Young Earth Argument: Moon Dust
The Claim
According to some Creationists, the earth gets millions of tons of
dust per year from outer space. Therefore, the moon also gets a fair
bit. If the moon is five billion years old, then it should be covered
in 50 or 100 feet of dust. It isn't. Therefore, the moon must be
much younger than scientists say.
Notice that this is not a claim based on the Bible. The specific
number of tons per year is quoted from the scientific literature.
The Facts
The infall of dust is one hundred times less than these
Creationists say it is. This has been known since about 1963. The
argument has been kept alive by not quoting from scientific
articles written after 1960.
More Detail
In the 1950's, Hans Pettersson went to the top of a tall mountain,
ran some air through a filter, and then measured the dust in the
filter. He concluded that at the very most, 15 million tons of dust
was arriving yearly from outer space. He guessed that not all of his
dust was from space, so he thought that 5 million tons was a more
likely figure. He wrote an article about this for the February 1960
Scientific American.
1960 was also the year of President Kennedy's promise to put a man
on the moon. NASA got a lot of money, and started up a lot of
committees. One of the committees pointed out that they should make a
measurement IN SPACE of space dust. This was done, and
McCracken and Dublin announced (at the 1963 Lunar Surface Layer
conference) that the earth gets a piddling 18,000 to 25,000 tons per
year. At the 1965 conference, the photographs taken by the Ranger
probe were shown, and it was agreed that the moon didn't look dusty.
In May 1966, Surveyor I landed on the moon, and the issue was settled.
The engineers designing the Lunar Lander were told to give it short
legs. A landing spot was chosen in the rocky uplands, just in case
lowlands and valleys had pools of dust.
In 1974, Henry Morris started the Moon Dust argument. In his book he said, on page 151-152:
The best measurements have been made by Hans Pettersson, who
obtained the figure of 14 million tons per year.
...
(Before the moon landings, there was considerable fear that the
men would sink into the dust when they arrived on the moon, but no
comment has apparently ever been made by the authorities as to why it
wasn't there as anticipated).
There are two inaccuracies in the first sentence, and one
in the second sentence.
In the second (1985) edition of the book, Morris produced a
completely astonishing number, 200 million tons a year, and referred
readers to "G.S. Hawkins, Ed., Meteor Orbits and Dust, published by
NASA, 1976". This document (actually published in 1967) does not
contain that number. Apparently Morris had an unnamed "creationist
physicist" calculate the number, and he calculated it wrong.
Richard Bliss of the ICR has since produced another number, a
million tons, this time giving a reference to "COMITE Speciale De
I'annee Geophysique International, Moscow, August 1985". That sounds
pretty recent, until you realize that the International Geophysical
Year was held in 1957-1958. The committee report was published in
1958, not 1985.
In 1989, Walter Brown produced two references (to Stuart R. Taylor
and to David W. Hughes) and from them he calculated 2,000 feet of moon
dust. This is a very strange number, since Pettersson's measurement
gave 100 feet as an upper bound. Schadewald
tried to repeat Brown's calculation, and came up with one inch of
dust.
Creationists Snelling
and Rush have documented the situation, and agree that the moon's
dust is not proof of a young earth. However, many other Creationists
have published the Moon Dust claim, and some still do. It's on the Web
today.
NASA and the USSR have not ignored this technical issue in the
decades since landing on the moon. It is, after all, relevant to the
health of satellites and space stations. (In 1998, more than 600
satellites were orbiting the Earth.) There have been theoretical
calculations. There have been measurements done by shining lasers into
space. There have been measurements based on the chemistry of deep
sea sediments. And NASA put up a satellite, the Long Duration
Exposure Facility, LDEF. It went up in 1984, and they retrieved it in
1990 to study the amount of damage from years of tiny impacts. LDEF
gave us a figure of 40,000 tons per year - a long way from millions.
Once again, the Moon Dust argument is not based on the Bible. It is
a purely scientific argument, based on calculation and on the evidence
in the publicly available scientific literature. (NASA is a civilian
agency, and its studies are available in libraries.) The current
scientific estimate is that the moon gets about an inch of dust per
billion years.
For more information:
The Moon
Dust FAQ (has a really good reading list)
The Age of the Earth has a
chapter describing the Moon's surface, and how it has been dated.
Old Earth Arguments FAQ
Footprints in the Dust: The Lunar Surface and Creationism,
Shore, Steven N., Creation/Evolution Issue XIV (Fall 1984),
pp.32-35 National Center for
Science Education
Walter Brown and the Moon Dust, Schadewald, Robert J., NCSE Reports Vol.10, No.3
(May-June 1990), p.16
Moon Dust and the Age of the Solar System,
Andrew A. Snelling and David E. Rush, Creation Ex Nihilo
Technical Journal, vol. 7 #11, 1993, pp. 2-42
The Soviet-American Conference on Cosmochemistry of the Moon and
Planets, 1977, NASA SP-370, (Vol. 2), pp. 571-664.
Soils of the Past, Rettallack, G. J., Unwin Hyman 1990, ISBN
0-04-551128-4, pp. 295-301.
the LDEF satellite
Last modified: 2 March 2002
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