Learning From Catastrophe: Biological Recovery at Mount St. Helens – Dr. Keith Swenson

Learning From Catastrophe: Biological Recovery at Mount St. Helens

Description: Noah’s Flood left the entire earth biologically devastated. Creationists believe that over the tens, hundreds and thousands of years following the Flood, living organisms recovered, eventually producing the ecosystems seen on the modern earth.  But is such a belief reasonable? Is the biota really that resilient? And if so, by what ecological mechanisms could such remarkable transformation take place?

Since there is no detailed information on biological changes which transpired following the Flood, creationists must look elsewhere for information.  One source is the study of recovery from modern disturbances, such as the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens which produced a 230 square mile area of biological devastation termed the blast zone.  The responses of organisms to this eruption have now been intensely studied for over 35 years generating hundreds of articles.

Dr. Keith Swenson shows us this renewal of life in the blast zone, noting the resilience of the creation and suggesting some comparisons between what happened at Mt. St. Helens and what must have occurred globally following the great Flood described in the Bible.

Speaker: Dr. Keith Swenson is a retired medical doctor who now teaches courses in biology and geology at Multnomah University in Portland, Oregon. He also served for twenty years as President of Portland’s Design Science Association and was on the board of the Seven Wonders Museum near Mount St. Helens. Keith especially enjoys leading field trips and has taken thousands to Mount St. Helens, the Columbia Gorge, Northwest forests and the Grand Canyon. He co-leads, with Dr. Steve Austin, periodic trips into the “Little Grand Canyon” at Mount St. Helens. Keith has a B.S. in Zoology from the University of Idaho and an M.D. from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. He and his wife, Connie, have four grown children.

A good summary of the recovery of the Mount St. Helens area after the devastation of the eruption in May 1980 is described in this article by Swenson and Catchpoole on the creation.com website. The unexpected rapid bounce back provides us insight into how the world recovered from Noah’s Flood.