The Importance of the Destruction in 3 Nephi – Part I

One of our readers sent in several questions about our articles regarding the Land of Promise being in South America. 
    Comment: “I have a few questions about your Book of Mormon theory. I am not an archaeologist or historian, just a regular guy who loves the Book of Mormon. I recently started my own study of what the setting of the Book of Mormon may have looked like in order to understand it better. While my initial goal was not to find a place on the map, the more I studied the details the more it became clear that there were some significant clues” Tyrus C. Response: It is always interesting when someone discovers what seems obvious to us but evidently hidden to most—the scriptural record contains all the “clues” necessary to find the answers to where Nephi sailed from, where he sailed to, when Lehi died, and where Nephi settled and built the City of Nephi. From this information, it is amazing how everything else stated in the scriptural record falls into place. It is so evident that it seems everyone could and would follow this information were they not inundated with erroneous information from places like BYU and LDS archaeologists who have convinced themselves that the Land of Promise is in Mesoamerica, which doesn’t fit the descriptions in the Book of Mormon without making changes to the scriptural record, beginning with the outlandish idea that Mormon meant different directions than the ones he stated and neither the Spirit nor Joseph Smith knew they were wrong by our compass headings.
    Comment: “In learning about your theory…”
    Response: It should be pointed out that we never use the term “theory” to describe our belief in this matter. We did not start out with a theory and then try to prove or disprove it. We did not start out with a location, a map, or an idea where the Land of Promise was located. We simply started with 1 Nephi 1:1 and followed along where the scriptural information took us. Frankly, in the beginning I was amazed at the results, for like most people, I thought the Land of Promise was located elsewhere than where the record actually led us.
    Comment: “I have some questions about how your theory would fit with these scriptures: 1) First, just to clarify, are you saying that the entire Andes mountain range (and the country of Brazil) rose out of the water in three hours? (3 Nephi 8:19).”

Response: I’m not saying that—geologists tell us that the Andes Mountains rose to their present height after the waters receded off the submerged continent. What is now the Amazon basin was pretty much submerged (part of a submerged continent); however, not all of Brazil was just beneath the surface. There were two areas to the east, called the Brazilian highlands or Brazilian Plateau, which rose on either side of the area where now the Amazon River empties into the Atlantic Ocean.
    One, to the north, was called the Guiana Shield, the other, to the south, was called the Brazilian Shield, including the Beni Foredeep—an area tested in a model with approximately 110 cores of pristine floodplains along approximately 1242 miles of the Rios Beni and Mamore in northern Bolivia; over 95 per cent of the 210 Pb profiles depict individual episodic deposition events, not steady-state accumulation, requiring a revised geochronological methodology. Stated in plainer English, this area did not develop from a steady accumulation of material but through episodic events, such as floods or, in this case, sudden rising of submerged ground to surface exposure.

In the southern area of the Brazilian Shield or Craton, was the Chaco Foredeep, i.e., a basin adjacent to a craton which is filled with a thick accumulation of sediment derived from an orogenic belt during uplift—typically from non to shallow-marine.
    These two cratons, i.e., a large, stable block of the earth's crust forming the nucleus of a continent, simply defined as an old and stable part of the continental lithosphere. The term craton is used to distinguish the stable portion of the continental crust from regions that are more geologically active and unstable (movable). Cratons can be described as shields, in which the basement rock crops out at the surface, and platforms, in which the basement is overlaid by sediments and sedimentary rock.

These two eastern cratons, or what would have appeared as ocean islands at the time are verified by an obscure event recorded in the time of man by the Koine Greek historian, biographer, essayist and philosopher Plutarch (later renamed upon becoming a Roman citizen: Lucius Mastrius Plutarchus), having studied mathematics and philosophy at Athens under the philosopher Ammonius in 66-67 A.D. The event claims that sailors who landed in Spain about 60 B.C. after visiting, so they said, two large Atlantic islands “10,00 stadia west of the African coast” (Robert Larson “Was America the Wonderful Land of Fusang?” American Heritage, April 1966, p43).
    Stadia is an ancient roman or Greek measure of length, about 185 meters—10,000 stadia would be about 1,850,000 meters or 6,069,553 feet or 1,150 miles. The closest distance between the African coast and the Brazilian coast is 1800 miles, a difference of about 650 miles or 5650 stadia. Of course, measurement of the open sea in 60 B.C. would be near impossible to measure and be right—the point is that these mariners claimed they had sailed west from the African coast and reached two islands—a the narrowest point between the two continents, their vessel would have reached the southern craton (or island) along the South American coast south of where the separation for the Amazon Sea would have been, and would have sailed northwest along the coast to have reached the northern craton (island) of the Guana Shield.
    An inscribed stone, reportedly found on the banks of the Paraiba river (a river where the continent reaches farthest east—where the mariners claimed to have landed) calls that area Iron Island during B.C. times. The inscription has been translated to read in part: ”We are Sidonian Canaanites from the city of the Merchant King. We were cast upon this distant island, a land of mountains…[after] embarking from Ezion-geber into the Red Sea…for two years around Africa. Then we were separated by the hand of Baal and were no longer with our companions. So we have come here, 12 men and three women, into  Island of Iron” (Dr. Cyrus Herzl Gordon, an American scholar of Near Eastern cultures and ancient languages, and Professor of Mediterranean Studies, Brandeis University, and author of the book Before Columbus, 1971).

Between these two eastern Cratons and the western uplift (Andean Uplift) was an inland Sea—geologists have given this area four names, the Pebasian Sea in the North, the Paranan Sea in the South, and the Panaense Sea in the middle. They have also called the entrance area of what is now the Amazon River the Amazon Sea. That many geologists have verified the sediments of the lowland continent as having been submerged at one time, and recently discovered as  having risen faster than previously thought geologically.
    Comment: “At most there was only three days of changes to the land before the earth did cease to tremble, and the rocks did cease to rend (3 Nephi 10:9)”
    Response: We need to keep in mind that in dealing with matters like this that the Lord has said took place, we are dealing with a Supreme Being that created the Universe, including stars such as VY Canis Majoris as big as 1420 times the size of our sun, taking the world’s fastest race care 2600 years to circle it once; or NML Cygni which is 1650 times larger than our sun; or UY Scuti at 1708 times our sun’s radius; black holes larger than our solar system; super galaxies such as IC1101 which is 6 million light years across, which is 11 times larger than the Milky Way Galaxy; or The Shapley supercluster some 400+ million light years long, 4,000 times larger than our own galaxy; or the Huge-LQG Quasar Group that would take 4 billion years to traverse from end to end while traveling at the speed of light; or TRES4, the largest planet so far discovered at 70% larger than Jupiter.
    The point is, God formed the earth, and in a matter of moments could reform it, causing earthquakes and destruction. The process of mountain building, as an example, that geologists claim takes millions of years could happen overnight given certain temperatures and movements within the earth. What man knows and can do is nothing to what God knows and can do.
(See the next post, ”The Changes Found in 3 Nephi – Part II,” for the rest of the questions and answer)