Below is the online edition of In the Beginning: Compelling Evidence for Creation and the Flood,
by Dr. Walt Brown. Copyright © Center for Scientific Creation. All rights reserved.
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For decades, textbooks have taught that the early Earth was molten for 500,000,000 years, because it formed by meteoritic bombardment.a If so, the heat released by impacts would have melted the entire Earth many times over.b Had Earth ever been molten, dense, nonreactive chemical elements, such as gold, would have sunk to Earth’s core. Gold is 70% denser than lead, yet is found at the Earth’s surface.c
Even granite, the basic continental rock, is a mixture of many minerals with varying densities. If melted granite slowly cooled, a “layer cake” of minerals, vertically sorted by density and freezing temperature, would form instead of granite.Therefore, the entire Earth was never molten and did not form by meteoritic bombardment.
Radioactive dating of certain zircon minerals also contradicts a molten Earth. Trace elements within those zircons show that the zircons formed on a cold Earth (less than 212°F).d However, based on radioactive dating, those zircons formed billions of years ago when, according to evolutionists, the Earth should have been molten (exceeding 1,800°F)—an obvious contradiction. Either the molten Earth idea or the radioactive dating method must be wrong; perhaps both are wrong.
Meteorites contain much more of the element xenon than Earth’s surface rocks, relative to other noble (inert) gases, such as helium, neon, and argon. Had Earth formed by meteoritic bombardment, Earth’s surface rocks would have a different composition, and our atmosphere would contain up to ten times more xenon than it has.e If Earth did not evolve by meteoritic bombardment, it may have begun as one large body. [See “Melting the Inner Earth” on pages 540–543.]