The Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Creationism (2018)

India and Bangladesh, where as many as 50 million people may be exposed to groundwater arsenic concentrations greater than 50 ppb (Mukherjee et al. 2009). If arsenic contamination is such a major problem in today’s world, why wouldn’t the Flood have elevated arsenic levels high enough to poison Noah and other life in the post-Flood world? This is an issue to address in developing a viable Flood model. Specifically, how would arsenic get into the Flood waters, what chemistry would it undergo in them, and what would be its ultimate fate? In this paper we will survey the conventional literature and integrate the data found there with a Young Earth Flood model to answer these questions. THE SOURCE OFARSENIC IN THE FLOOD A clear starting point for assessing this issue is to determine the source of arsenic in the Floodwaters. One way of approaching this would be to assume that all the sedimentary rock that currently exists represents igneous rock crushed by the Flood. This assumption could then be used along with the concentration of arsenic in the Earth’s crust to estimate how much arsenic could be mobilized by that process (Hutchison 2009). Arsenic concentrations in the modern crust are quite inconsistent, but we can take 5.1 ppm as an estimate for the uppermost portion of the continental crust, with 2.5 ppm as an upper estimate for the crust as a whole (Bowell et al. 2014; Henke 2009a). Assuming the current ocean volume of 1.4 x 10 21 L as an estimated Flood waters volume; that 4.77 x 10 17 m 3 of igneous rock was eroded in the Flood to produce the current sedimentary rock layers; and that rock had a density of 3300 kg/ m 3 (Morton 1998), we estimate that the Flood waters could contain between 2.81 ppm and 5.73 ppm arsenic. These are obviously maximum values, since they are assuming complete solubility of the arsenic. Arsenic solubility is complex and closely related to the chemistry of the waters they are interacting with; we will discuss arsenic solubility at length later in this study. These values are significantly higher than we would expect the actual arsenic concentration to reach, but they are also three orders of magnitude higher than the maximum permissible concentration of arsenic in drinking water. However, a more nuanced picture emerges if we do not treat the entire crust as a single uniform body. Arsenic is generally found today either as sulfide minerals (of hydrothermal or volcanic origin) or as oxides which are usually oxidation/weathering products of those sulfides (O’Day 2006; Bowell et al. 2014). The most common As-rich minerals are arsenopyrite (FeAsS), Realgar (As 4 S 4 ), and Orpiment (As 2 S 3 ), which oxidize to form H 3 AsO 3 and H 3 AsO 4 (O’Day 2006; Henke 2009a). These and other arsenic rich sulfides generally form from As-rich hydrothermal waters (Henke 2009a) or volcanic gasses (Henley, Mavrogenes, and Tanner 2012). The arsenic we find in the upper crust today can generally be traced back to deep-earth (lower crust) origins, brought to the surface by hydrothermal, volcanic, and tectonic activity (Mukherjee et al. 2014). The creation model holds that there was intense hydrothermal and volcanic activity throughout Noah’s Flood (Snelling 1984; Snelling 1994; Silvestru 2007; Silvestru 2008; Snelling 2009a). Some of the hydrothermal fluid likely originated with subterranean water stored within the pre-Flood crust; this is consistent with the phrase “fountains of the deep” in Genesis 7:11 (Snelling 2009b). There is evidence for hydrothermal activity in the pre-Flood world (Snelling 2009a). However, there are other logical sources for hydrothermal fluids and the arsenic within them during the Flood. One of the currently most favored models for the geology of the Flood, catastrophic plate tectonics, involves essentially the entire oceanic crust undergoing subduction (Snelling 2009a). This subduction of tectonic plates would be a source of hydrothermal waters (Henke 2009a). Today there is more arsenic in the continental crust than in the oceanic crust (Henke 2009a) but that may not always have been the case. In general, sedimentary rock has a higher concentration of arsenic than igneous rock (Smedley and Kinniburgh 2002; Escobar, Hue, and Cutler 2008; Basu et al. 2014) and while there undoubtedly were some sedimentary rock in the pre-Flood crust (Snelling 2009), a great deal of the sedimentary rock we see today was formed by the Flood. If we focus on igneous rock, it seems evident that both pre- and post Flood ocean crust is more basaltic whereas continental crust is granitic (Snelling 2009). Arsenic concentrations in modern igneous rock vary greatly and it is hard to determine an average for various types of rock (Henke 2009a), but commonly cited values for the arsenic content of basalts is 2.3 mg/kg and for granites is 1.3 mg/kg (Smedley and Kinniburgh 2002; Basu et al. 2014; Bowell et al. 2014). So it is possible that the basaltic pre-Flood oceanic crust had a somewhat higher concentration of arsenic than the granitic continental crust, with the element being redistributed between the oceanic and continental crusts during the Flood. This would provide a source for the arsenic to form the sulfide deposits found today. It would also have the effect of making it less likely that dangerous concentrations of arsenic would leach into groundwater used by humans and so is consistent with the original “very good” creation. The arsenic in the oceanic crust would have been mobilized into hydrothermal fluids and magma (from which some high arsenic hydrothermal fluids also originate today (Henke 2009a)) during the subduction associated with catastrophic plate tectonics. The mention of magma raises a second major source of arsenic. The Flood involved abundant volcanic activity. Volcanoes release arsenic into the atmosphere; it is estimated that today 1.715 x 10 7 Kg of arsenic a year is mobilized this way (Henke 2009a). The volcanic activity of the Flood would dwarf current levels, so we would expect the amount of arsenic released would be correspondingly greater. Much of the arsenic actually released from volcanoes would be absorbed onto particulate matter (Henke and Hutchison 2009) and would return to the surface either thorough solid deposition or in rain. Of course, there was a great deal of rain during the Flood – hence, we can expect that this arsenic would ultimately find its way into the Flood waters as AsO 3 3- or AsO 4 3- with varying degrees of protonation. However, studies have suggested that there is approximately twice as much arsenic in volcanic gasses as in the ash and particulate matter emerging from a volcano (Henley and Berger 2013). This gaseous arsenic is mostly in the form of As(OH) 3 (Pokrovski et al. 2002) and mainly reacts with H 2 S to deposit the arsenic as sulfides (generally associated with Fe and Cu) in the rock adjacent to the volcano (Henley and Berger 2013; Henley and Berger 2012). One study has suggested that more than 90% of the arsenic content in the volcanic gasses is actually deposited below the surface (Henley, Mavrogenes, and Tanner 2012). Hence the amount of arsenic deposited in the rock around the volcano is likely to be higher than the amount being Hutchison and Bortel ◀ Fate of Arsenic in the Flood ▶ 2018 ICC 230