Download Michelle Tsai Week 6 – Can Catastrophic Plate Tectonics Explain

Michelle Tsai
Week 6 – Can Catastrophic Plate Tectonics Explain Flood Geology?
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The earth has a thin rocky outer layer about 5-70km thick, the crust, that is consisted of
sedimentary rock layers, with fossils, underlying crystalline rocky basement of granites
and metamorphosed sedimentary rocks.
Underneath the crust, there’s a layer called mantle, which is made up of dense, warm-tohot, solid rocks that extends to 1,800 mi.
Underneath the mantle is the earth’s core, which is mostly iron. Most of the core, except
for the innermost part, is all molten.
Today, the earth’s surface has been divided by geologic processes into a mosaic of rigid
blocks, or plates. These plates are moving very slowly. Their interaction with one and the
other is called “plate tectonics”. However, since most of the “plate tectonics” took place
in the past, “plate tectonics” is merely an interpretation, model, or theoretical description
f what geologists envisage happened through earth history.
This is the general principle of the plate tectonic theory, that deformation occurs at the
edges of the plates by three types of horizontal motion, extension (rifting or moving
apart), transform faulting (horizontal slippage along a large fault line), and compression,
which is mostly by subduction (one plate plunging beneath another).
Extension is often equated to “seafloor spreading”, which occurs when seafloor is being
pulled apart or split along rift zones.
Transform faulting occurs when one plate is sliding horizontally past another.
Compressional deformation occurs when two plates move toward one another.
Antonio Snider was actually the first creationist that suggested the idea that the
continents had drifted apart. It is interesting that he had actually derived this theory
inspired by the Bible. Genesis 1:9-10 mentioned how God gathered together the seas into
one place, so that at that point in history, there probably have been only one single
landmass.
Four main lines of independent experiments and measurements brought about the birth of
the theory of plate tectonics, mapping of the topography of the seafloor using echo depthsounders, measuring the magnetic field above the seafloor using magnetometers,
“timing” of the north-south reversals of the earth’s magnetic field using the magnetic
memory of continental rocks and their radioactive “ages”, and determining very
accurately the location of earthquakes using a worldwide network of seismometers.
Eventually, more and more geologists became convinced of the plate tectonic theory
because it matched and explained many observations and lines of evidences, some
examples such as the jigsaw puzzle fit of the continents, the correlation of fossils across
the ocean basins, the mirror image zebra-striped pattern of magnetic reversals in the
volcanic rocks of the seafloor parallel to the mid-ocean rift zones in the plates, the
location of most of world’s earthquakes at the boundaries between the plates, the
existence of the deep seafloor trenches invariably located where earthquake activity
suggest an oceanic plate is plunging into the mantle beneath another plate, the oblique
pattern of earthquakes adjacent to these trenches, the location of volcanic belts, and the
location of mountain belts at or adjacent to convergent plate boundaries.