Posted on 02/16/2005 4:43:26 PM PST by DannyTN
© Copyright 2005 Institute for Creation Research. All Rights Reserved
An ongoing enigma for the standard geological community is why all the high mountain ranges of the world—including the Himalayas, the Alps, the Andes, and the Rockies—experienced most of the uplift to their present elevations in what amounts to a blink of the eye, relative to the standard geological time scale. In terms of this time scale, these mountain ranges have all undergone several kilometers of vertical uplift since the beginning of the Pliocene about five million years ago. This presents a profound difficulty for uniformitarian thinking because the driving forces responsible for mountain building are assumed to have been operating steadily at roughly the same slow rates as observed in today's world for at least the past several hundred million years.
But the uplift history of today's mountains is anything but uniformitarian in character. Observational evidence indicates that the terrain where these mountains now exist, in many if not most cases, was nearly flat and near sea level when the recent intense pulse of uplift began. The expectation of uniformitarian thinking generally is that most of the time denudation by erosion ought to be more or less in equilibrium with uplift.
This lack of agreement between field observation and uniformitarian expectation has led to conflict among specialists in the ranks of the larger earth science community. Theorists who address these matters, confident that their uniformitarian models are sound, tend to ignore the observational reports or reinterpret them as much as they can to match the predictions of their theories. Geomorphologists who focus on this topic, on the other hand, confident their observations correspond to reality, tend to dismiss the explanations of the theorists as hopelessly out of touch with the real world. However, because of the specialization that typifies most of science today, a sizable fraction of the earth science community is largely oblivious that the uplift history of today's mountains is even an issue at all.
This disconnect between the uniformitarian theorists and uniformitarian observationalists on the issue of mountains is nicely documented in a recent book by Cliff Ollier and Colin Pain entitled, The Origin of Mountains.1 The authors are geo-morphologists who focus on field data relating to the processes such as faulting, uplift, volcanism, and erosion that sculpt mountains. In their book they repeatedly relate how geological features they and other fellow geomorphologists observe in the field fail to match the explanations of their theorist colleagues. Yet in the end they offer no suggestion as to how the disparity between the existing uniformitarian theories and their observational data can be resolved, or where the errors in the theoretical framework might lie.
The Biblical record concerning the Flood that destroyed the earth and its inhabitants in Noah's day just a few millennia ago, however, provides a straightforward and credible way of resolving this uniformitarian impasse. In a nutshell, the catastrophic processes unleashed in the Flood not only deposited thousands of feet of fossil-bearing sediments on all the continents and moved North and South America some 3000 miles westward relative to Europe and Africa, but also increased the thickness of the buoyant crustal rock in the belts where high mountains now exist. When the catastrophic driving processes shut down, the zones with the thickened crust promptly moved toward a state of what is called isostatic equilibrium, resulting in many thousands of feet of vertical uplift of the surface.
The principle of isostatic equilibrium is similar to Archimedes' principle concerning objects that float. According to Archimedes' principle, the weight of a floating object equals the weight of the volume of fluid it displaces. For example, an ice cube, weighing one ounce and floating in water, displaces exactly one ounce of water. Because the density of ice is about 10% less than that of water, its volume for an equal weight is about 10% greater. From Archimedes' principle one can calculate the fraction of the ice cube that extends above the water surface. It is about 10%.
The principle of isostasy is very similar. It states that when in isostatic equilibrium, all columns of rock of equal cross sectional area (including any height of water that may be present) lying above some "compensation depth" in the earth weigh the same. The compensation depth is a point sufficiently deep in the mantle such that the rock is warm enough and therefore weak enough to flow plastically so as to relax any horizontal differences in hydrostatic pressure. This principle simply expresses the fact that when horizontal pressure differences are relaxed, the pressure at depth is equal to the total weight per unit area in the column above.
To apply this principle it is helpful to realize that the ground beneath our feet consists of two primary kinds of rock. One type, known as continental crust, rich in quartz and feldspar minerals, has a typical density of 2800 kg/m3. The other type is mantle rock containing denser iron-bearing minerals with a typical density about 20% higher, or 3400 kg/m3. Areas away from mountain belts such as the U.S. Midwest commonly display a crustal thickness on the order of 35 km. Mountain belts, however, frequently have crustal thicknesses greater than 50 km and sometimes as much as 70 km. Under conditions of isostatic equilibrium, continental regions with thicker crust usually display higher surface topography. For example, relative to a region with a 35 km crustal thickness, a zone with a 60 km crustal thickness, for the densities quoted above, would have a surface 14,500 feet higher.
So what is behind the uniformitarian puzzle concerning the uplift history of today's mountains? In terms of the time scale, it is useful to stress the vast difference between modern uniformitarian geology on one hand and the Biblical account of earth history on the other. Uniformitarians interpret the rock record since the abrupt appearance of multi-celled organisms in the rocks to represent more than 500 million years of time, while Biblical creationists interpret all but the topmost of these fossil-bearing rocks to represent the destructive work of a year-long global cataclysm that took place less than 5000 years ago. The Pliocene-Pleistocene timing of the main phase of mountain uplift, corresponding roughly to the Ice Age, while brief in the uniformitarian framework, still requires several million years on their calendar. By comparison, in the Biblical time frame, this uplift unfolds over several centuries following the main Flood cataclysm that itself lasted but a single year.
The case is compelling that the Flood involved massive tectonic transformation of the earth's surface. Many lines of evidence show that today's igneous ocean floor—all of it—has formed via seafloor spreading since roughly mid-way through the Flood. This implies that all the ocean floor formed prior to that point in earth history, including all the ocean floor formed at Creation and existing at the beginning of the Flood and all the ocean floor formed during the interval in which Paleozoic sediments were being deposited on the continents during the earlier stages of the Flood, has vanished from the face of the planet. Seismology provides a clue as to where it went. Seismic images of the mantle reveal a ring of dense, presumably cold, rock at the base of the mantle beneath the subduction zones surrounding the Pacific Ocean.
It has long been my conviction, along with several of my ICR colleagues, that the only way to fit all these observations together in a consistent manner is to conclude that the Flood involved an episode of extremely fast plate tectonics that cycled the pre-Flood ocean floor, as well as that formed early in the cataclysm, into the earth's mantle.2 The energy to drive this event was readily available in the form of gravitational potential energy of the cold, pre-Flood ocean floor rocks. The stress-weakening tendency of silicate minerals comprising mantle rocks allows the process to unfold in a runaway manner.3 Laboratory experiments document that these minerals can weaken by as much as 8-10 orders of magnitude for shear stress levels that can occur in the mantles of planets the size of the earth.
Calculations performed over the past decade show that the pattern of flow generated by subducting seafloor around a Pangean-like supercontinent similar to the one we believe existed prior to and again during the Flood, pulls the continental blocks apart in a manner similar to that indicated by the earth's present day seafloor record.
In addition, the huge amount of subduction at continent margins during an episode of runaway sinking of ocean floor leads to considerable thickening of the continental crust via two main processes. One is the melting of subducted sediments as they reach a depth of about 75 miles. This magma penetrates into the crust above as sills and dikes, with some being extruded at the surface as lava and volcanic ash. The other main process is the physical dragging of warm and ductile lower crust inboard relative to the continent by the subducting ocean slab. Both processes serve to produce zones of thickened continental crust at a continental margin adjacent to where slabs of ocean floor are plunging into the mantle. The west coast of South America is a prime illustration, where the crust has reached thicknesses of up to 70 km.
During the rapid subduction, the overlying continental surface tends to be depressed, even below sea level, due to the powerful dynamical forces produced by the sinking ocean slab below, despite the buoyancy of the thick layer of continental crust above. But when the process of rapid subduction shuts down, these dynamical forces disappear, and the buoyancy forces take over to elevate the zone of thickened crust toward a state of isostatic balance. The uplift of high mountains at the close of this episode of rapid subduction is therefore a logical after effect of this runaway process. Within the Flood framework, the timing of the uplift, unfolding in the centuries following the cataclysm, is just what one should expect based on simple mechanics considerations. On the other hand, no mechanical response in terms of uplift during tens of millions of years of tectonic forcing followed by a sudden pulse of uplift poses a serious problem for the uniformitarian framework.
Yet an equally bewildering difficulty for a uniformitarian is the widespread presence of what are known as planation surfaces that pre-date this global pulse of mountain building. Ollier and Pain document dozens of examples where regions that were later uplifted to form mountain ranges were first beveled to nearly flat surfaces by intense erosion just prior to uplift. These authors puzzle how the tectonic forces could have ceased operating long enough for erosion to have abraded away hundreds to thousands of feet of rock to form flat topography and then be unleashed again to uplift rapidly the entire region by many thousands of feet. The Flood framework provides the obvious answer. The beveling flat of such broad expanses of terrain was the logical consequence of the runoff from the Flood. And it would have occurred just prior to when the uplift took place.
Whitcomb and Morris, 45 years ago in their classic book, The Genesis Flood, pointed out the remarkable timing of the uplift of the present mountains as being after the Flood. They write, "It is extremely interesting . . . to note that most of the present mountain ranges of the world are believed to have been uplifted (on the basis of fossil evidence) during the Pleistocene or late Pliocene."4 They then quote a paper that provides documentation from North America, Europe, Asia, South America, and Africa. Surely it is time for evolutionists as well as creationists to give attention to this evidence that so strongly supports a recent global Flood.
References
Ollier, Cliff, and Colin Pain, The Origin of Mountains, Routledge, London, 2000.
Austin, Steven A., John R. Baumgardner, D. Russell Humphreys, Andrew A. Snelling, Larry Vardiman, Kurt P. Wise, "Catastrophic Plate Tectonics: A Global Flood Model of Earth History," Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Creationism, 1994, Creation Science Fellowship, Inc., Pittsburgh, PA.
Baumgardner, John, "Catastrophic Plate Tectonics: The Physics behind the Genesis Flood," Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Creationism, 2003,
Creation Science Fellowship, Inc., Pittsburgh, PA. Whitcomb, John C. and Henry M. Morris, The Genesis Flood, Presbyterian and Reformed, pp. 127-128, 1961.
* Dr. John Baumgardner is Associate Professor of Geophysics at the ICR Graduate School and Director of the new ICR Computing Center.
Yeah, but did you read the rest of the article? There are a lot of similarities to the Genesis account. Wonder where that came from?
A couple of Geomorphologists wrote book that discuss numerous findings that don't match traditional theories of mountain formations. The article's author uses that book as a springboard to discuss his own models of flood based geology.
If the great flood theory proved more useful in finding oil or mineral deposits than the geologic time scale worked out by more than a century of geologists, I'd be happy to take it up. Somehow these creation "scientists" think that geology is like ideology - a matter of indocrination. No. It's a matter of selecting interpretations of evidence that WORK.
It starts out with a lie and goes downhill from there.
Would you care to elaborate on how forces for mountain building have assumed to have changed over the past several hundred million years?
"There have been plenty of really big glacier-burst floods, and transgressions of oceans on continental shelves and such...I agree that some of these may contribute to the flood myths of the various societies that have them."
True, but it's easy to see how the legends of primitive societies can morph the second idea into the first.
"About 80 million years ago, India was located roughly 6,400 km south of the Asian continent, moving northward at a rate of about 9 m a century. When India rammed into Asia about 40 to 50 million years ago, its northward advance slowed by about half. The collision and associated decrease in the rate of plate movement are interpreted to mark the beginning of the rapid uplift of the Himalayas.
The Himalayas and the Tibetan Plateau to the north have risen very rapidly. In just 50 million years, peaks such as Mt. Everest have risen to heights of more than 9 km. The impinging of the two landmasses has yet to end. The Himalayas continue to rise more than 1 cm a year -- a growth rate of 10 km in a million years! If that is so, why aren't the Himalayas even higher? Scientists believe that the Eurasian Plate may now be stretching out rather than thrusting up, and such stretching would result in some subsidence due to gravity."
"We can measure how fast tectonic plates are moving today, but how do scientists know what the rates of plate movement have been over geologic time? The oceans hold one of the key pieces to the puzzle. Because the ocean-floor magnetic striping records the flip-flops in the Earth's magnetic field, scientists, knowing the approximate duration of the reversal, can calculate the average rate of plate movement during a given time span. These average rates of plate separations can range widely. The Arctic Ridge has the slowest rate (less than 2.5 cm/yr), and the East Pacific Rise near Easter Island, in the South Pacific about 3,400 km west of Chile, has the fastest rate (more than 15 cm/yr).
Evidence of past rates of plate movement also can be obtained from geologic mapping studies. If a rock formation of known age -- with distinctive composition, structure, or fossils -- mapped on one side of a plate boundary can be matched with the same formation on the other side of the boundary, then measuring the distance that the formation has been offset can give an estimate of the average rate of plate motion. This simple but effective technique has been used to determine the rates of plate motion at divergent boundaries, for example the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, and transform boundaries, such as the San Andreas Fault."
The concept of the Earth's crust in gravitational balance or equilibrium is called isostasy.
Consider low density crust floating on a denser mantle that flows.
When weight is applied to the crust, it subsides. When weight is removed, it rebounds (uplifts).
What are some ways in which weight could be applied to (or removed from) the crust? The continental glaciers which once covered much of the northern part of North America were on the order of several thousand meters thick (judging by the thicknesses of modern glaciers). (See diagrams in glacier chapter.) A 3000 meter thick ice sheet is about 2 miles thick. If we consider an ice sheet a mile or two thick, we realize that the added weight would have caused the Earth's crust to subside (or downwarp). The continental glaciers melted about 10,000 years ago. In this amount of time, the land has been steadily uplifting due to the removal of the weight. In the Hudson Bay region of Canada, as much as 330 m (about 1000 ft) of uplift has occurred. This is a rate of uplift of roughly 3 - 4 cm/year."
"Subduction zones are not totally efficient in removing the subducting plate. Some fraction of the plate gets left behind as accretionary complexes that accumulate at the leading edge of the overriding plate (Figure 22.2.1). In some cases, this accretion might be episodic, involving the collision of large lithospheric blocks, called tectonostratigraphic terranes. More commonly, only the sedimentary cover of the downgoing plate is accreted, while the underlying crust and mantle lithosphere are fully subducted. The thickness of this sedimentary cover varies considerably, from hundreds of meters at oceanic subduction zones, like the Mariana system, to as much as 7 km at oceancontinent subduction zones, such as the Makran margin of southwest Pakistan.""
"It starts out with a lie and goes downhill from there."- dread78645
The information you posted in response though, talks about the same slow forces operating on the Himalayas over 50 million years. While that's shorter than several hundred million years, it's only because the continents hadn't collided yet.
Your post seems to be confirming the articles comment, not showing it to be a lie.
Why ME???
</pitiful_whine>
I was the last person to visit some mines before the contractors sealed and disquised the openings in Utah (Temple Mt. area - south of I-70 about 20 miles south on UT24) a couple of years ago.
(Big Brother has to protect us, again, from rotting timbers and radon gas.)
Overinterpretation of Scripture leads to error, such as the sun going around the earth. Your mind is not big enough to derive an entire cosmology from what are clearly selected events described in a few hundred words. It is pride to think you can.
He has the DVD's to back up his claims ...
I agree overinterpretation of scripture can lead to error. I agree that the Bible intentionally leaves many things unanswered.
But the Bible specifically describes the flood as a global flood. What's more it specifically warns in 2 Peter 3 that there will come a time in the last days where people will assume that things have always continued from the beginning just as they are now, and thereby forget the creation and the flood.
The article posted wasn't just about a Young Earth, it was also very much about the flood. And most of the posters against it, including some compromised Christians, very much want to be able to say that the flood is not real and was just a nice story.
There is evidence to support the flood and a young earth if people will look at it.
The Bible specifically says the earth has "four corners" and is supported by "four pillars".
"four corners" is a reference to the four directions which we still use today.
I'm not aware of a reference in the Bible to "four pillars" except in the reference to constructing the Arc of the Covenant. However, the Bible does refer to "pillars of the earth" but in context that is obviously talking about great men.
The Bible does says the earth was hung over nothing. (Not bad science considering when it was written.)
That, however, does not significantly change the age or sweep of the fossil record or the geological column. Just because geology is making changes to theories in light of new evidence, that does not mean that those changes support your creationist point of view - just as the change from a geosynclinal mechanism to a plate tectonic mechanism for mountain building did not change the rough age of the Appalachians - just the manner in which geologists believed they were formed. And that techtonic model has undergone further modifications with the discovery of microplates as agents of mountain building - a process we see going on now on the Australian Plate as New Guinea is being uplifted in that manner.
I've looked at the evidence presented on FR for years. A lot is misapplication, a lot is conjecture and a lot is, quite frankly, pure BS - such as the claim that the Mississippi Delta is only a few thousand years old. The current delta is not very old - but there are plenty of traces of older deltas across Louisiana, and the Atchafalaya would have formed a new delta by now if the Army Corps of Engineers hadn't delayed that process. And the deposits from the Mississippi go all the way back to around Cairo - and that was from the river filling up the Mississippi Embayment, where a large chunk of North America split off - which is why the Applalachians disappear in Alabama and re-appear in SW Arkansas. And they found that missing chunk - down in Southern South America.
But you would have us believe that a young earth model could lift up the Appalachians, split off a chunk, move that chunk halfway across the world and fill in the embayment in the timeframes you are proposing. Yeah, sure.
The acceptance of catastophism may not be direct support, but it's certainly closer than it's been.
That a model has been proposed for geological changes during the flood, does not invalidate that plate tectonics occur today.
And the same can be said of the uniformist and evolutionist speculations.
Both sides have used models that are too complicated to draw the conclusions advanced. Both sides have advanced arguments based on faulty assumptions.
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