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.
A PDF version or hardbound print version may be ordered.
Copyright © 1995–2008, Center for Scientific Creation. All rights reserved.
Click here to order the hardbound print edition of this online book.
Phases of the Hydroplate Theory: Rupture, Flood, Drift, and Recovery
Figure 54: Rupture Phase of the Flood. This 46,000-mile-long rupture encircled the earth near what is now the Mid-Oceanic Ridge.
Rupture Phase. Centuries of tidal pumping (explained on page 112) powerfully increased the pressure in the subterranean water. This stretched the overlying crust, just as a balloon stretches when the pressure inside increases. Eventually, this shell of rock reached its failure point. Failure began with a microscopic crack at the earth’s surface. Because stresses in such cracks are concentrated at each end of the crack, each end grew rapidly—at about 3 miles per second. Within seconds, this crack penetrated down to the subterranean chamber and then followed the path of least resistance around the earth. The ends of the crack, traveling in opposite directions, circled the earth in about one hour.49 Initial stresses were largely relieved when one end of the crack ran into the path left by the other end. In other words, the crack traveled a path that intersected itself at a large angle, forming a “T” or “Y” somewhere on the opposite side of the earth from where the rupture began.
As the crack raced around the earth, the 10-mile-thick crust opened like a rip in a tightly stretched cloth. Pressure in the subterranean chamber immediately beneath the rupture suddenly dropped to nearly atmospheric pressure. This caused supercritical water to explode with great violence out of the 10-mile-deep “slit” that wrapped around the earth like the seam of a baseball.
Figure 55: Jetting Fountains. For a global perspective of what this may have looked like, see page 99.
All along this globe-circling rupture, whose path approximates today’s Mid-Oceanic Ridge,50 a fountain of water jetted supersonically into and far above the atmosphere. Much of the water fragmented into an “ocean” of droplets that fell as rain great distances away. This produced torrential rains such as the earth has never experienced—before or after.
Some jetting water rose above the atmosphere, where it froze and then fell on various regions of the earth as huge masses of extremely cold, muddy “hail.” That hail buried, suffocated, and froze many animals, including some mammoths. [For details, see “Frozen Mammoths” on pages 224–255.] The most powerful jetting water and rock debris escaped the earth’s gravity and became the solar system’s comets, asteroids, and meteoroids. [For details, see “The Origin of Comets” on pages 258–288, and “The Origin of Asteroids and Meteoroids” on pages 290–308.]
Figure 56: Flood Phase. Sediments in the escaping water increased until their volume nearly equaled the volume of water gushing out. These suspended particles quickly settled and buried plants and animals in a chaotic mixture. During this phase, a phenomenon called liquefaction sorted sediments, animals, and plants into horizontal layers that are more uniform and cover a much larger area than sedimentary layers laid down today. Traces of these dead organisms are called fossils. Global liquefaction is explained on pages 166–176.
Flood Phase. Each side of the rupture was basically a 10-mile-high cliff. Compressive, vibrating51 loads in the bottom half of the cliff face greatly exceeded the rock’s crushing strength, so the bottom half of the cliff continuously crumbled, collapsed, and spilled out into the jetting fountains. That removed support for the top half of the cliff, so it also fragmented and fell into the pulverizing supersonic flow. Consequently, the 46,000-mile-long rupture rapidly grew to an average width of about 800 miles all around the earth.
About 35% of the eroded sediments were from the basalt of the chamber floor.52 Sediments swept up in the escaping flood waters gave the water a thick, muddy consistency. These sediments settled out over the earth’s surface in days, trapping and burying many plants and animals, beginning the process of forming the world’s fossils.
The rising flood waters eventually blanketed the water jetting from the rupture, although water still surged out of the rupture. Because today’s major mountains had not yet formed, global flooding covered the earth’s relatively smooth topography.
As explained on page 112, salt precipitated out of the supercritical subterranean water before the flood began, covering the chamber floor with solid, but mushy, salt. Escaping water swept some of it out of the chambers, but other layers of salt remained on the chamber floor. When sediments blanketed the pasty, relatively low-density salt, an unstable arrangement arose, much like having a layer of light oil beneath a denser layer of water. A slight jiggle will cause the lighter layer below to flow up as a plume through the denser layer above. In the case of salt, that plume is called a salt dome. The extremely deep salt layers—some up to 20,000 feet below sea level27—are resting on what was the much deeper chamber floor. Wherever the chamber roof was removed, the floor below rose. Two such places are now the Gulf of Mexico and the Mediterranean Sea.
Figure 57: Salt Dome. Just as a cork released at the bottom of a swimming pool will float up through water, wet salt can float up through denser sediments. Salt dome formation begins when a small part of a wet salt layer rises. That causes other salt in the layer to flow horizontally and then up into a rising plume. If the salt and sediments are mushy and saturated with water, friction offers little resistance. The upturned (or bowl-shaped) layers next to the salt dome can become traps in which oil collects, so understanding salt domes has great economic value.
The supercritical water (SCW) in the subterranean chamber also dissolved minerals containing calcium, carbon, and oxygen. They, too, precipitated out of the SCW as temperatures rose, lining the chamber floor with limestone (CaCO3) particles. As the flood waters escaped, these particles were also swept out and up to the earth’s surface. The total volume of limestone on the earth today is staggering and cannot be explained by processes occurring at the earth’s surface. But, of course, the limestone we see today did not originate at the earth’s surface. [See “The Origin of Limestone” on pages 216–221.]
Flooding uprooted most of earth’s abundant vegetation and transported it to regions where it accumulated in great masses. [Pages 166–176 explain how this vegetation was collected and sorted into thin layers within the sediments.] Later, at the end of the continental-drift phase, buried layers of vegetation were rapidly compressed and heated, precisely the conditions that laboratory experiments have shown will form coal and oil.55 The flood phase ended with the continents near the positions shown in Figure 51 and the top frame of Figure 61.
Continental-Drift Phase. Material within the earth is compressed by overlying rock. Rock’s slight elasticity gives it springlike characteristics.56 The deeper the rock, the more weight above, so the more tightly compressed the “spring”—all the way down to the center of the earth.
The rupture path continuously widened during the flood phase. [See Figure 59e.] Eventually, the width was so great, and so much of the surface weight had been removed, that the compressed rock beneath the exposed floor of the subterranean chamber sprung upward. [See Figure 59f.]
As the Mid-Atlantic Ridge began to rise, creating slopes on either side, the granite hydroplates started to slide downhill. This removed even more weight from what was to become the floor of the Atlantic Ocean. As weight was removed, the floor rose faster and the slopes increased, so the hydroplates accelerated, removing even more weight, etc. The entire Atlantic floor rapidly rose almost 10 miles.
a) Overlying rocks keep a compressed spring horizontal.
d) Rupture completed. Jetting water not shown.
b) The spring remains aligned and compressed as the gap between the rocks widens.
e) The rupture’s path widens by the crushing, erosion, and collapse of the vertical walls, exposing what will become the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Most of earth’s sediments are quickly produced by escaping, high-velocity waters—the fountains of the great deep.
c) When the gap reaches a certain critical width, the spring suddenly buckles upward. Now consider thousands of similar springs lined up behind the first spring—all linked together and repeating in unison steps a–c. The upward buckling of any spring will cause adjacent springs to become unstable and buckle up themselves. They, in turn, will lift the next spring, and so on, in ripple fashion.
f) Continental-drift phase begins. The Mid-Atlantic Ridge “springs” upward, releasing extreme amounts of energy, inherent in compressed rock. Fracture zones form perpendicular to the ridge axis; rifts form along the ridge axis. [See Endnote 57 on page 129.] The massive hydroplates, lubricated by water, begin to accelerate downhill. As more and more weight slides away from the newly-formed Ridge, the exposed chamber floor quickly rises several miles (accelerating the hydroplates even more) and becomes the Atlantic floor.
Figure 59: Spring Analogy Showing Development of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.
As the first segment of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge began to rise, it helped lift adjacent portions of the chamber floor just enough for them to become unstable and spring upward. This process continued all along the rupture path, forming the Mid-Oceanic Ridge. Also formed were fracture zones and the ridge’s strange offsets at fracture zones.57 Soon afterward, magnetic anomalies (Figure 46 on page 104) developed.58
For a day or so, the sliding hydroplates were almost perfectly lubricated by water still escaping from beneath them. This process resembled the following:
A long train sits at one end of a very long, level track. If we could somehow just barely lift the end of the track under the train and the wheels were frictionless, the train would start rolling downhill. Then we could lift the track even higher, causing the train to accelerate even more. If this continued, the high-speed train would eventually crash into something. The long train of boxcars would suddenly decelerate, compress, crush, and “jackknife.”
Continental plates accelerated away from the widening Atlantic. (Recall that the rupture encircled the earth, and escaping subterranean water widened that rupture to an average of about 800 miles—on what is now the Pacific side of the earth as well as the Atlantic side. Plates then slid away from the rising Mid-Atlantic Ridge and toward that 800-mile gap on the Pacific side of the earth.59 The next chapter will explain dramatic events that occurred simultaneously in the Pacific.)
Eventually, the drifting—actually, accelerating—hydroplates ran into resistances of two types. The first happened as the water lubricant beneath each sliding plate was depleted. The second occurred when a plate collided with something. As each massive hydroplate decelerated, it experienced a gigantic compression event—buckling, crushing, and thickening each plate.
Figure 61: Computer Animation of the Continental-Drift Phase. The top frame shows one side of the earth at the end of the flood phase. Because the rupture encircled the earth, a similar eroded gap existed between the continental plates on the other side of the globe. The Mid-Oceanic Ridge rose first in the Atlantic, hours or days before the ridge traveled to and rose in what is now the Pacific. This caused the hydroplates to accelerate downhill on a layer of lubricating water, away from the widening Atlantic and into the gap on the opposite side of the earth.
The continental-drift phase ended (bottom frame) with the dramatic compression event that squeezed up the earth’s major mountains. These six frames simply rotate the present continents about today’s polar axis. Therefore, greater movement occurs at lower latitudes. Movement begins from where the continents best fit against today’s base of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge (see Figure 51 on page 109) and ends near their present locations.
Not shown are consequences of the compression event. For example, the compression squeezed and thickened continents, narrowing the widths of the major continents and widening the Atlantic. Of course, regions where postflood mountains formed thickened the most, but nonmountainous regions thickened as well. Regions that did not thicken are now part of the shallow ocean floor. [See Figure 42 on page 103.]
While it may seem strange to think of squeezing, thickening, and shortening granite, one must understand the gigantic forces required to decelerate sliding continental plates. If compressive forces are great enough, granite deforms (much like putty) on a global scale. On a human scale, however, one would not see smooth, puttylike deformation; instead, one would see and hear blocks of granite fracturing and sliding over each other. Some blocks would be the size of a small state or province, many would be the size of a house, and even more would be the size of a grain of sand. Friction at all sliding surfaces would generate heat. At great depths, this would melt rock. Liquid rock (magma) would squirt up and fill spaces between the blocks. This is seen in most places where basement rocks are exposed, as in the Black Canyon of the Gunnison (Figure 65 on page 121) and the inner gorge of the Grand Canyon (Figure 66 on page 121).
To illustrate this extreme compression, imagine yourself in a car traveling at 45 miles per hour. You gently step on the brake as you approach a stop light and brace yourself by straightening and stiffening your arms against the steering wheel. You might feel 15 pounds of compressive force in each arm, about what you would feel lifting 15 pounds above your head with each hand. If we repeated your gentle deceleration at the stop light, but each time doubled your weight, the compressive force in your arms would also double each time. After about six doublings, especially if you were sitting on a lubricated surface, your arm bones would break. If your bones were made of steel, they would break after nine doublings. If your arm bones were one foot in diameter and made of granite, a much stronger material, 17 doublings would crush them. This compression would be comparable to that at the top of each decelerating hydroplate. The compression at the base of the hydroplate exceeded the crushing strength of granite, even before the deceleration, simply due to the weight of overlying rock. Consequently, crashing hydroplates at the end of the continental-drift phase crushed and thickened each hydroplate for many minutes. Mountains were quickly squeezed up. The earth’s crust took on the thickness variations we see today.60
As the new postflood continents rose out of the flood waters, water drained into newly opened ocean basins. For each cubic mile of land that rose out of the flood waters, one cubic mile of flood water could drain. (Note: the volume of all land above sea level is only one-tenth the volume of water on earth.)
Compressing a long, thin object, such as a yardstick, produces no bending or displacement until the compressive force reaches a certain critical amount. Once this threshold is exceeded, the yardstick (or any compressed beam or plate) suddenly arches into a bowed position. Further compression bows it up even more. Buckling a hydroplate at one point bends adjacent portions.
Mountain chains were also pushed up by the crushing of hydroplates. Where the compression exceeded the crushing strength of granite, the plate thickened and shortened. The collapse of strength in the crushed region increased the load on adjacent regions, causing them to crush and the mountain chain to lengthen. Therefore, bending and crushing rapidly lifted mountain chains. Naturally, the long axis of each buckled mountain was generally perpendicular to its hydroplate’s motion—that is, parallel to the portion of the Mid-Oceanic Ridge from which it slid. So, the Rocky Mountains, Appalachians, and Andes have a north-south orientation.
As explained earlier, the forces acting during this dramatic event were not applied to stationary (static) continents resting on other rocks. The forces were dynamic, produced by rapidly decelerating hydroplates riding on lubricating water that had not yet escaped from beneath them.
Figure 62: Buckling. The upward buckling of a deep rock floor has been observed. A limestone quarry floor buckled upward in Yorkshire, England, in 1887.53 The explanation is quite simple. Shale, which lay beneath the floor, consists of platelike particles that can slide over each other like playing cards in a deck. The weight of the quarry’s walls squeezed shale toward the center of the quarry, increasing the pressure on the quarry floor. Once the slightest upward buckling began, the limestone floor weakened, allowing the shale to push up even more.
In the flood cataclysm, the “quarry” was about 10 miles deep, hundreds of miles wide, and 46,000 miles long. The high upward pressure on the “exposed” portion of the subterranean chamber floor was no longer balanced by the weight of the crust pressing down. Therefore, that portion of the chamber floor increasingly bulged upward, as happened in the quarry. Eventually, the hydroplates, still supported by high-pressure water, began to slide downhill, away from the rapidly rising bulge. This removed even more weight from the chamber floor, accelerating its upward bulging. Today, the upbuckled region is the globe-encircling Mid-Oceanic Ridge.
Mechanical and civil engineers call this phenomenon “the buckling of a plate on an elastic foundation.”54 I have often demonstrated this to audiences by placing long bricks on top of a foam mattress compressed in a rigid box. Then I slowly remove the bricks from the foam mattress, beginning at the center and moving outward. When enough bricks are removed, the mattress suddenly springs upward, raising the remaining bricks. If these bricks were on a frictionless surface, they would slide downhill, just as continents (hydroplates) did during the continental-drift phase.
Although a void opens up under the upbuckled foam mattress, no void would open up deep inside the earth, because pressures are too great. Consequently, high-pressure rock from below would be squeezed up to fill the space. That would not leave a void farther down, because even deeper rock would buckle into that space. Ultimately, mass from the opposite side of the earth must depress to compensate for the rising of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and the entire Atlantic floor. Thus, the Pacific and Indian Oceans rapidly formed. Evidence and details are given on pages 140–163.
As mountains buckled up, the remaining water under the plate tended to fill large voids. Some pooled water should still remain in cracked and contorted layers of rock. [See Figures 63 and 64.] This would partially explain the reduced mass beneath mountains that gravity measurements have shown for over a century.61formed
PREDICTION 1: Beneath major mountains are large volumes of pooled salt water.62 (Recent discoveries support this prediction, first made in 1980. Salt water appears to be about 10 miles below the Tibetan Plateau, which is bounded on the south by the largest mountain range on earth.)63
PREDICTION 2: Salty water frequently fills cracks in granite, 5-10 miles below the earth’s surface (where surface water should not be able to penetrate).
(Note: Each of the 39 predictions in this book is marked by an icon at the left representing Figure 40 on page 99.)
Friction at the base of skidding hydroplates and below sinking mountains generated immense heat, enough to melt rock, produce huge volumes of magma, and begin earth’s volcanic activity. Crushing produced similar effects, as broken and extremely compressed blocks and particles slid past each other. The deeper the sliding, the greater the pressure pushing the sliding surfaces together, and the greater the frictional heat generated. In some regions, high temperatures and extreme pressures from the compression event formed metamorphic rock, such as marble and diamonds. Where heat was most intense, rock melted. High-pressure magma squirted up through cracks between broken blocks. Sometimes magma escaped to the earth’s surface, producing volcanic activity and “floods” of lava outpourings, called flood basalts, as seen on the Pacific floor and the Columbia and Deccan Plateaus. The next chapter will explain the simultaneous production of deeper and far greater amounts of magma, some of which also escaped to the earth’s surface as flood basalts. (Magma frequently collected under the earth’s surface in pockets called magma chambers. When magma escapes from these chambers, volcanoes erupt. The heat remaining today is called geothermal heat.)
Some high-pressure subterranean water was quickly injected up into cracks in the crushed granite. This explains the concentrated salt water discovered in cracks 7.5 and 5.7 miles under Russia and Germany, respectively. Remember, surface water cannot seep deeper than 5 miles, implying that subsurface water was the source. This explains why the water’s salt concentration in these cracks was about twice that of seawater. Because that high concentration of subterranean salt water mixed during the flood with an approximately equal volume of preflood surface water (which had little dissolved salt), today’s oceans achieved their present salt concentration.
As the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and Atlantic floor rose, mass had to shift within the earth toward the Atlantic. Subsidence occurred on the opposite side of the earth, especially in the western Pacific, where granite plates buckled downward, forming trenches. [For details and evidence, see “The Origin of Ocean Trenches” on pages 140–163.]
Surrounding the Pacific is the “ring of fire,” containing the best-known concentration of volcanic activity on earth. Within the “ring of fire,” hidden on the floor of the Pacific, are vast, thick lava flows and 40,000 volcanoes, each taller than 1 kilometer. Frictional heating caused by high-pressure movements under the Pacific floor generated these lava outpourings that covered the hydroplate.
Therefore, the western Pacific floor is littered with volcanic cones composed of minerals typically found in granite and basalt. Continental crust has been discovered under the Pacific floor. [See Endnote 19 on page 158, and the prediction on page 151.]
Recovery Phase. Where did the water go? When the compression event began on a particular hydroplate, the plate crushed, thickened, buckled, and rose out of the water. As it did, the flood waters receded.
Simultaneously, the upward-surging, subterranean water was “choked off” as the plates settled onto the subterranean chamber floor. With the water source shut off, the deep, newly-opened basins between the continents became reservoirs into which the flood waters returned.
As you will recall, the floors of these deep reservoirs were initially part of the basalt floor of the subterranean chamber, about 10 miles below the earth’s surface. Consequently, sea level soon after the flood was several miles lower than it is today. This provided land bridges between continents, facilitating animal and human migration for perhaps several centuries.
Sediments, mixed with organic matter and its bacteria, were swept with draining flood waters onto the new ocean floors. There, the bacteria fed on the organic matter and produced methane. Since then, much of this methane combined with cold, deep ocean waters to become vast amounts of methane hydrates along coastlines.
Flood waters draining down the steep continental slopes eroded deep channels, especially downstream of drainage channels which are now major rivers. Today, we call these deep channels submarine canyons.
After the flood, hydroplates rested on portions of the former chamber floor, and oceans covered most other portions. Because the thickened hydroplates applied greater pressure to the floor than did the water, the hydroplates slowly sank into the chamber floor over the centuries, causing the deep ocean floor to rise. (Imagine covering half of a waterbed with a cloth and the other half with a thick metal plate. The sinking metal plate will lift the cloth.)
As sea level rose in the centuries after the flood, animals were forced to higher ground and were sometimes isolated on islands far from present continental boundaries. Classic examples of this are finches and other animals Charles Darwin found on the Galapagos Islands, 650 miles off the coast of Ecuador. Today, those islands are the only visible remains of a submerged South American peninsula. Darwin believed that the finches were blown there during a giant storm. Even if Darwin’s unlikely storm happened, both a male and female finch, rugged enough to survive the traumatic trip, must have ended up on each island.
The more sediments that continents carried and the thicker the continents grew during the compression event, the deeper continents sank. This also depressed the Moho beneath them. Newly formed mountains sank even more, depressing the Moho up to 50 miles below the earth’s surface. [See Figure 64.] As the ocean floors rose in compensation, the Moho below it rose as well. This is why continents are so different from ocean bottoms and why the Moho (where it can be detected) is so deep beneath mountains and yet so shallow beneath the ocean floor.
Figure 64: Typical Cross Section of Today’s Continents and Oceans. Notice the relative depths of the Moho. It is deepest under major mountains and shallowest under the ocean floor. Although some boundaries are uncertain, most of these general characteristics are well established. Notice also that large pockets of water may be under major mountains.
Many other things were far from equilibrium after the continental-drift phase. Over the centuries, the new mountain ranges and thickened continental plates settled slowly toward their equilibrium depth—just as a person’s body sinks into a waterbed. Sinking mountains increased the pressure under the crust on both sides of mountain ranges, so weaker portions of the overlying crust fractured and rose, forming plateaus. In other words, as continents and mountains sank, plateaus rose. This explains the otherwise strange aspects of plateaus noted by George Kennedy on page 107.
It also explains why plateaus are adjacent to major mountain ranges. For example, the Tibetan Plateau, the largest in the world, is next to the most massive mountain range in the world—the Himalayas. The Tibetan Plateau covers 750,000 square miles and rose to an elevation of about 3 miles. The Colorado Plateau, next to the Rocky Mountains, and the Columbia Plateau, next to the Cascade Mountains, are other dramatic examples.
Earth Roll. The sudden formation of major mountains altered the spinning earth’s balance,66 causing the earth to slowly roll about 35°–45°. The North Pole, then in what is now central Asia, began a slow shift to its current position.67 (The shift produced a 6° precession of the earth’s axis that Dodwell discovered from studying almost 100 astronomical measurements made over the last 4,000 years.) This is why coal,13 dinosaur fossils,68 and other temperate fossils69 are found near today’s South Pole. Many researchers have also discovered vast dinosaur and mammoth remains inside the Arctic Circle. All were at temperate latitudes before the flood.
The direction and magnitude of the roll are also shown by animals and plants that today live at specific temperate latitudes but whose fossils are found inside the Arctic Circle. Remains of a horse, bear, beaver, badger, shrew, wolverine, rabbit, and considerable temperate vegetation are found on Canada’s Ellesmere Island, inside the Arctic Circle. Such animals and plants today require temperatures about 27°F warmer in the winter and 18°F warmer in the summer.70 Also found are remains of “large lizards, constrictor snakes, tortoises, alligators, tapirs, and flying lemurs—now found only in Southeast Asia.”71 Isotopic studies of the cellulose in redwood trees on Axel Heiberg Island, just west of Ellesmere Island, show that they grew in a climate similar to that of today’s coastal forests of Oregon (35° farther south in latitude).72
Ellesmere Island and Axel Heiberg Island may have the largest known contrast between current temperatures and inferred ancient temperatures based on fossils. Both islands straddle 85°W longitude. Therefore, regions near this longitude experienced large northward shifts following the flood. The preflood North Pole rolled south near 95°E longitude while the region presently occupied by today’s North Pole rolled north near 85°W longitude. Also implied is a roll of at least 35°. Physics66 and geology67 give a similar picture.
An ancient historical record tells of a catastrophic flood and an apparent earth roll. Famous linguist Charles Berlitz reports that early Jesuit missionaries in China located a 4,320-volume work “compiled by Imperial Edict” and containing “all knowledge.” It states,
The Earth was shaken to its foundations. The sky sank lower toward the north. The sun, moon, and stars changed their motions. The Earth fell to pieces and the waters in its bosom rushed upward with violence and overflowed the Earth. Man had rebelled against the high gods and the system of the Universe was in disorder. 73
Endnote 66 explains why the Asian sky began “sinking” toward the north immediately after the flood.
Canyons. Drainage of the waters that covered the earth left every continental basin filled to the brim with water. Some of these postflood lakes lost more water by evaporation and seepage than they gained by rainfall and drainage from higher elevations. Consequently, they shrank over the centuries. A well-known example was former Lake Bonneville, part of which is now the Great Salt Lake.
Through rainfall and drainage from higher terrain, other lakes gained more water than they lost. Thus, water overflowed each lake’s rim at the lowest point on the rim. The resulting erosion at that point on the rim allowed more water to flow over it. This eroded the cut in the rim even deeper and caused much more water to cut it faster. Therefore, the downcutting accelerated catastrophically. The entire lake quickly dumped through a deep slit, which we today call a canyon. These waters spilled into the next lower basin, causing it to breach its rim and create another canyon. It was like falling dominoes. The most famous canyon of all, the Grand Canyon, formed primarily by the dumping of what we will call Grand Lake. It occupied most of the southeast quarter of Utah, parts of northeastern Arizona, as well as small parts of Colorado and New Mexico. [See the map on page 185.] Grand Lake, standing at an elevation of 5,700 feet above today’s sea level, quickly eroded its natural dam 22 miles southwest of what is now Page, Arizona. As a result, the northwestern boundary of former Hopi Lake (elevation 5,950 feet) was eroded, releasing waters that occupied the present valley of the Little Colorado River.
A Picture with a Story
Here at the Black Canyon of the Gunnison in Colorado, rock cliffs are exposed for up to 2,700 feet above the Gunnison River. Their marble-cake appearance comes from melted rock, primarily quartz, that was forced up through cracks in the darker rock.64 To appreciate the size of this cliff, notice the trees, 10 –15 feet tall, at the top of the cliff.
Now, let’s put aside all prior opinions and ask, “What must happen to cause this marble-cake pattern?” First, deep magma must be present or be produced.
Figure 65: Black Canyon of the Gunnison.
Second, the black rock must be fractured. This obviously takes gigantic forces acting over a large area, but the forces must be of a special kind. A tensile (stretching) force would produce one crack, or at most a few evenly-spaced cracks. At the instant of breakage, the pieces would scatter. (Try breaking something by pulling on it. When it breaks, the pieces will fly apart.) This leaves us with only one viable type of force—compression.65
If compressive forces acted equally in all directions, no breaks would occur. For example, deep sea creatures, living under high compressive pressure (inside and out), are not crushed. Also not crushed are many delicate pieces of pottery and other objects found in sunken vessels on the ocean floor.
If compressive forces acted slowly but were almost evenly balanced, slight but slow movements would occur at the molecular level, a phenomenon called creep. The rock would slowly flow like putty, until the forces balanced.
Some channels (or cracks) are wider than others. Normally, the largest channels provide the least resistance to the flow, and all the magma from below should have spilled out through them. (Pump a liquid into a closed container until it cracks. You will see only one or at most a few major cracks, not many little cracks.) If the magma had been contained in a chamber below, just waiting for a crack to appear, the first crack should release all the magma, unless it solidified on its way up through the colder rock. But if all cracks formed simultaneously, then magma would fill most cracks. All this leaves us with one conclusion for how the fractures occurred—rapid crushing.
Next, magma must rapidly squirt up through the cracks in the black rock. If it happened slowly, or even at the rate a river flows, the front edge of the upward-flowing magma would solidify (freeze), stopping the flow. If water is dissolved in any molten rock, its melting or freezing temperature is lowered considerably. Therefore, melted quartz with dissolved water could better survive the cold, upward journey.
Each individual channel (or vein) at the Black Canyon has a fairly uniform thickness. This reveals that the liquid’s pressure exceeded the rock’s pressure by nearly the same amount all along the channel. Again, this would not happen if the flow were slow or its consistency like that of cold tar.
This marble-cake appearance is exposed for at least 50 miles along the Gunnison River, so the compressive force must have been about the same over at least those 50 miles. Magma, if it came from one spot below, would tend to escape through the shortest cracks leading to the surface. Instead, magma has filled cracks over a 50 mile range. Consequently, the magma source and any water was probably spread over a large area directly below.
Because similar structures are seen where other deep basement rocks are exposed, these gigantic forces either “cropped up” many times at different places or this happened once on a continental or global scale. The parsimony criterion (looking for the simplest explanation) leads us to favor one big event. We will call this the compression event.
Figure 66: Inner Gorge of the Grand Canyon. The same marble-cake pattern exists in the inner gorge of the Grand Canyon, but with less color contrast than at the Black Canyon of the Gunnison.
We can conclude that this crustal rock was rapidly crushed over a wide area. Magma (probably containing dissolved water) was then quickly injected up through the cracks.
In studying this effect—an immense layer of “marble-cake rock”—we tried to deduce its cause. One can easily err when reasoning from effect back to cause. Another approach, that of reasoning from cause to effect, unfortunately requires starting assumptions. We began this on page 111 with an assumption and then looked at its logical consequences. When “cause-to-effect reasoning” is consistent with “effect-to-cause reasoning,” as it is here, confidence in our conclusion increases greatly.
PREDICTION 3: The Global Positioning System (GPS) measures plate velocities with ever increasing accuracy as data accumulates and equipment improves. Because the earth’s crust is shifting toward equilibrium, today’s plate velocities will be found to be very gradually decreasing.
PREDICTION 4: The crystalline rock under Gibraltar, the Bosporus and Dardanelles, and the Golden Gate bridge will be found to be eroded into a V-shaped notch. (This prediction concerning the Bosporus and Dardanelles, first published in 1995, was confirmed in 1998.)74
With thousands of large, high lakes after the flood, many other canyons were carved. “Lake California” filling the Great Central Valley of California carved a canyon (now largely filled with sediments) under what is now the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. The Strait of Gibraltar was a breach point as the rising Atlantic Ocean eventually spilled eastward into the Mediterranean. The Mediterranean Sea, in turn, spilled eastward over what is now the Bosporus and Dardanelles, forming the Black Sea.
Earthquakes. The flood produced great mass imbalances on earth, and these cause earthquakes. Continents sank into the mantle and lifted ocean floors. Mountain ranges sank into the mantle and raised plateaus. [See beginning on “Plateau Uplift” on page 187.] The shifting of material75 within the earth is the root cause of earthquakes and the slow shifting of continents. Both phenomena have been misinterpreted as supporting plate tectonics. (The following chapter explains this in greater detail.)
These powerful forces have different consequences at different depths. Some minerals suddenly rearrange their atoms into denser packing arrangements when the temperature and pressure rise above certain thresholds. This produces chains of microscopic implosions a few hundred miles below the earth’s surface.76 Because the flood occurred only about 5,000 years ago, temperatures are not uniformly hot at these depths.
Shallow earthquakes involve a different phenomenon.77 Trapped subterranean water, unable to escape during the flood, slowly seeps upward through cracks and faults formed during the crushing of the compression event. (Seismographs on the Pacific Ocean floor have measured tremors from such seepings.)78 The higher this water migrates through a crack, the more its pressure exceeds that in the walls of the crack trying to contain it. Consequently, the crack spreads and lengthens. (So, before an earthquake, the ground often bulges slightly, water levels sometimes change in wells, and geyser eruptions may become more irregular.) Simultaneously, stresses build up in the crust, again driven ultimately by gravity and mass imbalances produced by the flood. Once compressive stresses have risen enough, the cracks have grown enough, and the frictional locking of cracked surfaces has diminished enough, sudden movement occurs. Water acts as a lubricant. (Therefore, large temperature increases are not found along the San Andreas Fault.) Sliding friction instantly heats the water, converts it to steam at an even higher pressure, and initiates a runaway process called a shallow earthquake. [For more details, see “The Origin of Ocean Trenches” on pages 140–163.]
Ice Age. As mentioned on page 105, an ice age requires cold continents and warm oceans. Indeed, even the Arctic Ocean was a warm 73°F (23°C) soon after the Mid-Oceanic Ridge formed. While standard climate models, even making use of liberal assumptions, fail to explain this discovery,80 the flood does.
Sliding hydroplates generated frictional heat, as did movements within the earth resulting from the rising of the Atlantic floor and subsiding of the Pacific Ocean floor. Floods of lava spilling out, especially onto the Pacific floor, became vast reservoirs of heat that maintained elevated temperatures in certain ocean regions for centuries—the ultimate and first “El Niño.”81 Warm oceans produced high evaporation rates and heavy cloud cover.
Temperatures drop as elevation increases. For example, for every mile one climbs up a mountain, the air becomes about 28°F colder.82 Therefore, after the flood, the elevated continents were colder than today. Conversely, lowered sea levels meant warmer oceans. Also, volcanic debris in the air and heavy cloud cover shielded the earth’s surface from much of the Sun’s rays.
At higher latitudes and elevations, such as the newly elevated and extremely high mountains, this combination of high precipitation and low temperatures produced immense snow falls—perhaps 100 times those of today. Large temperature differences between the cold land and warm oceans generated high winds that rapidly transported moist air up onto the elevated, cool continents where heavy snowfall occurred, especially over glaciated areas. As snow depths increased, glaciers moved in periodic spurts, much like an avalanche. During summer months, rain caused some glaciers to melt partially and retreat, marking the end of that year’s “ice age.”