In the beginning, God created plants and animals to multiply and fill the earth (Genesis 1:11–13, 20–25). So, when areas are devastated, living things are engineered with the innate ability to rebound and recolonize. This was seen in the rapid recovery of life at Mount St. Helens after the cataclysmic volcanic eruption of May 18, 1980.¹ But conventional scientists seem to be finally recognizing and appreciating the reality of rapid recovery a bit more after studying the life that existed after the supposed Chicxulub impact.²

The journey to acknowledging life’s ability to quickly recover from vast destruction actually begins with acknowledging that such destruction has happened in Earth’s past, which was not a given for conventional scientists.

Biblical creationists have always maintained the Genesis Flood was a recent, catastrophic, worldwide event—a position that has been met with outright derision by conventional scientists, past and present. However, in the late twentieth century, evolutionary gradualism (uniformitarianism) was challenged by the publication of “a paper in Science in which Luis Alvarez and some of his colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley, proposed that the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous Period had been caused by the impact of an asteroid.”³ This was a resurrection of catastrophism (called neo-catastrophism by some). This theory proposes that changes in the earth’s crust are the result of violent, unusual, and sudden geological events, such as the alleged five mass extinctions that have supposedly occurred over the last 450 million years.⁴

Although catastrophism is not totally embraced by conventional geologists, there is constant reference to an alleged asteroid striking at Chicxulub in the Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico.⁵ For example, Science Daily reported in a recent article that “about 66 million years ago, a massive asteroid struck Earth and unleashed one of the most destructive events in the planet’s history.”² This quote would also fit the Genesis Flood model with just minor alterations: “About 4,500 years ago, a massive flood enveloped Earth, resulting in the most destructive event in the planet’s history.”

One might say that geology—after many decades of denial—has finally acknowledged that a worldwide cataclysmic event did occur in the past (just not the Genesis Flood). But the overturning of uniformitarian predictions didn’t stop there.

Uniformitarian thinking expects that badly damaged areas of the planet would take thousands of years to recover. However, ecologists are now realizing that devastated areas of the earth recover quickly, as the aftermath of the Mount St. Helens eruption demonstrated.¹ A recent article in Geology describes how new species supposedly evolved within a few thousand years of the alleged asteroid strike. The authors state, “Based on our new calibration, the first of these new species appeared <2 k.y. [less than 2,000 years] after the Chicxulub impact.”⁶

Christopher M. Lowery, research associate professor at the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics (UTIG) and lead author of the Geology article, said, “It’s ridiculously fast . . . This research helps us understand just how quickly new species can evolve after extreme events and also how quickly the environment began to recover after the Chicxulub impact.”² Coauthor Professor Timothy Bralower of the Department of Geosciences at Penn State University added, “The speed of the recovery demonstrates just how resilient life is, to have complex life reestablished within a geologic heartbeat is truly astounding.”²

This “ridiculously fast” recovery is hardly surprising from a biblical viewpoint.² God engineered His living creation with the ability to rapidly recover after the devastating Flood via their adaptation potential that was built into their DNA. All animals were able to adapt to the new and diverse environments after the Flood, so much so that they look designed to live in those environments today—because they were engineered from the beginning to have the innate ability to adapt to their environment.

At ICR, we don’t agree with the conventional science asteroid story.⁵ And we don’t accept the five secular extinction events mixed though the rock record. Instead, these supposed extinctions are merely the last occurrences of many types of flora and fauna buried by the floodwaters. The fossil record is really a record of the complete annihilation of ecosystem after ecosystem, giving the appearance of extinction events as each ecological zone was buried in succession.

The real rapid recovery was not between these so-called extinctions but at the end of the Flood year, when animals had to venture out into new ecological niches. Ecological recovery reflects the engineered ability of God’s creation to recover, rebound, recolonize, and fill the earth after the Flood. At last, conventional science is realizing that recovery can occur quickly.

References

1. Thomas, B. 2020. Biological Bounceback at Mount St. Helens. Acts & Facts. 49 (8): 14.
2. University of Texas at Austin. Life Rebounded Shockingly Fast After the Asteroid That Killed the Dinosaurs. ScienceDaily. Posted on sciencedaily.com March 15, 2026.
3. Palmer, T. 1999. Controversy: Catastrophism and Evolution; The Ongoing Debate. New York, NY: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers, 143.
4. Garrison, T. S. and R. Ellis. 2022. Oceanography: An Invitation to Marine Science, 10th ed. Boston, MA: Cengage Learning, 393.
5. Clarey, T. L. 2017. Do the Data Support a Large Meteorite Impact at Chicxulub? Answers Research Journal. 10: 71–88.
6. Lowery, C. M. et al. 2026. New Species Evolved Within a Few Thousand Years of the Chicxulub Impact. Geology. 54 (3): 285–288.

* Dr. Sherwin is a science news writer at the Institute for Creation Research. He earned an M.A. in invertebrate zoology from the University of Northern Colorado and received an honorary doctorate of science from Pensacola Christian College.