Reasons to Believe - RTB old earth

[darinhouston]

Apollos, thanks for the apology -- I accept. I went and Googled Walt Brown and now recall having read some of his work in the past. I have discounted much of it due to criticisms of his approach and fundamental assumptions from those in technical fields who would know such things (he, himself, is a mechanical engineer, and not a geophysicist as I recall). Some of it does look interesting, though,and I think I'll re-familiarize myself with some of his theories.

I should mention that my father-in-law is a geologist, and over the years I have brought him such novel theories about possible alternative explanations to geologic dilemmas -- he almost always has a very rational scientific explanation based on his much deeper experience where my lay understanding thought I had a "gotcha." I think that's a common fault with YECs.

[Apollos]

Apollos, thanks for the apology -- I accept. I went and Googled Walt Brown and now recall having read some of his work in the past. I have discounted much of it due to criticisms of his approach and fundamental assumptions from those in technical fields who would know such things (he, himself, is a mechanical engineer, and not a geophysicist as I recall). Some of it does look interesting, though,and I think I'll re-familiarize myself with some of his theories.

I should mention that my father-in-law is a geologist, and over the years I have brought him such novel theories about possible alternative explanations to geologic dilemmas -- he almost always has a very rational scientific explanation based on his much deeper experience where my lay understanding thought I had a "gotcha." I think that's a common fault with YECs.

I wish I could have the expertise to evaluate all of this, but we really are at the mercy of the experts. I did study astronomy, physics and geology at college, and a class on evolution, but only as part of a liberal arts degree, though I was often concerned at the lack of alternatives presented, and sometimes at the selective use of evidence, or even outright untruths - such as that no true scientist rejects evolution. Let me know if your father-in-law demolishes any of Brown's arguments - I would be interested in that. I do fear though, that if your it were a biologist you were bringing arguments to, that he would be able to do the same with intelligent design arguments, and that's an area where I feel that evolution is simply intuitively wrong, yet it amazes me how scientists are beholden to it. I go by the view that there if there are competent PhD scientists holding to an alternative, that there's a good chance that there are alternative interpretations of the evidence. Having said all that, if you run into any sites which refute or answer Brown, I would like to read them.

[Ian]

that he would be able to do the same with intelligent design arguments, and that's an area where I feel that evolution is simply intuitively wrong

I agree with this. But I think ID is in a separate category to the age of the Earth issue or even to evolution versus creation - in so far as we are able to make current observations of it, primarily of living creatures. Anyone watching David Menton`s videos "the hearing ear" and "the seeing eye" (AIG site) with an open, honest mind has to come to an ID conclusion. Perhaps unfortunate that on that site those videos run alongside stuff some of which is less intellectually compelling.

[darinhouston]

One thing to be cautious of -- we all have our own bias -- just because it seems clear (as it does to me) that mainstream science often has it wrong in many respects (for example with the fossil record and evolutionary explanations and geological theories and the like), that doesn't mean the fundamental world view is wrong. Even if Brown is correct in his theories about the Grand Canyon, for example, that merely negates an erosive view of its formation -- to me, many factors still suggest an old earth even if a cataclysmic event explains some of these processes as well as or better than a lengthy process.

[TK]

I just wish I knew who Cain was afraid of.

TK

[darinhouston]

Having said all that, if you run into any sites which refute or answer Brown, I would like to read them.

Just did a few minutes of browsing when I got home --

Hydroplate. Walt Brown's model proposes that the Flood waters came from a layer of water about ten miles underground, which was released by a catastrophic rupture of the earth's crust, shot above the atmosphere, and fell as rain.

How was the water contained? Rock, at least the rock which makes up the earth's crust, doesn't float. The water would have been forced to the surface long before Noah's time, or Adam's time for that matter.
Even a mile deep, the earth is boiling hot, and thus the reservoir of water would be superheated. Further heat would be added by the energy of the water falling from above the atmosphere. As with the vapor canopy model, Noah would have been poached.
Where is the evidence? The escaping waters would have eroded the sides of the fissures, producing poorly sorted basaltic erosional deposits. These would be concentrated mainly near the fissures, but some would be shot thousands of miles along with the water. (Noah would have had to worry about falling rocks along with the rain.) Such deposits would be quite noticeable but have never been seen.

***
Brown's theory is a rare example of a creationist actually trying to formulate a scientific theory. This would be quite commendable, were it not for the fact that Brown's main objective is to make sure his theory is in accord with Genesis and the Biblical flood, regardless of conflicting evidence. This is not scientific. However, if creationists use the methods of science, albeit imperfectly, to try and demonstrate the "facts" of creationism, they should be willing to accept and respond to scientific criticism of their theories, whether it be from evolutionists or iconoclast creationists like Morton. Peer review is part of what science is all about. An inability to respond on an appropriate scientific level would make any creationist theory suspect.
***
There are several things to notice about this situation. First, the crust must be absolutely impermeable to the water. There must be no earthquakes before the flood since the first crack in this sphere would allow the water to escape. This means that there must be no meteorites before the flood. And heaven help mankind if he ever were to have drilled into the crust for curiosity's sake.

There must absolutely not have been any elevation differences. The effects of a load on the top of the crust can be seen from using an elastic sheet solution to the load. The 4th order differential equation is:
***
A crust thinner than this value will be completely broken by the weight of the mountain.

The bending of the crust by 4.1 km will occur by fracture. This would immediately release the water. Thus, there are no mountains. Even a hill one kilometre high would require that the crust bend by 830 meters.

Therefore, the crust must be perfectly smooth. Thus, you must violate the Biblical record where it says that all the high mountains were covered. In your conception of the flood, there could be no mountains or hills.

Secondly, in your model, you must have pillars to retain the physical connection with the core. If you do not do this, you will have the certainty that the crust will eventually crash into the core. Friction between the crust and the water and the water and the core will cause the outer crust to begin to move in a fashion different to that of the earth's interior. This would cause turbulence and would lead to a crash. The crust is free to move in relation to the core in response to tidal forces. The theoretical height h of the equilibrium tide in a rigid earth is:
***
I have seen the IPOD* seismic line, every inch of it, and there is absolutely no evidence of any residual buried water or deeply buried cave to hold the water. There are no indications of collapse structures of the size your model would require anywhere on any seismic data I have ever examined in the past 22 years.
***
Brown has a 10 km thick granite crust with a 1 km thick layer of water. The pressure is enough to raise a tube of water to 17 km (see Brown, pg. 37, Fountains of the Deep). Water squirting up out of the hole will rise to that level. What is the velocity of the water coming out of the crack? Ignoring friction, this can be found by equating the potential energy of the drops at 17 km to the kinetic energy at the surface needed to propel the water that high. Thus:

***
Consider a 1 square meter tube with 577 cubic m/s emanating from it. Due to the fact that 2.02 atmosphere is the weight of 20 meters of water, water coming up the crack will not change to steam until the final 20 meters. With the velocity of 577 meters per second coming out of the crack, this means that 577 cubic meters each second will occupy 814 times the volume that it used to. As a water surface passes the point at which it turns into vapor, it will, within one second, be pushed 577 x 814 = 469,779 m. This is a velocity of 469 kilometers per second. There would be no flood since none of the vapor would remain on the earth. The earth's escape velocity is about 11 kilometers per second. Any object that exceeds 11 km per second leaves the earth and never returns. How could this theory cause a flood?

In reality these numbers would be somewhat smaller due to frictional effects, but even if they are off by 99%, the steam escaping is still above escape velocity for the earth. The steam would be sent to Alpha Centauri!!"
***

I did a little study on the Hydroplate Theory a few years ago. Let me see if my links are still good...
http://home.entouch.net/dmd/hydroplate.htm
http://mypage.direct.ca/w/writer/hydro.html

Alas the link to Tom Couchman's The "Hydroplate Theory" of Dr. Walter Brown: A "Common Sense" Evaluation is broken. I simply can't find it on the web anymore. I do have a hard copy, luckily.

One thing that all of the articles agree upon is that geological processes are heat producing processes. Brown's Hydroplate Theory would turn a supposed flood event into a superheated steam event.

To quote from Couchman's article:

The hydroplate would sink until the pressure from water trapped under the plates built up sufficiently to cause that water to flash to steam [calculations are provided in the article], at which point there would be a steam explosion which would blast the hydroplate into smithereens and blow it and all the water out into space. Imagine the entire globe packed tightly with hundred-times-more-powerful versions of Mt. St. Helens and you get the picture.

Couchman then points out that if you add to that steam heat the heat lent by the upthrusting of super hot magmatic intrusions and granitic monoliths as suggested by Brown, and add to that the heat created by the friction of the over-thrust stopping of the hydroplate movement, and add to that the heat of lava that Brown claims welled up and covered the hydroplate in the ocean basins...

Put all of these sources of heat together in one event, and every drop of water on earth would be turned to steam and would ablate into space, most likely along with all the gases in the atmosphere. The crust of the earth would absorb enough heat to kill everything living, and the earth would remain super heated for centuries, probably millennia,

What makes Couchman's article particularly interesting to the debate is that he believes in a literal biblical flood and finds Brown's theory not only scientifically unsupportable but contradictory to the biblical account.

[Homer]

I just wish I knew who Cain was afraid of.

Some fellow named Rex, from what I hear. First name was Ty but that is a nickname cuz his full first name scared off the girls.

[darinhouston]

More of Tom Couchman's response:

I'm bored (work has been slow today) so I read a bit about Walt Brown's Hydroplate theory and decided to pick it a apart a bit. I wrote the calculations out in a short hand that may not be familiar with everybody, so if there are questions fell free to ask.

Dr. Brown’s proposed Flood events:

With a few explanatory intervening comments, I will let Dr. Brown tell his story of what he thinks happened during the Flood, or as he calls it the “hydroplate catastrophe.” Dr. Brown hypothesizes that after the third day of creation there was a layer of water an average of 1.2km in thickness confined under the granite crust of the earth, with the basalt crust below that layer of water. This water comprised about half the water upon the earth, the remainder of the earth’s water being above the seafloor granite crust as shallow seas. Dr. Brown says that the tremendous pressure on this trapped subterranean water was increasing. He gives some speculations as to why this pressure increase should be happening, but it does not really matter; the increase might have been natural and it might have been miraculous. Here is Dr. Brown’s description of the result of that pressure increase.

The increasing pressure in the subterranean water stretched the overlying crust, just as a balloon stretches when the pressure inside increases. Eventually, this shell of rock reached its failure point. Failure began with a microscopic crack at the earth’s surface. Stress concentrations at both ends of the crack resulted in its rapid propagation at almost 2 miles per second, about half the velocity of sound in rock. Within seconds, this crack penetrated down to the subterranean chamber and then horizontally followed the path of least resistance, generally along a great-circle path around the earth. The ends of the crack, traveling in opposite directions, circled the earth in 2–3 hours. Initial stresses were largely relieved when one end of the crack ran into the path left by the other end. In other words, the crack traveled a path that intersected itself at a large angle (or formed a “T” or “Y”) somewhere on the opposite side of the earth from where the rupture began.

As the crack raced around the earth, the 10-mile-thick crust opened like a rip in a tightly stretched cloth. Pressure in the subterranean chamber immediately beneath the rupture suddenly dropped to almost atmospheric pressure. Water exploded with great violence out of the 10-mile-deep “slit” that wrapped around the earth like the seam of a baseball. All along this globe-circling rupture, whose path corresponds to today’s Mid-Oceanic Ridge, a fountain of water jetted supersonically into and far above the atmosphere. Much of the water fragmented into an “ocean” of droplets that fell as rain great distances away. This produced torrential rains such as the earth has never experienced—before or after.

The powerful upward-jetting water rapidly eroded both sides of the 46,000-mile-long rupture an average of 400 miles. About 35% of the sediments were eroded from the basalt below the escaping water. Eroded particles (or sediments) were swept up in the waters that gushed out from the rupture, giving the water a thick, muddy consistency. These sediments settled out over the earth’s surface in days, trapping and burying many plants and animals, beginning the process of forming the world’s fossils.

Picture the situation as Dr. Brown has described it. A 16km-thick shell of granite cracked like a ripe melon, freeing the water beneath it. Under the tremendous pressure of the overlying granite, the subterranean water was ejected from its confinement.

Since the overpressure of the granite imparted supersonic velocity to the escaping water, it relatively quickly eroded the edges of the granite sialic crust, forming an 800-mile-wide trench which went completely around the earth. This trench was of such a shape that the sialic crust, which had previously been a single shell around the earth, was now divided into three huge “plates.” As water continued to escape from beneath the sialic crust, much of it dissolved material from the edge of the crust to form a muddy or sediment-rich inundation medium which overwhelmed every living thing on the face of the earth (except, of course, the passengers on the Ark). Most of the remainder of the escaping water condensed in the atmosphere and fell to the earth as the torrential rains described in the Genesis story.

But there was still some water left beneath the granite plates, and that remaining water plays a prominent role in the next event of the Flood catastrophe.

Material within the earth is compressed by overlying rock. Rock’s slight elasticity gives it springlike characteristics. The deeper the rock, the more weight above, so the more tightly compressed the “spring”—all the way down to the center of the earth. Erosion by escaping waters continuously widened the rupture path during the flood phase. Eventually, the width was so great, and so much of the surface weight had been removed, that the compressed rock beneath the exposed floor of the subterranean chamber sprung upward. As the Mid-Atlantic Ridge began to rise, creating slopes on either side, the granite plates (which we will call hydroplates) started to slide downhill. This removed even more weight from what was to become the floor of the Atlantic Ocean. As weight was removed, the floor rose faster and the slopes increased, so the hydroplates accelerated, removing even more weight, etc. The entire Atlantic floor rapidly rose almost 10 miles.

As the first segment of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge began to rise, it helped lift adjacent portions of the chamber floor just enough for them to become unstable and also spring upward. This process continued all along the rupture path, forming the Mid-Oceanic Ridge. The sliding hydroplates were almost perfectly lubricated by water still escaping from beneath them. Continental plates accelerated away from the widening Atlantic. (Recall that the rupture encircled the earth, and escaping subterranean water widened that rupture, not just on what is now the Atlantic side of the earth but also on the Pacific side. Thus, the plates could move away from what would become the Atlantic.)

Picture again the scenario as Dr. Brown describes it. The simatic crust below the water, which was in turn below the sialic crust, had the overpressure of the sialic crust removed along the 800-mile-wide trench first created by the cracking of the sialic crust and then widened by the passage of the super-heated, supersonic water from beneath it. So the simatic crust bulged upward almost ten miles into the breach, lifting the edges of the three huge plates of granite which had been created by the rupturing of the sialic crust.

There was still some water underneath these “hydroplates.” The granite was not yet resting on the basalt below. When the edge of the granite hydroplate was tilted upward by the bulge in the underlying basalt, the plate would slide on the underlying water “downhill,” away from the uplifted basalt.

The bulge in the basalt became the mid-ocean ridge, and the movement of the hydroplates away from the mid-ocean ridge is the continental drift which conventional science assigns to the action of plate tectonics. But the drifting did not continue very long. Dr. Brown resumes the narrative.

Eventually, the drifting—actually accelerating—hydroplates ran into resistances of two types. The first happened as the water lubricant beneath each sliding plate was depleted. The second occurred when a plate collided with something. As each massive hydroplate decelerated, it experienced a gigantic compression event—buckling, crushing, and thickening each plate. Mountains formed and overthrusts occurred as the weaker portions of the hydroplates crushed and buckled. As explained earlier, the forces for this dramatic event were not applied to stationary (static) continents resting on other rock. The force was dynamic, produced by rapidly decelerating hydroplates riding on lubricating water that had not yet escaped from below.

As the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and Atlantic floor rose, mass had to shift within the earth toward the Atlantic. Subsidence occurred on the opposite side of the earth, especially in the western Pacific where granite plates buckled downward, forming trenches.

And there you have Dr. Brown’s explanation for the cessation of the sliding of the plates, the formation of mountains and the deep ocean trenches. One more thing: if this scenario is true, the floor of the Pacific ocean would be made not of basalt but of granite. Why do we see basalt on the Pacific floor? Here is the final piece of Dr. Brown’s explanation of the hydroplate event:

Apparently, frictional heating caused by high-pressure movements of brittle crust under the Pacific floor generated vast, thick outpourings of lava that covered the hydroplate.

According to Dr. Brown the Pacific floor basalt, created by “frictional heating” covers the granite. As a result of all this activity the earth’s crust reached its present configuration of continents and oceans, not in a hundred million years but in a few weeks. The torrential rains produced by the condensation of the water escaping from beneath the sialic crust began to subside, but the movement of the plates generated tremendous waves in all the ocean waters of the earth. These waves play still another part in Dr. Brown’s theory, a part which I will review in the next section of this paper.

Problems with Dr. Brown’s Flood story

What’s wrong with this story? Well, just about everything.

First of all, Dr. Brown has the interesting habit of not telling us, at least not in such a way that the detail is easy to locate, what we need to know to evaluate his model. Wonder why? If someone wanted to provide a serious scientific critique (a distinction I would not claim for this article) of the hydroplate hypothesis, he or she would need to know Dr. Brown’s proposed answers to at least the following questions:

1. How much of the sialic crust was above the pre-Flood waters as continental crust, and how much of it below the waters as seabed crust?
2. What was the average thickness of the layer of water which remained between the continental sialic crust and the underlying simatic crust, and what was the average thickness of water between the seafloor sialic crust and the underlying simatic crust?
3. What percentage of the seabed sialic crust was resting directly on the underlying simatic crust?
4 How quickly did the water under the sialic crust escape between the beginning of the rupture and the beginning of hydroplate movement—in other words, what was the duration of the venting phase?
5. How fast did the hydroplates move once they began to move, and how far did they go—in other words, what were the duration and extent of the drift phase?
6. What was the duration of the crust-thickening and orogeny event?
All these details (and probably more) would be necessary to permit a complete evaluation of Dr. Brown’s hypothesis, yet I have not been able to find any of them stated in a direct manner (there are some hints). Does Dr. Brown not expect his hypothesis to be treated as a serious theory (do I hear more laughter?)?

Second, there isn’t enough water on Dr. Brown’s earth. His two layers of water would total 2.4km if spread over the whole globe, but the actual amount of water would comprise a “hydrosphere” of 2.7km. Dr. Brown’s model is missing about 11% of the water that’s actually on the earth. Given this fact, the last thing Dr. Brown can afford to have happen is for some of this water to escape the atmosphere; he needs every drop. But he is forced to conclude that water under the enormous pressure postulated by the weight of all the continental rock would explode from under the hydroplates at supersonic velocity. In fact, his theory cannot do without either velocity or heat or both, because some of the escaping water has to collide with the sides of the sialic canyon created by the rupture of the water chamber to produce massive erosion of sheer granite (400 miles on each side of a T-shaped trench maybe 40,000 miles long, 10 miles deep, a total of 160,000,000 cubic miles of granite!) in a relatively short period of time (How long? See previous item!). Dr. Brown claims:

All along this globe-circling rupture, whose path corresponds to today’s Mid-Oceanic Ridge, a fountain of water jetted supersonically into and far above the atmosphere.

Now I happen to think he is right: given the scenario he proposes, a great deal of the subterranean water would have wound up “lost in space.” But for the purposes of this analysis I am going to assume that essentially all the water came back to earth, because he needs every bit of it to get anywhere close to all the water on earth today.

The next problem requires a little creative “guesstimation” about pre-Flood land and ocean areas. Today about 7/10 of the surface of the earth is covered by water, the remaining 3/10 by land. What were the ratios before the Flood? I can’t find anyplace where Dr. Brown tells us. But he refers to a depiction of pre-Flood “pangea” which contains continents which look pretty much like the ones we have today, so I will guess that he doesn’t think the ratios have changed much. The question I need answered is this one: on days 2-3 of creation, when the heavier part of the sialic crust sank to become seafloor, how far down did it sink?

Before the slumping of the granite into the sea beds the sialic crust already had 1.2km of water on top of it. How much did the water which drained off the rising part of the granite add to that depth? The land area is 3/10 of the total surface of the earth, and essentially (for purposes of this rough calculation) all the water on top of that 3/10 of the earth was spread over the remaining 7/10. The 3/10 of the earth which became continental surface had 1.2km of water on top of it, so to determine the average depth of water from the continental surface which was added to the sea water over the seafloor granite we perform the following calculation:

3/10 (.3) divided by 7/10 (.7) = 3/7 (.43) multiplied by 1.2km = .51

… or about another 500m of water on top of the existing ocean. So in order to get the continents just at sea level the depth of the water above the seafloor sialic crust had to be:

1.2km + .5km = 1.7km

Thus, while the lighter crust rose 1.2km to get to the same level as the water, the heavier crust must have sunk .5km to a total depth below the water of 1.7km. How much higher was the lighter crust—how high above sea level, on average, did it rise? Dr. Brown doesn’t help us, so we have to make some guesses. Let’s say the heavier crust sunk another .3km, to a total depth below the water of 2km. The heavier crust would have sunk .8km beyond the 1.2km by which it was originally below water to reach the average depth I have hypothesized for the sea floor. The average height of the continental crust above the sea level is given by:

7/10 (.7) divided by 3/10 (.3) = 7/3 (2.3) multiplied by .3km = .7km

So our supposed average height of the land above sea level would have been 700 meters. Since Dr. Brown says some mountains on the pre-Flood earth might have risen as high as 1.2km above sea level, that might be a good guess.

Lest I try my readers’ patience any further, let me get directly to the point. Assuming my calculations are close to correct, the sialic seafloor (under a mean sea depth of 2km) was, on average, separated from the simatic crust by only 400 meters (the original 1.2km minus the .8km which it sank), while the continental crust had 2.9km (the original 1.2km plus the additional 1.7km by which it rose) of water under it. That’s more than a sevenfold difference in depth. The total amount of water under the seafloor was greater, but it was spread out over nearly three times the area and was therefore much thinner.

And that calculation raises the third problem with Dr. Brown’s Flood story. Once the eruption of water began, it would take on average the same amount of time for essentially all the water to be ejected from beneath all the crust; however, it would take a lot less time for an any given expanse of undersea granite to come to rest on the underlying basalt than for any given expanse of continental granite to rest on the basalt. Unless the underside of the seafloor granite were perfectly flat—and given all those “pillars” Dr. Brown hypothesized, it would not have been—significant portions of the seafloor hydroplate would begin to rest against the sub-floor basalt long before any edge of the plate had eroded sufficiently to allow the hydroplates to begin to move. By the time hydroplate movement began, a large percentage of the seafloor sialic crust would be locked against the underlying basalt, preventing hydroplate movement.

The fourth problem with Dr. Brown’s story is similar to the second problem: not only is there not enough water, there isn't enough land. The average thickness of the sialic crust today is 70km. Dr. Brown’s proposed granite crust is 16km thick. He says that at the end of the hydroplate event the plates over-thrust each other and thickened considerably. I would hope so! By how much? If all of the 16km of sialic crust he has available to him, including every bit of what he claims was on the ocean floor, were stacked together to comprise a crust which covered 30 percent of the earth’s surface (which is how much it does cover today), that crust would average only about 53km thick. He is on average 17km short of having enough crust to stack to the thickness of the continental crust today, and he has none at all left to underlay the Pacific ocean. There simply isn’t enough granite in Dr. Brown’s model to do what he needs to have done! That’s okay, though, because as I have indicated seismic studies show that there is no widespread expanse of granite under the ocean floor.

A fifth and even more serious problem with Dr. Brown’s hypothesis is heat. There are several orders of magnitude too much of it for this story to have any chance of being real. If we do Dr. Brown the favor of allowing all the water erupting from under the crust to remain in the earth’s atmosphere, then all of the energy produced by the collapse of all the sialic crust down onto the underlying simatic crust, an average distance of 1.2km, is carried from under the crust by the water which escapes.

Simplify the picture by assuming the 16 km layer is actually a flat disk of area equal to the area of earth's surface.

Aearth = pi D2 = pi 12742^2 km^2 = 5.1x10 68 km^2 (Dearth=12,742 km)

The volume of this slab is Vgranite = Aearth * thickness of surrounding granite slab.

Vgranite = 5.1x108 * 16 = 8.2x109 km^3 = 8.2x1024 cm^3

(where 1 km^3 = (1000 m/km * 100 cm/m)^3 = 1x1015 cm^3/km^3)

Similarly, the volume (Vwater) of the underlying water layer is

Vwater = 5.1x108 km^2 * 1.2 = 6.1x108 km^3 = 6.1x1023 cm^3

The mass of the granite is its volume * density (or, specific gravity)

Mgranite = 8.2x1024 cm3 * 2.7 g/cm^3 = 2.2x1025 g = 2.2x1022 kg

The work to raise this mass to a height of 1.2 km against force of gravity is W = F*d, where F=m*g. So the total work is W=m*g*h, where g is the acceleration due to gravity. This is also the potential energy that will be released as kinetic energy in a fall of 1.2 km. This will be released even if the fall is through water. The terminal velocity will be less than if in a vacuum, but this is because the water heats up due to the frictional forces it exerts to slow the velocity of the mass. The amount of energy released is the same as for a fall without the water (applying conservation of energy principle).

W = 2.2x1022 kg * 9.8m/s2 * 1200m = 2.6x1026 Joules = 6.2x1025 cal

(where 1 calorie = 4.186 Joule)

One cm3 of water will rise 1C for every calorie absorbed. Assuming the water is at 0C initially, the temperature rise, T, is

dT = 6.2x1025 cal / 6.1x1023 cm3 = 102 Celsius ~ 100C

This assumes no phase changes (converting water to steam, or melting of ice). If the initial temperature is higher, then less energy is required to raise the temperature to boiling (at atmospheric pressure, which this isn’t). Any energy left over goes into converting water to steam. Water requires 539 cal/g to convert to steam at STP conditions. If the water is already at 100C before the fall, then the maximum volume will be vaporized, which is

Maximum volume H2O vaporized = 6.2x1025 cal / 539 cal/cm^3 = 1.1x1023 cm^3

This represents about 20% of the total volume of Brown’s subterranean water.

So, the water will rise in temperature to at least 100C, and depending upon its starting temperature, the water will convert between 0% and 20% of total volume of water to steam.

This calculation is optimistic, because Dr. Brown says the confined water had a temperature of about 50 degrees C (122 degrees F). Either way, the bottom line is that about half the water on earth has its mean temperature converted to at least 100 degrees C. That heat dissipates into the biosphere in two ways: by eroding rock into super-hot mud in the upper layer of the crust; and by condensation into rain. Convective transfer takes this heat to the upper reaches of the atmosphere were it can begin to radiate into space. But until it’s all radiated away, the earth has been turned into a super-sauna.

Actually, the most likely result of the collapse of the sialic crust which Dr. Brown proposes is that a significant percentage of the trapped water would be converted to steam. Since the water, as Dr. Brown correctly notes, cannot all escape at once, water near the center of the hydroplates would be trapped, and some of that water would “flash” to steam.

If we take the initial temperature of the water to 50C then “only” 10% of the subterranean water is converted to steam.

Once the slab falls, it is reasonable to assume the water only experiences normal atmospheric pressure. (We won’t try to factor in the additional effect that releasing the pressure on the subterranean water would cause when the slab fragments and falls, but it would be catastrophic in its own right.) At 1 atmosphere 1 cm3 of H2O converts to ~1700 cm^3 of steam. So even converting a small percentage of the water to steam will be catastrophic.

For example, if 10% of the water (1x10^23 cm^3) flashes to steam, that will produce 9x10^25 cm^3 of steam.

The volume of the earth is 4/3 pi r^3, or

Vearth = pi * 4/3 *(12742/2)^3 = 1.1x10^12 km^3 = 1.1x10^27 cm^3

The ratio of the volume of steam to initial water is

9x1025 / 1.1x1027 = 0.08 = 8%

Thus, converting 10% of Brown's supposed subterranean water to steam would result in a huge volume of steam: a volume equal to 8% of the volume of the entire globe!

Now, 8% may not seem to be significant at first glance. For comparison consider that the thickness of the outer crust of the earth is as much as 70 km in some continental locations. The volume of a uniform shell of crust 70 km thick will have a volume, VC, of

VC = pi * 4/3 * (63713 – 63013) = 3.6x10^10 km63 = 3.6x10^25 cm^3

The ratio of steam produced to an outer crust volume 70 km thick is

VS/VC = 9 / 3.6 = 2.5

Thus, the volume of steam produced by the collapse of the granite layer unto the basalt is over twice the volume of a 50 km thick outer “crust.” The entire outer 50 km of the earth could be blasted into space by such a catastrophe. The hypothetical granite layer would be decimated. Such an event would almost certainly result in the rapid death of this planet, rather than a rapid creation of continents.

In case you didn’t follow all of that analysis, here’s the bottom line. The hydroplate would sink until the pressure from water trapped under the plates built up sufficiently to cause that water to flash to steam, at which point there would be a steam explosion which would blast the hydroplate into smithereens and blow it and all the water out into space. Imagine the entire globe packed tightly with hundred-times-more-powerful versions of Mt. St. Helens and you get the picture. At least there’s no longer a problem with heat getting into the biosphere, because there isn’t any biosphere left!

But to re-focus on Dr. Brown’s unreality … Add to that heat the cooling of all the magmatic intrusions and granitic monoliths, which Dr. Brown says formed at this same time, and which one study [Robert Moore, “The impossible voyage of Noah’s ark,” Creation/Evolution 11 (Winter, 1983), Pages 1-43; cited by Alan Hayward, Creation and Evolution, Bethany House Publishers, 1985] estimated would increase the mean temperature of the ocean to 2700 degrees C. Add to those two sources the heat generated by the overthrust stopping of the hydroplate movement, which is essentially impossible to compute but which would be enormous even by itself. Add to those three sources the heat injected into the biosphere by the cooling of the basalt which Dr. Brown hypothesized covers the sialic crust which he says exists under the Pacific ocean basalt: “… vast, thick outpourings of lava that covered the hydroplate.” He doesn’t say how thick this lava layer is, but a 1km-thick layer of lava on top of the entire Pacific ocean would be about 104 million cubic km of lava to be cooled, an amount of heat which by itself would cook the earth many times over. Put all of these sources of heat together in one event, and every drop of water on earth would be turned to steam and would ablate into space, most likely along with all the gases in the atmosphere. The crust of the earth would absorb enough heat to kill everything living, and the earth would remain super-heated for centuries, probably millennia. Even if God protected the ark and its inhabitants from being steam-cooked, baked and fried, there is no chance that at the end of a year, a hundred years or a thousand years Noah and his family could leave the ark to start a new life.

Let me turn aside for a moment to make a point which bears not only upon Dr. Brown’s hypothesis but upon any young-earth explanation for the features that we see in the crust of the earth. All geologic processes generate heat and instability. All of them. And yet, all these geologic processes are also necessary for the earth to support life. The reason the earth is inhabitable is that God made it so that these life-giving geologic processes happen slowly, over geologic time scales. If you accelerate them wildly, as Dr. Brown has proposed, you make life impossible. This principle applies to any hypothesis—hydroplate theory or runaway subduction or dramatically increased rates of radioactive decay—which tries to explain the appearance of lengthy processes by proposing that these processes in the past operated much faster than they do today.

A sixth problem is one which I have already cited in connection with the creation event: the rock just won’t do what Dr. Brown needs for it to do. Compressibility doesn’t make basalt act like a spring, as he proposes. In fact, basalt is even denser and stiffer than granite—average density of 3 as opposed to granite at 2.7—which makes it less pliable. Even if the super-heated water from under the seafloor edge of the hydroplate lasted long enough to erode an 800-mile-wide canyon, the basalt underneath would not “spring up” ten miles to form a slope for the hydroplate. Furthermore, the illustrations in Dr. Brown’s book, which I roughly reproduced diagrammatically in this section, show the overlying granite curving gracefully to conform to the supposed shape of the basalt “spring” below, and that conformity wouldn’t happen either. I pointed out in the previous section that if granite had the putty-like properties Dr. Brown proposes the earth would experience continuous violent earthquakes. The same thing is true of basalt, which underlies all the continents and all the oceans. It is the stiffness and inelasticity of these materials, except over geologic time, which makes life on earth possible. Even Dr. Brown gives some recognition to this fact: he mentions, “high-pressure movements of brittle crust under the Pacific floor …” So the crust is “brittle” when Dr. Brown needs it to be brittle in order to generate lava, and putty-like when he needs it to be plastic to conform to the shape of the upward-springing basalt! It’s another case of Dr. Brown’s theory requiring self-contradictory properties for the materials in the earth.

But the seventh and last problem is the most egregious violation of common sense. Even if all the other difficulties I have cited could somehow be eluded, the hydroplates aren’t going anywhere. Why? Think about it. Dr. Brown claims that the splitting of the sialic crust divided it into three massive hydroplates which fit together at what are today the mid-ocean ridges. Let’s pretend (and that’s all it is, a pretense!) that the erosion of the edges of these plates took place as he proposes: remember, all the edges of all three plates were being eroded at about the same time, so that the average 800-mile-wide gap among the plates formed more-or-less simultaneously. At just the right moment, the underlying basalt “sprang up” to form a slope over ten miles tall, but that slope propagated itself completely around the earth, and included all of the edges of all three of the hydroplates. The entire edge of each of the hydroplates was then sloping upward. How were the hydroplates going to move? Whichever direction they went, they were going toward an upslope! In other words, if you could see a cross-section of the entire hydroplate (instead of just one edge of the hydroplate, as Dr. Brown shows in his book), it would look like this:


Dr. Brown has spent his whole narrative hallucinating upon the Atlantic mid-ocean ridge and the movement of the Americas away from that ridge. But on the west side of the Americas, in the Pacific, was the rest of the rim of that same hydroplate, sloping so that the plate wanted to move in the other direction—to the east. There was no place for the plate to go without going uphill. And the same was true of the other two plates. The effect of the mid-ocean ridge rising ten miles around the entire edge of every plate would have been to convert hydro-plates into hydro-bowls, which would be locked into place right where they were. Even if every other detail of Dr. Brown’s model operated exactly as he has proposed, the hydrobowls would not move an inch.

Dr. Brown’s hydroplates, and his hypothesis, are dead in the water.
In summary, Dr. Brown’s theory doesn’t have either enough water or enough rock to account for all the water and rock on the earth today. Portions of the granite plate under the ocean would likely rest on the underlying basalt before enough erosion of the edges of the sialic crust had taken place to allow movement of the plates. But even if these three difficulties could be overcome, there are three insurmountable problems with “hydroplate theory.” There are several orders of magnitude too much heat to allow life to continue. Rock won’t do what this theory requires it to do. And the hydroplates wouldn’t go anywhere anyway, because every edge of every plate would be on an uphill slope. Thus, even if there were some way for Dr. Brown’s interpretation of the creation to work, his interpretation of the Flood will not.

In brief, there is no chance at all that hydroplate theory is correct.

[Homer]

Something that puzzles me is the question raised about where the waters of the flood have gone. Perhaps they have gone where the waters that once were on the surface of Mars (so we are told by scientists) have gone.

[alastairblake]

Something that puzzles me is the question raised about where the waters of the flood have gone. Perhaps they have gone where the waters that once were on the surface of Mars (so we are told by scientists) have gone.

hey Homer, I have wondered about this too. some opinions presented by RTB have seemed to jive in my opinion.
here are some links.

id recommend picking some articles from this search result. (i searched 'flood' on RTB's site)
http://www.reasons.org/siteSearch/node/ ... od&x=0&y=0