1

. The rock layer would have had some stiffness, because it was almost 10 miles thick. However, the crust’s large area (basically the earth’s surface) would have given it great flexibility. If the crust’s thickness, density, or strength varied (as a sine wave, for example) with an amplitude of only 1% and a wavelength of 110 miles, the crust would have sagged downward to the chamber floor at more than 18,000 locations.

The effects of the rock sagging downward through water at one location on earth would spread laterally, but only at the speed of sound in water. Outside that expanding “ring of influence,” other sags could occur simultaneously.

2

. Walter Russell Bowie, “The Book of Genesis,” The Interpreter’s Bible, Vol. 1 (New York: Abingdon Press, 1952), p. 473.

3

. See Endnote 3 on page 369.

4

. According to the Masoretic text of the Old Testament, this time period was 1,656 years. [See page 393.] According to the Septuagint text, it was 2,242 years.

5

. The Book of the Cave of Treasures, translated from the Syriac Text of the British Museum (MS. Add. 25875) by Sir E. A. Wallis Budge (London: The Religious Tract Society, 1927).

6

. For details and supporting evidence, see pages 268–320.

7

. Before the flood, the energy added to the pillars every 12 hours by the gravitational pull of the Moon, and to a lesser extent the Sun, was huge. That energy was proportional to the crust’s massive weight times the average lift distance. [For details see “Energy in the Subterranean Water” on pages 440–445.]

8

. Besides iron meteorites, which were once 1,300°F, chondrules were once about 3,000°F. [See Figure 157 on page 304 and “Chondrules” on page 304.] Also, the matrix material encasing chondrules shows thermal metamorphism requiring temperatures of at least 750°F.  [See O. Richard Norton, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Meteorites (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 92.] While the heat-generating mechanisms for each are different, all three involve the release of gravitational potential energy.

9

. “Magnetotelluric measurements show the lower continental crust to be electrically conductive globally ... The most probable candidates for the conduction mechanisms are small amounts of interconnected saline pore fluids and interconnected thin films of graphite. ... We favor the supercritical saline fluid model ...”  R. D. Hyndman et al., “The Origin of Electrically Conductive Lower Continental Crust: Saline Water or Graphite?” Physics of the Earth and Planetary Interiors, Vol. 81, 1993, pp. 325, 341.

While these authors favor the saltwater explanation for this electrical conductivity, they assume that the salt water is in innumerable microscopic pockets that are electrically and horizontally connected. The authors are puzzled, because so much horizontal connectivity should be accompanied by vertical connectivity. Over long geological ages, this water should have leaked up to the earth’s surface.

The hydroplate theory solves the problem. The subterranean water layer began with worldwide connectivity. High compression in the rock directly above allowed little vertical porosity. Before the flood, the hot, slowly circulating subterranean water dissolved many minerals, such as salt. As water escaped during the flood, this saltwater layer simply became thinner.

“Nevertheless, the simplest explanation of increased conductivity in the deep crust is the presence of a continuous, lithostatically pressured, water-rich fluid.” Bruce W. D. Yardley and John W. Valley, “How Wet Is the Earth’s Crust?” Nature, Vol. 371, 15 September 1994, p. 206.

After presenting a strong case for the presence of water trapped deep under the earth’s surface, Yardley and Valley point out a problem. Over hundreds of millions of years, that water would leak up to the earth’s surface. It apparently never occurred to these authors that the earth is not hundreds of millions of years old—and most of the subterranean water did escape upward during the global flood.

10

. See Endnote 65 on page 137.

The hydroplate theory makes 41 explicit predictions. Prediction 1, published in 1980, says that large volumes of pooled salt water are beneath major mountains. The above study by Wie et al. explains why salt water appears to be about 10 miles below the Tibetan Plateau (the world’s highest and largest plateau), which is bounded on the south by the most massive mountain range on earth.

11

. One philosophical question, partially addressed in the first paragraph on page 385, lurks in the background: “Was the flood ‘programmed’ from the beginning?” In my opinion, the answer is no. In other words, if sin had not entered the world, I believe that the earth would still have its preflood subterranean water and pillars.

One admittedly speculative idea is that if mankind had not sinned and had learned to extract and use the abundant geothermal energy generated by tidal pumping, that energy could have been used for people’s benefit, not their destruction. After all, humanity needed an energy source if it was to exercise dominion over the earth (Genesis 1:28). Today’s primary energy source, fossil fuels, did not exist before the flood.

Sin has physical consequences (Genesis 3). What might they be when every intent of all humans (except Noah) was evil continually (Genesis 6:5, 7:1)? Therefore, sinful man’s activities might have caused physical changes that weakened the crust or a few pillars. As a second possibility, God could simply have commanded the earth’s crust to crack or a pillar to collapse. God spoke the universe into existence, so commanding such a small thing at the right place, which is all it would take, is not difficult to imagine.

Would this second possibility inject a miracle into the physical world, thereby departing from science? The hydroplate theory does not assume that a miracle happened. It assumes the presence of subterranean water before the flood. (Starting assumptions, often unstated, are part of every scientific theory that tries to explain the past.) The hydroplate theory has only this one assumption.

As explained on pages 368–370, the Bible states that subterranean water was supernaturally created along with the rest of the universe. Later, either sinful man’s actions (or inactions) or a direct act by God weakened the crust or pillars, thereby increasing the subterranean water’s pressure. Thus, the crust ruptured. Yes, God’s acts or man’s possible activity are not scientific ideas, but they bring us to the same starting point as the strictly scientific hydroplate theory. Regardless of how one reaches that point, everything that follows is within the scientific realm.

The role of creation science, as I see it, is to explain what we see in the universe with the fewest assumptions and without never-ending appeals to miracles. (It was this practice of invoking miracles to solve scientific problems that irritated so many and led to the rigid insistence on uniformitarianism.) Creation science avoids the narrow-minded assumption that “the physical universe is all there is and all there ever will be”—a belief called materialism and scientism. These views (materialism, uniformitarianism, and scientism), common in most schools and much of society, produce scientific contradictions. Creation science, on the other hand, (a) does not endlessly invoke miracles, (b) is more consistent with the evidence and the laws of physics, and (c) recognizes the obvious: there is a Creator (Romans 1:20). [See “How Can the Study of Creation Be Scientific?” on page 326.]