But let's have a look at another type of rocky feature, Stalactites - you know, those long pointy stone things that hang from the roofs of limestone caves dotted in many places around the world. In fact I saw some first hand recently in Dunmore Caves near Kilkenny, here in Ireland. They were super cool, apart from one huge one that had been blown up with dynamite in the 1920s by some guy who thought he'd like most of it in his private collection. All that is left is a blackened stump. Big shame. Anyway, evolutionists tell us that the big ones can be from tens of thousands to a few hundred thousands of years old. This is mainly because evolutionists generally assume vast swathes of time have occurred each time they find stuff. And you have to admit, at first look, Stalactites really do look Lord-of-the-Rings old!
Limestone Stalactites, also known as Speleothems *, form when water dissolves the limestone rock it passes through, then chemically deposits the results as it drips from the cave roof. As the mineral-rich water encounters the air inside the cave, the salts reform into limestone. The important thing to note at this point is that there are a lot of variables that can affect the rate of formation of the Stalactite, like how acidic the water flow is to begin with, how rich in Calcium Carbonate it becomes during it's journey, the rate of water flow, whether that rate of flow has varied over time or not etc.
That brings us to the mineral springs in Thermopolis, Wyoming. Thermopolis is a town of about 3,000 inhabitants and is home to numerous natural hot springs. The springs opened to the public in 1896 as part of an agreement with the Arapaho Indians. In the early 1900s, an enterprizing local decided to conduct an experiment that might attract even more visitors. So he inserted a long pipe downwards through the rock surface til it reached the steaming hot spring waters. The pipe extended above ground level quite a few feet also. Around the visible part of the pipe, he built a stone Tepee (I'm not sure if this made the dispossessed Native Americans feel any better or not) and the spring waters flowed down the sides of the structure thus :
The site was opened as a tourist attraction in 1909. Over the succeeding decades, limestone deposits began to build up on the outer sides of the tepee. The particular form of limestone deposited is known as Travertine. Today, Tepee Fountain, as it became known, looks like this (a recent amateur video uploaded by a visitor to Thermopolis via You Tube - please tilt your head sideways for parts of the short clip!) :
Formed in just over 100 years. Amazing! Travertine indeed is a very solid form of limestone. In fact, Burghausen Castle in Bavaria, Germany (pictured below) ** began construction nearly 1,000 years ago and is made almost entirely from Travertine and it certainly has stood the test of time.
So, given the right conditions, Speleothems can form remarkably quickly. The difficulty with a purely evolutionary view of Stalactite formation is that uniformitarianism *** is generally assumed, that is, that the rate of formation of Stalactites and Stalagmites (the variety that grow upwards from a cave floor) was the same in the past as it is today. It is true that many of these formations are growing very slowly now, as little as 0.13mm per year, but that doesn't mean what you do is just calculate backwards at the current growth rate and come up with an age of 150,000 + years. It's interesting that evolutionists have somewhat abandoned uniformitarianism as the overall mechanism of evolution, but still insert the hypothesis in many of their other analyses. By the way, in the picture beneath, a bat was found to have been captured by a Stalagmite in Carlsbad Caverns, New Mexico **** before the corpse had even had time to decay.
There are many other examples of speedy Stalactite formation in the man-made world also. The chemical process is quite different in these cases from those in limestone caves, but the fact remains again, that given the right conditions, these structures can form remarkably quickly when water flows through stone, or as in these cases, concrete. The below pictures come from the basements of the Lincoln Memorial, Washington U.S.A. (built in 1923), the George Rogers Clark Memorial, Indiana U.S.A. (completed in 1934) and from level 5 of a lead mine at Mt Isa in Queensland Australia!
An alternative Biblical explanation for Speleothems may come from the account of the Flood of Noah which according to Scripture occurred around 4,500 years ago. Genesis chapters 6 and 7 record that during a worldwide flood, not only did it rain pretty spectacularly, but also that the "springs of the great deep burst forth" (Gen 7:11-12) all over the earth. In this account, enormous lava streams and boiling mineral-laden geysers could easily have precipitated the subsequent rapid formation of rocky cave growths. After the floods subsided (Gen 8:14), the rate of formation of these phenomena would have decreased relatively quickly, in time to the much lower rates we see today. In this scenario, a uniformitarian evolutionary interpretation of how we got Speleothems would of course be completely misleading. Evolutionists use standard ways of assigning age to rocks such as Radiometric and Argon dating. It would be an interesting experiment if such dating tests were applied to Tepee Fountain!
The bottom line is this : the fact that rocky formations can form quickly does not prove that in particular cases, it has done. But equally, it is not possible to prove long timescales in specific examples either. However, once again, in educational institutions, lecturers are limited in what they can say on the subject of origins - alternative interpretations to that of evolution are universally not offered.
By the way, if you want to make your own mini Stalactite of sorts, you might even try this for a bit of fun!
Thanks for reading!
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speleothem
** http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burghausen_Castle
*** http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniformitarianism
**** http://creationwiki.org/Stalactite_and_stalagmite
