Catastrophic Plate Tectonics - Fact or Fiction?

Released from PNT. --AdminFor nearly 20 years (First reference I found was 1987) YEC John Baumgardner has been proposing Catastrophic Plate Tectonics (CPT) as a mechanism for the Genesis Flood. In all of that time, Baumgardner has never, to my knowledge, published a coherent explanation of how CPT could have occured in a peer reviewed scientific journal (as opposed to creationist publications). Invoking CPT is an extraordinary claim and thus requires extraordinary proof. Can any YEC advocates provide that proof? Are there peer reviewed scientific papers that supports the possibility of CPT?As I see it, CPT has two main problems. First is a coherent mechanism. Baumgardner has proposed "runaway subduction". Frankly, I don't know enough geology/physics to know if this is possible but it does appear that for CPT to occur this would have had to happen. So the physics of runaway subduction is a useful line of inquiry.Second, and more problematic, in my opinion, is the rapid movement of continents in months, rather than millions of years. I would think the heat generated during this process would melt everything. Can anyone address that possibility? If the heat weren't a problem, the tsunamis generated would have destroyed the ark before the rain even started falling. (Remember the ark didn't float until after the rain started to fall).

I don't know much about geology, so here goes. The flood was not intended to preserve things, you know. It was meant to kill everything. So what if there were some things that happened before the actual flood that started killing stuff? It is very possible that tsunamis were rampant everywhere around the world before the actual flood. Perhaps Noah was too much inland to be affected.

Hello, deerbreh.I would certainly agree that these catastrophic plate tectonic models have some problems with mechanisms. What drives plate tectonics is basically that the continents sit like rafts atop the mantle, which moves by convection. Even if you haven't seen neat diagrams and movies of convection currents, we are all familiar with rising heat and convection in pots of water as we bring them to a boil.The problem is that the mantle is not a liquid. It is solid rock. The continents are fastened atop of a solid mantle. It is true that the mantle is very hot and under great pressure, which is why it can flow at all, but it is not molten magma -- it is solid rock.The only way solid rock can flow at all is very, very slowly. Perhaps it is possible, and the geophysicists can inform me of this, but I cannot imagine solid rock flowing much faster than the mantle is doing now -- certainly not fast enough to produce the observed tectonic features in such a short time.It is possible, I suppose, that the mantle could have completely melted in a layer underneath the continents so that the continents would be floating atop a true liquid. But the tectonic features that we see would seem to require upwelling to separate plates, and subduction so that the opposite edges of the plates can disappear. But that indicates convection, so this liquid layer would have to be pretty thick. And considering the pressure at that depth that would require a whole lotta heat to melt this layer. Where did this heat come from? The mantle seems to have cooled and solidified pretty quickly -- where did this heat go?

GAW says"The flood was not intended to preserve things, you know. It was meant to kill everything. So what if there were some things that happened before the actual flood that started killing stuff?"So how do Noah and the ark animals survive all that heat? Besides, seems like a gigantic omission in the Genesis account, no?"It is very possible that tsunamis were rampant everywhere around the world before the actual flood. Perhaps Noah was too much inland to be affected."No mountain ranges or plateaus yet, right? The continents are just starting to separate and it will be some time before they begin colliding to create the mountain ranges amd plateaus. So what is going to stop the tsunamis from rolling right over the continents?This message has been edited by deerbreh, 06-30-2005 11:18 PM

I believe Baumgardner says the heat comes from accelerated decay of radio isotopes. This is one of those "physical laws" that needs to be broken for CPT to work.

Which confuses me. Why would an omnipotent being choose a natural phenomenon to destroy life when a snap of the finger should do it. Furthermore, why do YECs so readily accept the natural phenomenon of a flood (albeit a fantastic one) to end life, and yet the origin of life must be supernatural?

Basically, Baumgardner is a nut. I know that Chris will disagree, but in the only interview I've seen of him, the ultimate defense of his model was "God said it, an that's all ther is to say," or something very close to it.

Deerbreh,

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For nearly 20 years (First reference I found was 1987) YEC John Baumgardner has been proposing Catastrophic Plate Tectonics (CPT) as a mechanism for the Genesis Flood. In all of that time, Baumgardner has never, to my knowledge, published a coherent explanation of how CPT could have occured in a peer reviewed scientific journal (as opposed to creationist publications). Invoking CPT is an extraordinary claim and thus requires extraordinary proof. Can any YEC advocates provide that proof? Are there peer reviewed scientific papers that supports the possibility of CPT?

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The existance or non-existance of literature on a subject is hardly indicative of ‘proof’. The logic of your argument is ultimately flawed and based on the human minds methods of gauging credibility. This literature does not exist because it flies in the face of a more advanced paradigm of earth history. Even if a fantastic paper were written on CPT and were scientifically accurate within the scope of what is directly argued therein, it would not be published because of this.

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As I see it, CPT has two main problems. First is a coherent mechanism. Baumgardner has proposed "runaway subduction". Frankly, I don't know enough geology/physics to know if this is possible but it does appear that for CPT to occur this would have had to happen. So the physics of runaway subduction is a useful line of inquiry.

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How can you present this as a problem if you do not understand it sufficiently to do so? I agree the geophysics of runaway subduction is directly relevant to CPT

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Second, and more problematic, in my opinion, is the rapid movement of continents in months, rather than millions of years. I would think the heat generated during this process would melt everything. Can anyone address that possibility?

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You would think? Can you be more specific? Why do you think the heat generated would ‘melt everything’? What is the source of this heat? How do you think this heat would be distributed throughout the earth, the atmosphere, and space once produced? After that you can then explain why you believe this is problematic.

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If the heat weren't a problem, the tsunamis generated would have destroyed the ark before the rain even started falling. (Remember the ark didn't float until after the rain started to fall).

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Explain why you think this would happen.

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Chiroptera,

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Hello, deerbreh.
I would certainly agree that these catastrophic plate tectonic models have some problems with mechanisms. What drives plate tectonics is basically that the continents sit like rafts atop the mantle, which moves by convection. Even if you haven't seen neat diagrams and movies of convection currents, we are all familiar with rising heat and convection in pots of water as we bring them to a boil.
The problem is that the mantle is not a liquid. It is solid rock. The continents are fastened atop of a solid mantle. It is true that the mantle is very hot and under great pressure, which is why it can flow at all, but it is not molten magma -- it is solid rock.
The only way solid rock can flow at all is very, very slowly. Perhaps it is possible, and the geophysicists can inform me of this, but I cannot imagine solid rock flowing much faster than the mantle is doing now -- certainly not fast enough to produce the observed tectonic features in such a short time.
It is possible, I suppose, that the mantle could have completely melted in a layer underneath the continents so that the continents would be floating atop a true liquid. But the tectonic features that we see would seem to require upwelling to separate plates, and subduction so that the opposite edges of the plates can disappear. But that indicates convection, so this liquid layer would have to be pretty thick. And considering the pressure at that depth that would require a whole lotta heat to melt this layer. Where did this heat come from? The mantle seems to have cooled and solidified pretty quickly -- where did this heat go?

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The mantle does not have to exceed melting temperature in order to flow at the rates implied by runaway subduction. Indeed the mantle is not even ‘fastened’ to the lithosphere. If it was there would be no lithosphere-asthenosphere mechanical boundary. Indeed there is and it differentiates the rigid lithosphere and crust from the lower deformable mantle. What you need to understand is that the mantle is largely composed of silicate minerals. The deformational behaviour of silicate rock not only depends on temperature but on deformation rate. In runaway subduction, as the oceanic lithosphere sinks into the mantle it releases gravitational potential energy in the form of heat. High stresses also develop in the mechanical boundary layer surrounding the slab as a result of those gravitational body forces causing the silicate mantle rock to weaken. The weakening arising from heating can lead to an increased sinking rate, an increased heating rate, and greater weakening. This progressively increasing thermal weakening results in runaway."At shear stresses on the order of 10-3 times the low-temperature elastic shear modulus and temperatures on the order of 80% of the melting temperature, silicate minerals deform by a mechanism known as dislocation creep in which slip occurs along preferred planes in the crystalline lattice [19]. In this type of solid deformation, material strength depends on the deformation rate in a strongly nonlinear manner, proportional to the deformation rate to approximately the minus two-thirds power. At somewhat higher levels of shear stress, these materials display another type of deformational behavior known as plastic yield, where their strength decreases in an even more nonlinear way, in this case, inversely with the deformation rate (i.e., proportional to the deformation rate to the minus one power). When these deformation-rate-weakening mechanisms are combined with the temperature weakening discussed above, the potential for slab runaway from gravitational body forces is enhanced dramatically. A point many people fail to grasp is that these weakening mechanisms can reduce the silicate strength by ten or more orders of magnitude without the material ever reaching its melting temperature [19]."

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From: Baumgardner, J.R., Catastrophic Plate Tectonics:
The physics behind the genesis flood, Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Creationism, 1994, Volume II, pp. 35-45.Therefore, the low mantle viscosities achieved during the runaway process do not imply a release of heat that would be catastrophic to the surface. Baumgardner estimates a total production of heat due to the runaway process at approximately 10^28 J. This heat is released and redistributed in the mantle.-Chris GroseThis message has been edited by TrueCreation, 07-01-2005 02:16 AMThis message has been edited by TrueCreation, 07-01-2005 02:17 AM

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"...research [is] a strenuous and devoted attempt to force nature into the conceptual boxes supplied by professional education. Simultaneously, we shall wonder whether research could proceed without such boxes, whatever the element of arbitrariness in their historic origins and, occasionally, in their subsequent development." Kuhn, T. S.; The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, pp. 5, 1996.

Hello, TrueCreation.

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Indeed the mantle is not even ‘fastened’ to the lithosphere. If it was there would be no lithosphere-asthenosphere mechanical boundary.

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This part is not true. The boundary between the lithosphere and asthenosphere is a region where the composition and physical characteristics of the material changes over a relatively small distance. The lithosphere does not simply sit on top of the asthenosphere like a brick my sit atop my cement driveway.--

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The mantle does not have to exceed melting temperature in order to flow at the rates implied by runaway subduction.

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Perhaps this is true. I don't know. But we are not simply talking about deformation in a small localized region, but entire plates moving as a unit. I have some trouble conceptualizing how, if the mantle really did suddenly heat up to this level, and this did lead to the much more vigorous movements, why the convection patterns wouldn't become unstable enough to break into small cells, breaking the large plates into much smaller plates. But I am not a geophysicist; perhaps it is possible.-

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In runaway subduction, as the oceanic lithosphere sinks into the mantle it releases gravitational potential energy in the form of heat.

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That heat would be localized at the subduction zone. It would not be distributed very far through the mantle, and so could not contribute to this accelerated motion of the entire crustal plate.

Ah yes, the accelerated rate of radioactive decay. Even if we accept that, there was the release of a lot of heat that led to the increased movement of the continents, but where did this heat go when it was all over?

That part of the story is actually pretty easy to understand once you look through the eyes of the authors. At the time these tales were first told, there was no such thing as a natural phenomenon. Everything was supernatural; lightning, floods, earthquakes, desease and accident were considered Acts of GOD. That view point carried over into the modern era in your insurance policy where until very recently, clauses might exempt coverage for Acts of GOD or War. The basis behind the general exclusion of Flood Coverage in most HomeOwners policies was often couched that way.

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

God seems to only be able to work using cheap stage magician tricks. Why this nonsense about light traveling faster at the beginning? Why this nonsense about God "stretching the universe" when he created it? Just snap your fingers, dude, and have it come into being. So we presently only see stars out to 6000 lightyears, and more distant stars appear continually as the light finally reaches us. No need for unnecessary red-shifts, no need to see stars so far away, no need for radiometric dates older than 6000 years.Whenever people have to come up with accelerated decay rates, or run-away tectonic models, it always carries a slight odor of desperation, don't you think? Either their god is some greasy stage magician who can't do without his complicated tricks, or he's not so omnipotent as they want us to believe, being constrained to create (and destroy) according to very rigid rules.

Why are you asking us questions about your own scenario? If we're mistaken to believe your scenario would result in much generated heat, then just say so. Since a non-CPT person opened the thread, there was no introduction to the specifics of the CPT scenario. Perhaps you'd like to provide one. I think this is the heat Deerbreh was referring to. The problem is, when you have titantic masses moving about rapidly, titanic energies are involved. You've got quite a heat problem. Not to mention that the oceanic crust is less dense than the mantle you have it falling into. This would never happen. Subduction only occurs because the oceanic crust, being more dense than continental crust, is forced beneath it and down into the mantle where it eventually becomes part of the mantle.There are so many problems with CPT:

1. What caused the continents to suddenly begin moving at a rate of 10's of miles per day?
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2. Where did the energy come from to accelerate the continents?
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3. Where did the energy come from to keep the continents in motion? Is it presumed to be mantle currents?
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4. Where did the energy from decelerating continents go?
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5. Why, if the sea floor was recently created, does it instead appear young at oceanic ridges and ancient opposite them.
6. Why is CPT inconsistent with radiometric dating?
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7. Why is CPT inconsistent with magnetic reversal data?
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8. What about all the earthquakes and tidal waves such huge movements of the earth would have caused?

There are other problems, but that's a start.The key defect in the CPT proposal is that it fails to provide explanations for almost any data. In fact, it is contradicted by most data.--Percy

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Subduction only occurs because the oceanic crust, being more dense than continental crust, is forced beneath it and down into the mantle where it eventually becomes part of the mantle.

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Also, that material is still lighter than the surrounding mantle material, and so rises, forming the types of volcanism we observe at subduction sites (like the Japanese Islands, for example).

I guess that's a mystery. The bible is not a science text book. It is not even a history book. It is simply a general record of events at the time.Noah and other people were very primitive as far as human knowledge goes. Why include something that they themselves couldn't understand?You know, I seem to recall that once upon a time scientists were convinced that atoms are indivisible things, that the sound barrier couldn't be breached, and that the moon was out of reach.My point? Perhaps there was something in the equation that we are not yet aware of that allowed Noah and his family to survive. Is that suppose to be a statement or question? How do we know that there weren't any mountain range and plateau? Gravity.