According to Genesis chapter one, water played a key role in the creation events. It is thus not surprising that water be found, at least in trace amounts, in the celestial bodies. Now from the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, comes the first announcement of water found in a meteorite. Oh, there have been prior announcements, but those have all been dismissed as contaminated by terrestrial water. The water in this meteorite, which fell in Monahans, western Texas on 22 March, 1998, was locked inside a crystal of halite (table salt).

In the figure at right, L points to the water and V is a vapor bubble.

The matrix in which the water is embedded is the salt, which has turned blue from exposure to cosmic radiation. The inclusion measures about 15 micrometers or a bit over one hundredth of a millimeter long (0.0006 inch or 1/1700^th inch).

The water presence suggests far greater water presence than currently believed. On earth salt is deposited by evaporating water. If the salt in the meteorite has a similar origin, then there was much more water present at the formation of the meteorite than is evidenced by the microscopic amount pictured above. Planetary geologists also know that asteroids had water running through them, suggesting that water was involved in their creation. Of course, the asteroids could once have been a planet with water on it, which planet exploded.⁽¹⁾

The scientists who opened the meteorite would have missed the discovery had they used traditional methods to open it. Had they used the rock saw and water they would have destroyed the blue salt crystals and the water inclusions. Instead they used a hammer and chisel. "We just knocked a little piece off the side and there was this beautiful blue mineral," said Micael Zolensky of NASA's Johnson Space Center. The largest of the blue salt crystals is about the size of the nail on a little finger. In the microscope, Zolensky said, "what you see are these little rounded or square things just floating in the halite, and inside some of these you see these little vapor bubbles just dancing around."

A meteorite dealer who had a specimen that fell in Morocco last year had also found blue grains. Using the more careful preparation methods scientists confimed that it's halide, in a different meteorite.

No beaches on Mars

In the 1970s, the Viking missions to Mars showed some features which some researchers took to be remnants of ancient coastlines. The photos taken by Mars Global Surveyor in 1998 have a resolution ten times better than those of the Viking craft. The new pictures show no coastal features in the areas identified as such by the Viking team.

"While the suggestion that Mars at one time had oceans cannot be ruled out, the foundation for the 'ocean hypothesis' developed in the 1980s on the basis of suspected shorelines appears now to have been incorrect," Dr. Michael Malin concluded. "However, it should be understood that there is significant other evidence of water on Mars in the past, both from Mars Global Surveyor and from previous missions. Today, the Mars Orbiter Camera continues to acquire new high-resolution pictures, each one helping to search for clues to the very important question of the role of water in the evolution of Mars."⁽²⁾

No water ice on the moon?

On July 31 the Lunar Prospector spacecraft was deliberately crashed into a crater near the south pole of the moon. Scientists had hoped that the spacecraft's crash would release a detectable amount of water vapor. Earlier in its mission, Prospector had detected an abundance of hydrogen near the poles which led scientists to think that there was frozen water on or near the surface of the moon.

The chance of a positive detection was deemed at less than one chance in ten, but world-wide observation of the crash was done with sensitive spectrometers tuned to look for the ultraviolet emission lines expected from the hydroxyl (OH) molecules expected to be kicked up by the impact. There are several reasons why there were no observed results. These are:

• the spacecraft might have missed the target area;
• the spacecraft might have hit a rock or dry soil at the target site;
• water molecules may have been firmly bound in rocks as hydrated mineral as opposed to existing as free ice crystals, and the crash lacked enough energy to separate water from hydrated minerals;
• no water exists in the crater and the hydrogen detected by the Lunar Prospector spacecraft earlier is simply pure hydrogen;
• studies of the impact's physical outcome were inadequate;
• the parameters used to model the plume that resulted from the impact were inappropriate;
• the telescopes used to observe the crash, which have a very small field of view, may not have been pointed correctly;
• water and other materials may not have risen above the crater wall or otherwise were directed away from the telescopes' view.

Although the craft failed to prove the existence of water on the moon, its failure to do so does not disprove the existence of water on the moon. After all, it did have only a 10% chance of success.

The universe may be younger than previously thought⁽³⁾

Dr. Eyal Maoz of NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, CA, and astrophysicists from a variety of U.S. and Canadian institutions have found evidence suggesting that the universe may be younger than scientists had previously thought, and that it is expanding faster than expected. Their findings are reported in the Sept. 23 issue of Nature magazine.

Current estimates put the age of the universe at about 15 billion years. Maoz' research indicates the universe may be as young as 12 billion years, nearly the same age as its oldest stars. This implied relatively low age of the universe revives an old paradox in the field of astrophysics that the universe seems to be younger than some of the stars in it. The finding suggests that a revision of the cosmological model may be required.

Maoz and his team used the Hubble Space Telescope to observe the pulsing of giant stars called 'Cepheid variables' in the galaxy NGC4258. Researchers used a standard "Cepheid measurement" technique that allowed them to measure the distance from Earth to the galaxy. However, this measurement was different from another independent, highly accurate distance determination to that galaxy made using masers (the microwave equivalent of lasers), which are located at the galaxy center and orbiting a supermassive black hole.

A revision of the standard Cepheid measurement method would mean that estimates for the age of the Universe would have to be revised downwards by 10-15%, experts say.

Measuring galactic distances using Cepheid variables has been a standard since 1929. They are useful because their rate of pulsation is closely linked to their brightness. This means that a galaxys' apparent brightness can be used to gauge its distance from Earth.

Maoz and his colleagues used the Cepheid method to estimate the distance from Earth to the benchmark NGC4258 galaxy as 8.1 megaparsecs (Mpc), significantly farther than the geometric estimates derived by recent estimates. (One Mpc is equivalent to approximately three million light years.)

"We discovered a considerable discrepancy between the maser-based and Cepheid-based distance," Maoz said. "The bottom line is that it seems that galaxy distances may have been consistently overestimated by about 12%. This would imply that the universe is expanding faster than expected, and the age of the universe is lower by a similar factor."

Giauque-Debye effect and the wooly mammoths

Throughout the Arctic, regions of Alaska and Siberia are scattered with the remains of temperate zoned animals. Many still have their flesh and undigested food in their stomachs or even their mouths. Shattered bones are mixed at times with broken trees and shrubs, all from temperate to subtropical climates. Indeed, 82% of the animals were adapted only to temperate zone climate. Something happened to these creatures that literally blast-froze them instantly. Of the 60-odd hypotheses which have been put forth to explain the phenomenon, none has received universal acceptance.

Most Creationists favor the idea that the quick freeze happened at the start of the flood, but there seems to be a problem with that in that the creatures seem to be in post-flood sediment or soils. This leaves the possibility that the event was possibly related to the division of the land masses during Peleg's day, or some other phenomenon such as an icy comet fall or collapse of the earth's magnetic field. Persumably this marked the start of the ice ages.

In a previous issue of the Biblical Astronomer⁽⁴⁾ we took a brief look at the possibility that the earth's magnetic field could temporarily collapse (there in the context of the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Project or HAARP) and freeze the region of the poles. Now visionary Frederick Jueneman has made another interesting proposal about the Giauque-Debye effect.⁽⁵⁾ This effect is the rapid cooling of a body immersed in liquid helium when a powerful magnetic field around the object collapses. In short, the rapid collapse of a magnetic field will cool a body. The argument is that a catastrophic electrical discharge could have caused the ice age to form and the mamoths to be frozen instantly.⁽⁶⁾ Jueneman proposes that the discharge may have been triggered by an icy comet which had accumulated enough electrostatic charge to discharge itself into the earth's magnetic field.

"A cryogenic cooling of a moisture-saturated atmosphere by a cometary discharge and infall could cause a deluge-like situation, considering two concomitant constions. First a transient heating of the atmosphere by the comentary impact with a subsequential thermal expansion of our airmass envelope. Much of this atmosphere would be lost to space by the energetic thermal expansion. Then, with this expansion, there would also be an adiabatic cooling of the atmospheric gasses and desorption of the entrained water vapor dissoved in the airmass, with the ensuing rain and snowfall adding to the continuing cooling and resulting in a deluge and of course an instant ice age.

"Combined with this would be the massive electric discharge that could collapse Earth's magnetic field and contribute to the catabatic coolingnot to mention that any loosly distributed ice within the comet would be itself crygenically cold from its earlier excursion in the outer reaches of the solar system."

Dr. Jueneman goes on to note that there is evidence of massive electrical discharges around large craters such as Chicxulub on the Yucatan peninsula. There are several large craters in northern Canada, including James Bay, Ungava Bay, and possibly even Hudson Bay.

Given this scenario, we find several appealing factors to creationists. First of all, it provides a ready explanation for the ice age which, according to leading creationists in the field, lasted at most 400 years, starting some 100 to 200 years after the flood. The radiometric carbon "ages" of the mammoths corresponds roughly to about 100 to 200 years after the flood when corrected for the observed decay of the earth's mean magnetic field.⁽⁷⁾ Second, it explains the frozen mammoths and their ilk. Third, the time corresponds to the division of the earth in Peleg's day. The division of the continents would have been triggered by the temperature changes and crashing magnetic field, with the fractured continental plates floating on superheated steam from the retreated flood waters. Lastly, it also explains the magnetic "reversals" associated with the continental splits since the field would "bounce" for a while after its collapse.

Tara

Many of our readers have heard of Stonehenge in the Salisbury plain. Basically Stonehenge is a circular configuration of 50-ton pillars which have been arranged in such a way as to provide a calendar, that is to say, a computer which computes a calendar. The henge (ditch with embankment) at Stonehenge is about 100 yards (meters) in diameter. Now, according to a report in NEARA Transit,⁽⁸⁾ a much larger calendar computer has been found surrounding the hill of Tara in Ireland. Its diameter is more than half a mile (1 km).

Modern man makes several arbitrary assumptions about his environment and his history. One such assumption is that we are getting smarter and better all the time. This is at the heart of evolution, and though all evidence runs contrary to it and runs exactly in accord with the Bible's statement that "the heart of man is desperately wicked" (Jeremiah 17:9), yet man persists in his delusion. So it is with these monuments, but in a curiously backward way. The date of the Tara site has now been move backwards in time! Whereas it was once dated from the "iron age," it has now been pushed back into the stone age, to 2500 B.C. All this because the henge is larger than formerly assumed. One would think that if evolution is true, the smaller ring would be older and larger rings would evolve on the scene as men became technologically smarter. Not so when it comes to the occult. Here older is better. Why? Well, if the site can be made out to be very ancient, then the occult religion (today variously known as Humanism or New Ageism) can be given precedence over not only Christianity, but Judaism and Babylonialism (catholicism) as well. After all, it is widely assumed that the Druids, the new-agers of 2000 years ago, conducted human sacrifices at these sites. Evolutionism, Darwinism, Communism, Fascism, Naziism, Humanism, and "new versionism" in Christianity all have their roots in the occult. Each of these is founded on a lie, and except for humanism, all are founded on the fruits of heliocentrism, that the sun is central, ruling god of the universe.

By the way, although claims abound for a great age for Stonehenge, too, the alignment of the stones suggests that the site is no older than 500 B.C. and no younger than A.D. 250. I have no details on the Tara alignments to be able to decipher those.

A new cosmology⁽⁹⁾

In the April 1999 issue of Physics Today we find a long, technically deep article outlining a new cosmology that jettisons the Big Bang and even redshifts as infallible measures of cosmological distances. It should come as no surprise that the authors are G. Burbidge, F. Hoyle, and J. V. Narlikar. They propose a quasi-steady-state universe to replace the hot Big Bang.

It is easy to itemize narrow, specific problems bedeviling the Big Bang, but the three "boat-rockers" listed above also have an important philosophical bone to pick with modern astronomers and cosmologists.

The theory departs increasingly from known physics, until ultimately the energy source of the universe is put in as an initial condition, the energy supposedly coming from somewhere else. Because that "somewhere else" can have any properties that suit the theoretician, supporters of Big Bang cosmology gain for temselves a large bag of free parameters that can subsequently be tuned as the occasion may require.

We do not think that science should be done in that way. In science as we understand it, one works from an initial situation, known from observation or experiment, to a later situation that is also known. That is the way physical laws are tested. In the currently popular form of cosmology, by contrast, the physical laws are regarded as already known and an explanation of the later situation is sought by guessing at parameters appropriate to the initial state. We think this approach does not merit the high esteem that cosmologists commonly accord it.⁽¹⁰⁾

We have neither the space [ nor time] to lay out before you the details of the new Burbidge-Hoyle-Narlikar cosmology. Suffice that it involves black holes residing in galactic centers, thereby replacing the one-time Big Bang creation event.

The aspect of the new theory that amazes the most is the acceptance of the Arp heresy: that some quasars possess intrinsic red shifts not associated with the expanding universe. They write:

Nonetheless, observations over many years have accumulated good statistical evidence that many high-redshift quasars are physically associated with galaxies with very much smaller redshifts.

So, at least some prominent scientists accept Arp's conclusions.

S.F. editor's comment. "Minicreation events"? Creation is creation, whether the events are big or small!

Magnetic stripes on Mars⁽¹¹⁾

As the Mars Global Surveyor swooped down to altitudes between 100 and 200 kilometers [60 to 120 miles] above the Martian surface during its aerobraking orbits, magnetometers detected broad, parallel stripes with alternating magnetic polarity. These stripes across the planet's southern highlands are a great surprise to planetologists because they superficially⁽¹²⁾ resemble the magnetic stripes that parallel the rifts along the floors of the earth's oceans where new crust is forming. The obvious implication is that Mars once possessed drifting continents and a geomagnetic dynamo that occasionally reversed its polarity just as has supposedly hapened and is still happening on earth. Prior to this discovery, Mars was deemed too small to have possessed a heat-driven geodynamo, and there is no obvious surface evidence of drifting continents.⁽¹³⁾

Easy as it is to conclude that Martian continents once sailed ponderously cross the planet's surface, the scientific jury is still out. First of all, the Martian magnetic stripes are substantially different from earth's in shape, pattern, strength, and, above all, size. The Martian stripes are about 200 kilometers [120 miles] wide and 2,000 [1200] longmuch larger than earth's. Their magnetic field strength is more than ten times that of the terrestrial stripes. Whatever magnetic phenomena occurred on Mars must have been quite different from what happened on earth . Yet no ohter reasonable explanation has been found for the Martian magnetic stripes.

The amount of energy needed to flip the earth's magnetic field is stupendous, and no quantitatively satisfactory model has ever been found. Perhaps the phenomenon is thermo-electric and does not involve the earth's magnetic field but in small measure if at all. In the case of Mars, the surface has never been reworked (unlike the earth's which was reworked by the great flood) and the thermonuclear effects described in "The Creation of the Universe"⁽¹⁴⁾ may have something to say about it. [Ed.]

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1. See Unruh, J. T., 1995. "Phaeton," Biblical Astronomer, 5(74):18.
2. Isbell, Douglas, Mary Hardin, Michael Ravine, 1999. "New Mars Images: No Evidence of Ancient Ocean Shorelines," NASA Press release 99-114, Oct. 1.
3. Burton, Kathleen, Sept. 24, 1999. "NASA Researcher finds Evidence that the Universe May be Younger than Previously Thought," NOTE TO EDITORS: 99-58.
4. 1996. "Harping on HAARP," Biblical Astronomer, 6(78):4.
5. Jueneman, F. 1999. "Mammoths in the Myst," Research and Development, April, p. 11.
6. By instantly is meant a sudden drop of temperature to more than 90 below zero within a minute or two.
7. As corrected according to the C14 program available for free from the software library on the http://www.geocentricity.com web site.
8. Anonymous, 1999. NEARA Transit, 11:14.
9. Quoted from Science Frontiers, No. 124:1-2, Jul-Aug. 1999. Sourcebook Project, Box 107, Glen Arm, MD 21057.
10. Burbidge, Geoffry, et al. 1999. "A Different Approach to Cosmology," Physics Today, 52:38, April.
11. Quoted from Science Frontiers, No. 124:2, Jul-Aug. 1999. Sourcebook Project, Box 107, Glen Arm, MD 21057.
12. "Superficially" because these bands are seen 100 miles above the surface whereas one has to be withing 100-or-so yards of the ocean's floor to see the ones on earth.
13. On earth, for example, we have ridges of mountains where the spreading of the sea floor takes place. There are no such ridges on Mars.
14. Bouw, Gerardus D., 1997. "The Creation of the Universe," Biblical Astronomer, 7(79):10-19, Winter.

I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.