Ken Ham and the Water Wheel
Paul Blake

Paul completed his Bachelor of Science in 1989 at the University of Queensland majoring in geology, and his Honours in 1990 majoring in geology and palaeontology.

KEN HAM ON EDUCATION:  The water wheel - why did it stop moving?
Home Education Weekly News - 11 April  2003

Ken Ham: If you were to visit Cape Leevwin in Western Australia, you would be astonished at a very intriguing site. There is a water wheel that has become entombed in solid rock--and it happened in under 65 years!

How did this happen?  Really, it shouldn't surprise us to see such things. The precipitation of minerals from flowing water basically entombed the water wheel in rock.

The main reason most people are surprised to see such a phenomenon is because they have had the impression that such processes require long periods of time - even millions of years. Now, evolutionary scientists know that fossilization and rock formation can form quickly.  But the public, from my experience anyway, seems to have been given the impression that such things take millions of years.  Because of this, many people think that the Bible's time-line of history can't be true. That is why I like to use examples such as the water wheel to help get rid of these wrong ideas.

As Mr Ham mentioned above, mainstream scientists have no problem with the fact that some rocks can become lithified (made solid) very quickly.  However, Mr Ham then implies that all rocks can form quickly and thus validate creationist claims of a young Earth, but this is simply not true.  There are some rocks that require long periods of time to form, for example, the amount of time it takes to crystallise, cool and expose a granite to the surface is far longer than can be fitted into the creationist story of the geology of our planet.  The black, fine-grained limestones (sometimes with fossils) that some people use as facing stones are so fine-grained that the individual grains could only have settled in extremely quiet conditions with virtually no water currents over very long periods of time.