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

Continuing from the previous post regarding what we know and don’t know about Noah’s Flood and the aftermath that ushered in the Ice Age and the subsequent division of the continents in Peleg’s time. 
    Immediately after this catastrophic Flood of Noah, and the following continental rupture and drift, “the shorelines found themselves approximately in the positions corresponding to maximum unbalance," according to Cook, "and they began a readjustment at a maximum rate at first with ever-decreasing rates of adjustment thereafter, as the global isostatic anomaly lessened exponentially—a situation that can be observed in all radio-carbon-calibrated depth vs. time results for these readjustments.”
    All of this global shoreline readjustment probably began only about 4200-4300 years ago (after the Flood in the days of Peleg), certainly not 10,000 years ago, let alone 100 million years ago, etc. as geologists and evolutionists claim.

Ice caps grew so large and thick that their weight was more than continents could handle, and ruptured the land 

Obviously, then, according to Cook, “these caps ultimately grew so tremendous in size and weight that they eventually ruptured, driving continental fragments (our present-day continents) several thousand miles apart and, after finally melting, filled with their waters the great basin formed between the major continental blocks”—namely, North and South America in the West and Eurosaia and Africa in the East, which gave us the arctic and Atlantic basins. This occurred as the result of the Earth’s internal heat, the rift between the modern western and eastern hemispheres, which resulted in literally pushing the two hemispheres apart.
    To better understand this, it is necessary to recognize that, according to geologists, the Earth’s interior has distinct physical layers without regard to composition.  The outer layer is comprised of a rigid sphere called the lithosphere, meaning “rocky sphere,” which includes the upper, solid part of the mantle and all of the crust.  The lithosphere “floats” above a zone known as the asthenosphere, meaning “weak sphere,” which behaves as a hot, spongy or pliable plastic. Both the continental and oceanic crust is a thin layer of distinctive chemical composition overlying the mantle. On the other hand, the lithosphere is the rigid outer layer of the Earth, differing from the underlying asthenosphere by its physical and mechanical properties rather than its chemical composition. The lithosphere responds essentially as a rigid shell whereas the asthenosphere behaves as a very thick fluid. Deeper into the planet, the conditions of pressure and temperature steadily increase, with the rocks becoming hotter and denser the deeper you go and the weight of all the overlying rocks causing an increase in pressure as the decay of heavy radioactive elements like uranium deep in the core produces the increase in heat.

Thus, continents break up, due in part to this and the overload of the ice caps mentioned in the previous article. There were of course other factors involved (See Scientific Fallacies & Other Myths), including Seafloor Spreading, which gave added credence to Wegener’s postulated Continental Drift discussed in the previous article. This combination, in turn, led to the concept of Plate Tectonics, which is based on the Earth’s lithosphere being broken into a dozen or so rigid "plates” that float on the hot, malleable mantle like slabs of ice on a pond. Much of the Earth’s ancient history is the result of plates rifting into pieces to form new ocean basins and converging back together to form mountains and giant continents. Plate tectonics is the great unifying theory of geology. Virtually every part of the earth's crust and every kind of rock relates to the plate tectonic conditions that existed at the time it formed. There is very little in geologic history that makes sense except in the light of plate tectonics.
    This division then were in part created by, as Cook stated “the piling up of sediments removed from beneath the shields in radial glacial flow. When the load of sediments in the peripheral ring around an ice sheet becomes sufficiently large the crust begins to sink to form the basins.” These geosynclines, which are large-scale elongated depressions, or long troughs in the surface, or earth’s crust, containing masses of thousands or tens of thousands of feet of very thick sediment, volcanic rock and other deposits, including intrusion of crystalline igneous rock and regional uplift through folding, crumpling, and faulting along the axis of the trough complete the syncline—which, in the 19^th and 20^th centuries led to the now outdated belief that this was how mountains were formed.

Because the seafloor is characterized by mid-ocen ridges, which are caused by the rise of the hot mantle rock, when lava is extruded at any ridges, the rock it forms becomes magnetized and acquires the magnetic polarity that exists at the time the lava cools. As the crust moves away from mid-ocean ridges, it contains a continuous record of the Earth's changing magnetic polarity. It is interesting that, according to J.M. Hall and P.T. Robinson (Deep Crustal Drilling in the North Atlantic Ocean," Science, 1979, 204, pp573-586), "magnetic polarity of the ocean’s seafloors changes in patches down holes with no consistent pattern with depth, which would be expected with rapid formation of the basalt, combined with rapid field reversals, not the slow-and gradual formation with slow reversals" assumed by Uniformitarians (those opposed to the universal Flood and other cataclysmic events), and which is five hundred times faster than that seen in direct measurements of the field today, again verifying the cataclysmic event of a Flood, which is what Physicist Dr. Russell Humphreys suggests could have happened as a result of the Flood.
    There are two methods of seafloor spreading, since most plates diverge or move away from each other at mid-ocean spreading ridges, which are undersea mountains more than 12,000 feet high and 1,200 miles wide.  Molten rock moving upward by convection reaches the surface along these ridges and releases much of the Earth’s internal heat, and as the magna cools, it is pushed away from the flanks of the ridges.  Near the surface, the oceanic lithosphere is mostly basalt, a black, fine-grained volcanic rock, much heavier then granite. 
    The first is Seafloor Spreading: As molten rock rises to the surface, the entire oceanic lithosphere moves away from the spreading center.  In this way, new ocean floor constantly forms and slides away from either side of the ridge as solid plates of the lithosphere.  This process is responsible for the phenomenon known as “seafloor spreading.” 
    The second is Subduction Zone:  This is a boundary where two tectonic plates collide and, because of differences in density, one dives beneath the other.  Plates carrying oceanic rocks move across the face of the planet until they run into an obstruction, typically a continent, which is made of lighter rocks such as granite.  When the two plates collide, the heavier oceanic rocks subduct or sink downward underneath the lighter continent, usually forming a deep trench adjacent to the edge of the continent and are the deepest depressions of the Earth.

At one time, it was believed that land bridges existed between the existing continents and that the continents we know were always in their present position. However, this idea was first challenged as early as 1596 by the Dutch mapmaker Abraham Ortelius in his work Thesaurus Geographicus. Ortelius suggested that the Americas were "torn away from Europe and Africa by earthquakes and floods" and went on to say: "The vestiges of the rupture reveal themselves, if someone brings forward a map of the world and considers carefully the coasts of the three continents."
    This led to the only belief in geology today regarding the formation of continents, which is Continental Drift, though it wasn’t until three centuries later in 1912 that it was was seriously considered as a full-blown scientific theory and introduced in two articles published by a 32-year-old German meteorologist we mentioned earlier named Alfred Lothar Wegener. He contended that the supercontinent Pangaea began to split apart.   
    Thus, we that science’s determination of the events regarding the division of the continents is possible only when taken into agreement with the fact that a cataclysmic event took place that allowed for such events to unfold. And that cataclysmic event was the Flood of Noah.
    This, then brings us back to the concept of time and the fact that the Earth could not be as old as geology claims, or the events they claim took place could not have happened and leave the residue that we see all around us in the way discussed above. This, then leads us to the discussion of Time based on radiocarbon dating and whether the Earth’s atmosphere was and is in balance—a factor Libby claimed and set his clock to read, though, by his own admission, was not what all his test and clock showed—or is not in balance, as factual data verifies, giving us a reading of Earth’s origination somewhere between 10,000 and 15,000 years ago.