This is the online edition of In the Beginning: Compelling Evidence for Creation and the Flood, 8th Edition (2008),  by Dr. Walt Brown. It is designed to be read online.
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[ The Fountains of the Great Deep > The Origin of Comets > Details Relating to the Hydroplate Theory ]

Details Relating to the Hydroplate Theory

1. Formation Mechanism, Ice on Moon and Mercury. About 38% of a comet’s mass is frozen water. Therefore, to understand comet origins, one must ask, “Where is water found?” Earth, sometimes called “the water planet,” must head the list. (The volume of water on Earth is ten times greater than the volume of all land above sea level.) Other planets, moons, and even interstellar space⁸³ have only traces of water, or possible water. Some traces, instead of producing comets, may have been delivered by comets or by water vapor that the fountains of the great deep launched into space.

How could so many comets have recently hit the Moon, and probably the planet Mercury, that ice remains today? Ice on the Moon, and certainly on hot Mercury, should disappear faster than comets deposit it today. However, if the material that formed 50,000 comets were ejected recently from Earth and an “ocean” of water vapor was injected into the inner solar system, the problem disappears. On Mars, comet impacts created brief saltwater flows, which then carved “erosion” channels. [See Figure 163 on page 311.]

To form comets in space, should we start with water as a solid, liquid, or gas?

Gas. In space, gases (such as water vapor) will expand into the vacuum if not gravitationally bound to some large body. Gases by themselves would not contract to form a comet. Besides, the Sun’s ultraviolet radiation breaks water vapor into hydrogen (H), oxygen (O), and hydroxyl (OH). Comets would not normally form from gases.

Solid.  Comets might form by combining smaller ice particles, including ice condensed as frost on microscopic dust grains that somehow formed. However, one icy dust grain could not capture another unless their speeds and directions were nearly identical and one of the particles had a rapidly expanding sphere of influence or a gaseous envelope. Because ice molecules are loosely bound to each other, collisions among ice particles would fragment, scatter, and vaporize them—not merge them.

Liquid.  Large rocks and muddy water were expelled by the fountains of the great deep. The water would partially evaporate, leave dirt behind, rapidly radiate its heat to cold outer space, and freeze.  (Outer space has an effective temperature of nearly absolute zero, -460°F.) The dirt crust encasing the ice would prevent complete evaporation. (Recall that the nucleus of Halley’s comet was black, and a comet’s tail contains dust particles.)

High-velocity water escaping from the subterranean chamber would erode dirt and rocks of various sizes. Water vapor would concentrate around the larger rocks escaping from Earth. These “clouds” and expanding spheres of influence would capture other nearby particles moving at similar velocities. Comets would quickly form.⁸⁵

Other reasons exist for concluding that water in a gas or solid state cannot form comets.⁸⁶ Water from the fountains of the great deep meets all requirements.

2. Crystalline Dust.  Sediments eroded by high-velocity water escaping from the subterranean chamber would be crystalline, much of it magnesium-rich olivine.

3. Near-Parabolic Comets.  Because the same event launched all comets from Earth, those we see falling from the farthest distance (near-parabolic comets) are falling back for the first time and with similar energy. Other comets, launched with slightly more velocity, will soon be detected.

If the comets represented by the red bar in Figure 149 on page 273 are falling in from distances of 50,000 AU, their orbital periods are about 4 million years. How then could they have been launched from anywhere in the solar system if the flood began only about 5,000 years ago?

The distance (50,000 AU) is in error. Comets more than about 12 AU from the Sun cannot be seen, so both the distances they have fallen and their orbital periods must be calculated from the small portions of their orbits that can be observed. Both calculations are extremely sensitive to the mass of the solar system. If this mass has been underestimated by as little as about 17 parts in 10,000 (about the mass of two Jupiters), the true distance would be 585 AU and the period only 5,000 years.⁸⁸

Where might the missing mass be hiding? Probably not in the planetary region. The masses of the Sun, planets, and some moons are well known, because masses in space can be accurately measured if something orbits them and the orbit is closely observed.⁸⁹ However, if extra mass is thinly spread within 40–600 AU from the Sun (beyond Pluto’s orbit), only objects outside 40 AU would be gravitationally affected. (Recall the hollow sphere result on page 270.) That mass, depending on its distribution, could considerably shorten the periods of near-parabolic comets, because they spend 99% of their time at least 40 AU from the Sun.

Comet Ikeya-Zhang travels about 100 AU from the Sun and last returned to the inner solar system in March 2002. It is the one periodically observed comet that ventures most deeply into this region, 40–600 AU from the Sun. Its previous return was in January 1661, 341.13 years earlier. However, its orbital period, based on the accepted mass of the solar system, should have been 366.95 years. The simplest explanation for this 25.82-year discrepancy is that some extra mass lies at least 40 AU from the Sun.

Comet Herschel-Rigollet, with the second longest period, travels 57 AU from the Sun. It last returned in August 1939, 4.2 years ahead of schedule based on the traditional mass of the solar system. It too seems to have encountered extra mass beyond 40 AU.⁹⁰

What if two comet sightings, a century or more apart, were of comets which we assumed had such long periods that they should not be the same comet, but whose orbits were so similar they probably were the same comet? We might suspect that both sightings were of the same comet, and it encountered some extra mass beyond 40 AU that pulled it back much sooner than expected. Twelve “strange pairs” are known, suggesting that extra, unseen mass beyond Pluto’s orbit affects long-period comets but is not felt within the planetary region. These “strange pairs” are explained in Figure 151 and Table 15.

This “missing” mass could be composed of particles as small as gas molecules or as large as asteroid-size objects 100 miles wide. They would be difficult to detect with our best telescopes. However, with recent technical advances, dozens of large, asteroid-size objects are being discovered each year beyond Neptune’s orbit. They are called transneptunian objects. More than 1,000 have been discovered. Of course, no one knows their total number or mass or the total mass of the smaller objects among them.

Much is unknown about the distant region 40–600 AU from the Sun. For example, spacecraft launched from Earth decades ago are now entering that region’s inner fringes. These spacecraft are experiencing a slight, but additional, gravity-like acceleration toward the Sun. So far, efforts to explain this acceleration have failed. While its magnitude is too small to give near-parabolic comets 5,000-year periods, the effect is strengthening as the spacecraft begin to penetrate this region.⁹¹

   

4. Random Perihelion Directions. Comets were launched in all directions, because the rupture encircled the rotating Earth and crossed high and low latitudes.

5. Orbit Directions and Inclinations, Two Separate Populations. A ball tossed in any direction from a high-speed train will, to an observer on the ground, initially travel almost horizontally and in the train’s direction. Likewise, low-velocity comets launched in any direction from Earth received most of their orbital velocity from Earth’s high, prograde velocity (18.5 miles per second) about the Sun. Earth, by definition, has zero angle of inclination. This is why almost all short-period comets, those launched with low velocity, are prograde and have low angles of inclination.

Comets launched with greater velocities than Earth’s orbital velocity traveled in all directions. Most are long-period comets with randomly inclined orbital planes. Prograde comets launched with the highest velocities escaped the solar system, because they had the added velocity of Earth’s motion. This is why so many of the remaining long-period comets are retrograde. [See Table 12 on page 272.] (Almost all other bodies orbiting the Sun are prograde: planets, asteroids, meteoroids, and short-period comets.)

While this explains how two populations formed, one must ask if comets could be launched from Earth with enough velocity to blast through the atmosphere, escape Earth’s gravity, and enter large, even retrograde, orbits. To learn the answer, one must first recognize the huge, mind-boggling energy in the subterranean water, which, in turn, requires understanding tidal pumping and supercritical water—explained on page 118.

To escape Earth’s gravity and enter only a circular orbit around the Sun requires a launch velocity of 7 miles per second. However, to produce near-parabolic, retrograde orbits requires a launch velocity of 32 miles per second! Earth’s atmosphere would offer comparatively little resistance at such speeds. In seconds, the pulsating, jetting fountains would push the thin atmosphere aside, much as water from a fire hose quickly penetrates a thin wall.

Water pressurized by only the weight of 10 miles of rock would launch comets from Earth’s surface at a mere 0.5 mile per second. However, calculations show that other powerful effects, including water hammers and expanding gases from supercritical water, would do the job. [See “Energy in the Subterranean Water” on pages 440–445.]

Water Hammers. During the early days of the subterranean chamber’s collapse, giant water hammers would create enormous pressures. Today, water hammers occur, often with a loud bang, when fluid flowing in a pipe is suddenly stopped (or slowed) by a closing (or narrowing) valve—a device, such as a faucet, that controls the flow. A water hammer is similar to the collision of a long train with an immovable object. The faster and more massive the train (or volume of water), the greater the compression (or pressure jump) throughout the pipe. A water hammer concentrates energy, just as a hammer striking a nail concentrates energy. A moving hammer can produce forces many times greater than a resting hammer. The subterranean chamber acted as the pipe.

Once the water began to escape upward through any crack, a chain reaction would begin. Pillars (explained in Figure 54 on page 120) would be forced to carry more and more of the crust’s weight, because the subterranean water carried less. Therefore, pillars nearest the rupture would start collapsing first. Adjacent pillars, suddenly carrying additional loads, would also collapse like a house of cards. The crust would vibrate (flutter) in complex, wavelike patterns, like a flag held horizontally in a strong wind. Each narrowing of the chamber’s thickness would, in effect, partially close a valve, slow trillions of tons of water, and create a water hammer.

Forces familiar to us will not compress water much. However, the weight of 10 miles of rock resting on the trapped subterranean water would compress it by about 14%.⁹² Water, compressed by the vibrating crust, would act as trillions of springs. Those “springs” and the massive fluttering crust would have primary vibrational periods of about a minute. In other words, vibrations closed “valves,” which created water hammers, which created more vibrations, etc. Most people have heard water pipes banging or have seen pipes burst when only a few cubic feet of water were slowed. Imagine the excruciating pressures from rapidly slowing a “moving underground ocean.”⁹³

6. Jupiter’s Family.  A bullet fired straight up slows to almost zero velocity near the top of its trajectory—its farthest point from Earth. A comet also moves very slowly near its aphelion. If a comet’s aphelion is ever near Jupiter during any orbit, Jupiter’s large gravity will pull the nearly stationary comet steadily toward Jupiter. Because a comet spends a relatively long time near its farthest point, Jupiter’s gravity acts strongly for an equally long time, gently pulling the nearly stationary comet toward Jupiter’s orbit. Even a comet’s orbital plane is slowly but steadily aligned with Jupiter’s. Thus, aphelions of short-period comets tend to be pulled toward Jupiter’s nearly circular orbit, regardless of whether the aphelion is inside, outside, above, or below that circle. The closer a comet’s aphelion is to Jupiter’s orbit, the more likely it is that the comet will be rapidly drawn toward Jupiter’s orbit. 152

One can think of Jupiter’s mass as being spread out in a hoop that coincides with Jupiter’s orbit. (This “hoop analogy” simplifies the analysis of many long-term gravitational effects.) Comets feel more pull toward the nearest part of the hoop.

My statistical examination of all historical sightings of every orbit (almost 500) of every comet in Jupiter’s family confirms this effect. The hydroplate theory places the source of comets at Earth—well inside Jupiter’s orbit. Therefore, many comets reach their slowest speeds within a few astronomical units of Jupiter’s hoop. Thousands of years of gentle gravitational tugs by this hoop have gathered Jupiter’s family. Although Jupiter sometimes destroys comets or ejects them from the solar system, many comets in its family remain, because they were recently launched. A similar but weaker effect is forming Saturn’s family.  [See Figure 147.]

7. Composition, Heavy Hydrogen.  When the fountains of the great deep erupted, rocks were crushed, eroded, and sometimes reduced to clay. Mixed with that debris was carbonate-rich, salty, subterranean water (containing sodium, because salt, NaCl, contains sodium). Organic compounds—including methane, ethane, and the amino acid glycine—are found in comets,¹ because that water contained pulverized vegetation from preflood forests (as well as bacteria and other traces of life) from within hundreds of miles of the globe-encircling rupture.

Comets are rich in heavy hydrogen, because the water in the subterranean chambers was isolated from other water in the solar system. Our oceans have half the concentration of heavy hydrogen that comets have. So, if the subterranean chambers held half the water in today’s oceans (as assumed on page 117), then almost all heavy hydrogen came from the subterranean chambers.

Page 275 lists six surprising materials discovered on comet Tempel 1 by the Deep Impact mission in 2005. Only the hydroplate theory seems to explain the fluffy, porous texture of comets, and items a–e on page 275: crystalline silicates, clays, calcium carbonates, organic material, sodium, oxygen, and, of course, liquid water. Dust particles brought back to Earth by the Stardust Mission in 2006 were also crystalline and contained “organics” and “water.”

Item f (thick surface layers of very fine dirt with the consistency of talcum powder) is probably loess, a type of dirt composed of fine particles in the muddy ice that formed comets. Each time Tempel 1 came near the Sun in its 5 1/2-year orbital period, more of the ice on the comet’s surface sublimated, leaving behind the imbedded powdery dirt. Loess is described in more detail on pages 241 and 247.

8. Small Comets.  Muddy droplets launched with the slowest velocities could not move far from Earth, so their smaller spheres of influence produced small comets. Their orbits about the Sun tend to intersect Earth’s orbit more in early November than mid-January. Because small comets have been falling on Earth for only about 5,000 years, little of our oceans’ water came from them—or from any comets. Few small comets can reach Mars.

9. Recent Meteor Streams, Crater Ages.  Disintegrating comets produce meteor streams. If meteor streams were older than 10,000 years, the particles in them would be sorted by size. [See “Poynting-Robertson Effect” on page 39.] Because this is not seen, meteor streams and comets must be younger than 10,000 years. Only the hydroplate theory claims that comets began this recently.  Impact craters on Earth are also young.

10. Other/Enough Water.  Did the subterranean chamber have enough water to produce all the comets the solar system ever had?

Consider these facts. The oceans contain 1.43 × 10⁹ cubic kilometers of water. Also, Marsden and Williams’ Catalogue of Cometary Orbits (1996 edition) lists 124 periodic comets—comets observed on at least two different passages into the inner solar system. (Halley’s comet, for example, has been observed on 30 consecutive orbits dating back to 239 B.C.) In recorded history, 790 other comets have been observed with enough detail to calculate orbits. So, we know of 914 comets. (Small comets and fragments of a few comets that have been torn apart by passing too close to the Sun are numerous. However, their mass is only about 1% of the mass of all known comets combined, so they will not be considered here.)

Some comets escaped from the solar system—either directly at launch, or later when perturbed by a planet’s gravity. Other comets have never been counted, because they never came close enough to Earth in modern times to be seen, or because they collided with the Sun or a planet.  So, let’s presume that 50,000 comets were launched.

The average radius of a short-period comet nucleus is about 4.9 kilometers.⁹⁴ If comet Tempel 1 (the most accurately measured comet as of this writing) is typical of all comets, then a comet nucleus is about 38% water by mass and has a density of about 0.62 gram per cubic centimeter.⁴ If the subterranean chamber contained half of the water now in the oceans, then less than one-hundredth of the subterranean water was expelled as comets.

With such a small fraction of the available water required, the material that formed comets could have easily come from Earth.

11. Other/Death and Disaster.  Comets, launched at the onset of the flood, are being steadily removed from the solar system. For centuries after the flood, comets would have been seen much more frequently than today. Some must have collided with Earth, just as Shoemaker-Levy 9 collided with Jupiter in 1994. People living soon after the flood would have seen many comets grow in size and brightness in the night sky over several weeks. Some of those frightening sights would have been followed by impacts on Earth, daytime skies darkened with water vapor dumped by comets, and dramatic stories of localized destruction. Somehow, memories of these experiences spread worldwide. Perhaps the founders of different cultures learned from their ancestors that comets were first observed right after the flood, so comets became associated with death and disaster worldwide—hence the word “disaster”: dis (evil) + aster (star).

12. Other/Near Side of Moon. Moonquakes, lava flows, and large multiringed basins are concentrated on the side of the Moon now facing Earth. [See Figure 145 on page 270 and Figure 153.] Before the flood, the Moon’s spin was probably faster. As the flood began, the larger rocky debris launched from Earth tended to orbit the Sun near Earth’s orbit, so many extremely high-velocity impacts occurred during the fraction of the Moon’s orbit in which the Moon traveled in the opposite direction to that debris flow. The largest, most powerful impacts (perhaps occurring in only a few days) altered the Moon’s spin balance, causing the “heavy (impacted) side” of the Moon to oscillate like a decaying pendulum bob and eventually face Earth. (Five large, dense mass concentrations, called mascons, were discovered in 1968 just below the surface on the side of the Moon that now faces Earth.⁹⁵) Eventually, tidal stretching removed most of the Moon’s spin energy.

The Moon has been heavily bombarded. If these impacts removed only 2% of the Moon’s orbital energy, then, before the flood, the Moon’s orbital period would have been 30 days, as viewed from Earth. A 30-day period, coupled with the preflood 360-day year (as explained on page 150 and Endnote 23 on page 164), would have provided excellent clocks for everyone on Earth. [See “Did the Preflood Earth Have a 30-Day Lunar Month?” on page 437.]

Note: From here to page 290, the reader may wish to examine only discussions concerning theories of personal interest.

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