Science - Mountain building, quickly
Creation Safaris has a link to a few related articles on a recent large reduction in the required time estimated for mountain building.

The gist is basically that the time frame for mountain building has been reduced from 40 million years to 13 million years (over 2/3rd!). Additionally, the studies in nature also concluded that the rocks were metamorphosised over many 10 year periods of heating. This conclusion was based on the Argon 40/39 ratios in the rock.

Isn't it amazing that almost everywhere we look, scientists are reducing the age of things. Yet every time they do, think about how confidently they pronounced the previous age before you swallow the new age without thinking.

These papers essentially are trying to come up with a scenario that fits with all the evidence whilst still trying to get an ancient earth. Like most of the old earth findings, it is just another Ad hoc explanation attempting to explain unusual argon dating. I have to wonder what other dating methods were used to date the mountain in question and the continental collision that supposedly caused it.

As Simon Kelley in one of the nature articles in question says

However, the very short timescales involved will make this idea controversial, as existing work on garnet seems to indicate processes operating on a million-year timescale; but also, perhaps, simply because we geologists are attuned to thinking in millions of years, whereas the features we observe may be just the aggregations of many shorter events.

Indeed. Geologists are indocrinated over and over about millions of years, just as I was taught at school that fossil's take many thousands of years to form. However none of us was there to actually observe these rocks forms, and so any dating requires more assumption than observation.
- posted by Alan Grey @ Friday, July 15, 2005