This makes sense to me so i take it both sides are in agreement that at some point in the earths history (however it came to be) the earth was very maluable and the heavier metal elements sunk to the core
Well there are a lot of different Creationist interpretations. One I read today, and did a critique of under "A creationist take on quickly forming giant gaseous planets" on this board said that the Earth could never have been molten. That view makes some sense from a Creationist perspective because it would take it so long to cool, we would need an old Earth (older than 6000 years) to really make that possible.
Then the very inner core due to pressure maintains it's solid form but the outer core is a liquid, kind of acting as a lubricant.
Kind of, I suppose, but we don't know much at all about the physics of what's going on down there, what kinds of movements and currents are and that sort of thing so I don't know if I'd call it a lubricant. Maybe a sort of "insulator"(?)
How accepted is the idea that there was once a "super continent" pangea i think it's refered to as?
Most of the concept of continental motions, and Pangea, are accepted almost unanimously through the geologic community.
It's very new though. It was noticed even in the 1920s that the continents seemed to fit and shared the same rock and fossil types from the time of Pangea, but nobody could come up with a reasonable explanation of how continents made of rock could break and drift apart. At that time the best they could do was suggest that the continents were actually being dragged over the sea floor in response to tides...which was shown to be impossible so the idea was put on hold. In the 1960s paleomagnetism data and studies of the sea floor led to the theory of plate tectonics, which actually seems to work, and the idea caught on. And now we can even measure the motion of continents (North America moves about as fast as fingernails grow).
Oh yeah why is catastrophism not very widely accepted, it doesn't seem that unreasonable to me?
Catastrophism was once dominant in geology because people did not know the age of the Earth (except from study of the Bible) and they assumed that it was made a few thousand years ago. And if it was made that short a time ago only great upheavals of the Earth could form mountains. As science progressed that view began to change. Kelvin pushed the minimum age to 40 million years based upon thermodynamics. On an Earth that old you no longer need catastrophies to shape the land, slow and gradual processes suffice. And we can observe slow and gradual processes, but have not seen catastrophies. That was the original appeal, that you can *see* the changes in a uniformitarian view. Processes we see happening today most likely happened in the past, unless there is good reason to assume otherwise (which is rare). And when we model these processes happening over long time frames, we can use them to explain most of the geology we see today.
Hence the phrase, "The present is the key to the past", you look at what is happening today to try to understand processes that occured in the distant past.
With modern technology we can measure the annual growth of the Himalayan Mountains but we've never seen a mountain range be thrust up overnight. Plus, today we have things like varves, which are annual deposits in lakes made by the spring melt from nearby glaciers. They are like tree rings, and give us a record that goes back hundreds of thousands of years. We can study fossil pollen and volcanic ash preserved in those layers and find that, with the exception of ice ages, the Earth has been pretty much like it is today for as far back as those records go.
Of course uniformitarianism of the 1890s is not uniformitarianism of today because geologists have discovered in the last fifty years or so that catastrophies do occur. Very large volcanic deposits have been found in a few regions of the Earth and over a hundred impact craters are currently known to exist on the Earth. So the modern view is that most of Earth's geologic features are formed very very slowly, with an occasional catastrophe in between.
But now, to try and flip it over, with lots of recent catastrophies we would have to throw out most of the data geology has collected. We would have to throw out radiometric ages, we would have to throw out paleomagnetic data, and we would have to throw out varves. Plus we would have to explain why all those catastrophies suddenly stopped and how the effects of them on the life on Earth just vanished. For example, if there are 120 craters on Earth, and the Earth is six thousand years old, we should be getting a large new crater at least once every 50 years, but we haven't seen any. Or all the craters were formed at about the same time, but life somehow survived. But some of those craters are huge...one would seemingly kill most living things and change the Earth's climate for centuries afterward. So this is a problem with catastrophism - life on Earth is fragile.
So catastrophism is not popular because it would basically require geologists to assume all the data they have collected is wrong. It would also raise all sorts of other problems.
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