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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Conclusion
While it is shocking at first to consider—and try to grasp—the vast amount of energy in the subterranean chamber, one should also reflect on the answers it provides.
1. Comets and Asteroids. Pages 260–310 cite dozens of evidences showing that the material that merged in the years after the flood to become comets and asteroids was launched from Earth. The energy in the chamber was sufficient for that task.
2. Hot Origin for Cold Comets. Tiny rocks and dust recovered from comet Wild 2 (pronounced “Vilt 2”) in 2004 were found to have been forged in white-hot heat. This contradicts the standard story, taught since 1950, that comets formed in the coldest portion of the solar system.12 (In 2005, the Deep Impact space mission made similar discoveries in comet Tempel 1.) These rocks should not have been crystalline, and yet they were crystalline and earthlike, as I explained they would be in the 7th edition (2001, page 201). The subterranean chamber provided both the white-hot heat, launch energy, and crystalline material for comets, asteroids, and meteoroids. [See “Deep Impact Mission” and “Stardust Mission” on page 266 and #7 on page 276.]
3. Heavy Hydrogen. Normal hydrogen (1H) has a nucleus containing only one proton. Hydrogen that has absorbed one neutron is deuterium (2H); hydrogen that has absorbed two neutrons is tritium (3H). How were our oceans exposed to the neutron flux needed to form this heavy hydrogen?
Comets contain 20–100 times the concentration of heavy hydrogen as interstellar space and the solar system in general. Why are comets so rich in heavy hydrogen? Comets also contain water twice as rich in heavy hydrogen as Earth’s surface waters. Therefore, comets did not provide the Earth with its water. Actually, all the water in comets and about half the water in our oceans came from the subterranean chamber—a chamber that absorbed a high flux of neutrons from nuclear reactions as the flood began. Therefore, our oceans contain considerable heavy hydrogen, and comets have twice that concentration.
4. Irregular Moons. Most astronomers recognize that irregular moons are captured asteroids. But, how were so many captured? Invoking long periods of time will not work, because those moons are being destroyed or stripped from their planets too rapidly. The same energy that launched the particles that later merged to become comets and asteroids also scattered an ocean of water vapor into the solar system. That gas provided the aerobraking that allowed planets, large asteroids, and perhaps comets to capture moons. Today, that water vapor is no longer in interplanetary space, so aerobraking is not possible. This is why astronomers are baffled, but the hydroplate theory explains why there are so many irregular moons.
5. Ore Deposits. Conventional geologists have difficulty explaining the origin of Earth’s ore deposits. “Ores of sufficient richness to be extracted have required very special geologic processes to come into existence.”13 What were those special conditions and processes that concentrated large ore deposits?14 Beyond vague references to “hydrothermal solutions,” evolutionists can only say that ores must have formed slowly in the distant past. However, diverse ore deposits are not forming today—even slowly. Spontaneous combustion in the SCW under the crust may have produced Earth’s ores. Escaping flood waters swept those ores up to the Earth’s surface.
6. Gold Deposits. Why are gold veins at the Earth’s surface? If extremely hot water (932°F or 500°C) circulated under the crust, gold in high concentrations could go into solution. If the solution then came up to the Earth’s surface fast enough, little gold would precipitate as the water’s pressure dropped. About 250 cubic miles of water must have burst forth to account for the gold found in just one gold mining region in Canada.15 With less extreme pressure-temperature conditions, even more water must come up faster to account for the Earth’s gold deposits. These are hardly the slow, uniformitarian processes that evolutionists visualize. When the hydroplates crashed, vast amounts of hot water still under the crust burst up through faults and deposited concentrated minerals, including gold.
About 40% of all gold mined in the world is from the Witwatersrand Basin in South Africa. This gold, deposited in compressional fractures within the basin, precipitated from water whose temperature exceeded 300°C.16
7. The Quartz Problem. Geologists acknowledge their inability to explain where enough silica could come from to cement most of the Earth’s sediments into rocks. This is called “the quartz problem.” [See page 218.] SCW dissolved much of the quartz in the rocks bordering the subterranean chamber. That dissolved silica, cooling at the Earth’s surface soon after the flood, cemented rocks—and petrified wood.
8. Salt Deposits. Thick salt deposits on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean were not formed by evaporation but by hot brines expelled from deep in the Earth. Among the many reasons for this conclusion are the absence of organic remains in those deposits and the presence of ore minerals that are not found in evaporating basins today.17 Again, hot, erupting, mineral-rich subterranean water explains what we see.
9. Geothermal Heat. As one descends deeper into the Earth, temperatures increase. Many scientists and laymen believe that Earth’s geothermal heat is left over from the formation of the Earth by meteoritic bombardment. A few simple calculations show that if Earth formed that way, too much heat would have been released; the entire Earth would have melted several times over. [See Endnote 45a on page 80 and “Melting the Inner Earth” beginning on page 429.] Others believe that billions of years of radioactive decay produced the temperature patterns we see inside the Earth. The flaws in this thinking are explained in “The Origin of Earth’s Radioactivity.”2
10. Understanding Accelerated Decay. For more than 20 years, I and a few other creationists have cited evidence that the rates of radioactive decay were much faster sometime in the past. In 2005, some creationists, citing a few additional evidences, correctly reached the same conclusion. However, they did not know what caused accelerated decay or when it happened: during the creation,18 the fall, or the flood. They realized that the decay, whenever it happened, would have produced a vast amount of heat—enough, they thought, to melt much of the Earth and evaporate all the oceans. Because this did not happen, they reasoned that a miracle occurred or some strange, new physics removed the heat. (Miracles should not be invoked just to solve a scientific problem.)
In fact, normal physics was involved. These researchers never addressed the larger question: What was the origin of Earth’s radioactivity? They were also unaware of all the preflood subterranean water and why it became electrically conductive SCW and increasingly permeated the lower crust. That SCW absorbed most of the nuclear energy and converted it primarily to kinetic energy, without a huge rise in temperature. Furthermore, the extremely powerful fountains of the great deep expelled most of that energy into outer space. Some of these researchers completely missed the cataclysmic nature of the flood’s beginning—saying that when, “on the same day all the fountains of the great deep burst open” (Genesis 7:11), the fountains were simply like geysers. These individuals also did not realize that the hydroplate theory explains the accelerated decay and energy removal, and places that decay at the beginning of the flood.19
The origin and consequences of so much energy in the subterranean water is admittedly a startling new idea. Grasping and interrelating the many evidences will require a period of thoughtful reevaluation and reflection by each reader.