How long does a coral reef take to grow?
First published: Creation 14(1):14–15 December 1991 Australia’s beautiful Great Barrier Reef is the world’s longest coral reef. It extends from near Papua New Guinea down Australia’s east coast for about 2,000 kilometres. In a previous Creation magazine (Vol. 8 No. 1), we showed that using measured growth rates at the mouth of the Burdekin River, the Great Barrier Reef could have formed in the time since Abraham lived. However, the Great Barrier Reef, in spite of its huge area, is not the thickest known reef. This distinction probably belongs to Eniwetok Atoll in the Marshall Islands. This is a living reef resting on an extinct volcano cone which comes up about three kilometres (two miles) from the ocean floor. Drilling revealed about 1,400 metres (4,600 feet) of reef material. At least two writers have attacked the young age position using the argument that this coral atoll must have taken a very long time to form1,2—they estimate 138,000 and 176,000 years respectively as the minimum
