What Do We Know About Noah’s Flood – Part I

One of the issues that is often lost on the casual reader of not only this site, but of any Land of Promise writing, ideas, beliefs or theories, and that is the connection between known events and so-called “supposed events.” As an example, scientists often ignore the reality of a universal Flood, and in so doing, neglect, along with most people, to take into account the effect such an event would have on other scientific calculations and so-called systems and concepts, such as the proposed and often accepted Geologic Time Scale (which now sits at 4.55 billion years for the Age of the Earth) and its various divisions, the Eons, such as the Precambrian and the Phanerozoic, and Eras, such as the Paleozoic, Mesozoic, and Cenozoic, along with their numerous Periods and Epochs. 
   How these things come about is often fascinating, but almost always unknown and not understood by the scientists because of their close-minded approach to areas outside their ideologies.

Left: Rajdeep Dasgupta; Right: Megan Duncan, researchers at Rice University

According to Rajdeep Dasgupta professor of Earth Science, and part of the Rice University petrologists that conducted an eventful study sponsored by the National Science Foundation and the Deep Carbon Observatory, describing how fossilized carbon—the remains of Earth's earliest single-celled creatures—could have been absorbed and locked deep in Earth's interior at a time when atmospheric oxygen rose dramatically. The paper appeared in the journal Nature Geoscience.
    As he stated: “It's an interesting concept, but in order for complex life to evolve, the earliest form of life needed to be deeply buried in the planet's mantle.” But how one might ask, did it get there? To understand that we need look at Dasgupta’s added comment: "The mechanism for that burial comes in two parts. First, you need some form of plate tectonics, a mechanism to carry the carbon remains of early life-forms back into Earth. Second, you need the correct geochemistry so that organic carbon can be carried deeply into Earth's interior and thereby removed from the surface environment for a long time."
    Science does not understand how that happened, only that it did. Referred to as the "great oxidation event," a steep increase in atmospheric oxygen that is well-documented in countless ancient rocks, the event is so well-known to geologists that they often simply refer to it as the "GOE." As stated in the article “Early organic carbon got deep burial in mantle,” in Earth History-Geology, “Despite this familiarity, there's no scientific consensus about what caused the GOE."

Cyanobacteria, believed by Science to have become the first microbes to produce oxygen by photosynthesis

For example, scientists claim to know that the Earth's earliest known life, single-celled cyanobacteria, drew down carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and released oxygen. But the appearance of early life has been pushed further and further into the past with recent fossil discoveries, and scientists now believe that cyanobacteria were prevalent at least 500 million years before the GOE.” Cyanobacteria, which was formally known as “blue-green algae”—receiving their color and hence their name from the bluish pigment phycocyanin, which they use to capture light for photosynthesis, but can also be red or pink from the pigment phycoerythrin—which form stromatolites and lack membrane-enclosed organelles.

The claimed sudden increase in oxygenation of the Earth in both the GOE (Great Oxidation Event) and NOE (Neoproterozoic Oxygenation Event)

According to co-author Megan Duncan (shown above), who conducted the research for her Ph.D. dissertation at Rice, “Cyanobacteria may have played a role, but the GOE was so dramatic—oxygen concentration increased as much as 10,000 times—that cyanobacteria by themselves could not account for it. There also has to be a mechanism to remove a significant amount of reduced carbon from the biosphere, and thereby shift the relative concentration of oxygen within the system.”
    Dasgupta and Duncan found that the chemical composition of the “silicate melt”—subducting crustal rock that melts and rises back to the surface through volcanic eruptions—plays a crucial role in determining whether fossilized organic carbon, or graphite, sinks into the mantle or rises back to the surface through volcanism.
    This is also a process that would have occurred from a universal Flood that submerged every living thing on Earth, and through the subsequent division of the land mass, caused the very conditions—deep burial, subduction of rock, melting beneath the surface and volcanic eruptions—that would have met Duncan’s scenario. So let us take a look at the events in conjunction with the Flood and the buildup of the ice sheets known as the Wisconsin and Fennoscandia.
    According to Melvin A. Cook, in Prehistory and Earth Models (The Book Service, LTD, Random House/Penguin, 1966), “There are two great land masses formerly covered with ice which suddenly lost their ice caps and began rapidly to uplift in order to restore isostasy (vertical balance). These land masses comprising a great half-moon shaped, glacial denuded (“shield”) zone in northeastern Canada and another one in Europe and Asia called Fennoscandia”—from Fenno-Scandinavia (Scandinavian and Koala Peninsulas, Karelia, Finland and Denmark).

Ancient Fennoscandia covers today’s Scandinavian peninsulas, Finland and Denmark

As Cook adds, “Both of these land masses began to rise (following sudden denudation of ice) at precisely the same time and have followed identical land-rise curves ever since.” This is detailed by Geodesy and Geophysics work of Dr. Weikko A. Heiskanen and Dr. Felix A. Vening-Meinesz (The Earth and it Gravity Field, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1958).
    Now, regarding the ice sheets and their formation, an issue lost on many scientists and the general public as a whole is that whenever a large land mass overlaps or even extends well into polar regions of the earth, ice can do nothing else but grow on it—obviously, ice caps cannot grow on deep oceans even in polar regions because they are eroded too rapidly by convection of warmer water beneath them. Thus, when stabilized and insulated by land masses, they always grow under a terrestrial polar environment simply because condensation (ice and snow) greatly exceeds vaporization, melting and iceberg sluff-off. In fact, contrary to popular belief and the pseudo-science of "global warming," the ice caps are growing thicker as evidenced by satellite (European Space Agency CryoSat-2 satellite),
Dr. Benny Peiser of the Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF), and Ted Maksym of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, the latter conducting a study in which he sent an underwater robot into the depths of the Antarctica sea to measure the ice, which showed that the ice is actually much thicker than has been predicted over the last 20 years. Actually, "Global sea ice is at a record high," another key indicator that the water beneath the ice caps is either growing colder or at least maintaining its long-time cold temperature, growing ice as it has done for millennia.
    As Cook adds: “When these ice sheets (of the Wisconsin glaciation) were building up, the primordial continent (Pangaea) at high latitudes, both north and south, was subsiding regularly under ever-increasing polar ice loads while at lower latitudes it was uplifting. The total load eventually exceeded the strength of the continent and suddenly ruptured it from pole to pole.” Panageoa, by the way, was considered the supercontinent of all the earth (“Pan” means “all, entire, whole,” and Gaia” means “Mother Earth, land”). The concept that the continents once formed a continuous land mass was first proposed by Alfred Wegener, the originator of the theory of continental drift, in his 1912 publication The Origin of Continents (Die Entstehung der Kontinente).

In fact, the name "Pangea" (German: Pangäa) occurs only once, when Wegener refers to the ancient supercontinent as “"Schon die Pangäa der Karbonzeit hatte so einen Vorderrand … " meaning “Already the Pangea of the Carboniferous era had such a leading edge…” (The Carboniferous era is claimed to have covered a 60-million-year-span between the Devonian Period and the Permian Period).
    We might insert here an understanding of the times involved, since we have discussed the difference between ancient time in a claimed balance of radiocarbon frame and the factual unbalance time (see “Understanding Equilibrium,” in Chapter 2-RadioCarbon Dating, Scientific Fallacies & Other Myths) in which the Earth exists, and according to Melvin A. Cook, “By taking into account the unbalance of radiocarbon, this date is actually brought into line with Biblical history wherein continental shift occurred near the time of the Flood and “in the days of Peleg.”

(See the next post, “What Do We Know About Noah’s Flood – Part II,” for more on what we know and don’t know about Noah’s Flood and the aftermath)