe over the last 300 years. To them, all of geology, geophysics, cosmology, palaeontology, molecular genetics, 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 show 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 pure crap, 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 stupidity 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 will not tolerate 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. Ham routinely breaks the 9th commandment and is a first class idiot.

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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."

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How Did Turtles Get Their Shells? Oldest Known Turtle Fossil, 220 Million Years Old, Give Clues

ScienceDaily (Nov. 27, 2008) — With hard bony shells to shelter and protect them, turtles are unique and have long posed a mystery to scientists who wonder how such an elegant body structure came to be.

Since the age of dinosaurs, turtles have looked pretty much as they do now with their shells intact, and scientists lacked conclusive evidence to support competing evolutionary theories. Now with the discovery in China of the oldest known turtle fossil, estimated at 220- million-years-old, scientists have a clearer picture of how the turtle got its shell.

Working with colleagues in China and Canada, Olivier Rieppel, PhD, chairman of The Field Museum's department of geology, has analyzed the Chinese turtle fossil, finding evidence to support the notion that turtle shells are bony extensions of their backbones and ribs that expanded and grew together to form a hard protective covering.

The fossilized turtle ancestor, dubbed Odontochelys semitestacea (translation: half-shelled turtle with teeth), likely lived in the water rather than on land.

A report from Chun Li of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, and Xiao-Chun Wu of the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa, along with Field's Rieppel, will appear in the journal Nature. Other co-authors include Li-Ting Wang of the Geological Survey of Guizhou Province in Guiyang, China, where the fossil was discovered and Li-Jun Zhao of the Zhejiang Museum of Nature History in Hangzhou, China.

Prior to discovery of Odontochelys, the oldest known turtle specimen was Proganochelys, which was found in Germany. Because Proganochelys has a fully-formed shell, it provides little information about how shells were formed. Odontochelys is older than Proganochelys and is helpful because it has only a partial shell, Rieppel said.

"This is the first turtle with an incomplete shell," Rieppel said. "The shell is an evolutionary innovation. It's difficult to explain how it evolved without an intermediate example."

Some contemporary reptiles such as crocodiles have skin with bony plates and this was also seen in ancient creatures such as dinosaurs. Some researchers theorized that turtle shells started as bony skin plates, called osteoderms, which eventually fused to form a hard shell.

There are problems with this idea, including studies of how shells form in turtle embryos as they develop within eggs, Rieppel said. Embryo studies show that the turtle backbones expand outward and the ribs broaden to meet and form a shell, he said.

While paleontologists take such studies into account, they aren't sufficient to prove how anatomy evolved over time, and evidence can be read in different ways. The limbs of Proganochelys, for example, show signs of bony plates in the skin.

But Odontochelys has no osteoderms and it has a partial shell extending from its backbone, Rieppel said. It also shows a widening of ribs. Although Odontochelys has only a partial shell protecting its back, it does have a fully formed plastron – complete protection of its underside – just as turtles do today.

This strongly suggests Odontochelys was a water dweller whose swimming exposed its underside to predators, Rieppel said. "Reptiles living on the land have their bellies close to the ground with little exposure to danger," he said.

Other arguments favor the notion that turtle shells evolved as extensions of the reptile's backbones and ribs, Rieppel said, but the partial shell of Odontochelys speaks very clearly.

"This animal tells people to forget about turtle ancestors covered with osteoderms," he said.

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Rare Dinosaur Nest Offers Look into Bird Evolution

14th Nov 2008 - CALGARY, Alberta (Reuters) – Canadian researchers say they've narrowed down the likely owner of a dinosaur nest, abandoned on a river's edge 77 million years ago, adding the discovery offers a unique look at dinosaur reproduction and the evolution of birds.

Scientists from the University of Calgary and Alberta's Royal Tyrrell Museum say the nest unearthed in northern Montana in the 1990s likely belonged to one of two types of small, carnivorous dinosaurs.

The two suspects are a ceanagnathid, which looks somewhat like an ostrich, or a small raptor called a dromaeosaurid. Both are small by dinosaur standards and related to modern birds.

The nest likely held up to a dozen eggs, of which only fossilized fragments remain.

"We think, based on characteristics of the eggs, that we are probably dealing with a nest from a small raptor but we can't (be) 100 percent sure and rule out the other one," said Francois Therrien, curator of dinosaur palaeoecology at the Royal Tyrrell and co-investigator.

Nests from meat-eating dinosaurs are extremely rare. Only one other example has been found in North America, a nest of 67-million-year-old Troodon eggs that was also unearthed in Montana.

Therrien said the latest nest was discovered by commercial fossil hunters and originally thought to be from a relatively common duck-billed hadrosaur.

Darla Zelenitsky, a University of Calgary paleontologist, realized that the nest, a raised mound 50 cm (20 inches) across and surrounded by eggs, was actually from a small meat-eater.

Zelenitsky is the lead author of a paper on the nest, published on Thursday in the journal Paleontology.

Therrien said the find gives scientists new information on the evolution of reproduction in small carnivorous dinosaurs, filling in key gap in their knowledge and offering insight into how birds' methods of laying eggs and brooding evolved.

"This nest reveals that modern birds are not unique in the way they reproduce," Therrien said. "They actually inherited a lot of their ways of laying eggs from their dinosaur ancestors."

The nest was acquired by the Royal Tyrrell in 2006 and will be put on display in the museum in Drumheller, Alberta.

You can find all the latest dinosaur and fossil news here.