This is the online edition of In the Beginning: Compelling Evidence for Creation and the Flood
(7th Edition) by Dr. Walt Brown. The online version of the book is designed to be read online.
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Ice Age. An ice age implies extreme snowfall which, in turn, requires cold temperatures and heavy precipitation. Heavy precipitation can occur only if oceans are warm enough to produce equally heavy evaporation. How could warm oceans exist with cold atmospheric temperatures?
Another problem is stopping an ice age once it begins—or beginning a new ice age after one ends. As glaciers expand, they reflect more of the Sun’s radiation away from earth, lowering temperatures and causing glaciers to grow even more. Eventually the entire globe should freeze. Conversely, if glaciers shrink, as they have in recent decades, the earth should reflect less heat into space, warm up, and melt all glaciers forever.
Frozen Mammoths. Fleshy remains of about 50 elephant-like animals called mammoths, and a few rhinoceroses, have been found frozen and buried in Siberia and Alaska. One mammoth still had identifiable food in its mouth and digestive tract. To reproduce this result, one would have to suddenly push a well-fed elephant (dead or alive) into a very large freezer that had somehow been precooled to -150°F. Anything less severe would result in the animal’s internal heat and stomach acids destroying the food. If the animal remained alive for more than a few minutes, one would not expect to find food in its mouth. What could cause such a large and sudden temperature drop? Even if the Sun suddenly stopped shining, the earth’s temperature would not drop rapidly enough to produce such effects. Finally, these giant animals would have to be buried in what was presumably frozen ground—quite a trick.
How could large herds of elephant-like animals, each requiring much food, live in the Arctic? Even if the Arctic were warm, the lack of winter sunlight would allow far less vegetation to grow than is needed to sustain so many large animals. Today, the average January temperature in northern Siberia is -28°F. Your nose gets cold after a few minutes in +32°F weather. Consider how you would feel if your nose were a 6-foot-long trunk and the average temperature were a frigid 60°F colder for weeks. Where would you, or a mammoth, find drinking water?
Major Mountain Ranges. How did mountains form? Major mountains are often crumpled like an accordion. [See Figure 48.] Satellite photos of mountain ranges show that some resemble throw rugs that have been pushed against walls. But what force could push a long, thick slab of rock and cause it to buckle and sometimes fold back on itself? Even if a large enough force could be found to overcome the friction at the base of the slab, that force would crush the end being pushed before movement could even begin. Consequently, a mountain would not form.
We can see, especially in mountains and road cuts, thinly layered rocks folded like doubled-over phone books. Other “bent” rocks are small enough to hold in one’s hand. The tiny, crystalline grains in those folds are not stretched. So, how could brittle rock, showing little evidence of heating or cracking, fold? Rocks are strong in compression but weak in tension. Therefore, their stretched outer surfaces should easily fracture. Bent sedimentary rocks, found worldwide, often look as if they had the consistency of putty when they were compressed. They must have been squeezed and folded soon after the sediments were laid down, but before they hardened chemically. What squeezed and folded them?
Figure 48: Buckled Mountains. Textbooks and museums frequently refer to some uplifting force that formed mountains. Can you see that an uplifting force, by itself, could not cause this pattern? Horizontal compression was needed to buckle these sedimentary layers near the Sullivan River in southern British Columbia, Canada. The layers must have been soft, like wet sand, at the time of compression. Today, surface rocks are brittle.
Overthrusts. A similar problem exists for large blocks of rock called overthrusts that appear to have slid horizontally over other rocks for many miles. Such large sliding blocks should have considerable rubble under them. Many have none.
Standard geology has never adequately explained why overthrusts occur. Again, anything pushing a large slab of rock with enough force to overcome frictional resistance would crush the slab before it would move. [See the technical note on page 420.] Those who appreciate this problem simply say that the pore pressure of water in the rocks lubricated the sliding, and perhaps the slab slid downhill. What is overlooked is that rocks do not contain nearly enough water to do this, and overthrusted blocks are seldom on steep slopes.
Volcanoes and Lava. The temperature of erupting lava usually exceeds 2,000°F. Where does it come from, and why is it so hot? The earth’s mantle and inner core are essentially solid. Only the outer core, which lies 1,800–3,200 miles below the earth’s surface, is a liquid. The standard explanation is that lava (called magma when it is inside the earth) originates in hot pockets, called magma chambers, at depths of about 60 miles. How could magma escape to the surface? A key fact to remember is that at depths greater than about 5 miles, pressures are so great that all empty channels through which magma might rise should be squeezed shut. Even if a crack could open, the magma must rise through colder rock. Unless this happened quite rapidly, magma would cool, solidify, and plug up the crack. Also, heat diffuses. So, what concentrated enough heat to create the “hot pockets” and melt the vast volumes of rock that erupted in the past?
On the Columbia Plateau in the northwestern United States, 64,000 square miles of lava, with an average depth of 2/3 mile, spilled out rapidly under water.18 On the Deccan Plateau in western India, 200,000 square miles have been flooded with lava to an average depth of 3/4 mile. In southwestern Siberia, lava deposits are many times larger. The floor of the Pacific has even larger examples. Escaping magma at the Ontong-Java Plateau, on the floor of the western Pacific, was four times more extensive than on the Deccan Plateau. How did so much magma form, and how did it get out?
The world’s two deepest holes in hard basement rock are on the Kola Peninsula in northern Russia and in Germany’s northeastern Bavaria.19 They were drilled to depths of 7.5 miles and 5.7 miles, respectively. (Such deep holes, when quickly filled with water or dense mud, will stay open.) Neither hole reached the basalt underlying the granite continents. Deep in the Russian hole, to everyone’s surprise, was hot, salty water flowing through crushed granite.20 Why was the granite crushed? In the German hole, the drill encountered cracks throughout the lower few miles. All cracks contained salt water having concentrations about twice that of seawater. Remember, surface waters cannot seep deeper than 5 miles, because the weight of overlying rock squeezes shut even microscopic flow channels. While geologists are mystified by this deep salt water, the hydroplate theory provides a simple answer.
Another surprise at these drill sites was the greater-than-expected increase in the granite’s temperature with increasing depth. This raises the question of why the earth’s crust is so hot.
Geothermal Heat. Heat inside the earth is called geothermal heat. In general, the deeper man has gone into the earth—first in deep caves and mines and later with drills—the hotter the rock gets. What is the origin of geothermal heat? As children, most of us were taught that the early earth was molten. Later, we were told the earth slowly grew (evolved) by meteoritic impacts whose energy made the earth molten.
This popular story has several problems. First, the rate of temperature increase with depth, called the temperature gradient, varies at different locations by up to a factor of six.21 This is true even when considering only continental rock far from volcanoes. The deep drilling in Russia and Germany encountered rock so much hotter than expected that each project was terminated earlier than planned. If the earth has been cooling for billions of years, one would expect very uniform temperature increases with depth at most locations. Unusually hot or cold regions should not exist, because heat diffuses from hotter to colder regions.
Had the earth ever been molten, denser materials would have sunk toward the earth’s center, and lighter materials would have floated to the surface. One should not find dense, fairly nonreactive metals, such as gold, at the earth’s surface. [See “Molten Earth?” on page 80.] Even granite, the basic continental rock, is a mixture of many minerals with varying densities. If melted granite slowly cooled, a “layer cake” of vertically sorted minerals would form instead of granite. So, earth’s crust was never molten.
Mathematical solutions for heat conduction in spheres, such as the earth, are well known. These solutions can incorporate many facts, such as the earth’s thermal properties, radioactive heat generation, and temperatures at the earth’s surface. Such analyses are hopelessly inconsistent with the “molten-earth” story and “billions of years of cooling.” [See “Molten Earth?” on page 25 and “Rapid Cooling” on page 36.] What then generated geothermal heat, and why does it still vary so widely?
Strata. Earth’s crust is frequently stratified with layered rock (or strata) composed of cemented sediments. These layers, called sedimentary rock, are typically uniform, parallel, vast in area, thin, and tipped at all angles within mountains and under valleys. Often one layer rests on another having a completely different texture, color, and mineral content. What global process could have sorted and cemented these sediments? Present processes do not.
Why are strata so uniform in hardness? If truckloads of sand and other dry sediments were dumped on your yard and bags of cement were placed in another pile, anyone would have difficulty mixing them uniformly. Without a uniform mixture of cementing agent, concrete (and sedimentary rock) would quickly crumble.
Limestone. A typical cementing agent in sedimentary rock is calcium carbonate (CaCO3)—commonly called limestone. Any geologist who stops to think about it should realize that the earth has too much limestone, at least based on present processes. Sediments and sedimentary rock on the continents average about a mile in thickness and contain 10–15% limestone.22 How did so much limestone form—much of it quite pure? Limestone, without the impurities that normally drift in, suggests rapid burial. Most limestone is in vast layers, tens of thousands of square miles in area and hundreds of feet thick. Today, limestone forms either as it precipitates out of seawater or as sea creatures manufacture shells and corals containing limestone. In either case, oceans supply limestone sediments, but oceans already contain about as much dissolved limestone as they can possibly hold. So, where did all the limestone come from, especially its calcium and carbon, which are relatively rare outside of limestone?
Metamorphic Rock. Rocks change structurally and chemically when their temperatures and/or pressures exceed certain high values. The new rock is called a metamorphic rock. For example, limestone becomes marble (a metamorphic rock) when its temperature exceeds 1,600°F and the confining pressure corresponds to the weight of a 23-mile-high column of rock. Diamonds, another metamorphic rock, form under confining pressures corresponding to the weight of a 75-mile-high column of rock and 1,600°F, and yet diamonds are found in crustal rocks that were never deep.23 Most metamorphic rocks were formed in the presence of water, often flowing water.24 What caused the extreme temperature, pressure, and abundance of water?
The standard answer is that the original rock, such as limestone, was heated and compressed under a tall mountain or deep in the earth. Later, either the mountain eroded away or the deep rock rose to the earth’s surface. That would take millions of years. It is difficult to imagine mountains 23 or 75 miles high, because the world’s tallest mountain, Mount Everest, is only 5 1/2 miles high. Raising buried layers of rock 23 or 75 miles to the earth’s surface is even more difficult to explain, but with millions of years supposedly available to do it, few consider it a problem; fewer still address the problem. Ignored in this standard explanation is the frequent requirement for water, sometimes flowing water. Surface water, remember, cannot seep deeper in rock than about 5 miles, and even at 5 miles, water hardly flows. Metamorphic rock is a giant enigma.
Plateaus. Plateaus are relatively flat regions of extensive area that have been uplifted (not buckled) more than 500 feet relative to surrounding regions. Nearly horizontal rock layers underlie a plateau. The same sequence of layers surrounds the plateau but the layers lie at a lower elevation. Professor George C. Kennedy explains some of the problems associated with plateaus quite well.
The problem of the uplift of large plateau areas is one which has puzzled students of the Earth’s crust for a very long time. ... Given an Earth with sialic [granitic] continents floating in denser simatic [basaltic] substratum, what mechanism would cause a large volume of low standing continents to rise rapidly a mile in the air? Furthermore, evidence from gravity surveys suggests that the rocks underlying the Colorado plateau are in isostatic balance, that is, this large area is floating at its correct elevation in view of its mass and density. Recent seismic evidence confirms this, in that the depth to the M discontinuity [the Moho, explained below] under the Colorado plateau is approximately 10 kilometers [6 miles] greater than over most of continental North America. Thus, appropriate roots of light rock extend into the dense substratum to account for the higher elevation of the Colorado plateau. We have then a double-ended mystery, for the Colorado plateau seems to have grown downward at the same time that its emerged part rose upward. This is just as startling as it would be to see a floating cork suddenly rise and float a half inch higher in a pan of water. To date, the only hypothesis to explain the upward motion of large regions like the Colorado plateau is that of convection currents. Slowly moving convection currents in the solid rock, some 40 to 50 kilometers [25 to 30 miles] below the surface of the Earth, are presumed to have swept a great volume of light rock from some unidentified place and to have deposited it underneath the Colorado plateau. A total volume of approximately 2,500,000 cubic miles of sialic rock is necessary to account for the uplift of the Colorado plateau. While it is not hard to visualize rocks as having no great strength at the high pressures and temperatures existing at depths of 40 to 50 kilometers, it is quite another matter to visualize currents in solid rock of sufficient magnitude to bring in and deposit this quantity of light material in a relatively uniform layer underneath the entire Colorado plateau region.
The Tibetan plateaus present a similar problem, but on a vastly larger scale. There, an area of 750,000 square miles has been uplifted from approximately sea level to a mean elevation of roughly three miles, and the Himalayan mountain chain bordering this region has floated upward some five miles, and rather late in geologic time, probably within the last 20,000,000 years. The quantity of light rock which would need to be swept underneath these plateaus by convection currents to produce the effects noted would be an order of magnitude greater than that needed to uplift the Colorado plateau, that is, approximately 25,000,000 cubic miles. Even more troublesome than the method of transporting all this light rock at shallow depths below the surface of the Earth is the problem of its source. The region from which the light rock was moved should have experienced spectacular subsidence, but no giant neighboring depressions are known. A lesser but large problem is how such enormous quantities of light rock can be dispersed so uniformly over so large an area.25
The Moho. The Mohorovicic discontinuity, usually called the Moho, is the boundary between the earth’s crust and mantle. The Moho was discovered in 1909 by seismologist Andrija Mohorovicic. He noticed that earthquake waves travel noticeably faster below the Moho than above. In the early 1960s, efforts were made to drill deep enough to penetrate the Moho and learn what constitutes the Moho, but cost overruns and alleged mismanagement shut the project down. Today, drilling efforts are finding that above the Moho the “rock had been thoroughly fractured and was saturated with water, and free water should not be found at these depths!” 26 What is the Moho, why is the rock above fractured, and why does it contain free water?
Salt Domes. Vast salt layers are sometimes buried as much as several miles below the earth’s surface. Single salt layers in the Gulf of Mexico are sometimes 20,000 feet below sea level,27 100,000 square miles in area, and a mile thick! Often a salt layer has bulged upward several miles, like a big underground bubble, to form a salt dome. Large salt deposits are not being laid down today, even in the Great Salt Lake. What concentrated so much deep salt? Certainly 20,000 feet of water did not evaporate.
Large, deep salt deposits are also found under the Mediterranean Sea. A codiscoverer of these Mediterranean deposits claims that the Mediterranean must have evaporated 8–10 times to deposit so much salt.28 His estimate is probably low, but even so, why didn’t each refilling of the Mediterranean basin redissolve the salt residue left from prior evaporations, allowing currents to remove the salt from the basin?
Jigsaw Fit of the Continents. For centuries, beginning possibly with Francis Bacon in 1620, many have noticed the approximate jigsaw fit of the continents bordering the Atlantic. It is only natural that bold thinkers, such as Alfred Wegener in 1915, would propose that the continents were once connected as shown in Figure 49, and somehow they broke apart and moved to their present positions. But would continents, which extend to the edge of the submerged continental shelf (discovered in the mid-1800s and often hundreds of miles wide), really fit together as shown in textbooks? Distances are distorted when a globe is flattened into a two-dimensional map. Therefore, to answer this question, I formed two plates on a globe, matching the true shape and curvature of the continents. [See Figure 50.]
Figure 49: Continental Fit Proposed by Edward Bullard. Can you identify four distortions in this popular explanation of how the continents once fit together? First, Africa was shrunk in area by 35%. Second, Central America, southern Mexico, and the Caribbean Islands were removed. Third, a slice was made through the Mediterranean, and Europe was rotated counterclockwise and Africa was rotated clockwise. Finally, North and South America were rotated relative to each other. (Notice the rotation of the north-south and east-west lines.) Overlapping areas are shown in black.
The classical fit (Figure 49), proposed by Sir Edward Bullard, appears at first glance to be a better fit of the continents than my plates. However, notice in Figure 49’s caption the great “latitude” Bullard took in juggling continents. Were these distortions made to improve the fit? Few, if any, textbooks inform us of these distortions.
Figure 50: Continental Plates Made on a Globe. Notice that the fit of the actual continents is not as good as Bullard proposed. [See Figure 49.]
Instead of fitting the continents to each other, notice in Figure 51 how well they each fit the base of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. The hydroplate theory proposes that:
a. These continents were once in the approximate positions shown in Figure 51.
b. They were connected by rock that was rapidly crushed, eroded, and transported worldwide by erupting subterranean water.
c. As these eroded sediments were deposited, they trapped and buried plants and animals. The sediments became today’s sedimentary rock; buried organisms became fossils.
d. The continents quickly slid on a layer of water (rapid continental drift) away from what is now the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and came to rest near their present locations.
Details and evidence will be given later in this chapter.
Figure 51: Continental Plates on a Globe. By far the best fit of the continents is with the base of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge—not with other continents, as shown in Figure 50.
Layered Fossils. Fossils rarely form today, because dead plants and animals decay before they are buried in enough sediments to preserve their shapes. We certainly do not observe fossils forming in layered strata that can be traced over thousands of square miles. So, how did so many fossils form? It will soon become apparent why animals and plants were trapped and buried in sediments that were quickly cemented to form the fossil record and why fossils of sea life are found on every major mountain range.
Changing Axis Tilt. George F. Dodwell served as the Government Astronomer for South Australia from 1909 to 1952. In the mid-1930s, he became interested in past changes in the tilt of the earth’s axis. He collected almost 100 astronomical measurements made over a 4,000-year period. Those measurements indicate that the tilt of the earth’s axis smoothly decayed from 25°10' to its present value of 23°27'. Based on the shape of the decay curve, Dodwell estimated that this axis shift began in about the year 2345 B.C.29
Although the gravitational forces of the Sun, Moon and planets can change the tilt of the earth’s axis, such changes are much slower than those Dodwell measured. Extraterrestrial bodies striking the earth would provide an abrupt change in axis orientation, not the smooth changes Dodwell measured. Also, only a massive and fast asteroid striking the earth at a favorable angle would tilt the axis this much. The resulting pressure pulse would pass through the entire atmosphere and quickly kill most air-breathing animals—a recent extinction without evidence.
Comets, Asteroids, and Meteorites. These strange bodies, sometimes called “the mavericks of the solar system,” have several remarkable similarities with planet earth. They contain considerable water. (About 38% of the mass of comet Tempel 1 was frozen water.30) Water is rare in the universe, but both common and concentrated on earth—often called “the water planet.” Most of the remaining mass of a comet is dust, primarily the crystalline mineral olivine. Solid material that formed in space would not be crystalline. Olivine may be the most abundant of the almost 4,000 known minerals in the earth’s crust and mantle. Asteroids and meteorites are similar in many ways to earth rocks. Surprisingly, a few meteorites contain salt crystals, liquid water, and living bacteria!31 Some asteroids have a chemical substance (kerogen) found in plants.
Summary. These are a few of the mysteries associated with the 25 topics listed on page 104. The hydroplate theory will explain these mysteries and tie together the causes and effects of this dramatic, global catastrophe.