This is the online edition of In the Beginning: Compelling Evidence for Creation and the Flood
(7th Edition) by Dr. Walt Brown. The online version of the book is designed to be read online.
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Small Comets
Since 1981, Earth satellites have photographed tiny spots thought to be small, house-size comets striking and vaporizing in our upper atmosphere. [See Figure 33 on page 39.] On average, these strikes occur at an astonishing rate of one every three seconds!54 Surprisingly, small comets strike Earth’s atmosphere ten times more frequently in early November than in mid-January55—too great a variation to explain if the source of small comets is far from Earth’s orbit.
Small comets generate controversy. Those who deny the existence of small comets argue that the spots are “camera noise,”56 but cameras of different designs in different orbits give the same results. In three experiments, rockets 180 miles above the Earth dumped 300–600 pounds of water ice with dissolved carbon dioxide onto the atmosphere. Ground radar looking up and satellite cameras looking down recorded the results, duplicating the spots. Ground telescopes have also photographed small comets. These comets are hitting Earth’s atmosphere at a rate that would deliver, in 4.5 billion years, much more water than is on the Earth today. Comets contain water twice as rich in heavy hydrogen as our oceans. Therefore, our oceans would be much richer in heavy hydrogen than they are if comets bombarded Earth for billions of years or if most of Earth’s water came from comets.