Dissolved Nickel in the Oceans

This sounds rather technical but isn’t really.  Water is amazing stuff, not least because it will dissolve almost anything in small amounts.  One wouldn’t think that a metal like nickel would be a prime candidate for this sort of treatment, but even this dissolves to a small extent in sea water, like many other metals.  In this sense it is no different in principle to the sugar you put in your afternoon tea, although the proportions are somewhat different.

The point is that sea water could hold much more nickel than it does at present, and we are nowhere near the level at which it would start to precipitate out as a solid, perhaps as a salt of some kind.  If the claims of Evolutionists are correct it most assuredly should have got to the point of precipitation well within four billion years.  The question we should be asking, therefore, is why it hasn't yet reached that limiting level.  To answer that we really need to know where all this nickel comes from.

There are two sources of nickel in the world's oceans.  Some comes from rivers, the nickel being constantly washed into the sea from the land, and some comes from meteoric dust.

Meteoric dust contains about 2.5% nickel, which is about 300 times higher than is on average found in rocks on Earth.  The Earth sweeps up meteoric dust as it orbits the sun, and the nickel content of this lands primarily in the sea.  What finishes up on land also contributes to what is washed into the oceans from rivers, of course.

If we divide the amount of nickel in the oceans by the amount now coming down in rivers every year we come up with a rather surprising figure.  It transpires that all the nickel in the world's seas could have been contributed by rivers solely from earth rocks and soil in the last 9,000 years.  In the nature of things it would be reasonable to assume that at first, when this process began, the rate of nickel contribution would have been somewhat greater.  This means that a figure of 9,000 years is probably too high.

But then, of course, we have to add in the nickel swept up in meteoric dust which fell into the oceans directly.  This would shorten the time still further, and unless we are going to claim that for many millions of years meteoric dust did not contain the amounts of nickel we find in it today, we have to admit that the oceans are, geologically speaking, very young.  In view of the Bible's account that in Noah's flood the 'great deeps were broken up', this is more than an just an academic discovery.

The Talk Origins Archive on the Web objects to the above conclusion on the basis that what is actually measured is residence times, and they make the a priori assumption that all elements must be in steady state, i.e. as much is lost (in spray, principally) as is gained (by runoff).  This must indeed be true of the more abundant elements such as Sodium and Aluminium – as indeed Cook (in 'Prehistory and Earth Models') points out – and there is no problem with these.

Nickel, however, is a trace element and Cook also points to its non-steady state.  Nickel concentrations average 5.5 nmol.kg-1 the surface and 10 nmol.kg-1 in deep water in the Eastern Atlantic Ocean (cited).  These are orders of magnitude below the maximum possible concentration.  In any case, the very fact that there is this large difference indicates that while spray loss may well be significant the process is relatively young, else the concentrations would be more-or-less uniform as the ions moved up from the deep ocean.

“Although nickel shows the characteristic dual covariance with phosphate and silicon, a marked horizontal concentration gradient cannot be completely explained by variations in the nutrient concentrations.  Elevated levels of nickel over the continental slope and the floor of the Cascadia Basin suggest that nickel, having been remobilized during early diagenesis in hemipelagic sediments, may be diffusing into the water column and thus setting up a concentration gradient.”
(Limnol. Oceanogr., 29(4), 1984, 711-720 1984, by the American Society of Limnology and Oceanography, Inc.)

The overall conclusion from this is that the figures support a very young age for the ocean.