Joel Kontinen
The belief in billions of years is fraught with enormous problems, such as the faint young sun paradox that supposedly caused the phenomenon known as snowball Earth, which has never been explained in a plausible manner.
It would probably have made an end of all life.
There are other fatal problems as well. According to Nature,
“Studies suggest that Earth's magnetic field arose more than 4 billion years ago. Geophysicists call it the 'new core paradox': they can't quite explain how ancient Earth could have sustained a magnetic field billions of years ago, as it was cooling from its fiery birth.”
They desperately need a dynamo that will work for four billion years, and that isn’t easy.
Now, researchers think that they have solved this problem. Kei Hirose, a geophysicist at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, suggests that the presence of silicon dioxide did the trick, while David Stevenson, a geophysicist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, relies on magnesium oxide.
The major problem with both approaches is a belief in billions of years, with Earth initially looking more like Venus than the blue planet we’re used to seeing.
However, some studies suggest that Earth had water from the very beginning, which would imply that it never was that hot.
The most fruitful way to approach the dilemma is to rely on what Genesis says about Earth’s beginnings.
Source:
Witze, Alexandra. 2015. Magnetic mystery of Earth's early core explained. Nature news (17 December).
Posts
