Earth Archives

August 13, 2025August 12, 2025

Global Warming in the Past

We all need to be concerned about the impact of human activities on climate change, but the media hype suggesting that global warming is something new is simply not true. Science News magazine reported data on global warming in the past, going back to the Paleozoic era over 485 million years ago.

The data show that temperatures reached nearly 95 degrees Fahrenheit (35 degrees Celsius) three different times in Earth’s history. The time of the coolest temperatures is the period in which we are living. Earth cooled about three million years ago, reaching 53.6 degrees Fahrenheit (12 degrees Celsius). According to NASA, the present average global surface temperature is 59 degrees Fahrenheit (15 degrees Celsius). It appears that our planet is heading into a warm cycle, which humans contribute to, but they are not the only cause.

The media and politicians sometimes present an alarmist view of the future to attract more attention. There has been global warming in the past, and while humans will be affected by future climate change, there are many contributing factors.

Reference: Science News magazine for August 2025 (page 35)

August 6, 2025August 5, 2025

Shortest Day on Record?

If you’re thinking that you didn’t accomplish much yesterday, August 5, 2025, it might be because the day was shorter than usual. I don’t mean that the daylight hours were shorter. Earth’s solar day was shorter than the typical 24 hours, which equals 86,400 seconds. You probably didn’t notice because the day was only 1.25 milliseconds shorter. Blaming the shortest day won’t help—you’ll need to find some other reason for not achieving more.

Earth’s rotation speed had been gradually slowing down, but for some reason it started speeding up in recent years, making the days shorter. Official and precise records of solar day lengths since 1973 show that they were getting longer. Earth’s gravity creates friction against the Moon, causing it to drift farther away and slowing Earth’s rotation. A slower rotation results in longer days.

The Moon’s position relative to Earth’s equator creates tidal forces that very subtly influence Earth’s rotation rate. Scientists speculate that the slower rotation of Earth’s liquid core might cause the outer layers of the planet to spin faster, but that remains only speculation.

We can’t really say that yesterday was the shortest day because July 5, 2024, was 1.66 milliseconds shorter than the usual 24 hours. Don’t worry about any noticeable change in the length of days. God has given us an incredibly stable planet on which to live. Many finely tuned factors make life on Earth and our existence possible, and it could not have been accidental. This remarkable planet is further evidence that God exists.

Reference: space.com

July 15, 2025July 14, 2025

Radical Sea Level Changes

Scientific American magazine reported that if the entire Greenland ice sheet melted, global sea levels would rise by 24 feet. The article clarified by saying, “The sheet won’t melt all at once, of course…” What articles like this fail to convey is that Earth has experienced radical sea level changes throughout both geologic and human history.

Geologic history shows marine deposits in places you wouldn’t expect. When I taught earth science, I took my classes to Thornton Reef on the south edge of Chicago, Illinois. I am told that the gravel pit now occupying the reef is the largest in the United States. On one trip there, a student found the tube of a cephalopod, an ancient giant octopus-like creature. Clam shells, snail shells, and brachiopods filled buckets that my students took home. This reef is similar to modern ocean reefs, except it winds through the south side of Chicago with a major interstate highway running right through it.

Other examples of historic radical sea level changes are abundant. Oolitic limestone in southern Indiana consists of tiny ocean creatures called oolites. The limestone in the Grand Canyon contains marine deposits. On the other end of the scale, canyons are cut into continental shelves along the U.S. East Coast of the United States. Those canyons were cut when the shelf was out of water. Scuba divers have reported signs of ancient human-made structures and fire pits in those canyons.

Was the Red Sea at the same level when Moses led the Israelites across? Are people searching for Egyptian armor and chariot remains in the wrong spots? The “Sea of Reeds” was likely dry land at that time, so efforts there are probably doomed to fail. We still have much to learn about climate history, radical sea level changes, and ancient peoples. As our technology improves, discoveries will increase, and we look forward to uncovering more evidence of Earth’s history.

Reference: “Greenland’s Frozen Secret” in the July/August 2025 issue of Scientific American, pages 26-36.

John Cooper explores dry land evidence for the credibility of the biblical account in a series of videos produced by Does God Exist?

June 20, 2025June 20, 2025

Bogong Moths and Stellar Migration

Since ancient times, humans have used the stars for navigation. So have various animals and migratory birds. Even some insects use the stars to guide their flights at night. For the first time, researchers have discovered that insects use the stars to guide their long-distance migrations. The insects are Bogong moths, native to Australia.

Researchers spent years studying the migration of Bogong moths. They wanted to know how a moth flying at night could journey 620 miles (1000 km) to a place it had never been before. After spending their summer in the cool, dark caves of the Australian Alps, every autumn, they travel to their breeding grounds in the Australian bush.

Since Bogong moths travel at night, they can’t navigate by the Sun. Past research has shown that birds, as well as some insects such as dung beetles, use Earth’s magnetic field to guide their flight. However, dung beetles travel only a few meters, not 1000 kilometers. Researchers sought to understand how Bogong moths navigate their way.

Researchers captured some Bogong moths and placed them in a planetarium-like flight simulator that blocked Earth’s magnetic field, allowing the moths to navigate by eyesight alone. The research concludes that the moths use the stars to guide them.

These moths aestivate (remain dormant) during the hot summer, huddling tightly together on cave walls or dark crevices, and migrate in the cooler weather to eat and reproduce. What is the purpose of these moths and their stellar migration? They nourish various predators in Australia. Many birds rely on them for food. Additionally, mammals, particularly pygmy possums, depend on them. Even Australian aborigines have feasted on Bogong moths.

We have described long migrations by butterflies, including monarchs and painted ladies. However, butterflies are active during the day, but moths fly at night. Bogong moths are the first insects known to migrate long distances at night using the stars for guidance. Is the remarkable migration of the Bogong moths merely an accident, or is it another essential part of an incredibly complex, designed system of life?

References: space.com, the journal Nature, and Wikipedia

June 17, 2025June 16, 2025

Dealing With Disasters

One of the challenges that we all face is dealing with disasters such as tornadoes, hurricanes, and floods. Skeptics claim that if a God exists, He wouldn’t allow these terrible natural disasters to take place. That claim displays a combination of scientific and theological ignorance.

Tornadoes result when hot air is trapped under a layer of cold air. Warm air rises, but if the cold air above it is dense enough, the warm surface air will become even warmer. Eventually, the hot air will rise through the cold layer. Hang glider pilots and soaring birds look for these vertical updrafts. When the ground is covered with vegetation, there is never enough heat to trigger a strong upward air movement. However, when thousands of acres of land are plowed up or paved over, the surface air becomes hotter and creates stronger vertical movement. Earth’s rotation spins these upward air movements, creating a tornado.

Areas around 30 degrees north and south latitude are usually deserts. The states of Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, and Alabama are at or near 30 degrees north latitude. Hurricanes pick up massive amounts of water from the ocean and dump it on the land. Without hurricanes, there would be a water shortage in many places. In the past, storm surges were not a problem because the coastal areas were lined with mangroves and other plants on the barrier islands and along the mainland coast. Today, that protection has been stripped away and replaced with hotels, roads, parking lots, and beach-front homes. The result is that we are dealing with disasters.

God told humans to take care of the Earth, but greed, selfishness, and ignorance have often caused disasters. The more we learn about the creation, the more we understand that God designed it to work well, but humans have brought much pain and suffering on ourselves by misusing God’s gift. We must work together and avoid repeating past mistakes, or we will continually be dealing with disasters.

May 9, 2025May 8, 2025

Confidence in Astronomical Observations

Some people have asked how we can know that astronomers’ statements about the evolution and demise of stars are factual. This question is usually asked by those in religious denominations that demand a young Earth, which means a young cosmos. Even though the time factors are much longer than human existence, we can have confidence in astronomical observations.

Although humanity has not been around long enough to observe the complete life of a star, we have seen intermediate steps in star evolution. Astronomers plot the luminosity (brightness) of stars against their surface temperature (or color/spectral type) with graphs called the Hertzsprung-Russell (H-R) diagram. It’s a powerful tool for classifying stars, studying their evolution, and understanding their properties. An example is the Crab Nebula.

In 1054, astronomers saw a star explode. The debris pattern of the explosion resembles a crab, so astronomers call it the Crab Nebula. Almost a millennium later, measurements show that the nebula is roughly 10 light years in diameter and is expanding at 1,500 kilometers per second. Observations of the Crab Nebula by the Hubble telescope in 2005 and the Webb telescope in 2023 show steps in the life of a star. Observations of other stars provide more information about a star’s lifetime, giving us confidence in astronomical observations.

Even though I didn’t see the launch, if I see a rocket climbing higher in the sky with every passing second, I know it was launched. I can even compute the launch time. When a car comes to a stop, leaving tire tracks, I know the car was going fast when someone applied the brakes. Every day, we understand evidence of a process without seeing it from start to finish. Astronomers come to understand the life history of stars in the same way.

As we have pointed out before, the Bible does not tell us the age of the cosmos or Earth. We can have confidence in astronomical observations. Young-earth theology is not only in opposition to the evidence but is also inconsistent with the biblical account.

References: apod.nasa.gov for May 8, 2025, and Wikipedia.

April 25, 2025April 22, 2025

Soil Moisture and Water Shortages

Living on a river that feeds Lake Michigan, we tend to ignore messages of water shortages. There is some irrigation in our area, but nothing like what we see in other regions of the world. Recent studies of global soil moisture show a very different picture.

Drought events at various global locations have caused the loss of 1.614 gigatons of water between 2000 and 2002. (One gigaton is one billion tons.) In the United States, irrigation has been highly contested as rivers in Nebraska and Colorado cannot supply the water needed to grow wheat and other grain crops. Drawing from the water table has caused it to drop over 10 feet in recent years.

Studies at the University of Texas and Seoul National University show that the problem of water shortages will cause more hunger and human suffering if we don’t do something to stop the soil moisture loss. The solution to water shortages is available.

There was no way to recover water lost to the oceans in the Old Testament days, but now there is. We can use nuclear energy and various processes to desalinate seawater. Removing the salt from seawater provides the salt humans need while producing fresh water for irrigation and replacing soil moisture.

God has provided humans with the water we need. In ancient times, humans lived by bodies of fresh water. With the expanding human population, not everyone could live on the shores of lakes or along rivers, so water had to be moved from places of plenty to places of drought. The Romans did this with aqueducts stretching for miles. In the western United States, we can allow rainfall and mountain ice melt to replace soil moisture while supplementing the need for water in cities by the ocean, like Los Angeles, using desalination.

The teachings of Jesus were ones of peace and concern for others. Water shortages have fueled greed and rivalry in areas of our planet. We need to use the nuclear energy God has given us to desalinate water rather than as a tool of war.

Reference: “Earth’s soil is drying up” by Kasha Patel in the Washington Post

April 23, 2025April 22, 2025

Hadley Cells and God’s Design

One of planet Earth’s many unique design features is the atmosphere’s circulation pattern, allowing advanced life to exist on our planet. This pattern was first noticed in 1735 when George Hadley was working with the motions of wind recorded by scientists. Realizing that wind currents were not just accidental, he originated the idea of what we call Hadley cells. We know today that the circulation of the atmosphere is much more critical and complex than anyone understood in Hadley’s day.

A feature designed into Earth’s weather pattern is how the insolation moves daily. Insolation is the amount of solar radiation that reaches the surface of a planet. Of the other planets in our solar system, only Mars has a tilt, which spreads the insolation from one latitude to the next, but Mars does not have enough atmosphere for this to be a significant factor. The other planets don’t change their tilt, so the Sun’s radiation is constantly over one latitude. The temperatures at that latitude climb very high, and everywhere else is unbelievably cold.

On Earth, the Sun’s energy gradually changes daily, moving to 20 degrees north or south latitude and striking at the Earth’s equator only two times a year. The Sun is over the equator at the equinoxes on about March 20 and September 22, and the day and night length is the same. Around June 21, the Sun is as far north as it gets, and around December 22, it reaches its southernmost point.

In the Hadley cells, air rises in tropical zones, where it drops its moisture as it cools. At 30 degrees latitude, the cooler air sinks and has very little moisture. Virtually all of Earth’s major deserts are around 30 degrees latitude north and south. In the western United States, we find the Mohave Desert, but the eastern U.S. does not have a desert even though it is at 30 degrees. Hurricanes and the Atlantic Ocean bring a large amount of water to states located at 30 degrees latitude in the eastern U.S. So many things make advanced life possible on this planet that trying to attribute all of them to chance requires far more faith than believing that God designed and created the weather on Earth so you and I can exist.

March 13, 2025March 13, 2025

Christopher Columbus’s Blood Moon

On the night of Thursday March 13 to Friday March 14, 2025, the Western Hemisphere, including the United States, will experience a total lunar eclipse. This eclipse has a connection to Christopher Columbus’s blood moon of 1504. Let me tell the story.

Of course, we know that Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492. That’s when he “discovered” the new world. However, Columbus made three more journeys across the Atlantic, with the last one from 1502 to 1504. On that visit to Jamaica, he ran into difficulty. He was stranded as his ships were crawling with marine worms. He sent a small party in canoes to get help from the Spanish-occupied island of Hispaniola, a hundred miles away.

While waiting for rescue, the crew’s food supply ran out, and the indigenous Arawak people grew tired of supplying provisions for the small trinkets the Spaniards offered in exchange. As his crew members were starving, Columbus had to devise a plan.

Fortunately, Columbus had astronomical tables indicating that a full lunar eclipse would occur on March 1, 1504. He called the local chiefs together and told them that the all-powerful Christian God was displeased with their refusal to help him. He told them that as a sign of God’s wrath, on that night, the Moon would turn dark and become the color of blood.

At first, the natives laughed at Christopher Columbus’s blood moon threats. The laughter stopped when the eclipse began. Columbus told them he would ask God to restore the Moon if they would meet his demands. Then he withdrew and watched his hourglass to time the eclipse. As the eclipse ended, he returned to the Jamaicans, who were pleading for his forgiveness. Columbus and his crew had everything they needed until the rescue ships arrived six months later.

So, what does Christopher Columbus’s blood moon have to do with the one you can see a few hours from now? I invite you to observe the one that will occur tonight. In the Eastern time zone, the eclipse will begin shortly before midnight. The Moon will become gradually darker until it becomes blood red during totality from 2:26 a.m. to 3:31 a.m. Just subtract one hour from those times for each time zone going westward. I’m sure you want to know the connection of this eclipse to Christopher Columbus’s blood moon. That will be the subject tomorrow.

January 16, 2025January 12, 2025

Life on Mars in Fiction and Fact

Our fascination with Mars goes back to American sci-fi, with War of the Worlds, written by H. G. Wells and published in 1898. It was recreated as a radio drama by Orson Welles on Halloween in 1938, causing panic in America. In 1950, Ray Bradbury released a novel called The Martian Chronicles, which ended with the Earth destroyed by nuclear war. In 2005, Steven Spielberg directed a movie based on the Wells novel starring Tom Cruise. In 2015, The Martian was a science fiction movie starring Matt Damon. We have now scientifically investigated the red planet, resolving the question of life on Mars.

Measurements made by NASA’s Curiosity Rover from four Gale crater sites show that there is no life on Mars and that there has never been life on Mars’ surface. The ratios of carbon and oxygen isotopes indicate that no biosphere existed on the planet. Rock samples show extreme rates of evaporation and carbon flowing into the atmosphere like bubbles from a pressurized can of soda.

Previous measurements on Mars have been made in ice, which forms and melts there with some degree of regularity. For the first time, science has isotopic readings from rock samples. One can argue that there has been life on Mars in the distant past preserved many feet below ground, but drill cores have not backed up that theory.

The more we learn from scientific data gathered in space, the more we realize how extraordinary life is on Earth. Mars is NOT our twin planet, and no planet in our solar system is. Travel to another star and another solar system would not be within human capacity at any time during the lives of those living today. Humans may destroy Earth by nuclear war, but Bradbury’s story of The Martian Chronicles is not a predictor of how that might happen.

The Bible says God created time, space, matter-energy, and life. It doesn’t tell us when or how many steps were involved in creating the planet on which we live. The Bible does tell us how to live and avoid the things that can destroy this planet. Albert Einstein is purported to have said that if nuclear war is used in World War III, World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones. Moving to Mars is not an option. We can avoid wars by following the words of Jesus Christ in Matthew 5-7.