a

. “The kinetic energy (~5 x 10³⁸ ergs) released in the largest impacts (1.5 x 10²⁷ g at  9 km/sec) would be several times greater than that required to melt the entire Earth.”  George W. Wetherill, “Occurrence of Giant Impacts during the Growth of the Terrestrial Planets,” Science, Vol. 228, 17 May 1985, p. 879.

b

. If gold were found only near volcanoes, then one might claim that gold was brought up to the Earth’s surface by volcanoes.  However, gold is seldom found near volcanoes.

Suppose that extremely hot water (932°F or 500°C) circulated under the crust—a crust that had never been molten. Gold in high concentrations could go into solution. If the solution then came up to the Earth’s surface fast enough, little gold would precipitate as the water’s pressure dropped. If this happened, about 250 cubic miles of water must have burst forth to account for the gold found in just one gold mining region in Canada. [See Robert Kerrich, “Nature’s Gold Factory,” Science, Vol. 284, 25 June 1999, pp. 2101–2102.]  If these ideal pressure-temperature conditions did not exist, even more water must come up faster to account for the Earth’s gold deposits. These are hardly the slow processes that evolutionists visualize. On pages 104–135 and 369–374, you will see how, why, and when vast amounts of hot water—circulating under a crust that had never been molten—burst up through faults.

About 40% of all gold mined in the world is from the Witwatersrand Basin in South Africa. This gold, deposited in compressional fractures within the basin, precipitated from water whose temperature exceeded 300°C. [See A. C. Barnicoat et al., “Hydrothermal Gold Mineralization in the Witwatersrand Basin,” Nature, Vol. 386, 24 April 1997, pp. 820–824.]

Robert R. Loucks and John A. Mavrogenes, “Gold Solubility in Supercritical Hydrothermal Brines Measured in Synthetic Fluid Inclusions,” Science, Vol. 284, 25 June 1999, pp. 2159–2163.

c

. John W. Valley, “A Cool Early Earth?” Scientific American, Vol. 294, pp. 58–65.

d

. “Meteorites, he notes, contain 10 times as much xenon, relative to other noble gasses, than occurs in Earth’s atmosphere. In addition, the relative abundance of xenon isotopes found in meteorites doesn’t jibe with the pattern found on Earth. If meteorites did deliver most of the water to our planet, they also would have provided xenon, and our atmosphere would have to have a very different composition, Owen maintains.” Ron Cowen, “Found: Primordial Water,” Science News, Vol. 156, 30 October 1999, p. 285.