CPT Q. 058: Why should the Deep Sea Drilling Program data be taken seriously by creationists?

Q. 58. Why should DSDP and ODP dates be accepted as reliable, especially given that only a handful of indisputable off-ridge dates were obtained, that there is testimonial evidence that drilling program officials ignored contrary evidence, and that the programs were terminated because it was concluded that current technology would not be able to drill to the depths necessary to reach true basement? You seem to accept at face value the DSDP scientists’ assertions that they drilled to basement in many of their sites. Yet Storevedt (1997) noted that they simply assumed that Layer 2 basalt was basement. Furthermore, Pratt (2000) documents that the vast majority of the sites did not hit basement. He also showed that the trend of dates off ridge had a wide scatter, even ignoring data contrary to DSDP conclusions, citing age scatter of tens of millions of years along a single magnetic anomaly. There have been many citations of samples recovered by dredge and drilling near and along the ridge that showed ages that were widely discrepant from those predicted (see summary in Pratt, 2000).

Response: I can sympathize with your bewilderment in trying to sort out the various issues and make sense of all the conflicting truth claims if you are giving serious credence to Pratt’s (2000) paper. If a person has a sufficient grasp of the big picture, many of the anomalies to which Pratt is pointing indeed provide useful leads from the standpoint of research on the Genesis Flood. But it is important to keep in mind that Pratt in no way is thinking in terms of a recent global tectonic and hydrologic cataclysm, so he is severely handicapped in his ability to make sense of the anomalies himself. For example, all the dramatic up and down motions, not only of the continents, but also of the ocean floor are a complete bewilderment to him. Pratt is correct that conventional plate tectonics has no good explanation for these up and down dynamics, but that is not the case with catastrophic plate tectonics.

In regard to the section of his paper dealing with deep sea drilling, he points to several noteworthy anomalies, but he himself is at a loss as to how to make sense of them. If we consider the case of the continental rocks dredged in the late 1960’s from the area around Bald Mountain at about 45° N latitude just west of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, I find this data extremely fascinating. I do not dismiss out of hand that Bald Mountain itself possibly might be a sliver of continental crust, way out of place in this location. However, upon reading the original papers which describe these dredged rocks, I conclude that such an inference is far from certain. Essentially all of these rocks of continental affinity are well-rounded and lack the thick coating of manganese oxide that covers most of the other seafloor rocks in the area. Moreover, they seem to be widely scattered in the larger vicinity, even on the opposite side of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, and not localized to Bald Mountain. At 45° N latitude it is not farfetched to suspect that many if not most of these rounded rocks without manganese coatings are indeed glacial erratics, that is, rocks scoured from a continent surface by glacial action, incorporated into the glacial ice, set adrift within icebergs as the glacier reached the coastline and calved off icebergs into the sea, and then dropped to the sea bottom when the icebergs melted.

In regard to the small number of deep sea drill holes to reach basement which Pratt cites—that was as of 1977! Since 1977 there have been more than a thousand additional holes drilled, with a much larger fraction reaching basement because of better technology. Most of the uncertainties that existed as to the structure of the oceanic crust as of 1977 have now been resolved. The deepest hole into the basaltic basement is now more than a kilometer. The earlier conjecture that the present oceanic crust might resemble the rock assemblages known as ophiolites that are exposed at the earth’s surface in many places and readily sampled and studied has now been substantiated by the drilling results. Ophiolites are now interpreted as former pieces of ocean floor that have been tectonically emplaced, or obducted, onto a continent. The confidence behind this interpretation is derived primarily from the ocean drilling results obtained over the past 30 years. Moreover, from the vast number of holes drilled since 1977, the case to me is incontrovertible that the age of the ocean crust increases in a systematic way as one moves away from the spreading ridges. How can anyone now doubt that basic finding?