>>>J>  - the world is several billion years old

>>> I never saw any evidence, and I challenge you to find some.

SM> Paging Dr. Leipzig, Dr. Marty Leipzig.......

Shit, you called me away from Happy Hour for this?

OK, OK, since you went through all the trouble of asking...

An adjunct list of Q&D (quick & dirty) evidence for an ancient Earth:

Some bristlecone pine trees in the White-Inyo mountain range of California date back beyond 2000 BCE. One, labeled "Methuselah" germinated in 2726 BCE. But their tree rings have been matched with those of non-living trees; this shows that the latter germinated about 6000 BCE, which predates the year 4004 BCE by 2 millennia.

The Green River Formation of the Pieance Creek, Uinta, Green River and Wind River Basins of Wyoming and Utah, there are varved sedimentary couplets (annual layers of sediment) that record 20 million years of geologic history.

The Castille Evaporite Complex of West Texas and eastern New Mexico contains seasonal couplets of aragonite/anhydrite (similar to lacustrine varved sediments) that can be correlated over 150,000 km^2, and contains over 45 million annual couplet serie s.

Ice core samples have been taken in Greenland that show 40,000 annual layers of ice; while Antarctic ice cores (where the Ice Coring program has been more energetic) show some 110,000 annual layers .

Los Alamos National Laboratory has developed a method of measuring the length of time that surface rocks have been exposed to cosmic rays (cosmogenic ionization through neutron capture). Cosmic rays stream into the atmosphere from all directions in s pace and break neutrons free when they collide with air molecules. When these neutrons hit rocks on the ground, they react with a tiny number of mineral atoms which create radioactive isotopes. At sea level, a few hundred modified atoms are created e ach year in a gram of quartz which is near the surface of the ground. New measuring techniques can detect very small numbers of these atoms and thus estimate the number of years that the rocks have been exposed. Scientists have found ages of about 8, 500 years for glacial moraines in Newfoundland and 830,000 years for extinct volcanoes in Nevada.

The "nuclide" argument is one of the best proofs of an "old earth". Nuclides are forms of matter that are radioactive. Each nuclide decays into another form of matter at a certain rate. After an interval of time equal to its half-life, only half of t he original material is left. Scientists have found that every nuclide with a half-life over 80 million years can be found naturally occurring on earth. All Nuclides with a half-life under 80 million years do not exist naturally. The only logical exp lanation for these observations is that the world formed billions of years ago. There are enough long-lived nuclides still around to be still detectable. The short-lived nuclides have long since decayed and disappeared. The only exceptions to the lat ter are short lived nuclides which are being continuously generated by the decay of long-lived nuclides.

Because of solar and lunar tides, the rotation of the earth is gradually slowing, by about 0.005 seconds per year. About 370 million years ago, each day was 22.7 hours long. Studies of rugose coral fossils (paleocoelentrochronology)that were independ ently estimated to be 370 million years old revealed that when they were alive a day lasted about 22 hours. This relationship has been confirmed with other coral fossils. This is rather good evidence that the world was in existence a at least a third of a billion years ago.

The coral reef at Eniwetok atoll in the Pacific Ocean has been measured to have a thickness of up to 1380 meters. Even the most optimistic coral growth rates would require that the atoll be over 130,000 years of age.

It takes thousands of years of below freezing temperatures to build a 100 foot layer of permafrost. But large areas in the north are permanently frozen to depths exceeding 1.60 km. This took many tens of thousands of years to accomplish.

Radio carbon dating of wood, which is accurate as far back as 50,000 years, has identified many wooden objects to be many tens of thousands of years old

Reversals of the earth's magnetic pole are recorded in the Atlantic Ocean sea bottom for the past 110 million years

Rate at which the continents are spreading apart from each other indicates that the Atlantic Ocean is about 206 million years old.

Radioactive dating of the oldest earth rocks gives an age of almost 4100 million years. Moon rocks and meteorites from outer space give dates in excess of 4000 million years. Concordance of lunar and terrestrial radiometric dating methods yield the a ge of the earth to be 4600 million years +/- 0.2%.

If we assumed that all of the minerals which are carried by rivers into the oceans remains trapped in the oceans, then it would take 260 million years for the concentration of sodium to reach its present level. If plankton, fish or other plants adsor b sodium, then it would take much longer. We can conclude that the age of the earth is something greater than a quarter billion years.

Measurements by sensors attached to satellites shows that space dust accumulates on the moon at the rate of about 2 nanograms per square centimeter per year. (A nanogram is one thousandth of a million of a gram.) This rate would require 4.5 million y ears to reach a depth of 1.5 inches, which is approximately the depth experienced by the astronauts who walked on the moon. This agrees rather well with radioactive dating of moon rocks.

Estimates for the length of time for the galaxies to have spread apart to their present spacing are in excess of 10,000 million years.

Global tectonics and stratigraphy indicate that about 115 million years ago, the ancient supercontinent of Pangea was beginning to split apart so that land that would become South America and Africa were drifting apart. At first, the drift caused som e shallow seas and a few land bridges. Later, the Atlantic Ocean opened up and became gradually wider until it became the ocean that we see today. This theory would have a logical consequence in the evolution of dinosaurs. Before this split in land m ass took place, dinosaurs would have evolved into a variety of species which were found throughout Pangea. Since 115 million years ago, when the land bridges disappeared and the seas became too deep to cross, the dinosaurs would have evolved differen tly in Africa and South America, due to their isolation from each other. This is precisely what has been observed in the fossil record.

So there.

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