When I think of the desert country of southern Utah, I don’t picture a landscape shaped by tsunamis, hurricanes, and meteorite impacts. The Institute for Creation Research, for some reason, has invoked all of these and more in an attempt to show that the existence these arches only make sense if Earth is a young planet. Let’s take a look at “Another Arch Collapse at a National Park,” published on ICR’s website in 2024. This article is about the collapse of Double Arch in Glen Canyon National Recreation Area in Utah in August of 2024.
Let’s take a look at some of the claims. The first claim is a quote from a website called IFLScience.
Quote from IFL Science: “A popular natural rock feature that stood for millions of years has come crashing down into Lake Powell in Utah’s Glen Canyon National Recreation Area. Known as the Double Arch, the stunning geological attraction had been one of the park’s most visited beauty spots, but collapsed on Thursday, August 8.”
Analysis: Contrary to the claim in this quote, it is unlikely that any of the arches in southern Utah are millions of years old. Arches form, and arches collapse. The American Geophysical Union (AGU) has an article in their EOS science magazine called “The Delicacy of Arches,” in which a University of Utah geophysicist estimates that most arches are thousands of years old, and the largest ones may be about 100,000 years old. This is far short of millions of years.
As an aside, I suspect that ICR was unaware that “IFLScience” is short for “I F***ing Love Science.” Perhaps ICR should have looked for a different science news source.
𝗜𝗖𝗥: “The arch is made of supposedly 190-million-year-old sandstone, hardly robust igneous rock like granite.”
𝗔𝗻𝗮𝗹𝘆𝘀𝗶𝘀: The Navajo Sandstone is robust enough to form tall cliffs in places like Zion, and not all granite is cliff-forming.
𝗜𝗖𝗥: “But there is also earthquake and tectonic activity that no doubt would have occurred in that area many millions of times.”
𝗔𝗻𝗮𝗹𝘆𝘀𝗶𝘀: Even if this newly collapsed had been millions of years old, there have not been millions of significant earthquakes in southern Utah in that timeframe.
𝗜𝗖𝗥: “In addition, there would also be many millions of years’ worth of meteorites, tsunamis, bitter cold, hail, volcanoes, climate change patterns, Ice Ages, tornadoes, flooding, windstorms, drought, lightning, hurricanes and meteorological activity of all sorts. Do evolutionary geologists really expect the public to believe delicate sandstone arches would endure all of that?”
𝗔𝗻𝗮𝗹𝘆𝘀𝗶𝘀: This article just took a steeper nosedive. How many tsunamis have hit that part of Utah in the past ten million years? Zero. How many volcanic eruptions have hit that spot? Zero. How many glaciations has that location experienced? Zero. How many hurricanes? Well, there is a town named Hurricane in southern Utah, but the answer is, once again, zero. Even within a young-Earth framework in which these arches formed after Noah’s flood, the answer is still zero.
𝗜𝗖𝗥: “Smithsonian Magazine stated, ‘Park officials are unsure what caused the collapse. But changing water levels and erosion from waves are thought to be contributing factors.” Would there not be such conditions many times over during those alleged millions of years that should have brought all such arches down sooner?’”
𝗔𝗻𝗮𝗹𝘆𝘀𝗶𝘀: Here’s another massive fail. Double Arch is located at the edge of Lake Powell. Lake Powell filled after Glen Canyon Dam was completed in the 1960s. Before that, the arch was high and dry on a slope a couple of hundred feet above the base of the canyon. The base of this arch has not been exposed to waves for millions of years, but perhaps for six decades.
𝗢𝗻𝗲 𝗺𝗼𝗿𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗴: When ICR published this article in 2024, it had a picture of the wrong arch. The picture has been removed but the ICR article still gives an image credit.
𝗖𝗼𝗻𝗰𝗹𝘂𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻: ICR aims to defend the truthfulness of the Bible, a desire I share. This article, however, is simply one more example of bad science arguments being used by the modern young-Earth creationist community. With the “millions of years’ worth of meteorites, tsunamis…” quote, I am frankly surprised that it made it through the ICR editorial process. The problem is not with the Bible, which is the infallible word of God, but with young-Earth speculations that are in reality only loosely based on the Bible.
My testimony of how I came to faith in Christ
God’s Global Plan of Salvation
Notes:
Double Arch in Glen Canyon National Recreation Area in Utah is not to be confused with Double Arch in Arches National Park.
I changed my major from meteorology to geology following a trip to Arches and Canyonlands National Parks during my second year of college. I was still a young-Earth creationist at that time.
