Young-earth "proof" #19: The size of the Mississippi River delta divided by the sediment accumulation rate gives an age of less than 30,000 years.
19. Since when does the age of the earth have anything to do with the Mississippi delta? If the Mississippi delta is, in fact, 30,000 years old, what of it?
Because of oil exploration, geologists know that the sediment in regions around the Mississippi River delta is 7 miles thick! (Hayward, 1985, p.83). Did you ever wonder how Noah’s flood, which was quite shallow according to Dr. Hovind, perhaps less than a quarter of a mile deep, managed to stack up 7 miles of sediment?
It is stretching the long arm of coincidence much too far, to suggest that there just happened to be a vast hole in the ocean bed seven miles deep near the mouth of the Mississippi, and that the Flood just happened to fill that hole with sediment, while leaving nearby areas of the Atlantic unfilled; and that similar coincidences just happened to occur around the mouths of all the world’s great rivers.
There is no quick way to get that 7 miles of sediment. It takes time for the earth to sink under a load. Suppose you went down to the Gulf of Mexico one fine day, say just off the Texas coast, and dumped a pile of sediment there 7 miles high! I haven’t the foggiest idea how long that mountain of sediment would sit there before sinking down to sea level, but I can assure you that it would not disappear overnight. Parts of that heap would probably still be there centuries later.
A super-charged Mississippi River isn’t even going to build mountains to begin with. The onrushing, sediment-loaded water would just be pushed further into the gulf. You would get a "delta" vastly more spread out than the one we have — and nowhere near 7 miles thick. Think about it.