The Oceans A Key To the Past

The Oceans – A Key to the Past

In an earlier generation scientists suggested that the oceans might be of real help in determining the age of the earth. After all, the seas completely surround the land masses and thus receive the output of the rivers that flow into them. The rivers carry sediment and chemicals in solution which have eroded from the continents.

Scientists have assumed, therefore, that most of the chemical composition of ocean water is derived from the weathering of rocks. Sverdrup et al wrote: “According to present theories, most of the solid materials dissolved in the sea originated from the weather of the crust of the earth.”(2)

H. Kuenen wrote in 1965: “Apart from meteoric dust and gaseous matter, the ultimate sources of all sediments are igneous and metamorphic rocks.”(3) And Kuenen continued:

Ground water containing dissolved matter including silica, calcium, sodium, iron, magnesium, phosphorus, humic acids, etc., reaches the sea by way of rivers, or directly by seepage along the shore. Apart from gases, including carbon dioxide, derived directly from the atomosphere, this is the main source of dissolved matter in the sea water . . . A minor contribution comes from volcanic exhalations and from the expulsion of sea water trapped between the grains of the older marine sediments.(4)
Thus today scientists expect that much of the past history of the earth can be deduced from the chemical content of the oceans. For instance, the salt NaCl is the most abundant constituent of sea water, and both Na and Cl are present in the rocks.

Therefore scientists have supposed that a knowledge of the amount of NaCl in the sea, compared with the amount entering the seas each year by the weathering of the land, would give a close approximation of the age of the earth. An earth age of about 100 million years was estimated by earlier scientists by following this assumption.

But other dating methods have been developed. Based on radioactive decay analysis, scientists have decided that the earth must be approximately 4.5 billions years old. The age of millions of years deduced from the ocean evidence was decisively rejected in favor of the longer radioactive ages.

Supposedly a much more acceptabe timetable was gained for all of the developments imagined by evolutionists. Very little is heard today from researchers investigating the content of sea waters as far as total earth dating is concerned.

But the oceans still exist. Since this world is presumably more than 4 billions years old, and since oceans as well as continents have existed continuously, certain relationships and equilibriums must exist between the continents and the oceans.

Contentions of earlier scientists about an earth-ocean time relationship should still be valid. Assuming that present natural phenomena are a key to the past, examination of the relationship of the materials of the continents to those of the oceans should result in some kind of a timetable for geological history.