Bob Enyart
[Originally published as Rapid manganese nodule formation “around beer cans”]
Manganese nodules can form rapidly (just like opals, gold veins, and even a river gorge). However the biased old-earth Wikipedia entry (consistent from 2005 through 2020) claims that:
Nodule growth is one of the slowest of all geological phenomena, on the order of a centimeter over several million years.
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Wow, that would be slow! And a Texas A&M Marine Sciences technical slide presentation says, “They grow very slowly (mm/million years) and can be tens of millions of years old.”
However, according to a World Almanac documentary manganese nodules have formed “around beer cans,” said marine geologist Dr. John Yates in the 1997 video Universe Beneath the Sea: The Next Frontier. Evolutionists hold to a belief that these nodules form super slowly, but their belief seems to conflict with actually measurable deposition rates of ocean sediment which would bury nodules as much as 1,000 times more quickly than they claim the nodules would form.
Thus millions of manganese nodules (also referred to as naturally-occurring ferromanganese) wouldn’t be just sitting where they are on the ocean floor. Nor would these buried nodules be disproportionately in uppermost layers of ocean sediments where drilling demonstrates that most nodules are in fact concentrated.
From Marine Geosciences: “fast formations of ferromanganese incrustation have been also observed near ships wrecked during the First World War (Goldberg, 1958) or around motor plugs (Andrews, 1972).” (Note: If you track down the Goldberg and Andrews references, please email your findings to Bob@RealScienceRadio.com. Thanks!) Also, many nodules exist in the Great Lakes of North America even though no one believes these bodies of water existed until 14,000 years ago.
Typical of contradictory old-earth claims, a paper in Marine Biology states that such encrustation forms “slowly… at 1 to 5 mm” per million years, yet “by a process that is poorly understood,” which is essentially an admission that they don’t know how quickly ferromanganese forms.
So, if they don’t understand the process, why claim that they can quantify the rate of the process? Industry-wide, a scientist’s claim is more readily accepted by the biased old-earth community if he says that some process takes a million years. However, if nodules and other such encrustments take that long to form, just as the Texas A&M presentation above pointed out an obvious conflict, the paper states:
It remains unexplained why crusts are not overwhelmed by more rapid biological processes occurring simultaneously.
Yes, unexplained. And inexplicable. Because nodules don’t require millions of years to form.
Regarding their formation and mining, a John Hopkins University doctoral dissertation states that manganese nodules seem to, “grow around shark’s teeth, pieces of bone, or other previously-existing cores. Whatever their origin, they are being formed continuously at a rate which makes them effectively non-depletable.” Learn more about this in the Journal of Creation, see the Manganese Nodules thread at TheologyOnline.com, and listen to a chat about these with John Baumgardner, for many years a Los Alamos National Laboratory geophysicist.
Here’s The Point:
The marine geologist’s testimony of rapidly forming manganese nodules disproves the claim that hundreds of thousand of years are required for such growth. Of course, countless nodules can be older than the canning industry. But manganese nodule growth on a beer can undermines the credibility of old-earth scientists who make knee-jerk claims, without strong evidence, that countless geologic features that countless geologic features take thousands or millions of years to form (like opal formation, a few weeks, not 10,000 years, and geologic features on Surtsey Island, a few months, not eons). Since evolutionists tend to have a zero concession policy, which is not evidence of confidence in their position, don’t look for old-earthers to acknowledge that manganese nodules should now be taken off their list of evidence for an old earth.
