C. Other Solar System Phenomena Consistent with Heat from Accelerated Nuclear Decay 1. Small Shrinkage Escarpments on the Moon and Mars still causing earthquakes NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter photographed thousands of small escarpments, which appear to be folds in the lunar crust caused by the shrinking of its interior. Seismometers left on the moon by the Apollo missions detected shaking that is probably the result of the continued shrinking of the interior, crustal movement, and building up of some of these escarpments. After the major thermal expansion cracks formed and filled with lava that solidified, the interior of the moon began slowly cooling, and thereby slightly shrinking in size over time. (Steigerwald, 2019) That these escarpments are still forming today strongly implies that the moon is not in thermal equilibrium, and that its interior is hotter than would be the case if it was really 4.5 billion years old and there had been no period of accelerated nuclear decay. 2. Resurfacing of Venus The surface of Venus is obscured by its continual global cloud cover, but its surface features can be seen using radar. NASA’s Magellan mission mapped the surface in high resolution several decades ago. Scientists were surprised to find that its surface is nearly free of craters, which has led many to conclude that at some relatively recent time, the entire planet was resurfaced in a rapid global tectonic event (Strom et. al., 1994). Creation scientists have proposed that the heat energy needed to drive such an event came from accelerated decay (Baumgardner, 2002). Due to the cloud cover and extreme temperatures, it has been hard to get detailed data on the global distribution of radioactive isotopes, but gamma ray spectrometers on the Venera landers gave readings that imply a similar concentration of Uranium, Potassium, and Thorium to terrestrial basalts or other volcanic rocks (Taylor et. al., 2018). (Figure 7) Since Venus is similar to the Earth in size and composition, it seems reasonable to assume that calculations done for the energy balance of accelerated radioactive decay on Earth (Stenberg, 2012) would be similar to the heat balance on Venus. Likewise, it seems likely that similar processes of crust-mantle differentiation and enrichment of the crust with radioactive isotopes would have taken place. One key difference, though, is that Venus has very little water, which would have affected its ability to reject decay heat from its surface, and also would have impacted the melting point of its mantle and crust materials. Regardless, the present surface of Venus implies that the majority of heat associated with accelerated decay went into heating the interior of the planet and causing global, catastrophic geological effects, and that it occurred after the creation of Venus on Creation Day 4. 3. Gas Giant Heat Balances Most of the gas giants are emitting more heat from their surface than they are receiving in light from the sun. (Samec, 2000). This implies one of two things. One of these is that there has been and still is a relatively small internal continuous heat source of some kind. The alternative is that in the fairly recent past there was a pulse of heat and what we are seeing is the remnants of that heat pulse. The most likely source of this pulse of heat would be from accelerated radioactive decay, as discussed herein. 4. Transient Martian Hydrosphere Due to its lower gravity and weak magnetic field, Mars seems incapable of retaining an atmosphere for long. However ample eviFigure 7. Global map of Venus showing a dearth of large impact craters, implying a relatively recent resurfacing event STERNBERG Craters and cracks 2023 ICC 15
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTM4ODY=