Bob Enyart
[Originally published as Carlsbad Cavern]
Carlsbad Caverns removes sign after series of unsubstantiated age claims
The Carlsbad Caverns: A Walking Tour in 3D video with official audio narration asks about the cave formations, “Do you know how quickly they grow?” And answers,
Nobody knows the answer to that question. For one thing, formation growth is based on the amount of rain or snow on the surface.
Advertisement Below:
Carlsbad area native and cave expert with the U.S. Forest Service, geologist Jerry Trout, said that From 1924 to 1988, there was a visitor’s sign above the entrance to Carlsbad Caverns that said Carlsbad was at least 260 million years old. In 1988, the sign was changed to read 7 to 10 million years old. Then, for a little while, the sign read that it was 2 million years old. Now the sign is gone.
The January 1993 Arizona Highways magazine interview continues:
In short, he says, geologists don’t know how long cave development takes. And, while some believe that… stalactites take years to form, Trout says that through photo-monitoring, he has watched a stalactite grow several inches in a matter of days.
And while even stalactites, which hang from the ceiling, can grow rapidly, Carlsbad’s official audio tour acknowledges that, “stalagmites are generally made by faster dripping water.”
Why Would They Change Their Story so Dramatically?
Did you know that stalactites can grow several inches within a few days? While old-earth claims abound in the area, after downgrading the dates so many times, the National Park Service at New Mexico’s Carlsbad Caverns wisely took down their sign altogether.
On a family vacation I heard onsite the official audio tour (which the NPS recently removed from the Internet), which states about Carlsbad Caverns that the “rate of formation depends on the amount of available water.” That’s accurate, of course, and suggests that a sufficiently catastrophic flood on the surface could form the entire cave rapidly.
Here’s the point:
The old-age mindset makes typical knee-jerk claims such as assuming opals require tens of thousands of years to form, whereas geologists now acknowledge that microbes make them in wet sand on the beach in just a few weeks. Likewise, that old-age mindset claims that countless features on earth, including caves, could not form in the biblical timeframe of fewer than 10,000 years.
However, one-by-one, hard science is disproving these claims of deep time. See for example the dinosaur soft tissue and dinosaur bone and eggshells that are loaded with short-lived left-handed amino acids and especially short-lived carbon 14!
