High pressures in oil fields would have bled off if earth were old (Talk.Origins)
- The high pressures found in oil and gas wells are proof of a young earth. If the earth were old, the pressures would have bled off by now.
Source:
Hovind, Kent, n.d. Universe is not "billions of years" old.
CreationWiki response:
(Talk.Origins quotes in blue)
1. The high pressures show that the oil and gas are trapped by rock impermeable enough to hold such reservoirs for many millions of years. If the assumptions (young earth and leaky rocks) behind the claim were true, the pressures never would have built up in the first place.
Dr. Alexander Lalomov writes that "In real conditions it is difficult to imagine sedimentary rocks remaining so impermeable for so long," and: "Experts in petroleum prospecting note the impossibility of creating an effective model given long and slow oil generation over millions of years (Petukhov, 2004)." There are many examples of reservoirs being replenished within decades, rather than millions of years (Dmitrievsky and Valyaev, 2002).
2. A geological event which could cause oil and gas to migrate into a reservoir could have occurred relatively recently. Even if the oil field is young, that does not mean the oil, much less the earth, is young.
If such an event occurred recently, that would not be uniformitarianism. We agree that a young oil field doesn't prove a young Earth. The point is that it fits better with a young Earth. The oil itself can be shown to be young due to measurable C14 (Barenbaum, 2004; Baumgardner et al., 2003; Doughty, 2006), and the presence of short-lived cosmogenic isotopes.
References:
- Mineral Deposits as an Example of Geological Rates. In CRSQ 2007, 44(1): 64-66.
- Batten, D., 2019. Age of the Earth: 101 evidences for a young age of the earth and the universe,, No. 44.
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