Reader: “They had left the city [Kishkumen] when it happened [3 Nephi 9:10] and witnessed it and described the after effects when it got light again.”
Response: No doubt many people witnessed the various destructions that occurred; however, we have no reliable accounts of such happening. As for Kishkumen, if it was one of the Robbers cities, it would have been hidden up in the mountains somewhere in their “secret places,” which lends to a curious interest in how these missionaries from the Land Northward found it in the first place when those in the land southward didn't know exactly where these secret places were, and in the second place why the Gadianton Robbers would not have killed them when they came to call the Robbers to repentance as your source claims. Even Alma had to leave the city of Ammonihah for fear of his life from the people of Ammonihah, one can only wonder what the hardened Robbers might have done to those “young men” who came down to preach to them.”
Reader: “I got the impression that it was up around the area of Venezuela at the time and they were stranded on an island as the land around them had sunk into the sea.”
Response: We have covered time and again that the area you mention in modern day Venezuela was under water, creating the island Jacob said they were upon in the Land of Promise (2 Nephi 10:20). According to Geologists who have worked on this submerged portion of the continent, that would place them in what has been called the Pebesian Sea Inlet or North Portal Seaway.
Unless, of course, they were to the east in Venezuela, on what geologists refer to as the Guiana Shield, which is one of the three cratons of the South American Plate, with a series of plateaus marking the Guiana Highlands—and one of only three basic areas that would have been above sea level during the B.C. period and until the destruction spoken of in 3 Nephi 8, 9).
If those you speak of were on the Shield, it would be interesting to know how they got there and what they were doing there in the first place
Reader: “I wouldn't be surprised if some of the Caribbean Islands are merely the tops of some of the land that sank.”
Response: One can speculate all day on the events covered in a history dating over 1000 years; however, it should be something done with historic knowledge involved. As an example, the Caribbean plate is situated, as geolgosts describe it and we have reported here on occasion, as a “teeter-totter,” that is, as the eastern section rises from internal plate action, the islands of the Caribbean rise, as the plate action dips in the other direction, the Panama knot rises and connects to South America. We know that this has happened at least once as discovered by the deep sea research and scientific drilling vessel for oceanography and marine geology studies named the Glomar Challenger. As we have written before, the ship was designed by Global Marine Inc. (now Transocean Inc.) specifically for a long term contract with the American National Science Foundation and University of California Scripps Institution of Oceanography and built by Levingston Shipbuilding Company in Orange, Texas. Launched on March 23, 1968, the vessel was owned and operated by the Global Marine Inc. corporation. Glomar Challenger was given its name as a tribute to the accomplishments of the oceanographic survey vessel HMS Challenger, the name being a truncation of Global Marine. it started on a 15-year-long scientific expedition, with the Deep Sea Drilling Program criss-crossing the Mid-Atlantic Ridge between South America and Africa, in which 17 drill holes in 10 different sites along an ocean ridge between the continents proved continental drift and seafloor renewal at rift zones, which strengthened the proposal of a single, ancient land mass, which has been called Pangaea, by geologists.
Glomar Challenger deep sea drilling vessel
In 1970, the 400-foot long, 65-foot
wide vessel, which can drill to a depth of 22,500 feet in a water depth of up
to 20,000 feet, successfully drilled and retrieved several cores off both
coasts of Panama Drilling on the two sides of the Isthmus of Panama,
established the fact that at one time Panama was submerged beneath the seal
level and there was an open water flow between the Pacific and Caribbean
(Atlantic) which was later closed in recent times to form a land bridge that we
now see (Scripps and JOIDES joint report along with Lamont-Doherty Geological
Observatory of Columbia University, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, the
Institute of Marine Sciences of the University of Miami, and the Department of
Oceanography of the University of Washington). “Recent findings by the Deep Sea Drilling Project
explaining how the Isthmus of Panama was formed were announced at the AGU
Annual Meeting in April by Tjeerd H. van Andel and G. Ross Heath of Oregon
State University's Department of Oceanography as one of the principal results
of Leg 16 of the Deep Sea Drilling Project. The cruise began in Cristobal,
Panama, on February 5 and ended in Honolulu, Hawaii, on March 30.
“During the first part of drilling during the vessel Glomar Challenger's sixteenth cruise, the shipboard scientists tested a hypothesis developed recently at Oregon State University and Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory of Columbia University. On the basis of geophysical observations, this hypothesis suggests that an ocean ridge extended eastward from the present position of the Galapagos Islands. This ridge split lengthwise as a rift zone grew from the eastern end. The southern half remained at its position near the equator while the northern half broke in several pieces that began a slow drift northward in response to thermal currents deep in the earth.
In all, the Glomar Challenger mission covered 375,632 nautical miles, drilled in 624 different sites, recovering 19,119 cores (American Geophysical Union, “Earth & Space Science News,” Vol 52, Iss 6, June 1971, pp456-457).
The northern boundary of the Caribbean Plate with the North American plate is a transform orstrike-slip boundary which runs from the border area of Belize, Guatemale (Motagu Fault) and Honduras in Central America, eastward through the Cayman trough on south of the southeast coast of Cuba, and just north of Hispaniola, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands. Part of the Puerto Rico Trench, the deepest part of the Atlantic Ocean (roughly 27,559 feet), lies along this border. The Puerto Rico trench is at a complex transition from the subduction boundary to the south and the transform boundary to the west.
The eastern boundary is a subduction zone, the Lesser Antilles subduction zone, where oceanic crust of the South American Plate is being subducted under the Caribbean Plate. This subduction forms the volcanic islands of the Lesser Antilles Volcanic Arc from the Virgin Islands to the north, to the islands off the cost of Venezuela in the south.
The Great American Interchange in which land and freshwater fauna migrated between North America and South America via the uplifted western margin of the Caribbean Plate (Central America), i.e., the area of Panama, was a later event, which peaked dramatically in recent times.
The point is, as long as Panama is tilted up as it is, lifting the land in the west, the eastern part of the Caribbean Plate—a 1.2 million square mile oceanic tectonic plate underlying Central America and the Caribbean Sea off the north coast of South America will be tilted down, covering the area that the antedeluvians once settled before the Flood and built the cities that are now covered by the Caribbean Sea.
(See the next post, “Interesting Thoughts from a Reader and Our Responses – Part VII,” for more information on the comments and responses regarding the Nephites and their activities)
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