A Summary of the Manganese Thread

[Johnny]

My claim was that:

The bottom line is that the nodules by themselves cannot be dated

(emphasis added)

Let me ask you then, what is an example of something that can be dated "by itself". It is apparent that you're trying to squirm out of what you said. Let's go back and look at what you originally said:

"The bottom line is that the nodules by themselves cannot be dated, and Bob's example of them forming around an obviously modern artifact trumps any other inferences that claim they form slowly."

So what is this quote saying? It sounds an awful lot like you're saying that nodules can't be dated so that Bob's find trumps any inference that must be made about their slow formation. This statement's accuracy is contingent upon the inability to date manganese nodules.

Still no response from Bob Enyart? Is everyone pretty much in agreement about Bob's arugments, or will someone step up and defend him?

 

[bob b]

"It sounds an awful lot like you're saying that nodules can't be dated so that Bob's find trumps any inference that must be made about their slow formation. This statement's accuracy is contingent upon the inability to date manganese nodules."

Congratulations. You have passed the test for understanding English!

 

[fool]

The wikipedia article on them says they can be dated radiometricly.

 

[Johnny]

Congratulations. You have passed the test for understanding English!

Thank you.

Unfortunately, they can be dated by quite a variety of methods. So you were wrong.

 

[bob b]

Thank you.

Unfortunately, they can be dated by quite a variety of methods. So you were wrong.

I realize that people try to date the nodules by indirect methods. That is why I carefully composed my statement to take that into account.

The primary reason that people believe that their dating methods are accurate is that different methods have been seen to give similar answers.

Having been in the business of data analysis for a number of years I gradually became aware that there is a natural human tendency to find patterns and correlations in voluminous data sets, even when no such underlying effects are present.

 

[Bob Enyart]

Lest anyone forget what this was all about to start with

Lest anyone forget what this was all about to start with

Do Manganese Nodules Require Millions of Years to Form? No.

At the Enyart household, we watched a documentary on mining the oceans in which a marine geologist stated that manganese nodules, millions of which liter the ocean floor, take five to fifteen million years to form to grapefruit size. I paused the video, and said to my kids something like: “That’s not true! The Bible teaches that the earth is young, so we know that they must form quickly. And besides, if it took millions of years, then very few would be visible, they’d be buried by deposits.” The first two entries (that’s all I checked) of a Google search on the three words, manganese nodules formation, yielded the same claims: The Wikipedia entry stated, “Nodule growth is one of the slowest of all geological phenomena – in the order of a centimeter over several million years.” And a Texas A&M Marine Sciences technical slide presentation stated, “They grow very slowly (mm/million years) and can be tens of millions of years old.” Thankfully, we continued to watch the video and heard another geologist state that some manganese nodules “were actually [formed] around beer cans, which obviously are not millions of years old.” My kids are not old enough to drink beer, but they are old enough to be suspicious of the evolutionary bias that produces knee-jerk claims of old age.

-Pastor Bob Enyart
Denver Bible Church & KGOV.com

Transcript from the Universe Beneath the Sea World Almanac video:

Narrator: In 1872, the British ship HMS Challenger set out on a four-year voyage of exploration. One of the discoveries made by scientists aboard the Challenger was the existence of large numbers of irregular balls of manganese littering the Pacific sea bed. They lie in densely packed areas, covering millions of square miles. This picture of the pacific sea bed taken by a camera dragged beneath a survey ship, shows how densely the nodules are packed. Trillions of these potato-sized rock lumps lie hidden in the icy darkness. Analysis of the nodules reveal them to be a storehouse of rare metals, manganese, cobalt, copper, and nickel, as well as lesser amounts of dozens of other uncommon elements. In theory, they were an unclaimed natural resource, worth billions of dollars: they were black pearls! Scientists analyzed them for details of how they were formed, theorizing that minerals were precipitating out of the water, and forming layers around a nucleus.

James Hein, Marine Geologist: The manganese nodules form on the deep sea floor in 4,000 to 6,000 meters water depth. The manganese and the iron oxides nucleate around a central core; and the central core can be either a rock fragment, it can be a shark’s tooth, it can be a whale ear bone, it can be a fragment of an older manganese nodule. And manganese oxides accrete in circular layers around the nucleus. And it takes about five, ten, fifteen million years to form a nodule about this size [grapefruit-sized]. Typical deep-sea manganese nodules are more this size [displaying smaller nodules], they’re in the range of about one centimeter to four centimeters.

Narrator: However, there are many unanswered questions about manganese nodules. Even their age has recently been called into question.

John Yates, Marine Geologist: Later discoveries of manganese nodules found that some of the concretions were actually [formed] around beer cans, which obviously are not millions of years old. So, there was a dichotomy. The nodules appeared to grow at different rates, depending on the supply of minerals. There was also a link established between the formation of manganese nodules, and the level of activity in the plankton in the ocean above. In fact, the link appeared to be that the tritus, from the plankton, actually contributed to the formation of the nodules.

Universe Beneath the Sea: The Next Frontier, 1999, World Almanac Video, WorldAlmanacVideo.com, Beverly Hills CA 90211; about halfway into the 50 minute video​

Just wanted to share this typical experience with you. What evidence did they have that these form over millions of years? I guess they had none. Evolutionists make this claim as a matter of habit. And then, if they don't happen to find a specimen forming on a Michelob (or a stalactite growing on an AiG cap), then we creationists have an especially difficult time proving to those with an open mind that the claim of millions is nothing more than knee-jerk bias. -Bob

 

[fool]

It's deja-vu all over again :crackup:

 

[fool]

Here is an interesting article on the nodules including some positations on growth rates.
http://www.ias.ac.in/currsci/feb102000/OCEANRESEARCH4.pdf
I skimmed it and have no idea what it said, other than it refers to some dateing method, I'll read it tomorrow.
Also, if you google yourself up some manganese nodules, http://www.google.com/search?q=mang...=&rls=GGLD,GGLD:2005-02,GGLD:en&start=10&sa=N
The old thread is the 17th thing on the list.
We're famous fellas! :rotfl:

 

[bob b]

I had already Googled and read the same reference you posted above.

 

[fool]

I had already Googled and read the same reference you posted above.

Well quit holdin out Bob, what's it say?

 

[bob b]

Well quit holdin out Bob, what's it say?

Nothing that would cause me to believe that millions of years are required to generate manganese nodules.

You read it. Why do you believe it in the light of the evidence Enyart presented?

I would guess that if you had lived in the days of Galileo you would have sided with the scientists and their mathematical equations and then refused to look through Galileo's telescope to see for yourself the moons revolving around their planets.

 

[Jukia]

You read it. Why do you believe it in the light of the evidence Enyart presented?

QUOTE]

Evidence? That was evidence? A comment from someone on a video made for the general public? Okey dokey, now I believe!

 

[Bob Enyart]

Waiting for ThePhy's Reply to My 3rd & Final Offer

Waiting for ThePhy's Reply to My 3rd & Final Offer

Meanwhile, back at the nodules thread...
I spied this:

Evidence? That was evidence? A comment from someone on a video made for the general public?

Okay, so you doubt the veracity of the claim made by the marine geologist quoted on the World Almanac documentary that some manganese nodules haved formed in less than a century. Got it. But, so that we can understand how you evaluate apparently contrary evidence, could you answer this question:

Jukia, if you saw sufficient corroboration to convince you that some manganese nodules (which were otherwise indistinguishable from other nodules), had formed rapidly, would that cause you to reject the previously published theoretical claims that lenghty periods were required for nodule formation?

-Awaiting Your Reply


ps. Has anyone in this thread reported the date for the first canning of beer? It happened in America:

In 1935, the G. Krueger Brewing Company of Newark, New Jersey became the first brewer to market beer in steel cans. In that year, only about 25 percent of beer was packaged in bottles and cans -- the rest was kegged. Today, however, about 90 percent of America's beer production is consumed from bottles and cans.​

And:

The beverage can was invented at the beginning of the 1930s in the USA. The Gottfried Krueger Brewery from Newark/New Jersey, launched "Krueger’s Beer“ in cans on the market on January 24, 1935...
In Germany, Schmalbach presented its first beer can in 1937...​

 

[Jukia]

Meanwhile, back at the nodules thread...
I spied this:

Okay, so you doubt the veracity of the claim made by the marine geologist quoted on the World Almanac documentary that some manganese nodules haved formed in less than a century. Got it. But, so that we can understand how you evaluate apparently contrary evidence, could you answer this question:

Jukia, if you saw sufficient corroboration to convince you that some manganese nodules (which were otherwise indistinguishable from other nodules), had formed rapidly, would that cause you to reject the previously published theoretical claims that lenghty periods were required for nodule formation?

-Awaiting Your Reply

Pastor Enyart, aside from the fact that it is really difficult to take much of what you say involving science with other than a large grain of salt...

Based on your post, and assuming everything you said was accurate. the quick forming nodules were not necessarily the equivilent to the the ones claimed to have formed over long periods. I would need details on what the concretions on the beer cans were made of, where they were found, how thick they were etc. It could be that what was taken as a concretion on a metal beer can formed faster becasue sea water interacted with the metal in the can.

As an experiment, if nodules equivilent to the size that are claimed to form on sharks teeth at 4 to 6000 meters over millions of years can be shown to form on sharks teeth in the same places in 50 years to the same size it seems to me that there would be something that would question the accepted sceince that these nodules form verry verry slowly. there is an experiment for the YEC group. Get some funding to do an experiment in mid Pacific in 4000 to 6000 meters, gonna need a long bit of line. Or figure out some other experiment. those PhDs at AiG ought to be able to come up with something. But, and this is a big but, they would have to do it in such a way that it was publishable in a real science journal, not a creationist rag.

I do not know exactly how the existing nodules formation time was determined but I would guess that a starting point would involve calculations with respec to the amount of the metals in sea water at a certain density and temperature and the rate at which they might precipitate out of the seawater when given a particular substrate to start.

 

[Johnny]

Bob Enyart has essentially claimed that an aluminum can is a dating device. We can look at the date on the aluminum can and know that the nodule is yonger than that date. But all manganese nodules come with a dating device attached. In fact, each layer of a manganese nodule comes with several different date stamps. This tells us not only their age but their growth rates. So growth rates are not merely "best guesses". They are well-documented.

Finding a young manganese nodule says little about the others except that there are certain conditions in which they could have formed faster. But they didn't. We checked their date stamp.

 

[Bob Enyart]

Scientifically Cautious

Scientifically Cautious

Pastor Enyart... Based on your post, and assuming everything you said was accurate...

Yes, it has to be accurate, by definition. No? It is a hypothetical.

...the quick forming nodules were not necessarily the equivilent to the the ones claimed to have formed over long periods. I would need details on what the concretions on the beer cans were made of, where they were found, how thick they were etc.

They had to be identical, by definition. Aside from rapid formation, they were "otherwise indistinguishable."

It could be that what was taken as a concretion on a metal beer can formed faster becasue sea water interacted with the metal in the can.

Good point. Would that mean that only the first layer of nodule formation on the can would form more quickly? If the nodules were "otherwise indistinguishable," all additional millimeters of growth concreted onto what otherwise was a normal nodule suface (albeit with a salt-water-filled beer-can substrate). Did the theoretical claims of required long-period formation ever show insight by stating that similar nodules could form very rapidly with other nucleus material?

Perhaps the brewery nodules referred to by Yates are not "otherwise indistinguishable," and then there might be more to argue in defense of the previously published time requirements. But it seems that, on the credibility of World Almanac and marine geologist John Yates describing these nodules as "obviously are not millions of years old," that you Jukia (and Old Earthers generally), as scientifically cautious, should be willing, at least tentatively, to take manganese nodule formation out of their Old Earth Evidence Column.

-Bob Enyart

 

[Jukia]

I studied marine geology, does that make me a marine geologist. Have someone find Yates, and have him post here. I have been asking for that, but no one seems to have found him. I think Hein, the other marine geologist cited works for the USGS. Find Yates.

And I do not necessarily have an Old Earth column, dont need one. Taken as a whole it all points to an old earth.

 

[Jukia]

But it seems that, on the credibility of World Almanac and marine geologist John Yates describing these nodules as "obviously are not millions of years old," that you Jukia (and Old Earthers generally), as scientifically cautious, should be willing, at least tentatively, to take manganese nodule formation out of their Old Earth Evidence Column.

-Bob Enyart

One more post for the day:
1. I was unaware that the World Almanac was a seriously credible scientific publication.
2. Find Yates (actually that sounds like a good title for a movie)
3. Just because some concretions form on beer cans in a short time does not mean that the manganese concetions found in the deep ocean did not form much more slowly.

Gotta go.

 

[Bob Enyart]

I do not necessarily have an Old Earth column, dont need one. Taken as a whole it all points to an old earth.

BEQ1b-J: Two views exist regarding the age of the earth: young earth, and old earth. Also, human beings make careful observations of the world, and those observations will be interpreted differently by adherents of the opposing views of YE and OE. Do you agree that those who hold either view on the age of the earth can sort that evidence into Evidence Columns, one of which is titled Young Earth Evidence, and the other of which is titled Old Earth Evidence. Of course, either side may wrongly categorize evidence. But I’m asking you: is this paradigm valid for evaluating evidence for the age of the earth?

To answer your question [BEQ1b-J]:
To be honest I am unsure whether or not this is a valid method...

 

[Johnny]

What does quoting me have to do with Jukia? He/she is a different person. I am unsure whether the two-column method is valid because there is really only one real column of evidence. That was my hesitancy.

But while you're here Bob, you want to respond to the initial post?