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Geoscience Reports
9
BAUMGARDNER’S MODELING OF RAPID
PLATE TECTONIC MOTION
Ben Clausen, Geoscience Research Institute
Dr. John Baumgardner’s early
roots are from Texas, in a family
casual to the claims of the Bible.
After receiving a master’s degree in
electrical engineering from Princeton University, he returned to Texas
where he became part of a Presbyterian college Sunday school class.
Through a verse-by-verse study of
the Gospel of John, he was led to
consider the question of who Jesus
Christ is and had what he calls “a
dramatic conversion experience.”
Having been well-schooled in evolution theory, he took a while to
recognize a conflict with the Bible’s
portrayal of an originally perfect
earth, where death and a catastrophic
flood occurred only after sin.
While giving university lectures
on creation/evolution topics, he
became keenly aware of the need for
creationists to provide a geological
model to account for the large-scale
motion of Earth’s surface, i.e., plate
tectonics.
In 1983 Baumgardner completed
his Ph.D. in geophysics from the
University of California, Los
Angeles (UCLA) with a thesis
entitled, A Three-Dimensional Finite
Element Model for Mantle Convection. He now continues his
modeling of plate tectonics as well
as other geophysical fluid dynamics
research as a staff member of the
Theoretical Division, Fluid Dynamics Group, Los Alamos National
Laboratory.1,2
To model the motion of Earth’s
plates (roughly equivalent to the
continents), Baumgardner uses a
Fortran program called TERRA3,
developed originally as part of his
Ph.D. research, that must be run on
a supercomputer because of its size
John Baumgardner in his lab at the Los
Alamos National Laboratory in New
Mexico. Photo courtesy Public Affairs
Office, Los Alamos National Laboratory.
and complexity. It divides Earth’s
mantle (a 3000 km layer of rock that
surrounds Earth’s core) into millions
of three-dimensional hexagonal
cells, each with a variable value for
its temperature, pressure, density,
velocity, and material properties.
These variables change through time
in a calculation based on a small set
of basic principles. TERRA is one
of four models in the world capable
of modeling Earth in a global
manner. Results from this computer
program have been presented at the
American Geophysical Union
meetings4 as well as being described
in scientific journals.5
Baumgardner’s simulation of the
Genesis Flood begins with an
original single supercontinent that
breaks up because the surrounding
ocean floor is colder, and thus
denser, than the rock below it. The
more dense surface rock follows the
natural tendency to sink into the
hotter, less dense mantle rock
beneath it. The drag of the sinking
ocean floor pulls the more buoyant
continental plates outwards from the
center of the supercontinent resulting
in the drift of North and South
America away from Europe and
Africa still seen today. Runaway subduction, first proposed in the 1960s
by a physicist at General Electric,
allows this movement of the tectonic
plates to happen rapidly and is a
consequence of the fact that silicate
minerals weaken dramatically with
increasing temperature and deformation rate. By omitting some of the
physics of rock deformation,
TERRA can model the scientifically
standard slow rates of plate motion.
However, when the more detailed
physics is included, Baumgardner
finds the model predicts much more
rapid motion. Details of his model
for the Genesis Flood were presented
at the Third International Creation
Conference.6
Baumgardner recognizes that
there are legitimate questions about
the physical processes needed to
obtain these rapid rates:7 (1) The time
frame for the Flood requires an
effective mantle viscosity [resistance
to fluid flow] almost one billion
times smaller than the estimated
present viscosity. Since viscosity
decreases exponentially with increasing temperature and also in a
strongly nonlinear manner with
increasing deformation rate, he
believes [and recently has demonstrated in numerical calculations]
that such decreased viscosity naturally occurs throughout large
volumes of the mantle as the runaway process unfolds. (2) The short
time scale for plate motion conflicts
with the long time scale implied by
radiometric dating, which requires
all radioactive decay since the
Cambrian [where the lowest major
1 0
fossil bearing rocks appear] to have
taken place since the beginning of
the Flood. Baumgardner believes the
nuclear decay rates likely have not
been constant during Earth’s history
and were orders of magnitude higher
during the Flood event. (3) Based on
the normal rate at which rocks conduct heat, millions of years seem to
be required for the cooling of the
oceanic lithosphere from near the
molten state to its current thermal
regime. Baumgardner believes that
enhanced cooling rates, as a consequence of hydrothermal circulation
of ocean water through the lithospheric layer, are insufficient to solve
the problem. In addition, a much
faster transfer of heat from the crust
into oceans would seemingly produce a temperature for the ocean and
atmosphere that is too hot for life.8
Baumgardner concludes that “an
enhanced rate of nuclear decay
during the [Flood] event and a loss
of thermal energy afterward” “cannot be understood or modeled in
terms of time-invariant laws of
nature”. He believes that “intervention by God in the natural order
during and after the catastrophe
appears to be a logical necessity.”
In the Los Alamos community,
Dr. Baumgardner is known as a
Christian activist, concerned for
example with the dogmatic teaching
of evolution as fact in the public
schools, but he does not push his
religious views on his colleagues.
Brad Hager, a geophysicist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says
it would require a miracle to increase
the thermal diffusivity [rate at which
rocks conduct heat] to a level where
the lithosphere could have cooled in
a few thousand years. However,
Hager has only respect for Baumgardner’s computer program. Gerald
Schubert, of the UCLA Department
of Earth and Space Sciences, agrees
that “As far as the code goes, Baumgardner is a world-class scientist.”
Geoscience Reports
“Indeed, there is universal agreement
that TERRA, created to prove the
Bible literally true, is one of the most
useful and powerful geological tools
in existence.”1
ENDNOTES
1. Burr C. 1997. The geophysics of God:
a scientist embraces plate tectonics
— and Noah’s flood. U.S. News &
World Report (June 16) 122(23):5558.
2. Wieland C, Batten D. 1997. Probing
the earth’s deep places: interview
with plate tectonics expert Dr John
Baumgardner. Creation ex nihilo
(June-August) 19(3):40-43.
3. Web information is available at
http:///www-igpp.lanl.gov/
TERRA.html (on Terra) and at
http://curie.eps.jhu.edu/nasa.html
(on the High Performance Computing in Geodynamics).
4. (a) Baumgardner J. 1992. 3-D
numerical investigation of the
mantle dynamics associated with the
breakup of Pangea. Fall Meeting
Abstract Supplement, October 27.
Eos, Transactions of the American
Geophysical Union 73(43):576;
(b) Baumgardner JR. 1994. Thermal
runaway in the mantle. Fall Meeting
Abstract Supplement, November 1.
Eos, Transactions of the American
Geophysical Union 75(44):687.
5. (a) Bunge H-P, Richards MA, Baumgardner JR. 1996. Effect of depthdependent viscosity on the platform
of mantle convection. Nature 379
(1 February):436-438; (b) see also:
Computer replicates Pangea’s breakup. Geotimes 38(3):9; (c) Beard J.
1993. How a supercontinent went to
pieces. New Scientist 137(1856,
16 January):19.
6. (a) Baumgardner JR. 1994a. Computer modeling of the large-scale
tectonics associated with the
Genesis Flood, and Runaway subduction as the driving mechanism
for the Genesis Flood. In Walsh RE,
editor. Proceedings of the Third
International Conference on Creationism. Pittsburgh: Creation
Science Fellowship, p 49-62;
(b) Baumgardner JR. 1994b. Runaway subduction as the driving
mechanism for the Genesis Flood.
In Walsh RE, editor. Proceedings of
the Third International Conference
on Creationism. Pittsburgh: Creation
Science Fellowship, p 63-75.
7. Baumgardner JR. 1986. Numerical
simulation of the large-scale tectonic
changes accompanying the Flood. In
Walsh RE, Brooks Cl, Crowell RS,
editors. Proceedings of the First
International Conference on Creationism. Pittsburgh: Creation
Science Fellowship, p 17-30.
8. Barnes RO. 1980. Thermal consequences of a short time scale for seafloor spreading. Journal of the
American Scientific Affiliation
32:1123-125.
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