Below is the online edition of In the Beginning: Compelling Evidence for Creation and the Flood,
by Dr. Walt Brown. Copyright © Center for Scientific Creation. All rights reserved.
Click here to order the hardbound 8th edition (2008) and other materials.
Since 1981, Earth satellites have photographed tiny spots thought to be small, house-size comets striking and vaporizing in our upper atmosphere. [See Figure 34 on page 42.] On average, these strikes occur at an astonishing rate of one every three seconds!64 Surprisingly, small comets strike Earth’s atmosphere ten times more frequently in early November than in mid-January65—too great a variation to explain if the source of small comets is far from Earth’s orbit.
Small comets are controversial. Those who deny their existence argue that the spots are “camera noise,”66 but cameras of different designs and different orbits give the same results. In three experiments, rockets 180 miles above the Earth dumped 300–600 pounds of water-ice with dissolved carbon dioxide onto the atmosphere. Ground radar looking up and satellite cameras looking down recorded the spots. Ground telescopes have also photographed small comets. These comets are hitting Earth’s atmosphere at an astonishing rate that would deliver, in 4.5-billion years, much more water than is on Earth today.
In other words, if the earth were 4.5-billion years old, and small comets had been entering our atmosphere at this rate since the earth began, the earth should have much more water than it now has. Therefore, either the earth is young or small comets began falling onto earth recently—or both.