Fact and Fiction about Dinosaur-Age Bacteria

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American tax dollars through the National Science Foundation fund the JOIDES Resolution research vessel, partly named after Captain James Cook's HMS Resolution which was used for quite a bit of exploring. The acronym stands for Joint Oceanographic Institutions for Deep Earth Sampling.

The ship is packed with scientists and crew, and they do quite a bit of drilling for ocean floor core samples. Since the research is international in scope, one particular journey was led by Japanese researchers and explored the South Pacific. What they discovered astonished them.

Researchers doing ocean floor drilling from the JOIDES Resolution were astonished at what they found: Dinosaur-age bacteria that became active. Their guesses do not make sense.
JOIDES Resolution, WikiComm / John Newcomb (CC BY 3.0), slightly enhanced
They got themselves a passel of bacteria that were "sleeping", and were successfully awakened. (Unlike a predictable science fiction movie, they didn't turn everyone into evil monsters.) Here's where the secular old-earth paradigm kicks in. Those bacteria were in an area that they could not have reached without help.. Assuming they were over a hundred million years old, scientists were amazed that the little critters started doing bacteria stuff.

Apparently, scientists forgot some aspects of science and logic. They weren't actually dormant, so a mysterious power was invoked because they survived so long without energy. Interestingly, secularists simply accepted the claims of the researchers instead of doing additional work to see if they were correct.

Once again, biblical history from the Genesis Flood can be plugged in. Then things make a lot more sense.

Researchers say they have revived bacteria over 100 million years old from “lifeless” muddy layers of the deep Pacific.

Lab incubators helped “coax the microbes out of their epoch-spanning slumber.”

. . . 

The findings have astounded scientists. The ocean floor in that region is renowned for having far fewer nutrients there than seabed sediments elsewhere. As one remarked, “Nowhere else on Earth do you find sediment as close to totally dead as this.” However, the drill core samples did contain oxygen, which these aerobic (air-breathing) bacteria need, so this was not a limiting factor.

. . . The drill had to go through thick capping layers of a hard, dense rock called porcellanite,4 which is impenetrable to microbes. So when the layers were deposited—allegedly 101.5 million years ago—they trapped the bacteria beneath. And no other micro-organisms (which could serve as a nutrient source) could get in.

To sea the whole thing, sail over to "‘Dinosaur Age’ bacteria revived from deep sea bed."