Catastrophic Plate Tectonics
By Jon Covey, BA, CLS(ASCP)
Edited by Anita K. Millen-Covey, MD, MPH, MA
If this world were created in six standard days, modified by the curse after
Adam’s sin, and mauled by a global flood, what would it look like today? If this
world were the result of uniformitarian
processes over billions of years,
as evolutionists claim,
what would it look like? If this world were the
result of multi-continent catastrophes, as evolutionary neo-catastrophists
suggest, what would the aftereffects be? How could we decide which theory was
nearest the truth?
A report in the journal Science
concluded that 540 million years ago the
supercontinent Rodinia suddenly cracked apart. The plates comprising the
earth’s crust then moved and rotated much more rapidly than previously
thought. Almost simultaneously, a new supercontinent, Gondwanaland, formed.
[Kirshvink]
Supercharged Plates
The beginning of the Cambrian, about 540 million years ago, was a time when
animal life seems to have exploded, perhaps associated with or following
changes in the composition of Earth’s atmosphere and oceans. Kirschvink et al.
compiled paleomagnetic data from several continents and suggest that this was
also an unusual time for plate tectonics. The data imply that all of the major
continental plates rotated and moved rapidly during the Early and Middle
Cambrian.
For example, Australia evidently traversed about 90 degrees in latitude within
30 million years. The authors suggest that the motion can be explained by rapid
rotation of Earth’s mantle and lithosphere. [Brooks]
Heralding the report, The Los Angeles
Times said this event might have set off
the most prolific explosion of life in the planet’s history. [Cole]
The Times said
that the dramatic diversity of life that suddenly appeared in the fossil record
about 530 million years ago–the so-called Cambrian explosion–produced the
ancestors of virtually all living things on Earth today. Researchers have not
been able to explain this sudden appearance of so many disparate body plans.
Obviously, Joseph Kirschvink (a Cal Tech geologist) and his colleagues think the
sudden movement of crustal plates sparked the previously inexplicable explosion
of life:
We propose that rapid continental motions during the Cambrian period...
occurred during the same time interval as the Cambrian evolutionary
diversification and therefore the two events may be related. [Kirschvink]
The Times
quotes Kirschvink as saying:
Life diversified like crazy about a half-billion years ago, and nobody
really knows why. When we started assembling a real picture, it suddenly became
apparent that this burst of motion was
synchronous. The continents were moving at the same time.... That
was the key insight.
The Times
says Kirschvink speculates that relatively sudden transportation of
species living in warm regions to cold ones, and vice versa, would have forced
the kind of rapid adaptation to changing environments that drives evolution. He
says that emerging traits are more likely to survive in small inbreeding
populations, which is a great script for increasing diversity. This might be in
keeping
with Stephen Jay Gould’s punctuated equilibrium, or possibly with George Gaylord
Simpson’s concept of quantum evolution. [Simpson, 1983]
According to evolutionists, the best way to get diversity of life is to kill as
much
of it as possible. This seems to be the theme of David Raup’s
Extinction: Bad
Genes or Bad Luck?
(1991) Do your level best to wipe out life and life will respond by evolving a
richer smorgasbord of delectable creatures.
Back to Eyewitness Observation vs. Speculation
Both creationists and evolutionists have speculated about the separation of
Gondwanaland into the current arrangement of continents. Creationists begin
their speculation based on an eyewitness testimony. God told Moses, leader of
the
Children of Israel, that He created the earth and caused
dry land to appear out of the waters. God said, "Let the
waters below the heavens be gathered into one place, and let the dry land
appear." [Gen. 1:9] Since the waters were gathered into one place, the land
must have been also in one place. Later testimony says that the earth was
divided many years later. [Gen. 10:25]
Diversity vs. Disparity
Creationists say diversity follows pre-existing disparity of the many created
body
plans (phyla). Art Battson’s
On the Origin of Stasis.
shows that the fossil record is contrary to the standard evolutionary
explanations. Evolutionists state that diversity proceeded from a single common
ancestor. The Cambrian fossil record is a record of disparity involving as many
as 75-100 different phyla, depending on who does the classifying. The disparity
seen in the early Cambrian represents
almost every phylum that has ever existed. Duane Gish, in all his public debates
with evolutionists, says that the sudden appearance of many new life forms at
the beginning of the Cambrian is what we would expect if creation is true. This
fact bothers evolutionists, and they have long been looking for an explanation
for the sudden appearance of such a rich and varied fossil record.
Evolutionists speculate how all the diversity of the Cambrian came about.
Kirschvink evaded the real problem. Where did the disparity come from? Once
the disparity exists, it is not difficult to explain the great diversity. We
creationists explain the present diversity after the Flood based on basic animal
kinds taken aboard the ark. Rapid diversification took place after the Flood
when the animals returned to the land.
Ken Ham asks, "If there was a worldwide
flood, what should we expect to see in the sedimentary rocks?"
Billions of dead things buried in rock layers laid down by water all
over the earth.
Then he asks, "What do we see?"
Billions of dead things buried in rock layers laid down by water all
over the earth.
Many evolutionists regard the Bible as myth and allegory. Strange that after all
these years, scientists who rejected catastrophe and embraced uniformitarian
geology, sometimes for no better reason than to deny the Bible, are now
embracing a catastrophic scenario to explain geology and evolution. This is
strange because creationism teaches that the world’s geological features and
species diversification happened in a few thousand years. The difference is
evolutionists believe these things took place in sudden spurts, each separated
by millions of years.
Creationists speculate that the Flood produced the fossil segregation patterns,
e.g.,
trilobites in the Cambrian, and dinosaurs in the Jurassic, etc.
Evolutionists note five major periods of mass extinction in the fossil record.
David
Raup refers to these periods as mass killings. [Raup] He mentions that the best
documented of the Big Five came at the end of the Cretaceous (when the dinosaurs
died off). He says:
“Also, sediments from the Cretaceous are widely distributed
because it was a time when continents were
flooded by shallow
seas, leaving a good marine record on the present land surface.”
[Raup, p. 66; my emphasis]
The Floodwaters came mainly from the ocean as a result of violent upheaval by
plate tectonics and volcanic eruptions (part of the fountains of the great deep
mentioned in Genesis 7:11; 8:2).
This initiated rapid, runaway subduction of the oceanic crust deep into the
mantle, as the hot magma from the mantle upwelled and filled the ocean basins
and created unimaginable quantities of steam, which was the source of the 40
days and nights of rain. Notice that in Genesis 7:11, the rain did not begin
until the fountains of the deep broke up (erupted).
The hot, new ocean crust, being less dense than the continental crust rose up,
displacing water in the former ocean basins. The displaced ocean waters swept
over the continents and deposited marine sediments on all the
continents. There are more marine sediments on the land than land sediments.
The five mass killings are the result of major depositions from transported
biomes driven by plate tectonism during the Flood. The violent tectonism
produced a series of gigantic tsunamis. These multiple pulses of ocean water
transgressed onto and regressed off of the continents. The seemingly rapid
diversification that followed each mass killing is nothing more than continued,
but lesser, deposition of sediments containing the multitude of diverse species.
The fossils of the five major killings and the periods of lesser killings that
followed them represent the organisms living immediately prior to the Flood’s
onset. The fossils from most of the geological periods represent Flood kills in
which creatures were buried suddenly, preserving their remains.
ICR Scientists Develop Catastrophic Plate Tectonic
Theory
Around 1993, Steve Austin and his colleagues, at the Institute for Creation
Research, worked out a model of the global flood based on catastrophic plate
tectonics. Now evolutionary geologists have decided that the breakup of the
original supercontinent was catastrophic, although not on the scale suggested
by Austin and his colleagues. [Austin]
The Cambrian explosion represents the initial stages of the Flood when the first
layers of marine sediments were laid down on the continents after the ocean
waters swept across them. Probably, in those initial stages, the continents were
together. This probably explains why geologists such as Derek Ager (see
The
Nature of the Stratigraphic Record,
1993) are able to trace distinctive deposits
over several continents often separated by wide ocean basins. Some of these
widespread deposits come from later geologic periods, meaning many millions
of years according to evolutionary reckoning. If the early Cambrian marks the
beginning of continental redistribution, how can the same deposit of sandstone
or limestone bridge several continents? At some point, one has to say that
regardless of whatever tremendous catastrophes distributed those deposits, the
widening ocean basins would prevent multi-continental involvement from the
same event.
According to Austin and other ICR scientists, creationist catastrophic plate
tectonics theory began in 1859 when Antonio Snider proposed that rapid plate
movement occurred during the Flood. Evolutionists attribute the theory of plate
tectonics to Alfred Wegener in 1915 (very few ever mention Snider). [Tarbuck, p.
392]
Modern plate tectonic theory hangs on the ideas of continental drift and the
uniformity of present processes extrapolated over billions of years.
ICR scientists begin their explanation with a pre-Flood earth consisting of
core,
mantle, and crust. There were two types of crust: continental and oceanic.
Oceanic crust was made of denser materials (mafic) than continental crust
(sialic).
As the Flood began, gigantic slabs of ocean floor broke loose from their
moorings with the continental crust and slid beneath the continents (perhaps the
result of asteroid bombardment that disrupted the earth’s crust). These slabs
deformed the mantle. This produced heat and decreased the viscosity of the
mantle around the descending oceanic slabs. The more liquid (less viscous)
mantle allowed the plates to fall faster and faster. This created more heat,
increasing mantle flow. They called this self-feeding process thermal runaway.
By the time the slabs reached the earth’s core, about 60 days later, their speed
was about five meters per second.
John Baumgardner, one of the ICR scientists, ran a computer program to
simulate this process. As the slabs fell through the mantle and generated heat
(the slabs remained relatively cool), great plumes of molten mantle rose up to
the earth’s surface and erupted through enormous fissures, ejecting
unimaginable quantities of fast-moving lava, which ran into ocean basins. This
heated the ocean water, increasing evaporation. The water vapor from the
ocean added to the rain already pouring down from the water above the
"firmament," and later became the source of moisture for the ice age snows.
Certainly, much of what creationists say is speculative, but they have an
advantage. God, the
eyewitness told
Moses what happened.
Although many scientists disregard this, observation is a necessary step in the
scientific method. God caused and saw the Flood. Moses recorded what God told
him.
The creationist catastrophic plate tectonic model is tied to the Flood. It has
explanatory power and predictive success. It clarifies certain Scriptures and
explains some physical data that the conventional plate tectonic theory doesn’t
explain.
Before Geologists Accepted Plate Tectonics
In the 1960s, some geologists still hadn’t accepted the idea of moving tectonic
plates. One reader of our newsletter called me after she received part one of
this series. She remembers, back then,
teaching the separation of the original supercontinent
and that the continents still move. She
said that one person in her class scoffed, ridiculing the Bible’s
inference that the continents moved apart.
Back then, Geologists might have ridiculed ICR geologists
for suggesting that slabs of oceanic crust would fall through the mantle,
reaching thermal runaway. How could oceanic slabs sink into the mantle under
their own steam? Some would have been thought it pure poppycock. They
would not have accepted the idea that slabs of oceanic plate in thermal runaway
went crashing into the earth’s core at five meters per second. That was only a
few years ago. What would they think now that some leading geologists believe
there was a time when the plates moved faster? What would they say now that some
researchers are convinced of "slab pull?" [Kerr] Consider Kerr’s report in
Science.
On one level, why the plates move is no mystery at all. Plates are just the
upper
limb of a vast, heat-driven circulation system that stirs the planet to its
depths.
But pinpointing where the forces that actually move the plates are concentrated
has been difficult, given researchers’ fuzzy view of Earth’s interior and the
limited ability of computer models to simulate the planet’s complex dynamics. The
most realistic computer models of plate motions to date have strengthened the
case for one of the front-running driving forces. Says Mark
Richards of the university of California, Berkeley, who helped develop one of
the models, "We tried to show clearly that the main driving force is slabs,"
churning the mantle as they sink into trenches and thus dragging the plates
along.
Other researchers agree that the modelers have strengthened the case for slab
pull. Even if these simulations hold up, however, they don’t solve the full
mystery of plate motions. At the same time as the computer models support
slab pull, one group of researchers is saying that peculiar stirrings of the
mantle
beneath South America imply a different driving force in that part of the world.
Baumgarder’s Computer Simulation
One of the ICR geologists involved in research on catastrophic plate tectonics,
Dr. John Baumgardner, spoke with Carl Wieland and Don Batten in an interview
for Creation ex nihilo (a creationist
family magazine, see inserted brochure).
[Wieland] They said:
A 1993 New Scientist article spoke
highly of your (Baumgardner’s) 3-D
supercomputer model of plate tectonics. [New Scientist]
Baumgardner replied:
“There are to my knowledge three other computer codes for
modeling the earth’s mantle and so on, in the world. These other
three use a mathematical method not so well suited for the modern
parallel supercomputers. The one I developed used the finite
element technique and performs very well on the new, very large
supercomputers. So, many of my colleagues are recognizing it as
the most capable code in the world. Last year NASA funded this
effort as one of the nine grand challenge projects for the next three
years in the High Performance Computing and Communication initiative, and are
supporting two post-doctoral researchers to
collaborate with me to improve it, and apply it to study the earth.
This code is comparable to what are called general circulation models for the
atmosphere and oceans, which are some of the largest codes in the world in terms
of how much machine power
they consume. It’s got lots of physics in it to model the details of the
mechanical behavior of the silicate rock inside the earth. My
present focus is to make the representation of the tectonic plates
even more realistic. So the code is in an ongoing state of
development, but it’s come a long way in the
last 15 years.”
Thermal Runaway during Subduction
Figure 1
Thermal runaway of subducting oceanic slabs had important consequences for the
Flood.
The rapidly descending slabs heated the mantle surrounding them, which decreased
mantle density and viscosity. Plumes of hot magma rose rapidly to the earth's
surface and into the ocean basins, which jettisoned steam into the atmosphere,
intensifying global rain
and warming the ocean, which would drive the subsequent ice age. The magma
formed
hot new ocean floor and raised the sea level by isostatic rebound, because the
hot oceanic
crust was less dense than cool continental crust. Continued outpouring of magma
also
filled ocean basins, causing the sea level to rise even more and completely
flood the
continents. When the old oceanic crust was completely subducted and replaced by
the
new ocean crust, runaway subduction and plate motion stopped The new crust
cooled,
became denser than the continental crust, and sank down, producing deeper ocean
basins
which allowed the Flood waters to recede off the continents.
Q&A with Baumgardner
The following Q&A section continues selected parts of an interview with
geophysicist Dr. John Baumgardner, who worked at the Los Alamos National
Laboratory, by Carl
Wieland and Don Batten. [Wieland] The entire interview is available in Creation
magazine:
http://creation.com/probing-the-earths-deep-places.
CM = Creation interviewer; JB = John Baumgardner.
CM: We understand you've shown that as these floating blocks of rock push down
into the material below, things get hotter, so the 'slipperiness' increases and
there's a runaway
effect. The faster they sink the hotter they get, so the faster they can sink.
JB: Yes-rock that comprises the ocean floor is colder, and therefore denser than
the rock
below it, so it can sink into the earth's interior [see Figure 1
Based on Tarbuck, p. 403]. The properties of the rock inside the earth,
especially at the
high temperatures that exist there, make it possible for the colder rock from
the earth's
surface to peel away and sink in a runaway manner down through the mantle-very
rapidly.
So this 'happens' on your computer model all by itself, from the laws of
science, over a
short time-scale, not millions of years?
JB: That's correct. Exactly how long is something I'm working to refine. But it
seems that once this sinking of the pre-Flood ocean floor starts (in a
conveyor-belt-like fashion down
into the earth, pulling things apart behind it), it is not a slow process
spanning millions of
years. It's almost certain that it runs to completion and, recycles' all of the
existing floor in a
few weeks or months.
CM: You're part of a team of top creation scientists. This team is developing a
model of catastrophic plate tectonics based on this mechanism, which believes
the continents broke
up (from a single landmass) during the Flood and not afterwards as some
creationists have
proposed.
JB: Yes. There is compelling evidence from the fossil-bearing sediments on the
continents
that the breakup occurred during the time these sediments were being deposited.
We are
convinced that this ‘continental sprint’ as it’s been called, occurred during
the time of the Flood and was part of the mechanism for it.
CM: Why is a six-day, recent creation important?
JB: I believe it's a pivotal issue in regard to the reliability of God's Word.
It ultimately bears
on the authenticity of Jesus, because Jesus put his stamp of authority on the
writings of
Moses. Taken at face value, the scriptures indicate that the original earth was
a perfect
world, one which included man and woman, one in which there was no death. There
were
no carnivorous animals-all the animals and man were given the green plants to
eat. To reconcile the Biblical account of world history with our observations
requires only acknowledging a catastrophe which destroyed all air-breathing land
life except for that preserved in Noah's Ark. I believe there is no negotiation
possible on this question.
CM: You gave a poster presentation on this 'runaway rapid continental drift'
mechanism at the
American Geophysical Union meeting in 1994. At least some of the 6,000
scientists there
saw it. What was the feedback?
JB: Many people were interested in the numerical techniques I used for such a
calculation,
because it's a significant computational challenge. Almost no one seemed to
appreciate
the implications of it. Actually, this concept of 'runaway subduction' [rapid
sinking of the
'plates' as described earlier] has been in the literature for over 30 years. It
was picked up in the geophysical community in the early 1970s, but for some
reason interest disappeared.
People in my field are not ignorant of this possibility; it's just not seriously
explored.
CM: Why do you think that is?
JB: Well, there's no real motivation to pursue it. Some toyed with the idea that
such
runaway effects might have been involved in recent volcanism in the southwestern
U.S.
But in their framework, they're not really looking for worldwide effects.
The above interview helps to clarify what Dr. Baumgardner and five other
scientists on the
Institute for Creation Research's (ICR) team worked on. Their goal was to
develop a catastrophic plate tectonic theory that has strong explanatory and
predictive
power and can compete with secular explanations of plate tectonics. The
remainder of this
article is based on their paper. [Austin]
What was the nature of the pre-Flood world? Anyone who wants to give a plausible
explanation of the Flood must begin by listing the factors that would affect the
course of the
Flood.
Figure 2. Pre-Flood Earth Structure
Figure 2 shows the general internal structure of the
earth.
[Tarbuck, see drawings on pp. 380 & 386]
The magnified outermost layer, the
brittle lithosphere, is 100 kilometers thick.
The thickness of continental crust averages 35 kilometers (its density is 2.8
times water's
density), and the oceanic crust is only 5 kilometers thick (density 2.9-3.0).
The mantle is far beneath the earth's surface (about 800 km beneath us). The
only way
geologists can explore it is through the observation of seismic waves that
earthquakes
produce and the use of mathematical models. Seismic S waves (Snake or undulate)
are
unable to travel through the liquid regions of the earth, such as the liquid
outer core.
Geologists discovered that S waves do travel through the mantle, indicating that
it acts as
an elastic solid.
Unlike the continental crust whose temperature increases rapidly with depth due
to heat
conduction from the upper mantle, the mantle's temperature increases much more
gradually. This means that the mantle must have a more efficient way than
conduction for
transferring heat to the upper regions of the earth, otherwise it would have to
be hundreds
of times hotter than the upper mantle. If the mantle can act as a fluid, it can
transfer heat
from the depths of the earth to the upper mantle by convection, similar to the
process seen
in a glass pan of water heating on a stove, or beaker of water over a burner.
Ghostly
billows can be seen as heated water moves from the bottom to the top.
Under tremendous pressure, the solid mantle rock can act like a fluid or a
solid. It is plastic.
If sudden stresses act upon it, it reacts like a solid, as in the case of S
waves generated by
earthquakes. If allowed enough time, when stressed, it will flow upward like
heated water flows upward through layers of cooler, denser water.
The lithosphere is approximately 100 km thick and is composed of brittle rock
(See Figure
2). Below the lithosphere is the upper mantle which contains the low-velocity
zone. This zone contains pockets of melt and crystals making up 10 percent of
the zone. Both P
(Punch) and S waves slow down when penetrating this zone.
The asthenosphere (astheno
meaning weak) spans the zone of partial melting, descending to about 700 km
where it
meets the mantle. Molten rock expelled by volcanoes originates about 125
kilometers
below the surface where partial melting of subducting oceanic plates laden with
wet
sediments occurs. Temperatures rise about 20-30'C per kilometer of depth. Water
tends to
lower the melting temperature. This hot, liquid magma has a lower density than
the
surrounding rock and buoys upward, eventually initiating volcanism.
Asthenospheric rock,
although not melted, is very hot and deforms easily. When the asthenosphere
moves, it
tends to move the lithosphere above it and is partly responsible for plate
movement.
However, slab pull seems more important for plate movement because it involves
stronger
forces.
God must have already separated the earth into crust, mantle, and core before
the creation
of life, because heavy elements contained within the earth would have sunk into
the core
and release tremendous gravitational potential energy, melting the crust and
vaporizing the
ocean. This structure (crust, mantle, and core) provides a natural driving
mechanism for
rapid plate tectonics.
Baumgardner explained that the mantle was less viscous before the Flood,
[Baumgardner]
because it was slightly warmer then. Lower viscosity of the mantle allows the
thermal
runway he and his ICR colleagues propose.
ICR's team also believes the oceanic and continental crusts were much as they
are today.
Before the Flood began, the continental crust was stable and sialic (silica and
aluinina-rich,
granitic rock); the oceanic crust was made of denser basaltic material (rich in
magnesium and iron; mafic). These differences in density make continents float
above the denser
materials making up the ocean crust and the mantle.
Pre-Flood Sediments
By the time of the Flood, there were already considerable sediments. There was a
biological need for sediments because God had to prepare a planet that could
sustain life.
Solid bedrock is unsuitable for plant growth and is a poor habitat for many
burrowing
creatures. We have to assume that when God caused the dry land to appear, He had
to
create enough soil on it to sustain life. This feature would give the appearance
of age.
Does this mean God deceived us? Some things must be created with the appearance
of
age if they are to be functional. Adam was created as an adult. Eve was created
from
Adam's rib as an adult. Must God limit His activity to the natural laws after He
established
them? If that's the case, should we believe the Egyptian plagues were simply
well timed
disasters and the Egyptian soldiers drowned in six inches of water'? When God
stretched
out the heavens, was the starlight coming from the stars likewise stretched to
the red end of the spectrum? If so, this would mean the red shift is not
evidence of a big bang. It corroborates the Bible's testimony of what God did.
When the land arose out of the sea, the water washed off the continent and left
sediment
behind. Sediments that are presumably pre-Flood (Precambrian >570 million years
evolutionary), contain substantial quantities of all types of minerals. This
makes it likely that there were pre-Flood sediments. It is not likely that the
Flood generated all the sediments,
including limestone, etc.).
ICR's team cites many possible events that could have initiated the Flood
(Austin, p. 612),
e.g., the hand of God, meteor or asteroid collision, and other things. They feel
confident
that slabs of oceanic crust broke loose, began subducting (sliding beneath the
continents),
and initiated the Flood.
Subduction
The movement of, oceanic slabs began sliding under the continents (subduction)
along
continental margins for thousands of kilometers. Today, subduction results by 1)
sea-floor
spreading from the mid-oceanic ridge where upwelling magma creates new sea floor
and
2) slab pull (see Figure 1). As the slabs subducted, they deformed the mantle
and
generated heat. The heat made the mantle less viscous and more buoyant, which in
turn made it easier for the slabs to fall into the mantle, generating more heat.
This resulted in thermal runaway, which has been substantiated by Baumgardner's
computer model. Of
course, a computer simulation is not the real thing, but the results make it
worthy of further
investigation. All the present oceanic crust is from Flood or post-Flood times
because
modem ocean crust seems to date from then. [Austin, p. 612] This means all or
most of the original ocean crust has subducted. The subducting slabs would have
pulled the continents
attached to them. If the slabs were moving several meters per second, so would
the continents. When the continents collided at this speed, mountain belts such
as the Appalachians, Himilayas, Caspians, and Alps were created.
Catastrophic plate tectonics theory can answer questions about the Flood such as
"Where did all the water come from to cover the entire earth, and where did it
all go?"
This theory can also explain most features of the earth's structure and
sediments better
than uniformitarian geological theory, which is based on Charles Lyell's
misinformed
ideas. It also has better explanatory power than the new catastrophism of
evolutionary
geologists, which attempts to correct Lyell's errors. It can also explain why
and how the
ice age occurred.
A short digression about salt deposits
Someone recently asked how diluvialists (those who believe in Noah's global
flood) explain salt domes. A
salt dome is formed in areas of
extensive salt deposits that have been buried by sediments for thousands
of feet. After the salt is buried, it begins to
migrate upwards through the sedimentary
rock and forms a dome [Tarbuck, pp. 68-69]. Evolutionists
believe entrapped continental seas and salt
lakes evaporated over thousands to millions
of years and formed the extensive salt
deposits. This is why some rocks are called evaporites. They owe their existence
to evaporation of water solutions bearing their
distinctive minerals. However, evaporation
is not the only way to get "evaporites."
Sodium chloride (NaCl), the main ingredient in table salt, is very soluble in
water, and
people, including creationists, have always assumed that salt deposits must be
the work
of evaporation over many millennia. However, if most of the water for the Flood
came out
of the earth and the ocean, we can assume that great quantities of hot
subterranean
brines gushed into the ocean when the fountains of the great deep erupted. These
hot
water geysers were undoubtedly supersaturated with various minerals, including
NaCl. A
solution is supersaturated whenever there is a higher concentration of a
specific salt than
could normally be achieved by the simple addition and dissolution of that salt
at standard
temperature and pressure.
Superheated water (much greater than 212o
F) under great pressure in a mineral
environment (rocks) beneath the earth's surface will quickly dissolve many
minerals.
During the Flood, gigantic jets of superheated, supersaturated water from the
fountains of
the great deep hit the greater volumes of cold, ocean water and cooled rapidly.
This caused instantaneous crystallization, precipitating much of the dissolved
minerals,
including NaCl. Some of the minerals simply mixed with the surrounding ocean
water, of
course, but much salt crystallized and precipitated and was quickly buried by
Flood
sediments. These buried salts were protected from dissolving in the Flood. Some
of these
precipitates might have been swept away by sediment-laden turbidity currents and
deposited far from their point of origin. Afterwards, the deeply buried salt
deposits formed
salt domes.
Ocean salinity probably increased as a result of the Flood. If one were inclined
to calculate the rate of increase in oceanic
salinity (about 3 x 1011
kg/yr) and extrapolate this
over time, one would discover that not too many million years ago the ocean must
have
been fresh water. Drs. Russell Humphreys and Steve Austin (both on the ICR team)
made calculations based on known influx of salt to the ocean and concluded that
the
maximum age of the ocean is 62 million years. This conclusion is based on
uniformitarian
assumptions, and a global flood would drastically change the estimate [Austin
1990].
Mantle-wide Flow
Remnants of cooler mantle have been detected as seismic anomalies deep in the
mantle.
This is good evidence favoring the ICR team's theory of runaway plate subduction
during
the Flood. Baumgardner cites evidence that mantle flow was still happening
during the
mid-to-late Flood stage (evolutionary Cenozoic era) [Baumgardner, p.38]. For
instance, evolutionists Anderson and Perkins [Anderson] proposed that thermal
runaway might
produce surges of hot material just under the lithosphere, causing unprecedented
volcanic activity. According to them, this
might have happened in the southwestern United
States. Volcanic activity decreased in
frequency and intensity for many years after the
Flood.
Severe earthquakes persisted well into the Biblical era, e.g., Amos 1:1 and
Zechariah 14:5. The whole earth had been destabilized as a result of the Flood,
and we
are actually in a quiescent period. Earthquakes and volcanic activity were
nonexistent on the pre-Flood earth. From the Scriptures, we know that tectonic
activity, including
earthquakes and volcanic activity as described in Joel 2 and Acts 2 will
increase in the future:
“And I will display wonders in the sky and on the earth,
Blood, fire, and columns of smoke.
The sun will be turned into darkness,
And the moon into blood,
Before
the great and awesome day of the Lord comes.”
Theoretically, with rapid plate subduction, slabs of oceanic crust sinking into
the mantle
would heat the mantle surrounding them. Heated mantle would be more fluid and
more
buoyant, making it flow faster and move upward. Wherever plates sank, plumes of
hot
mantle would rise to the surface, erupting as volcanoes (called seamounts in the
ocean).
At the same time, falling crust would have carried cooler mantle to the core
boundary and
cooled the outer core. This would have caused strong convection in the core.
According
to Humphreys [Humphreys, 1987, 1988], this would have resulted in rapid
reversals of the
earth's magnetic field. (Humphreys is part of the ICR team.)
Oceanic plates have low electrical conductivity. As they subducted during the
Flood, they
would have interfered with the mantle's high conductivity. The mantle's high
conductivity
normally attenuates the core's magnetic field, but interference by ocean plates
plunging
deep into the mantle during thermal runaway would have allowed the rapid
reversals of the core's magnetic field to be expressed on the earth's surface.
Humphreys' model is
superior to other models because it can account for:
1.
Low intensity of paleomagnetic and archaeomagnetic data
2.
The erratic frequency of paleomagnetic reversals through the Phanerozoic
3.
Patchy distribution of sea floor paleomagnetic anomalies
4.
Rapid reversals seen in lava flows such as those at Steens mountain in Oregon
Crustal Plates
Ocean Floor Spreading
If rapid plate subduction quickly dispensed with the ancient ocean crust, how
was it
replaced? Hot liquid mantle material welled to the surface and erupted through a
series of
fissures called the mid-oceanic ridge (see Figure 1 Crustal Plates for
approximate route of ridge). This
ridge is approximately 40,000 miles long, bisecting nearly every ocean in the
world. The
mid-oceanic ridge acts as a spreading center where upwelling mantle material
flows out,
creating new ocean floor.
This spreading occurred during the Flood, during which volatile gases, including
water, escaped from the
magma and entered the atmosphere. These gases would have been partly responsible
for the cooling condition which would have helped start the ice age after the
Flood because they would have reflected heat from the sun back into space. The
magma's heat vaporized huge
amounts of ocean water, adding to the torrential downpour that lasted forty days
and may
have been the actual source of the "windows of heaven."
One might wonder why the ocean waters continued to rise until 150 days after the
Flood
began if the rain stopped after 40 days. Water was still pouring out of the
fountains of the
great deep. Understanding this and how new sea floor was made is essential to
explain
how the entire earth could be inundated. One also needs to remember that after
the sea
floor material cooled, that its density would become greater and would begin
sinking
down, and the continents would rise up in the process of isostatic equilibrium.
The new
ocean basins resulting from this process would provide a place for the
Floodwaters to go.
The ocean, heated by the enormous outflow of magma through the mid-oceanic
ridge,
would now be prepared to deliver the huge quantities of water vapor required to
sustain
the ice age at a time when volcanic gases cooling the earth would have prevented
oceanic heating from solar radiation. On going, but steadily decreasing,
volcanic activity
would continue to expel volcanic gases into the atmosphere, perpetuating cooling
conditions for an ice age.
References
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Resulting from Viscous Heating, J.
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Austin, S.A., and Humphreys, D.R., The sea's missing salt: A dilemma for
evolutionists.
Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Creationism,
Robert Walsh,
editor. Creation Science Fellowship, Inc., Pittsburgh, p. 17, 1990.
Austin, S. A., J. R. Baumgardner, D. R. Humphreys, A. A. Snelling, L.
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