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The Catastrophic Plate Tectonics Model Six of the world’s top creation scientists, geologists Steven Austin, Andrew Snelling and Kurt Wise and geophysicists John Baumgardener, Russell Humphreys and Larry Vardiman, presented the Catastrophic Plate Tectonics Model at the 3rd International Conference on Creationism in 1994. Background History Over 140 years ago, before the American Civil War, there was a Bible-believing scientist who lived in Europe named Antonio Snyder. His idea was that possibly when God created the land on the third day of creation, that it was originally created as one large continent rather than the seven continents that exist today. (In Genesis 1:9, God said, “Let the waters below the heavens be gathered into one place, and let the dry land appear.” If the water was gathered into one place, maybe the land was in the other place, possibly meaning one large continent with inland seas.) He thought that possibly the seven continents that exist today resulted from the breaking open of the fountains of the deep during the Great Flood (Genesis 7:11) and these continents were moved apart catastrophically (large scale rapid change). His idea was published the same year (1859) Charles Darwin published his book Origin of Species which suggested that living things came from simpler kinds of life over long periods of time rather than being created by God. Darwin’s book quickly became popular and so not many people read or even noticed Antonio Snider’s work. Fifty years later, in 1909, Snider’s idea called “plate tectonics,” was rediscovered by Evolutionary scientists. Because they believe the Earth is billions of years old so that there is time for living things to have evolved, they also think the continents moved apart very slowly. This idea of the Earth’s crust existing as large shifting plates is still a theory (a well tested educated guess) but it is commonly accepted today. If we accept this theory and view it through the truth found in the Bible, we would believe the continents moved very quickly during the Genesis Flood around 4,500 years ago rather than slowly over millions of years. The Earth’s Structure The Earth looks like a beautiful blue marble from outer space. If you were to cut it in half, scientists believe you would find that it has several layers, not unlike a hardboiled egg. The outermost layer is a solid shell called the crust, like the shell on our egg. The crust is fairly thin, about the same thickness as the skin of a peach is to the whole peach. (The crust is between 3-45 miles thick and the Earth is around 4,000 miles to the center of the Earth.) The crust rides on the Earth’s mantle, which is like the white of the hard-boiled egg only thicker. The mantle makes up about 70% of the interior of the Earth and is believed to be made up of warm to hot solid rock which is under extreme heat and high pressure from the rocks of the Earth’s crust pressing down on it. The center of the Earth is called the core and could be thought of as the yolk of our hard-boiled egg. Scientists believe the real core has two different parts. The outer part nearest the mantle is believed to be made up of mostly liquid iron with a little nickel mixed in. The weight of the crust, mantle, and outer core presses the very hot iron of the inner core from every direction because it is at the center of the Earth. Scientists believe 1 that it is squeezed so tightly due to pressure from overlaying rock, that even though it is hot enough to be liquid, it exists as a solid. This process is called pressure freezing because it is frozen into a solid, not because it is cold (a lack of energy), but because it is under such great pressure that it can’t move. The crust is made up of two types of plates which are believed to ride on the upper portion of the mantle called the asthenosphere. It is called astheno meaning “weak” or “feeble” because it is ‘weak’ compared to solid rock due to the presence of water within the minerals, so the asthenosphere exists in a state between a solid and a liquid which geologists call plastic rock. The continental plates, which make up the continents, are made of layers of fossilcontaining sedimentary rocks (believed to have been deposited during the Genesis Flood) over granites and metamorphic rock. These metamorphic rock layers of the continental plates are from sedimentary rock which probably washed off the original landmass (or supercontinent) on the third day of creation when God called it out from underneath the ocean. The estimated 30 miles of sediments that washed off the original continent show no traces of fossils because plants and animals had not been created yet. These sediments were deposited as sedimentary rock which, during the Flood, experienced the heat and pressure required to change it into the metamorphic rock we find today. Oceanic plates, containing basalt rock, are similar in composition to the rock of the mantle, which is thinner but heavier than the rock of the continental plates. The oceanic plates could be compared to floor tile (thinner and heavier) and continental plates could be compared to carpet (thicker and lighter). These pieces of “carpet” (the continental plates) and “tile” (the oceanic plates) are believed to ride on the plastic rock of the asthenosphere. The continental plates ride high in the mantle because they are composed of a less dense material than the mantle rock below causing them to float. The oceanic plates are composed of the same type of rock as the mantle but are much cooler. Because the molecules of cooler substances are more tightly packed together than hotter substances of the same composition, the oceanic plates are denser than the mantle rock, thus these plates sink deeper in the mantle than the continental plates do. (Remember, most solids sink in liquids of the same composition because the molecules of a solid are more closely packed together and so they are more dense than the liquid of the same composition. Water is an exception to this rule because of hydrogen bonding and therefore ice floats.) The oceans exist over the oceanic plates because water always moves to the lowest possible point (pulled by gravity), the oceanic plates (the tile) are lower in the mantle than the continental plates (the carpet). (See drawing on the next page.) 2 Popularly Accepted Plate Tectonics Model Today, scientists teach that the Earth’s crust consists of many rigid plates that make up a very large jigsaw puzzle. Each of these plates is believed to be moving slowly in relation to neighboring plates. Some plates move away from their neighbor (divergent boundaries) and the molten rock from the mantle comes up and fills the space in between, then cools, almost like if you get cut and the blood comes up and fills in the space in between, then makes a scab. One of the places we see this is on the ocean floor. The Mid Atlantic Ridge is a submarine mountain range in the Atlantic Ocean that is made from mantle rock that has filled in and cooled where the plates have spread apart from one another. If the plates move towards their neighbor something different happens. If two continental plates move toward one another (convergent boundaries), the edges of the plates crumple and are pushed upward, often producing mountains. When one plate sinks under another, it is called subduction. If a continental plate pushes against an oceanic plate, the thinner, heavier oceanic plate sink under the lighter, thicker continental plate producing very deep areas in the ocean called trenches. A group of volcanic islands are often found along these trenches made from the mantle coming up through the crack between the two plates. If plates slide by one another, they form a fault where many earthquakes occur like the San Andreas Fault in California. Most, but not all, scientists today believe the seven continents came from one large “supercontinent" called Rodinia which is Russian for motherland. Evolutionist scientists believe this happened over hundreds of millions of years. They believe the plates have always moved at the same slow speeds at which they are moving today, about 4 inches per year. At this slow speed, it would take an ocean floor or mountain range over 100,000,000 years to form. Considering the Earth is only around 6,000 years old, that’s a very long time! Catastrophic Plate Tectonic Model (CPTM) Let’s break this name down. Catastrophic refers to large scale rapid change. Plate refers to the plates of the Earth’s crust. Tectonic refers to building or construction. Model refers to a hypothesis or educated guess of how things might have happened. It is an “educated” guess because it is based on many facts that are observed today but we can only guess from those facts and what our Bible tells us as to what may have happened in the past. Put it all together and we have an “educated guess on how the plates of the Earth’s crust where built through large scale rapid change, Catastrophic Plate Tectonic Model. The CPTM suggests that the continental and oceanic plates of the Earth’s crust moved very quickly in the past due to the violence of the Genesis Flood. We can only 3 guess at exactly how the Flood started. A popular theory with many creation scientists today is that God chose to use a group of comets or asteroids to open the fountains of the deep which is the first event of the Flood mentioned in the Bible (Genesis 7:11). This idea comes from the huge craters buried deep in the rock layers found around the world, and are believed to have formed early in the Flood. However God chose to start the Flood, the CPTM that we are studying suggests that three things happened. For readability, the CPTM will be written as if it happened in the way described. Please remember, this is a good educated guess, not fact. What the Bible says is fact! Thing One – The Ocean Plate Takes a Dive A sudden “crack” between the continental plate and the oceanic plate got things going with a bang. The colder, denser oceanic plate dove into the plastic upper mantle underneath the continental plate (subduction). This happened along thousands of miles of coastline at the beginning of the Flood. As this oceanic plate dove into the mantle, it would have been something like a piece of tile diving into very hot thick plastic rock. This would have made the mantle heat up even more due to friction. The hotter the mantle would become, the thinner it would become and the faster the oceanic plate would dive into it in a conveyor-belt-like fashion. Scientists believe it was moving over 6 feet per second or 5-10 miles per hour! This motion of the oceanic plates diving into the mantle caused the continental plates that were still connected to oceanic plates in other places, to be torn apart as they were drug toward the many “dive areas.” Because the continental plates are lighter, they would not have been pulled completely into the mantle like the heavier oceanic plates but they sure had some kind of ride! The broken pieces of the continental plates became seven smaller continents. These seven crashed into each other at times during their several months of travel. Scientists believe the entire original ocean floor dove into the mantle and was replaced by new oceanic plates that formed during the Flood. When all the pre-Flood ocean floors had been replaced, the continental “sprint” would have ended. Thing Two – Movement and Change in the Mantle and Core The cold ocean plates plunging deep into the mantle would have reached the vicinity of the outer core, almost 1,800 miles down, in just a couple of weeks. The huge cold slabs would have caused cooling at the mantle-core boundary compared to the temperatures around it. This rapid cooling and temperature differences would have caused the liquid metals in the outer core to circulate (typically hot things rise and cooler things sink causing convection currents and circulation). This movement of the liquid metal in the outer core would have caused an electric field something like what is carried in a wire attached to a battery. Electric fields cause magnetic fields to change direction and so the Earth’s magnetic field reversed several times during the Flood. 4 The magnetic field of the Earth not only protects us from cosmic radiation but also is what makes our compasses point north. So if you had been on the ark with a compass, you might have noticed the compass change directions from north to south and then back again every week or two. This change occurred several times during the Flood. Where the plates moved apart, mantle filled in the ripped Earth and started to cool forming new rock which would become the new oceanic plates. These rocks reflect the magnetic field of the Earth at the time they cooled. They show this flip-flopping of the Earth’s magnetic field during this time in a zebra stripe pattern. Thing Three – The Rains Came Down and the Floods Came Up As the oceanic plate dove into the mantle on one side of the Earth, new ocean floors were being made on the other side where the mantle filled in the openings between the plates that were ripped apart (divergent boundaries). This hot mantle would come in contact with the ocean waters forming supersonic steam jets stretching for 43,500 miles along the seafloor rift zone encircling the planet. These steam jets would have helped to provide the water and cloud condensation nuclei (all the dust and dirt particles that were eroded away and carried in the steam jets into the atmosphere) for forty days and forty nights of global rain. This would have provided enough water to produce three feet of rain per hour globally for the full forty days and forty nights. That’s an incredible amount of precipitation! The land would have been quickly and violently worn away by the intense rain, huge waves, and rapid movement of the continents. This quick, violent wearing away of the land is called catastrophic erosion. It would take time for the new ocean floors to cool. During this cooling time, the rock would have been thicker, lighter, and hotter than when it cooled into a thinner denser solid state. Because it was thicker, lighter, and hotter, this new oceanic plate would have floated higher in the mantle than the thinner denser cooler oceanic plate, about 3,300 feet higher, causing it to float in the mantle almost at the same level as the land. The continental plate was no longer higher than these new oceanic plates so the ocean water was pushed inland (encroachment – the non-football version). (Please study the drawing below to understand better how the ocean waters were pushed inland.) The waters prevailed for 150 days! &ow really use your imagination and try to picture Thing One, Thing Two and Thing Three all happening at the same time; the oceans floors plunging deep into the mantle, supersonic steam jets spraying into the heavens, the land being torn apart and drug in different directions sometimes crashing violently into one another, intense inescapable global rain, devastating tsunamis, monstrous volcanoes, and the ocean waters being pushed inland due to the new hot ocean 5 floors. This was truly a horrible judgment and not a good time to be caught outside God’s protection that was found only in the ark! The End of the Flood The surface of the original supercontinent had been catastrophically eroded by the Flood and covered by almost a mile deep of new rock in most places. The new rock was fossil-containing sedimentary rock laid down underwater from pieces of rock and sand carried away by the Flood waters. Igneous rock formed from all the molten rock of the mantle and cooling lava. Sedimentary and Igneous rock were changed into metamorphic rocks when they experienced intense heat from openings in the crust below them and pressure due to being buried by all the debris carried in the Flood waters. Planet-wrenching earthquakes occurred, collisions of continental plates birthed mountain ranges, and the volcanoes continued their devastation as the continents settled into their new locations. Some of these volcanoes covered millions of square miles like the size of several average sized states. When all the thinner heavier original ocean floors dove into the mantle, the plate movement would have slowly stopped. The lighter continental plates wouldn’t have slid into the mantle. The steam jets and global rains would have stopped. As the new ocean floors cooled, they would have become thinner and heavier causing them to sink lower into the mantle. This would allow the ocean waters to return to their place and drain off of the land. Summing Up The CPTM suggests the thinner heavier ocean floors slid into the Earth’s mantle to leave the less dense land plates floating. Because the ocean floors slid very quickly, we believe the land was torn apart and moved very rapidly also. The old ocean floor was replaced by molten rock from the mantle which was thicker and less dense, so it floated higher in the mantle causing the Earth’s ocean waters to be pushed inland. Steam jets were caused by cold ocean water touching the hot mantle rock in cracks between moving plates. This provided the water in the atmosphere for global rains. As the new ocean floors cooled, they sunk lower in the mantle and the ocean waters returned to their place over the ocean plates and off the continental plate. Please remember, we do not know for sure this is what happened but it is a very interesting model that bows to the authority of the Bible and tries to explain the scientific evidence known to date. A prediction of this model was that there should still be pieces of the oceanic plates that have not yet fully melted deep in the mantle. Recently, new technology has allowed scientists to detect the existence of these oceanic plates deep in the mantle near the outer core. They cannot be easily explained if the earth is old and everything moves very slowly because they should have long since melted away if they have been there for millions of years. It is good supporting evidence for the CPTM. To stay informed, subscribe to Answers Magazine offered by Answers in Genesis (answersingenesis.org) and Acts and Facts offered by the Institute for Creation Research (icr.org) for more developments within the Biblical Scientific Creation Model of Origins. It is an exciting time to be a Bible-believing scientist! Special thanks to Dr. Andrew Snelling for his article Can Catastrophic Plate Tectonic Explain Flood Geology. 6 Try Terrific Terms - Take a few minutes and make sure you understand what these words mean by drawing a line from the word in the left hand column to the definition in the right hand column. 1. catastrophic a. educated guess on how things might be 2. plates b. fast and violent 3. model c. building or construction 4. tectonic d. earth's crust _____________________________________________________________ Check Your Understanding - To check your understanding of the material, answer the following questions by placing the correct letter in the space below. ___ 5. Rides high and dry in the mantle because it is made up of less dense granites mixed with other things. ___ 6. Sinks low in the mantle because it is cooler and denser. ___ 7. Runs to the lowest possible place due to gravity. ___ 8. Weak due to a lot of water in the minerals of this rock. ___ 9. A "scar" from where the earth "bled" mantle and it cooled. ___ 10 . Plates bending upward produce these. ___ 11. An ocean plate diving under another plate leaving a very deep area. ___ 12. These are formed when mantle comes up through cracks between two ocean plates. ___ 13. Plates sliding by one another form this. a. fault b. Mid-Atlantic Ridge c. land plates d. water e. ocean plates f. upper mantle g. mountains h. trench i. volcanic islands ________________________________________________________________ ___ 14. What does it appear God used to shatter the crust of the earth and start the Flood. ___ 15. The ocean water coming in contact with the hot mantle rock produced these. ___ 16. The ocean plates plunging into the mantle of the earth caused this to be ripped apart. ___ 17. Hot new ocean floors that were bleeding out of the torn earth would have ridden higher in the mantle causing this to happen. ___ 18. Continents were sprinting at this speed in miles per hour. ___ 19. Cold ocean plates deep in the mantle caused temperature changes in the outer core which set up an electric field which caused this to happen and show in the new rocks that formed. ___ 20. The number of days it took the earth's new ocean plates to cool and sink into the mantle. a. jets of steam b. tsunamis c. ocean levels rise d. Rodinia e. 5-10 f. comets g. Pangaea h. 150 i. plates deep in the mantle j. reversing magnetic field _____________________________________________________________ 7