1

. North America would join Asia at the Bering Strait. Except for very narrow bodies of water, Australia would connect to Asia along a 1,000-mile-wide land bridge, Europe would join North America via Greenland, and Antarctica would touch South America.

2

. Nimrod, who ruled at Babel, lived three generations after Noah (Genesis 10: 8–10), while Peleg lived five generations after Noah.

3

. The slab must first separate from its foundation before sliding and stretching can begin. At the extreme pressures pressing a continent onto its foundation, “fusing” would occur. Atoms on one side of the slab-foundation interface would bond with atoms on the other side in a crystalline, minimum-energy structure. Breaking that bond by some shearing action along a nearly horizontal plane would require precise, herculean forces.

Some speculate that large asteroid impacts or volcanic eruptions broke the continents. If such global disasters occurred, consider the vast collateral damage. Had today’s fragile life forms been anywhere on earth during such a catastrophe, they would not be here today. Also, deep rock is under extreme compression, which prevents spreading or breaking.  These proposals have many other problems.

4

. Bernard Northrup, “Continental Drift and the Fossil Record,” Repossess the Land (Minneapolis: Bible Science Association, 1979), pp. 165–166.

5

. Three lines of evidence also support the conclusion that sea level was several miles lower than today: submarine canyons, tablemounts, and coral formations almost one mile below Eniwetok Atoll.  For details, see pages 106–138.

A drastically lowered sea level after the flood surprises most people, because it has always been difficult to see how water covering all the earth’s mountains could go anywhere, let alone miles below today’s sea level. However, once one realizes where the flood waters came from, one can understand where they went.

Following the Ice Age, a few land bridges would have been divided by a relatively small rise in sea level (about 300 feet).  However, this probably occurred long after the flood, and would not be the division spoken of in Peleg’s lifetime.

6

. Legends of the Hopi Indians tell how their ancestors came to the Americas. After a gigantic flood, their ancestors used many family-size rafts made from hollow reeds [bamboo] and “island hopped” for many years north and east to the Americas. The steep coastline [today’s continental slope] forced them along the coast until they could land. Rising water later drowned the chain of islands along their path. [See Frank Waters, Book of the Hopi (New York: Penguin Books, 1963), pp. ix–27.] The Hopi legend and its significance were brought to my attention by Kevin P. Kluetz on 4 June 1996.

This seems to describe the Mid-Oceanic Ridge in the Pacific as a major corridor to the northeast. It would explain many things, including why the earliest known settlers in the Western Hemisphere lived in Central and South America and came from southern Asia. [See Tom D. Dillehay, “Tracking the First Americans,” Nature, Vol. 425, 4 September 2003, pp. 23–24.] Today, bamboo, sometimes 12 inches in diameter, grows abundantly in southeast Asia and is used in building large, seagoing rafts. [See Bruce Bower, “Erectus Ahoy: Prehistoric Seafaring Floats into View,” Science News, Vol. 164, 18 October 2003, pp. 248–250.]

Lowered sea levels in the centuries after the flood also contributed to rapid migration in other parts of the world. The Austronesian family of languages include those spoken by the peoples of Taiwan, Indonesia, Madagascar, New Zealand, Easter Island, the Philippines, Hawaii, and other Polynesian Islands—1,200 languages in all. Linguists, tracing the “ancestry” of each language, can see that the mother tongues originated in Taiwan and then radiated southwest, south, and east to the lands mentioned above—a span of 16,000 miles. [See R. D. Gray et al., “Language Phylogenies Reveal Expansion Pulses and Pauses in Pacific Settlement,” Science, Vol. 323, 23 January 2009, pp. 479–483.] For example, words associated with canoes are common among those languages outside Taiwan, but not on Taiwan. [For linguistic details, see Jared M. Diamond, “Taiwan’s Gift to the World,” Nature, Vol. 403, 17 February 2000, pp. 709–710.] Similar conclusions were reached in a study that traced mutations in a common bacterium in human intestines. [See Yoshan Moodley et al., “The Peopling of the Pacific from a Bacterial Perspective,” Science, Vol. 323, 23 January 2009, pp. 527–530.]

Also, pots, tools, bones, and farming methods show that the outward expansion happened in several surges a few thousand years ago. Some experts feel improved boating technology allowed explorations to distant islands. Early sea migrations used bamboo sailing rafts. Later, canoes were used, and still later, outriggers. Lowered sea levels after the flood would have reduced the distances vessels had to travel, because most of these lands, which are today islands, would have been connected or nearly connected.

Commerce and travel would have continued between many of these once larger, nearly-connected lands as sea levels rose, the lands shrunk to become islands, and the waterways separating the islands expanded. Without this understanding, we might think that ancient peoples survived long, dangerous voyages and just happened to land on distant islands.