This is the online edition of In the Beginning: Compelling Evidence for Creation and the Flood, 8th Edition (2008), by Dr. Walt Brown. It is designed to be read online.
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The Origin of Ocean Trenches and the Ring of Fire
SUMMARY: Deep folds, up to thousands of miles long and several miles deep, lie on the floor of the western Pacific Ocean, in an area centered directly opposite the center of the Atlantic Ocean. The plate tectonic theory claims that plates drifting on the earth’s surface dive into the earth and drag down the folds. Fifteen reasons will be given that show why this idea cannot be correct.
As the flood increasingly altered the earth’s balanced, spherical shape, growing gravitational forces tended to squeeze the earth back toward a more spherical shape. Once a “tipping point” was reached, that portion of the subterranean chamber floor with the most overlying rock removed rose at least 8 miles to become today’s Atlantic floor. This caused the Pacific floor—the region inside the ring of fire—to subside (sink) and buckle inward, producing folds called ocean trenches. (Measurements and discoveries near trenches confirm this subsidence and the absence of diving plates.) Shifts of material inside the earth began producing “oceans” of magma that became earth’s outer core. Some magma escaped to the earth’s surface, especially onto the subsided Pacific floor. Mass imbalances in the earth remain, so earthquakes now occur and continents sporadically shift—not drift—toward the trench region of the western Pacific.
Imagine standing at the edge of a vast depression that reminds you of the Grand Canyon, but this “canyon” is several times deeper. Its smoother walls are almost as steep as the Grand Canyon’s, but the view across the 60-mile-wide depression is never obstructed by intermediate land forms. This “canyon,” thousands of miles longer than the Grand Canyon, does not have sharp turns. Such depressions, called ocean trenches, would be the leading natural wonders of the world if water did not hide them. (Average ocean depth is 2.5 miles; the deepest trench reaches 6.86 miles below sea level.) Sixteen trenches are concentrated on the western Pacific floor. What concentrated so many trenches, and why in the Western Pacific?
Surprisingly, trenches contain shallow-water fossils.2
Materials [like fossils] which are usually supposed to be deposited only in shallow water have actually been found on the floor of some of the deep trenches.3
Why are such unlikely fossils in a remote part of the ocean—a thousand times deeper than one would expect?
Today, most of the earth’s crust is vertically balanced, like blocks floating in a pan of water. Less dense blocks “float” higher up, while denser blocks sink in more. This is called isostatic equilibrium. However, ocean trenches are earth’s most glaring departure from this equilibrium. That may be an important clue about how trenches formed. As various authorities have written:
... trenches are characterized by large negative gravity anomalies. That is, there appears to be a mass deficiency beneath the trenches, and thus something must be holding the trenches down or else they would rise in order to restore isostatic equilibrium. 4
The most striking phenomenon associated with the trenches is a deficiency in gravity ... Measurements of gravity near trenches show pronounced departures from the expected values. These gravity anomalies are among the largest found on earth. It is clear that isostatic equilibrium does not exist near the trenches. The trench-producing forces must be acting ... to pull the crust under the trenches downward!5
In other words, something has pulled, not pushed, trenches down. Today, the downward pull of gravity in and above trenches is less than expected even after adjusting for the trench’s shape, so less mass exists under trenches than one would expect. It is as if something deep inside the earth “sucked” downward the material directly below trenches. This would reduce the mass below trenches. (If you want to show a slight weight loss, weigh yourself while on a ship sailing over a trench.)
A useful illustration is to think of a slight vacuum, or reduced mass, under trenches—much like a partial vacuum, which “nature abhors.” That is, nature always tries to move material to fill a vacuum. If one waited long enough, material inside the earth would flow in under trenches to fill this “partial vacuum.” Today, crustal plates move an inch or so each year toward trenches, so this “partial vacuum” is slowly being filled in modern times. Later, we will see where the missing mass under trenches went and what created the “partial vacuum.” Clearly, this “filling in” has not been going on for millions of years.
Figure 79: Spin. A spinning body, such as a figure skater or the earth, spins faster if it becomes more compact about its spin axis. This skater starts a spin with outstretched arms. Then, as she pulls her arms in near her spin axis, she spins so fast she becomes a blur.
Gravity tries to make the earth as compact and round as possible. Earthquakes cause the earth to become more compact and spin slightly faster, the farther back in time we look, the less compact we should find the earth, at least until we arrive at the time the out-of-balance condition arose. Because earthquakes can occur deep within the earth, the out-of-balance condition affected the entire earth and, as you will see, resulted in the formation of trenches and the ring of fire.
A technique called seismic tomography has shown that rock in the upper mantle is denser under continents than under oceans. The technique uses earthquake waves to see inside the earth, just as a CAT scan uses x-rays from many angles to see inside your body. Each earthquake radiates waves through the earth. Knowing the precise time of an earthquake and the times the waves reach seismometers around the world, scientists can calculate each wave’s velocity along a specific path. After many earthquakes and knowing the velocities along tens of thousands of different paths, a computer can estimate the wave speed at every point inside the earth. Higher than normal speed implies colder and/or denser rock at that point. Earthquake waves travel faster under continents. Some increases in speed are too great to be caused entirely by colder temperatures.6
Almost 90% of all earthquake energy is released under trenches. Earthquakes often occur near sloping planes, called Benioff zones, that intersect a trench. These earthquake zones enter the mantle at 30°–60° angles below the horizontal and extend to depths of about 420 miles.
A fault is a fractured surface within the earth along which rock masses have slipped. During an earthquake, opposite sides of a fault “unlock” and rapid sliding begins. If the side of a fault nearest a distant seismometer moves toward the seismometer, a compression wave will be detected first. If that side moves away from the seismometer, a tension wave will be detected first. By examining the first wave to reach many seismometers, one can deduce the orientation of the fault plane and whether the earthquake was triggered by compression or tension. Earthquakes near a trench are almost always due to horizontal tension (at the trench location) perpendicular to the trench axis.8 Measurements also show that microearthquakes on the ocean floor tend to occur at low tide.9
A prominent feature on all ocean floors is the Mid-Oceanic Ridge. One characteristic of the ridge figures prominently in two competing theories for how trenches formed. As explained in the preceding chapter, the ridge is cracked in a strange pattern. Some cracks are nearly perpendicular to the ridge axis, while other cracks are parallel to it. Their shapes and orientation are best explained by the stretching of the ridge.10 What would stretch the ridge in two perpendicular directions? These cracks are easily seen along the Mid-Oceanic Ridge in Figure 43 on page 109.
More than 40,000 submarine volcanoes, called seamounts, litter the Pacific floor. Some rise higher above the seafloor than Mount Everest rises above sea level. Strangely, the Atlantic has few seamounts. If, as the plate tectonic theory claims, one plate dives (subducts) beneath another, why aren’t seamounts and soft sediments scraped off the top of the descending plate?
About 2,000 flat-topped seamounts, called tablemounts, have tops that are 3,000–6,000 feet below sea level. Evidently, as these volcanoes tried to grow above sea level, wave action planed off their tops. Either sea level was once much lower, or ocean floors were higher, or both. Each possibility raises new and difficult questions.
More than half of the world’s active and dormant land volcanoes and 90% of the world’s earthquakes occur along the ring of fire, shown in the inset map on page 145. Obviously, that 25,000-mile-long, horseshoe-shaped path is a region that was greatly disturbed in the past.
From deep in the mantle, enormous amounts of melted basalt, called flood basalts, rapidly12 spilled up onto the earth’s crust—especially onto the Pacific basin. Above sea level, the “spills” that we can examine today are large enough to cover the eastern United States to the height of the Appalachian Mountains—from Atlanta to New York City and from the Appalachian Mountains to the Atlantic Ocean. More than a dozen of these convulsions have occurred at different places on land, dwarfing in volume the total magma in all volcanic cones. The volume of all “spills” below sea level may be a thousand times greater.
Rocks are made up of a variety of minerals, some of which contain molecules of water. These minerals would not feel wet to the touch, because each water molecule is locked separately in a mineral’s crystalline structure, and the water occupies only about one-thousandth of the rock’s volume. Nevertheless, the inner earth is so large that it probably contains several oceans’ worth of water. This may explain why a large amount of water (equal to the water in the Arctic Ocean) appears to be concentrated at depths of 500–750 miles, especially under eastern Asia and a small portion of western North America.13