judge

Although I am creationist (I suppose) I am not familiar with "creationist" flood ideas. The only aspect of creation that I consider important is that all men were made from one man, and that this man was originally not mortal. As augustine said "non imposse mori sed posse non mori" It was not impossible for him to die but it was possible for him not to die."

But I think some try to explain this by saying that originally there was one land mass and that this land mass broke up after the flood.

http://www.ldolphin.org/rockrecord2.html

I'm sure Joe must have seen this and perhpas has some comments

Joe Meert

JM: I've seen it, but I've never seen the data used to reconstruct the single continent, nor what the continent looked like. I have a brief discussion of one of the problems associated with the Baumgardner model at
http://gondwanaresearch.com/oceans.htm

Cheers

Joe Meert

ps418

Some have tried to explain the current distribution of continents in terms of Noah's Flood. However, they've failed miserably in my view, and all such theories are catastrophically at odds with the geologic evidence. And in fact, we have a very good idea of how fast the continents have moved over time since the breakup of Pangea. In addition to Joe Meert's article, I'd recommend one of my own on how plate-spreading histories are determined, and why they falsify catastrophist tectonic models:

Sea-floor Spreading and the Age of the Earth

However, if we assume for the sake of argument that something like Baumgardner's tectonic model is correct, this raise some very interesting questions, one of which is what happened to all the heat it would have generated. In such models, all or virtually all of the world's existing oceanic crust was formed within a "few weeks or months," during Noah's flood, roughly 4500 years ago. The world's oceanic crust consists of approximately 2 billion km3 worth of mafic igneous rock, accounting for about 60% of the earth's surface. Assuming a period of 100 days for emplacement of the current oceanic crust, a few months, this equals 20 million cubic km emplaced per day (Strahler, Creation Science and Earth History, p. 212-213). And since viscosity of the magma would need to be very low to emplace large volumes in a short time, and since viscosity is inversely related to temperature, the magma would have to have been very, very hot initially. The heat released by such an event would be immense to say the least. And that's not considering the enormous volume of volcanism that would have to take place on the continents themselves to produce the geologic record as we find it, or the heat generate by things like accelerated nuclear decay.

Patrick

Mike Rosoft

The standard creationist explanation is that the sedimentary layers were laid down before, during, or immediately after the flood, but that the folding of the sediments into mountains occurred sometime after this.

But if the mountains were formed after the deposition of marine fossils took place, why do we need the flood to explain them? Doesn't it make the whole argument pointless?


Mike Rosoft

Kevbo

Mike, I think it's a function of the amount of evidence for plate tectonics. They can't deny that it exists (like they used to) because it is so blatantly obvious, and it actually helps their case (if you ignore the impossible physics and heat generated). It's sort of how they went from declaring that no species had ever gone extinct, because God's creation was "perfect," to accepting hyperevolution to shoehorn a lesser number of creatures into Noah's Ark.

Shpongle

Well, yes, it does make it pointless. But they're probably hoping the uninformed layman doesn't know that.