Mount St. Helens Blew Up Secular Science – by David Rives

On May 18, 1980, Mt. St. Helens erupted sending a plume of ash as high as 16 miles into the atmosphere.

The top 1,300 feet of Mt. St. Helens was ejected from the North side of the mountain forming a crater up to 2 miles across and a half a mile deep.

Sterile soil growing plants?

This area is gorgeous, filled with wildlife and abundant plant growth. It’s hard to imagine that less than fifty years ago, a massive volcanic eruption stripped the mountainside bare, killing all the animals and destroying the forest.

One region, called Pumice Plain, was buried under six feet of sterile rocks and volcanic ash and dust, called pumice. Scientists assumed nothing could grow or live in such nutrient-poor soil so they assumed recovery would take a really long time. Only…it didn’t!

A flowering plant called lupine was soon growing in the soil. Unlike most plants, this one has lives closely with a bacterium that harvests nitrogen out of the air, instead of the soil. These plants could grow in the ‘useless’ soil and their nutritious seeds served as food for the humble pocket gopher. These tiny mammals soon moved in to eat the lupine and, in the process, stirred up the soil. Soon new plants and animals could move in.

Within a decade after the eruption, Mount St. Helens was once again a thriving ecosystem. Ecologists never imagined that life could regain the area so quickly after such incredible devastation, however it did. Only years after the initial eruption, you would never imagine that this place was desolate just a few decades ago!

It seems God has specifically designed life to be able to regain its footing after a catastrophe. After the Flood, plants and animals would’ve quickly recolonized and turned the landscape into a beautiful and live-able world. This process would not have taken many decades—Mount St. Helens powerfully illustrated how quickly an ecosystem can recover.

Do Volcanos and the Ice Age Go Together?

When you think of volcanos, you probably think of fiery lava oozing down a mountain. What if I told you that when you think “volcano,” you should think “Ice Age”?

This particular volcano erupted in May of 1980 and was closely studied by geologists and others. It really helped us understand more about how catastrophes shape our planet.

Mount St. Helens seemed like a big explosion. After all, it released the equivalent of four hundred and forty tons of TNT and created the largest volcanic landslide on record. The ash cloud it created even cooled the earth by a fraction of a degree. So, what would happen if volcanos were erupting all over the world, at roughly the same time? It’s hard to imagine what a catastrophe of that size would do!

Most of the rock record we have today was laid down during the global Flood of Noah’s day. This was about four thousand, three hundred and fifty years ago. Throughout this record we find vast amounts of volcanic ash, so we know that, during the Flood, there was intense volcanism. Mount St. Helens is absolutely dwarfed by what happened during that time in earth’s past.

So, what does this have to do with an Ice Age? Well, we know that volcanic eruptions send aerosols into the atmosphere, and they last up there quite a long time. With all the volcanism during the Flood, the atmosphere would have been filled with these aerosols. These aerosols reflect sunlight back into space, cooling the earth. Now, if a small volcano like Mount St. Helens here, can cool the earth by a fraction of a degree, imagine what dozens of massive volcanos could do?

These aerosols would’ve cooled the earth’s temperature but the molten rock from these volcanos would’ve warmed the oceans. There would have been warm oceans and cool air and continents. This caused a lot of evaporation, which falls as…snow. There would have been cooler summers mean less melting, particularly at the poles, and so the snow builds into glaciers and ice sheets. That would have made an Ice Age! Eventually, as the world settles down, the climate does too, and the glaciers retreat to where we have them today, just near the poles.

So, next time you think of a volcano, think of the Ice Age and how the Bible’s history and the global Flood explain what we see around us.

Do humans control the climate?

The eruption of Mount St. Helens spewed vast amounts of dust and ash into the air and also released tons of trapped carbon dioxide.

Now, it’s popular today to believe that man-made CO2—carbon dioxide—emissions are causing dramatic climate change, however, natural disasters like Mount St. Helens should remind us, we really don’t have control over the weather!

Although the estimates keep going up, in 2013 scientists estimated volcanos are slowly releasing six hundred million tons of carbon into the atmosphere each year. These estimates came from only sampling a small number of volcanos and don’t include so-called dormant volcanos, which they now believe are also releasing carbon! So, that figure will likely continue to go up as scientists do more research.I

If there’s an eruption—watch out! It causes a change in the climate, leading to a cooling trend from aerosols trapped for years in the atmosphere.

Now, the climate change debate is really about different views of the past. If you believe the earth is millions of years old, and the ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica preserve a record of the climate stretching back hundreds of thousands of years, you’ll have a very different view on manmade climate change than someone with a different view of history.

You see, when we start with the Bible’s history, we know there was a perfect climate that was marred by sin, we know there was a global Flood that radically changed the planet—including our climate. This Flood was accompanied by intense volcanism, which would have released vast amounts of CO2, as well as aerosols, into the atmosphere. Those trapped aerosols led to global cooling and, eventually, the Ice Age! There’s been radical climate change in the past and humans had everything to do with it because of our sin!

Two different views of the past, lead to two different views of the present. We need to start with the right foundation—God’s Word—to get the right perspective.

I’m David Rives…Truly the heavens declare the glory of God.