Volcanic Regions of Victoria, Australia

A friend on Facebook asked how to explain another area of the world from the Flood perspective.

Hi Tas, just wondering if you have any information about the Historic Volcanic Region of central Victoria. Everything I can find all talks in millions of years. Thanks.

You can get an idea for what is happening by taking the ‘ages’ given in millions of years and looking up the geological column for that age on the chart on this post. As I say in that article, the ages quoted are not necessarily an exact relation but they usually give a useful first estimate.

You also need to picture in your mind what was happening with the Flood water: floodwaters rising … floodwaters falling … post-Flood. It’s a lot easier to imagine the receding floodwater—where it may have been flowing to—than to imagine what was happening as the waters were rising.

And it is important to think about the physical shape of the features and their relationship with other things.

This article sets out the broad-brush sketch of the geological history of Victoria along the lines I described above.

If you Google volcanism in Victoria, or look at a geological map of the area, you will discover there are two stages of volcanism. The first is the Older Volcanics, which are given ages of 30–40 million years. These would have erupted during the Flood after the floodwaters had been receding for a while. I say “a while” because the period of time when the floodwaters were receding were mostly erosive on the continent, so the water had to have abated enough that it was no longer eroding rocks away. But that is a bit complicated at the edge of the continent, such as Victoria, because that is where the receding waters flowed into the sea. The Older Volcanics are covered with other sediment that would have been deposited when lots of water was flowing over the area.

Then there are the Newer Volcanics which are typically assigned ages less than 6 million years. The eruption centres form prominent cones on the landscape and are given names. To maintain their volcanic shape means they have not been eroded much, and so they would have erupted after the Flood.

Tower Hill between Warrnambool and Port Fairy is one such prominent volcanic cone. It’s assigned an ‘age’ of 35,000 years based on carbon-14 measurements. It’s interesting to see the summary in this report of how the age of the volcano increased as more measurements were made. Using the rough carbon-14 calibration curve this age for Tower Hill volcano would translate to about 4,000 years ago, which was around the time of Abraham. The Flood ended about 4,500 years ago.