Below is the online edition of In the Beginning: Compelling Evidence for Creation and the Flood,
by Dr. Walt Brown. Copyright © Center for Scientific Creation. All rights reserved.
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Rocket Science
Figure 228: Extreme Velocity. Shown (not to scale) is a cross section of the earth’s crust and the jetting supercritical water (SCW) hours to weeks after the rupture. The left and right dashed lines are the vertical center lines of a hydroplate and the rupture, respectively. A mirror image of this figure (not shown) would lie to the left and right of each center line. Because of this symmetry, the dashed lines can be thought of as barriers beyond which matter will not flow. The Moho marks the bottom of the porous, spongelike region under the chamber’s floor.
Here, SCW acts like a rocket’s propellent escaping with a velocity ve to the right of the rocket’s nozzle (represented by the vertical, yellow line). The “rocket” (shown in silhouette) cannot move to the left, since an identical jetting rocket (because of symmetry) is pushing to the right with an equal force.
For centuries before the flood, the powerful ability of SCW to dissolve certain minerals opened up a myriad of twisting, spaghetti-thin channels throughout the chamber’s floor and ceiling. Once the flood began, weeks of steady heating from nuclear reactions in the fluttering crust continuously pressurized the SCW in those miles of long, thin, interconnected channels. That, in turn, greatly elevated the pressure in the subterranean chamber, thereby accelerating the escaping subterranean water even more, not just while it was under the crust but also as it was accelerating upward in the fountains.
Today, SCW is still coming out of what was the porous floor of the subterranean chamber. [See Figures 54 and 55 on pages 123 and 123.] The hot water in the spongelike pockets, which absorbed much of the nuclear energy, also heated the solid structure adjacent to the tiny water pockets. Today, that heat—geothermal heat—accounts for the increasing temperatures as one descends into deep caves or drills deeper into the earth. The Moho, explained on pages 115 and 129 and in Figures 54 and 66, lies about 3 miles below the ocean floor—the former chamber floor.
Jet fuel in a high-performance aircraft contains about 20,000 BTU of chemical energy per pound. Greater aircraft speeds might result if the energy content could be increased or the metals containing the hot gases could be strengthened to withstand even higher combustion temperatures and pressures. In comparison, SCW has many orders of magnitude more energy per pound, and its container (earth’s thick crust) was much stronger than an aircraft’s combustion chamber. Obviously, the exit velocities, expansion rates, and mass of the fountains of the great deep were trillions upon trillions of times greater than any jet expelled by an aircraft.
The next time you see contrails in the sky, recognize that escaping, hot, high-pressure gases (primarily water vapor) from a jet aircraft expand downstream so much that they cool, condense and sometimes freeze. The fountains of the great deep experienced vastly greater expansion and cooling in an environment much colder than where jet aircraft fly. Recall that billions upon billions of tons of supercold ice crystals suddenly fell from the fountains and buried and froze many mammoths—and much of Alaska and Siberia, and, no doubt, other places (at least temporarily). [See pages 252–282.]
The temperature, T, in an expanding supersonic flow is determined by the Mach number, M, stagnation temperature, T0, and the ratio of specific heats, k, which for a perfect gas is about 1.4.1
The stagnation temperature for the situation in Figure 227 is the temperature in the subterranean chamber. Chondrule temperatures reached 3,000°F (page 376) and iron-nickel meteorites exceeded 1,300°F (Figure 172 on page 326). Because both chondrules and meteorites came from the subterranean chamber, T0 was about 3,000°F. Launch velocities of at least 32 miles per second were required to place near-parabolic comets in retrograde orbits.2 [See page 300.] If the sonic velocity in the downstream flow was 0.2 miles per second, then
where absolute zero on the Fahrenheit scale is -460°F. Although M, T0, and the effective sonic velocity can only be estimated, the flow’s temperature after expansion was so cold, it can be considered to be nearly absolute zero!
The fountains, unlike a jet aircraft’s exhaust, did not collide with and transfer much of their kinetic energy to the atmosphere. Seconds after the rupture, only the thin boundary layer (shown in blue) made contact with the atmosphere. The thin boundary layer must be compared with the great width of the rupture. As explained in Endnote 93 on page 391, that width was initially about 6 miles and then, because of erosion and crumbling, grew to hundreds of miles. Most of the heat transferred into that boundary layer would have ended up at the top of the atmosphere—lifted by both natural convection and entrainment.
The fountains split and spread the atmosphere, allowing most of the water to escape into the vacuum of outer space. Some water within the boundary layer was slowed enough to fall back to earth as rain or ice. Almost all the energy in the rocks and SCW launched from earth became kinetic energy, not heat. Much of that energy was electrical (as explained in Endnote 53 on page 139); its release and the acceleration of the fountains probably continued outside the atmosphere.
Notice that the mechanism for accelerating the fountains to supersonic velocities is not the same as in a standard supersonic jet aircraft or rocket propulsion system. There, a high pressure combustion chamber is upstream of the entire flow, having to push all the fluid downstream through a converging-diverging nozzle. No matter how high the combustion chamber’s pressure pulses (which only travel at the velocity of sound), those pulses cannot outrun the converging flow which might, at most, reach the velocity of sound at the nozzle’s throat.
However, in the fountains of the great deep, every fluid bundle, throughout the entire column, expanded continuously because of the properties of supercritical water and its vast energy content. The column’s expansion was extreme, because the surrounding pressure dropped rapidly—from the enormous pressure in the subterranean water to almost zero pressure in the vacuum of space.
A closer analogy is that of a bullet traveling down a gun tube. A propellant burns and generates gas throughout the flow, so the gas expands everywhere and the pressure behind the bullet steadily increases, continually accelerating the projectile until it leaves the gun tube. Some pistols, many rifles, and most artillery pieces steadily accelerate their projectiles to supersonic velocities while in relatively short gun tubes. [See “Paris Gun,” Figure 196 on page 366.] The fountains were in an approximately 10-mile long “gun tube,” not to mention the hundreds-to-thousands of miles of acceleration before and after reaching that “tube.”
The back pressure of the escaping SCW (analogous to the recoil of a gun or the thrust of a rocket) was also extreme. It greatly retarded the flow of SCW trying to escape from the subterranean chamber.