Titan Continues To Fascinate While Defying Speculation

How much is understood by scientists about Titan? There have been many instances where scientists never discover what they had predicted. The data defies long-age assumptions, thereby increasing the complexity within their framework rather than confirming it.

Saturn’s giant moon Titan keeps on revealing mysterious and fascinating discoveries. NASA’s Cassini spacecraft finds a river on Titan comparable to that of the Nile river on earth. However, Titan is too cold (-179) to allow flowing water rather it’s ethane and methane which fill the lakes and streams on Titan.

New Scientist, explains…

“Coursing 400 kilometres towards a dark delta, a river found on Saturn’s moon Titan is the longest yet seen outside Earth. Bearing a striking resemblance to the Nile, the river hints at ongoing geological activity on the moon.”

“The Nile’s relatively straight shape is partly controlled by fault lines, which on Earth mark the places where tectonic plates meet. Titan is probably too small to have plates, but the river may also be tracing a fault in the bedrock, says Farr. Pressure could build up on such faults, causing them to shift and form new chasms and lakes, he says.” 

It is interesting to note, even though scientists don’t believe Titan has plate tectonics, they do however believe the river tracks a fault line! Sounds complicated, doesn’t it? In another discovery found on Titan, the moon is icier than previous thought!

In Phys.org…

“Scientists have long suspected that a vast ocean of liquid water lies under the crust. The new study suggests that the internally generated heat that keeps that ocean from freezing solid depends far more on Titan’s interactions with Saturn and its other moons than had been suspected.”

“The picture of Titan that we get has an icy, rocky core with a radius of a little over 2,000 kilometers, an ocean somewhere in the range of 225 to 300 kilometers thick and an ice layer that is 200 kilometers thick,” he said.”

“Previous models of Titan’s structure estimated the icy crust to be approximately 100 kilometers thick. So if there is more ice, then there should be less heat from the core than had been estimated. One way to account for less heat being generated internally is for there to be less rock and more ice in the core than previous models had predicted.”

“From measurements of the observed gravitational field of Titan, one can compute what the shape of Titan ought to be. But the new data show that Titan’s shape is much more distorted than would be predicted by a simple gravitational model. That discrepancy means the internal structure of Titan isn’t quite so simple.”

Titan’s data conflicts with long-age assumptions, for example…Its lack of craters and the craters are shallow which is hard to believe using long-age assumptions considering the moon contains the most gravitational pull.  Jupiter’s moon Ganymede, is a comparable size to Titan, but yet its craters are hundreds of meters bigger!

Next, there are dramatic changes happening in Titan’s atmosphere! Using an amazing instrument called the “Composite InfraRed Spectrometer”, a research team from the University of Bristol discovered “an enormous increase in Titan’s exotic trace gases over the south pole within a relatively short time.”

These gases are formed by sunlight, which then are converted by Titan’s atmosphere into benzene and hydrogen cyanide. The researchers were very surprised by this discovery considering such a rapid change within just a few short months. Why wouldn’t a circulation model predict activity even being relatively close to that high level? Well, it goes back again to the long-age assumption which prevails in secular science that bases everything on how things evolved. This discovery causes a problem for that assumption because they will have to invent something on how this erosive process could have been sustained over Titan’s presumed billions of years!

Another long-age problem was also discovered but more in-depth although questioning the age wasn’t discussed in this paper, it was just presumed to be very old!  The rate of thermal escape of hydrogen from Titan’s upper atmosphere has been a dilemma. Researchers found that dissipation of hydrogen and methane is similar to Jeans escape, meaning that molecules escape the atmosphere based on their kinetic energy derived from temperature.  The paper did suggest, “A global and temporal description is required to model Titan’s upper atmosphere.”

Every so often, one finds new papers which modified old papers that have been falsified such as the prediction of a global ocean being on Titan.  A new model was invented and then presented in Icarus (which should be free) where they calculated (using only ratios, not bulk quantities) that surface liquids should be dominated by ethane (56%) over methane (32%), with much lower concentrations at the poles. This counters actual observations on Titan, where the only lakes found are at the poles!

Everyone can agree that observational raw data is vastly superior to invented speculation! We learn something about what is out there in space, we don’t really learn anything with speculative models other than they require fixing all the time to rescue the overall theory. But when you believe in a young universe, these amazing discoveries do not increase the complexity of that! One marvels on how Titan continues to confirm creationism, while defying secular speculation!

Did Earth’s Oceans Come From Asteroids?

For many years, secular planetary scientists believed condensation from the solar nebula, or comets were responsible for the earth’s oceans.  And it would be easy to assume this considering comets are mostly ice which is why it became a popular idea for many years but with direct observations suggests something different.

These direct observations of comets were conducted by the Stardust and Deep Impact which have shattered theories about the origin speculation of comets. Belgian planetary scientists back in 2009, discounted comets saying the earth is too close to the sun, that carbonaceous chondrites contain water sufficient to create a “veneer” of water after the Earth cooled, but observational data of ratios containing osmium isotopes do not match! Also, other researchers have discovered that  nitrogen isotope ratios differed significantly between comets and Earth’s atmosphere!

In Astrobiology Magazine… “Observations from this sample are changing our previous thinking and expectations about how the solar system formed,” a Stardust mission researcher said.

In science daily…“A new analysis of dust from the comet Wild 2, collected in 2004 by NASA’s Stardust mission, has revealed an oxygen isotope signature that suggests an unexpected mingling of rocky material between the center and edges of the solar system. Despite the comet’s birth in the icy reaches of outer space beyond Pluto, tiny crystals collected from its halo appear to have been forged in the hotter interior, much closer to the sun.”

What about condensation from the local solar nebula? That is also dead too. Inventing models that suggest the earth is dryer than expected, the so-called “snow line” in planet formation theory is now thought to be even farther out than previously believed which means the water had to be delivered by something.

With everything else discounted, what is next? Their latest option which is out of desperation more than anything else is trying to fit asteroids into the materialist framework along with its difficulties as the source and deliver of the earth’s oceans!

In NASA’s Astrobiology Magazine…

“Our results provide important new constraints for the origin of volatiles in the inner Solar System, including the Earth,” Alexander said. “And they have important implications for the current models of the formation and orbital evolution of the planets and smaller objects in our solar system.”

An implication is not a theory anymore than a constraint, generally ad hoc explanations are not scientific.  Because of the desperation with basically no other options left (but that doesn’t mean they could never invent more), there were no calculations on how many asteroids it would take to create the earth’s oceans. Asteroids have more of a problem than comets, because unlike comets which are mostly made of ice, asteroids are mostly made out of rock.

It would take an enormous amount of asteroids to squeeze out carbonaceous chondrites, in fact the earth would have to be covered and this would most certainly be detectable if it happened. Also the timing and size of the asteroids would have to be accurate because volcanoes would have to cease from being so active that the asteroids would avoid being buried in lava and the size is important too! Too big and the asteroids would boil up the oceans!

So did the earth’s oceans come from asteroids? Clearly, not! It was a last-ditch effort to find something in the universe to rescue their hypothesis that could deliver water to the earth in order to create the oceans as icy comets were discounted because of new direct data! It’s time they change their framework to intelligent design, namely God!

Geology’s Pace Confirms Creationism

Public education which also teaches Darwinism also teaches “geologic time” as a very long duration of time like millions of years.  But reported through out this year in Darwinian publications, geology moves rather quite rapidly!

In the beginning of the year, it was discovered that kimberlite eruptions, which enable diamonds from deep in the mantle to rise to the surface, are much more rapid than previously thought.

In PhysOrg.com…

“Kimberlite, a type of magma that is normally found deep within the Earth’s crust is known to somehow make its way to the surface at times, and when it does, it quite often has diamonds in it. Scientists have long believed that some process whereby some unknown substance being dissolved in water and carbon dioxide was responsible and that the rise was likely rapid, but other than that, had no real good explanation of how they moved upwards. Now, the riddle appears to be solved.”

“Canadian volcanologist Kelly Russell and his colleagues at the University of British Columbia, as they describe in their upcoming paper in Nature, believe that when hot rising magma runs into silica rich minerals, carbon dioxide laden foam is released, forcing the minerals to the surface.”

According to a drilling survey, explosions under the sea in Norwegian waters is able to produce enough sand instantaneously to cover Manhattan almost 500 feet deep! According to Nature in May 2012…

“At the start of the most recent ice age, pressurized sand exploded through cracks in the sea floor at the bottom of the North Sea, producing a body of sand large enough to bury Manhattan under 160-metre-high dunes.”

They are talking about 10 cubic kilometers of sand erupting through these cracks quite rapidly.

Another another geological process that was assumed by the evolutionary time frame to be a long process is also quite rapid. In Science Daily…

“The depths of Earth are anything but peaceful: large quantities of liquids carve their way through the rock as fluids, causing magma to form. A research team led by the University of Münster, has shown that the fluids flow a lot faster through solid rock than previously assumed. In the Chinese Tian Shan Mountains, fluids pushed their way to Earth’s mantle from great depths in just 200 years rather than in the course of tens or even hundreds of thousands of years. “

“During field work in the Chinese part of the Tian Shan Mountains (Celestial Mountains), the research team found structures in the rocks they were studying which can be ascribed to massive fluid flows at great depth. “Our investigation has shown that a great deal of fluid must have flowed through a rock vein at about 70 km depth and that this fluid has obviously already covered a distance of several hundred meters or more — the transport of such large quantities of fluid over such a great distance has not been demonstrated by anyone before us” explains Timm John from the Institute for Mineralogy, University of Münster. “

“And the most exciting thing is that this amount of fluid flowed through the rock in what is for geological processes a very short time, only about two hundred years,” adds Nikolaus Gussone of the same institute.”

It is exciting to discover geological processes moving in a very short period of time!  But in order to keep millions of year in their time frame,  the Norway team decided not to take into account an actual observation of the fluid accumulation there and then they use Ad hoc explanations order to keep it into the millions of years time frame.  They write… “The release of fluids from minerals in the descending plates is a large-scale and continuous process that takes place at depths up to two-hundred kilometres and takes millions of years,” they explained. , “During this time, the fluids first accumulate.” 

In the creationist model, the earth is young, and observing rapid geological processes confirms it! There is no adjusting those observations to an Ad hoc explanation in order to fit into its timeline.  This isn’t going to be the last time you will hear of  “more rapid than previously assumed” because there are other rapid processes out there which falsify the Darwinian of assumption of millions of years!

Revised Estimates Confirms The Creationist Model

In the last few years, secular research has complicated the dynamo theory, to the point where it can’t even hold up to the old age of billions of years. For example, in phys.org back in 2010…

“But scientists’ understanding of dynamo theory has been complicated by recent discoveries of magnetized rocks from the moon and ancient meteorites, as well as an active dynamo field on Mercury – places that were thought to have perhaps cooled too quickly or be too small to generate a self-sustaining magnetic field.  It had been thought that smaller bodies couldn’t have dynamos because they cool more rapidly and are therefore more likely to have metallic cores that do not stay in liquid form for very long.”

Nobody has observed what is really in the Earth’s core, but the mechanism that became popular among secular scientists is the only one in which they thought could be sustained for billions of years, but new research has challenged that, something creation scientists have been saying for years…

In Nature…

“Revised estimates of σ and k calculated directly at core conditions have fundamental consequences for the thermochemical evolution of the deep Earth. New estimates of the power requirements for the geodynamo suggest a CMB [core-mantle boundary] heat flux in the upper range of what is considered reasonable for mantle convection unless very marginal dynamo action can be sustained, while a primordial inner core is only possible with a significant concentration of radiogenic elements in the core. There are objections to a high CMB heat flux and also to radiogenic heating in the core, but one of the two seems inevitable if we are to have a dynamo. If the inner core is young, these high values of conductivity provide further problems with maintaining a purely thermally driven dynamo.”

“A thermally stratified layer at the top of the core also appears inevitable. Viable thermal history models that produce thin stable layers and an inner core of age ~1 Gyr are likely to require a fairly rapid cooling rate and some radiogenic heating. The presence of a stable layer, and the effects associated with an increased electrical conductivity, have significant implications for our understanding of the geomagnetic secular variation.”

Geophysicists have discovered that their most popular dynamo theory for the Earth’s magnetic field is not able to sustain itself over vast periods of time which leads them to square one in their evolutionary time frame with this question, “how did our planet retained its magnetic field for “geologic time?” There are  mechanisms that can sustain the Earth’s magnetic field, but not for billions of years which confirms the creationist model of the Earth being much younger!