This IS a web site dedicated to Mount St Helens

I recently found this on You Tube and I found it very entertaining!




»www.youtube.com/watch?v=zp5MO77bFA4

Another fun video!

I enjoyed this video so much that I must share it!



»www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozbFerzjkz4

A little humor in your day.

This one of the funniest videos on the Anti-Museum I have found so far!



»www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tn5Sk6AS-s

The Minnesota Bridge Tragedy

This is a time to give those who lost loved ones, or who were severely injured or simply those who were lucky to survive the collapse of the I-35W Bridge in Minneapolis, Minnesota as chance to grieve. Rescuers still need to undergo the difficult and gruesome task of recovering the bodies of those who are still listed among the missing. As a people, we join in the call for prayer and reflection. Eventually, this tragic incident too will be investigated. A cause identified. There is a new bridge that will need to be engineered and constructed. And hopefully, we will finally learn a few lessons from the tragic event that unfolded on August 1, 2007.

I would agree that now is not the time for political recriminations, but someone should have told this to our increasingly out of touch president.

This morning, while crossing my own bridge to reach to work, I made a rare listen to the President of the United States, speaking from the Rose Garden. The news station had interrupted their regular broadcast invite George Bush to speak to the nation, about the tragedy in Minnesota.

It is appropriate when a major national tragedy to occur, for the President to say a few words of condolences. We want to hear from the President that all is well in the world and he is taking proactive measures to help those directly impacted by the tragedy. And this morning, George Bush began in his stammering manner by saying, “I spoke to Governor (Tim) Pawlenty and Mayor (RT) Rybak this morning . . . I also told them how much we are in prayer for those who suffered. And I thank my fellow citizens for holding up those who are suffering right now in prayer.”

Okay, there is nothing wrong with the President’s opening. But then he said, “By the end of the week, members (of Congress) are going to be leaving for their month-long August recess. And by the time they will return, there will be less than a month before the end of the fiscal year on September the 30th, and yet they haven’t passed one of the 12 spending bills that they’re required to pass.”

Huh? Did I just hear this correctly? Once again, the President had the nation’s attention looking upon him for leadership and guidance and instead, he spends most of his speech complaining about Congress budget dispute with the White House. It seemed as though he had learned nothing after his bungling of Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

What was George saying? Had Congress adopted the Transportation budget for 2008 sooner, we could have avoided the I-35W Bridge in Minneapolis from collapsing?

This is one time when I will not place direct blame on Bush and his Administration of crooked thieves, at least not immediately. But the statement was simply shameful.

The fact is; highway administrators and civil engineers have been raising the alarm over the failing national infrastructure for nearly three decades now. According to a 2005 report from the American Society of Civil Engineers, 160,570 bridges out of the nations 590,750 bridges were declared to be structurally deficient or functionally obsolete. In another ASCE report published during the same year claimed that it will take $1.6 trillion to repair the nation’s infrastructure problems from aviation to sewer systems.

In simple truth, we have ignored in grand scale, our aging infrastructure that we have become very dependent upon for our daily lives. The collapse of the I-35W Bridge is but the latest representative of an ever increasing list of failures that is due to neglect, age and overuse.

There is no single individual to blame. Republicans and Democrats are equally guilty. Both have tried to govern on the cheap, whether the place is the hallowed halls of the federal government or in the planning department of a municipality. We have grown convinced that we can all enjoy the benefits of the commons (good roads, bridges, schools, fire, police, etc.) and at the same time allow for massive tax cuts that benefit corporations and the very rich, justify the unjustifiable debt and wonder aloud, when we too will benefit, while at the same time handout blank checks to continue a war that lost its reason and meaning a long time ago.

News reports indicated this evening that the problems with the I-35W Bridge had been known since 1990, but based on the rating scale engineers use to quantify bridge safety; the bridge had not fallen below the 50 percent margin requiring the bridge replacement. At the same time, there was a news report about Minnesota Governor Pawlenty had vetoed a five cent increase to the state gas taxes in May of this year that could have directed millions of dollars for road repair in Minnesota.

But perhaps the most obscene news item released today, was the postponement of the groundbreaking ceremonies for the Minnesota Twins brand new, $522 million (out of which, $392 million will be paid for by the taxpayers of Hennepin County) Baseball Stadium. This last item is especially obscene in face of the tragic collapse of the Minneapolis Bridge. The message it seems, it’s okay to spend millions of the public money (and break the "no new taxes pledge") for billionaire sports owners, to be played by millionaire spoiled brats and watched by the very elite, but heaven forbid we spend that same amount of money on replacing an aging bridge or building a new school.

Something is very wrong in this country. What is the use of a multi-million dollar baseball stadium, when the freeways and bridges needed to bring people to the games is falling apart?

When lies goes deep.

The photograph shows Step Canyon as it nears Johnston Ridge Observatory. "Engineers" Canyon (bottom left) is seen merging into Step Canyon.

Since Clues 3 and 4 are nearly identical, there is really no need to write a separate column. Here are to two clues for a recent creation offered at the AiG Creation “Museum:”

Clue 3 - “Looit” (the word should be Loowit) and Step Canyon –
Mudflows cut canyons out of solid rock in just a few years – A miniature example
of rapid erosion immediately during and after the flood.

Clue 4 - Engineers and Little Grand Canyon – Mudflows cut soft sediments in hours – A miniature example of rapid erosion immediately during and after the flood.

“Clue” 3 and “Clue” 4 is just plain silly. First, I would hardly call Loowit and Step Canyons, true canyons, both of these “canyons” average between 40 to 60 feet deep and they are as wide as a street. So-called “Engineers” Canyon was established by the US Army Corp of Engineers in 1982 as they began efforts to pump water out of the still dam up Spirit Lake and that “canyon” too is only 40 to 60 feet in depth. Finally, the “Little Grand Canyon” does not actually exist (not at least on any official map of the national volcanic monument). That name was developed by ICR geologist Steve Austin to describe erosional features located near Coldwater Lake about eight miles west of the volcano.

But, there is no denial that the “canyon” system in the Toutle River Valley, beneath the feet of Mount St Helens developed within a few years after the 1980 eruption. What AiG is implying though in Clues 3 and 4 (and at other displays in the so called “museum”) that events observed at Mount St Helens are common to canyon systems around the world, including the Grand Canyon in Arizona. This is just plain silly!

There were several contributing factors that lead to the rapid erosion at Mount St Helens after 1980, none of which are especially unique for a landscape that was substantially altered by a recent volcanic eruption. At the outset of the eruption of May 18, 1980, 0.6 cubic miles of the mountain went tumbling into the Toutle River Valley. It was the largest landslide in recorded history. Near the base of the mountain, the valley was buried to an average depth of 600 feet. Further away and as far as 14 miles down the Toutle River Valley, the debris avalanche added an average of 150 feet. 120 feet of the deposit at the base of Mount St Helens, consist of loosely consolidated pyroclastic flow debris. At least 32 pyroclastic flows were observed on May 18, 1980 and even more documented during the five other explosive eruptions that occurred during that year, which extended as far north as the shores of Spirit Lake, five miles northeast of Mount St Helens.

Now let’s add into the equation the following: steep terrain, no vegetation, loosely consolidated volcanic and avalanche debris and an average annual precipitation total of 130 inches per year. What do you get? Erosion and a lot of it! Long after Mount St Helens finally does return to a prolonged period of dormancy, erosion will remain as the mountains greatest hazard for decades to come for the people and communities which hug the shores of the Toutle River.

But does the “canyon” system at Mount St Helens compare to the Grand Canyon in Arizona? This is what Steve Austin and the AiG “museum” wants people to believe. If a canyon system can rapidly develop at Mount St Helens, so the logic goes, why not the same thing occurring at the Grand Canyon?

The Grand Canyon is 277 miles long, approximately 1 mile deep and as much as 18 miles wide, at the Canyon’s widest point. I had the privilege of hiking the Grand Canyon from the North Rim to the South Rim and I can speak first hand that crossing the “canyons” of Mount St Helens is nothing when compared to trekking across the hot and difficult terrain at the Grand Canyon.

What should be immediate apparent to a visitor to the Grand Canyon is the substantially different geological conditions at the Canyon, as compared to Mount St Helens. The walls of the Canyon is composed of limestone at the rim and alternates between limestone, sandstone, shale and metamorphic granite to the bottom of the Canyon, where the Colorado River can be found flowing through the Vishnu Gorge. The sedimentary rocks that comprises most of the walls of the Canyon, is easier to erode, but the metamorphic rock that is found towards the bottom of the Canyon is much more resistant to erosion.

Now it is true that a great debate continues throughout the geologic community on how the Grand Canyon was developed, especially across the Kaibab Plateau which sits higher then the neighboring Marble Canyon to the east. There are several good hypotheses floating around, but none are definitive because much of the evidence to support the hypothesis long ago eroded away or is buried somewhere. Austin and the AiG “Museum” has hitched their wagon to one popular hypothesis known as “headwater” erosion of the Kaibab Plateau, but this is about as close to making a scientific observation I have found from Austin or AiG.

The real challenge facing YEC geologists is the rate of erosion at the Grand Canyon. Although sedimentary rock are easier to erode, the rates observed today remain slow and certainly based on modern observations that the rate of erosion at the Grand Canyon it would be impossible to cram the development of the Grand Canyon into the 4,350 year old time frame developed by YECers.

Austin and his compatriot at ICR, John Morris, attempted to account for the problem of erosion at the Grand Canyon by claiming in the years after the “flood,” the freshly deposited “flood” debris (which will eventually make up the limestone, sandstone, shale and more) had yet to solidify, creating a condition that is similar to (where else?) the loosely consolidated landslide and volcanic debris found at Mount St Helens, where erosion after the “flood” would be relatively “easy.” But this claim too is extremely problematic because based on the conditions described by Austin and Morris to work, the sediments at the Grand Canyon would have the consistency of a slushy and gravity simply could not sustain the walls of the Grand Canyon that we see today.

Morris recently came up with an answer to this problem too, when in May of 2007, he claimed that the pyroclastic flow debris and landslide debris at Mount St Helens has “hardened” into solid rock, creating another comparison to conditions found at Mount St Helens and the Grand Canyon. But, this is a complete fabrication. The pyroclastic debris has not “hardened” because the temperature of the flows were not hot enough to weld the volcanic debris together and what rocks are found in the landslide debris, were rocks BEFORE the eruption because these rocks are the broken up remnants of the formally 9,677 foot edifice of Mount St Helens.

In the end, the actual value of using the “canyon” system at Mount St Helens is to establish a red herring to support a common straw-man argument to attack the geological age of the Grand Canyon.

At a minimum, the Grand Canyon is about 1.3 million years old, based on the dating of basalt flows that enter into the Canyon near a point called Torroweap on the western edge of the Canyon. The start of the actual formation of the Grand Canyon could have occurred between 6 million to 12 million years ago and perhaps as much as 35 million years ago (depending on which hypothesis is looked at). And the reported ages of the Grand Canyon actually does not address the timeframe it took the Colorado River to actually slice through a mile of rock for 277 miles. Regardless, the timeframe needed to develop the Grand Canyon is far greater than the 6,000 year or 4,350 year timeframe permitted by YEC theory.

So when a geologists say it took “millions of years” to form the Grand Canyon, the AiG museum will throw up a photograph of the “canyon” system at Mount St Helens and say that it does not take that much time, without really bothering to explain the differences between both places. It might a convincing argument for the ignorant and the gullible, but for anyone with half brain can quickly recognize the AiG is being less than truthful.

Bad Dates or Bad Intentions?

AiG’s Second Clue from the Mount St Helens Eruption goes like this:

Lava Dome – When 11 years old, a new lava dome dates greater than 350,000 years old by potassium-argon (K-Ar) dating – An example of radioisotope dating difficulties.

In 1648, Irish Prelate, Archbishop James Ussher concluded the date of creation occurred on October 23, 4004 BC. Now Ussher was not the first and he certainly would not be the last to determine the age of the planet following biblical genealogies, but Ussher’s date became the best known. This is perhaps due to publishers of the King James Version of the Bible inserted Ussher’s date in the annotated section of the bible after 1701.

Dispensationalist’s theology insists on a young-earth being true. The problem YECers face, the rest of the world had moved far and beyond our understanding of the age of the Earth once dictated by Ussher. And thanks to the discovery of radioactive decay during the turn of the twentieth century, it is now well established that the age of the planet is 4.55 billion years old, a timeframe which most mainline denominations and the Roman Catholic Church has accepted.

The science of geochronology is well established and had been for at least the past sixty years. This is a science that is able to measure the radioactive decay rates of certain elements trapped in certain crystals (zircons) that formed inside (mostly) igneous rocks to obtain an absolute age. The concept is relatively simple. Determine the ratio between parent isotopes to daughter isotopes, which the half-life of the isotopes is known to obtain an absolute age of the sample being tested. There are some limitations to geochronology like most techniques will not provide accurate results for recently formed samples and errors will sometime occur because the sample was not properly processed, nor can one obtain accurate results from samples obtained from sedimentary rocks or metamorphic rocks. Tens of thousands of samples are worked on each year, with highly accurate results, despite YECers attempts to pull out the odd Irish pennants.

Geochronology is a form of positive evidence that the earth is old. But, YECers insist is very young. ICR will allow for a time frame of 6,000 to 10,000 years old, however AiG accepts only the chronology established by the seventeenth century Irish Anglican cleric. However, if God truly made the planet 6,009 years ago, surely nature can reveal some form of positive evidence – beyond the scholarly writings of Ussher – to confirm Ussher’s timeframe. Despite several half-hearted attempts like focusing on magnetism and amount of salt in the seas, YECers have no positive evidence to support their position, none whatsoever.

So if you cannot produce positive evidence to support your position, do what you can to discredit your opposition. And this is where Mount St Helens comes into the picture.

In the mid-1990’s an ICR geologists name Steve Austin submitted a sample he obtained from the 1980-1986 lava dome to a laboratory to be dated using the Potassium-Argon technique. The laboratory Austin had sent the sample clearly indicated on the form that they were unable to obtain an accurate result for samples younger than 2 million years old (actually material as young as 6,000 years old can be dated using the K-Ar method, but this particular laboratory Austin chosen, lacked the equipment to do this type of dating to that high degree of accuracy), which Austin reported in his paper. Austin also reported that he deliberately did not mention where the sample came from. Not surprisingly, Austin got the result he was looking for when the laboratory reported indicated the age of the Mount St Helens sample to be about 350,000 years old. Austin’s little misdirection’s did not seem to matter. Instead he widely publicized through the YEC bible tracts of yet another example of where radiometric dating cannot be trusted.

So what did Austin’s little experiment show?

When you put bad science (B.S.) in, you get B.S. out!

“Clue” 1 - Ash Cloud: A single ash cloud cools the earth a fraction of a degree – A miniature example of the earth cooling after the flood

It was Benjamin Franklin, while serving as a US Envoy to the French Court, who made the first connection between the impacts a volcanic eruption can have with the climate. In 1783, Laki on the island of Iceland had erupted, producing a tremendous amount of sulfuric acid into the atmosphere, which had deleterious effects over Europe the following year (over 7,000 people died, most due to starvation).

But perhaps the most famous attempt to understanding the impact volcanic eruption had on the climate came a full century later when the British Royal Society took on the task to study the global atmospheric conditions left by the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa in Indonesia. Of course most recently, as climate scientists are attempting to understanding the complexities of our climate and global warming, the role volcanoes play in climate change is given close scrutiny.

Let’s for a moment give AiG the benefit of the doubt and say there was a global flood. According to Michael Oard, a researcher with ICR, the flood would had been as much as a volcanic event as it was a water event (although a literal reading of Genesis 6-8 supports only the water version.) Oard states, when the water and drained away and Noah was permitted to leave the Ark, the global atmosphere was chocked full of volcanic ash, setting the condition necessary for an ice age to develop.

It is good at least, YECers are finally admitting there was an ice age and lots of volcanism, because there was a time when YECers refused to acknowledge an ice age. However, the clue has lots of problems.

While volcanic ash will deflect sunlight, ash is not the only thing they emit. In fact, for the ash to even reach the stratosphere volcanoes must also become a gas factory (and a lot of it!). Among the gases produce by an erupting volcano include sulfur, sulfur dioxide, sulfuric acid, hydrogen sulfide, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxide and water vapor. And if you had been following the debate on global warming at all, each of these gases are considered to be greenhouse gases.

Volcanic gases are really a double edge sword. Sulfuric acid for example is able to deflect sunlight, causing global cooling, but water vapor, sulfur and the other greenhouse gases traps heat, thus preventing the heat to escape, which is the factor for global warming.

Oard suggest there were as many as 50,000 volcanoes that erupted during the time of the flood. If true, many of these eruptions were so-called super-eruptions like those found at Yellowstone and Lake Toba in Indonesia. Just one super-eruption can emit enough gas to create a global cooling; lasting for months to years, but 50,000 volcanic eruptions will produce a tremendous amount of gases, which can actually set about the conditions for massive global warming, as well as suffocate all of the survivors on the Ark in volcanic gases and kill all of the surviving fish in the acid laden waters.

But why stop?

Heat is enemy for YEC is another way. During the course of the flood, there would be a tremendous transfer of heat produce by the waters flowing from the depth, accelerated nuclear decay (the YEC explanation for why radioisotope dating methods report ages greater than their accepted 6,000 year date), volcanic activity, meteorite impacts and other possible sources.

Heat is a form of energy. And based on the explanations provided by YECers in recent years to explain the flood, there would be enough heat generated to increase the global temperatures by a burning 1000 degree Celsius. Not only this would be enough for all of the water used in the flood to flash into steam, this would also destroy what remained of the planet atmosphere. God would certainly have gotten his wish; everything on the planet would be destroyed, along with everyone riding the Ark.

Perhaps the people at AiG should have thought about this a little further, before comparing the volcanic eruption at Mount St Helens to their global flood theory.