Re: [asa] moon dust

The principal problem remains (in my view) that all the careful science
and articulate explanation still struggles in the face of (usually is
trumped by) gut reaction in the absence of training in critical thinking
or preparation in a relevant discipline, or even readiness. The more
arcane (specialized) the explanation, the more this is the case.
Realistically, most folks just do not have the preparation to entertain
and respond intellectually to such explanation. For them, the arguments
have to be more anecdotal and broadly explanatory. Even then, the task
is to overcome the natural tenacity of a personal worldview, no easy thing.

In essence, this gets down to who do you trust. For this community, I
think the jam-jar-lid principle applies, ...slow, steady pressure,
...i.e., a clear personal expression of love and awe for Creation and
its Author, articulate and properly-leveled repetition of the best
science as appropriate, consistency and integrity, compassion and
gentleness, and patience. It doesn't hurt to be able to be gracefully
restrained when passions rise. JimA

philtill@aol.com wrote:

> The best books IMO are the ones published by the University of
> Arizona Press. They have a nice big volume called "Mars." It is a
> beautiful summary of all the Viking and earlier research. It has been
> outdated by all the recent spacecraft, and so I think they may have
> published a second volume on Mars but I haven't kept track since my
> job is focused entirely on the Moon, these days.
>
> Regarding the Moon, the "Lunar Sourcebook" is awesome. It is out of
> print but available on CD from the Lunar and Planetary Institute
> (www.lpi.usra.edu <http://www.lpi.usra.edu>). I'm not sure if they
> have restrictions on who can buy it, since it is available due to a
> clause that NASA had with the publisher for the purpose or
> accessibility for research or something like that, but if you check
> their website you'll find out.
>
> There is also a recently published book called (I think) _New Views of
> the Moon_.
>
> The problem with trying to construct arguments to help the YEC's is
> that you get no professional credit in your career for doing this, and
> you get no gratitude from the majority of the church, etc. You get no
> benefit except the knowledge that you just might help one or two
> individuals. Therefore, there is to my knowledge **nobody** spending
> time to pull together the arguments about the Moon or Mars to help
> YEC's see the truth. There is a wealth of useful data out there on
> this topic, but most active scientists just don't have time to spend
> on this tangent. Maybe this is something you will want to do, and if
> so, you will probably be the first person to publish a book on that topic!
>
> God bless!
> Phil
>
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: tandyland@earthlink.net
> To: asa@calvin.edu
> Cc: philtill@aol.com
> Sent: Sat, 13 Jan 2007 6:10 AM
> Subject: RE: [asa] moon dust
>
> Ah, but they have now possibly discovered water on Mars, so that
> "proves" that there "could" have been a flood.....
>
> Do you have a good reference(s) online or in print which discusses the
> Moon and/or Mars geological data that you have presented, so I could
> do further research? And to which skeptical YEC's could be pointed.
>
>
> Jon Tandy
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu
> [mailto:asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu] On Behalf Of philtill@aol.com
> Sent: Friday, January 12, 2007 7:10 PM
> To: tandyland@earthlink.net; asa@calvin.edu
> Subject: Re: [asa] moon dust
>
> I should point out that the argument is even more compelling on
> Mars because there you have volcanoes, river networks, dry ocean
> beds, and layer upon layer upon layer of sediment in the canyons
> and craters where lakes used to be. There was never any tectonics
> to destroy the record of the past. The geological history is long
> and varied, and can't be explained by Noah's flood since Noah
> didn't live on Mars. Ironically, the earliest geological epoch on
> Mars is called the Noachian, a reference to Noah, because that is
> when Mars was wet.
>
> Phil Metzger
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: tandyland@earthlink.net
> To: philtill@aol.com
> Sent: Fri, 12 Jan 2007 6:38 PM
> Subject: RE: [asa] moon dust
>
>>>I like pointing to the Moon and Mars to counter some of the wacky
> YEC claims, because those bodies aren't supposed to have had a
> global flood and so you can't appeal to amazingly coincidental
> splashes of sediments and fossils and isotopes to fall together in
> the flood and form the entire geologic column. Of course, you
> can't really appeal to that anyhow, but it is just more obvious
> that you can't do it on the Moon where there was no flood.>>
>
> This is an excellent point. I've read about the radioactive
> isotope dating of the moon rocks being roughly the same (4 billion
> years) as that of earth rocks and meteorites. If recent YEC
> arguments about the global flood speeding up radioactive decay
> rates by several orders of magnitude, then why would the moon have
> the same age rocks?
>
> Are you saying that there are recognizable sediment layers on the
> moon, due to the processes you outlined, which can be dated
> through successive layers through a relatively predictable
> sequence of dates back to multiple million/billion years? (Again,
> what about these sediment layers, if no global flood?) Where can
> more of this data be found, to understand this kind of moon
> surface dating sequence in detail?
>
>
> Jon Tandy
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu
> [mailto:asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu] On Behalf Of philtill@aol.com
> Sent: Friday, January 12, 2007 4:41 PM
> To: pleuronaia@gmail.com; asa@calvin.edu
> Subject: Re: [asa] moon dust
>
> Hi David,
>
> I think the source you found here is misleading. Not only
> will it not answer the YEC's silly claim (because it misses
> their point), but it also confuses the science and thus misses
> a much better argument that can be made for the oldness of the
> Moon.
>
> We distinguish between "dust" and "soil" in the regolith.
> Soil does include the "dust-sized" particles (we call them
> silt- or clay-sized particles when they are mixed in the soil,
> or we call them the "fines fraction"), but it also inludes
> sand-sized particles and perhaps even gravel in the loose
> definition of soil. Regolith includes even more than "soil"
> does because it also includes the gravel, stones, boulders,
> and even large but busted-out blocks from the bedrock. When
> the paragraph below describes the astronauts hammering the
> core tube 70 cm into the soil, that wasn't dust they were
> hammering it into. It was regolith, or better it was "soil"
> (not passign through the rocks or boulders that would have
> blocked the tube).
>
> There actually is a very small dust layer lying on top of the
> regolith and it is perhaps a centimeter deep or so. It is
> segregated out from the regolith because of the unique
> electrostatic processes on the Moon. Without an atmosphere to
> mediate electrostatic charge, particles can become highly
> charge-up in the strong UV light of the sun (due to the
> photoelectric effect) and then they can remain charged for
> long times. Then, as the overall region of soil becomes
> positively charged, they levitate away from one another or
> even fly up into the sky like popcorn. The astronauts
> reported seeing geysers of dust shooting up above the horizon
> where the day/night terminator line was approaching them.
> Then, the dust falls back down onto the top layer of the
> regolith. The bigger particles and boulders cannot do this,
> of course, so it tends to segregate out the silt- or
> clay-sized particles. By this process, a true dust layer
> exists on top of the soil, which is distinct from the soil (or
> more generally from the regolith) that is beneath it. This
> dust layer is very thin, which gives rise to the wacky YEC claims.
>
> Their claim arose from the influx of dust from space onto the
> earth. The YEC's weren't talking about the soil or regolith
> on the Moon. They were talking about the very fine-particled
> dust layer falling on top of it from space and building up.
> (That's why the paragraph quoted below misses their point.)
> Supposedly if you extrapolate this influx from space for four
> billion years then you get a huge depth of dust on the Moon,
> and without any lunar oceans to convert the fines into
> mudstone it should still be lying there on the surface,
> right? Well, wrong. For one thing, I think the influx
> measurement they based this on was inaccurate and has since
> been corrected. But more to the point, this is a typical
> "one-sided" equation that the YEC's are famous for
> presenting. There are actually processes beside oceans and
> mudstone that convert fine particles into something different.
>
> The Moon is constantly bombarded by micrometeorites that on
> Earth would have been filtered out by the Earth's atmosphere.
> These micrometeorites tend to break larger particles into
> smaller ones (comminution) and also create glass splatters
> from the molten material that then hardens and glues smaller
> particles together into larger ones (agglutination). This
> produces a characteristic particle size distribution in the
> soil. In fact, you can date the age of the soil in any given
> area by looking at the fraction of agglutinates, as well as
> many other dating methods. When a larger asteroid or meteor
> strikes the Moon, it might excavate deeply enough into the
> regolith to reach bedrock, which it then busts up and throws
> out as an ejecta blanket. Thus, it has deepened the regolith
> and also created fresh soil. This immature soil does not have
> any agglutinates and it has a particle size distribution that
> is much coarser than aged soil (fewer fi nes). You can
> estimate how many millions of years it has been lying there by
> how many agglutinates have built up in it and also by how many
> fines have been created through comminution. In fact, you can
> see layering in the lunar soil and these layers are varying in
> maturity age. That is because one ejecta blanket is thrown
> out over another, so the soil tends to get more mature (more
> agglutinates, more fines) the deeper you go. You can also go
> to the blanket of a young crater (dated independently by [1]
> its blanket being on top of all the others, [2] by the number
> of cosmic ray tracks in the particles, and [3] by the rim of
> the crater not being eroded through smaller imact events), and
> see how it has indeed very few agglutinates and is very
> coarse. This produces an independent verification of an old
> earth, in addition to all the other methods, and of course it
> agrees with the overall paradigm that we see everywhere in
> nature.
>
> Furthermore, in addition to the agglutination process that
> converts dust into larger particles, the micrometeorite
> "gardening" process also mixes particles, so that dust lying
> on the surface can get buried as the soil is overturned.
> There are well-accepted rates at how fast the soil is
> overturned to a particular depth on the Moon, based on the
> influx rate of different size meteorites and micrometeorites.
>
> (Of course, reality is very complicated and so there is a lot
> more in lunar soil to take into consideration beyond this, but
> this gives a basic sketch of some of the key concepts.)
>
> I like pointing to the Moon and Mars to counter some of the
> wacky YEC claims, because those bodies aren't supposed to have
> had a global flood and so you can't appeal to amazingly
> coincidental splashes of sediments and fossils and isotopes to
> fall together in the flood and form the entire geologic
> column. Of course, you can't really appeal to that anyhow,
> but it is just more obvious that you can't do it on the Moon
> where there was no flood.
>
> By the way, I have studied every single report prior to the
> Surveyor and Apollo landings on the Moon, and I have yet to
> see one that says NASA expected 10 feet of dust or that the
> legs of the landers were going to be 10 feet long. Every
> single report I have seen had predicted 2 or 3 cm of dust,
> which is exactly what we found. That's because the lunar
> scientists weren't working with one-sided equations. I don't
> know where this urban legend came from, that says NASA
> predicted deep dust. I think there may have been perhaps
> **one** oddball paper way back (which I have yet to find) that
> said something to that effect. But in general, NASA **never**
> believed there would be thick dust on the Moon.
>
> Now there has been some recent discussion that there **might**
> actually be thick dust inside the permanently shadowed craters
> near the lunar poles. That is because (as mentioned above)
> the UV transport process can cause dust-sized particles in
> sunlight to fly up, and if they fall back down into a
> permanently-shadowed crater then they will never become
> charged up by UV again and so they can never again come out.
> However, impact processes can throw them out and convert them
> to soil and overturn the soil to mix them in, and so lest we
> make the mistake of a one-sided equation you must compare the
> rates of those processes against the rate of the dust falling
> in by the UV transport, and so the dust might be thicker than
> 2 or 3 cm but by how much??? I have not seen that calculation
> yet, but we probably will in the next year or two since we are
> seriously considering one of the poles as the site of the next
> lander.
>
> God bless!
> Phil Metzger
>
>
>
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: pleuronaia@gmail.com
> To: asa@calvin.edu
> Sent: Fri, 12 Jan 2007 3:33 PM
> Subject: [asa] moon dust
>
> Since the moon dust argument is so popular, I thought it might be
> helpful to post what I recently found in tracking down details.
>
> The material on the moon's surface (or other planets) above
> the solid
> rock is called regolith. As on Earth, it includes smaller and
> larger
> pieces and is more solidly compacted below the surface. The claim
> that the dust layer on the moon is very thin was based on a
> newspaper
> photo of astronaut footprints. In reality, the astronauts were
> able
> to hammer a hand core in 70 cm and mechanical drills went in
> over a
> meter without reaching solid rock. Based on measurements by
> seismometers and observation of shallow craters (no old small
> craters
> are visible; young small craters appear to only penetrate the
> regolith), average depth of regolith is estimated at about 4
> m. Thus,
> the claim that the layer is only a few cm or inches is off by a
> similar order of magnitude to some of the high estimates for dust
> layer thickness that are popularly cited in young-earth
> arguments.
> (The presence of other, lower estimates for expected regolith
> thickness is not usually mentioned.)
>
> If you step on dust, on Earth or the Moon, you don't sink to
> solid rock.
>
> -- Dr. David Campbell
> 425 Scientific Collections
> University of Alabama
> "I think of my happy condition, surrounded by acres of clams"
>
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Received on Sat Jan 13 12:56:34 2007