Magma Chambers and the Age of the Earth

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Once again, a uniformitarian (slow and gradual processes over millions of years) assumption was challenged by researchers who wanted to give something a closer look. Volcanoes have a habit of blasting out lava, erupting for centuries all the way down to a year or so. Some eruptions are more like geological indigestion and do not send sonic waves around the world.

Where do they get all that magma, anyway? (Magma is molten rock, and when it is sent through the earth's crust, it is called lava.) Geology is a historical science, and there are magma chambers below the earth's crust. Magma builds up there until eruptions occur.

Volcanoes erupt, sometimes for a year or centuries. The magma is in chambers beneath, and research shows they fill much faster than geologists thought.
Lava Toe Forming at Kilauea, US Geological Survey / Hawaiian Volcano Observatory (usage does not imply endorsement of site contents)
The Yellowstone supervolcano has a pair of sizeable magma chambers that are detected through seismic tomography, which brings to mind the procedures used in medical CT scans. Radiometric dating has failed scientists, who trusted inaccurate results to conclude that it took huge amounts of time for the chambers to fill with magma. (Indeed, such slow rates sometimes would have cooled and crystalized, blocking the chambers.) Now scientists are admitting to extremely rapid filling and have mentioned catastrophic processes. Although they are not admitting it, these results support biblical creation science models for the young earth!
The magma chamber under consideration, the Skaergaard intrusion in East Greenland, “has been important to the development of key concepts in igneous petrology, including magma differentiation and fractional crystallisation and the development of layering,” says Wikipedia. According to the new study, its formation was “catastrophically rapid”—orders of magnitude faster than previously believed. By implication, other magma chambers also were filled with unexpected speed: not requiring millions of years, but just centuries, decades, or even months in some cases.

To read the rest of this hot topic, click on "Major Rethink of Magma Dogma."