Looks and Dogmas Are Misleading

During the transition from the eighteenth century belief in the Bible as the standard for understanding geology, to the nineteenth century embracing of uniformitarianism, sometimes called gradualism, that is, “the theory that changes in the earth's crust during geological history have resulted from the action of continuous and uniform processes,” modern man became enamored with slow, drawn-out change. Everything was based on time—long periods of time, what is called “deep time”—for anything to have happened, such as mountains forming or collapsing, in a process of causation.
    From around 1850 onward, geologists endorsed the belief that “The present is the key to the past.” Therefore, it was believed that Earth's features had been shaped by the same geological processes that could be observed in the present acting gradually over an immense period of time—if it looked old, it was old. If it had erosion lines, it was very old.    All mountains were once higher, and the way things age now is how it has always been.
    This was the death knoll for catastrophism, that is “the theory that the Earth had largely been shaped by sudden, short-lived, violent events, possibly worldwide in scope,” a concept first popularized by the early 19th-century French scientist, anatomist and paleontologist Georges Cuvier. He had proposed that new life forms had moved in from other areas after local floods, and avoided religious or metaphysical speculation in his scientific writings—it held that geological epochs had ended with violent and sudden natural catastrophes such as great floods and the rapid formation of major mountain chains.
    However, with the death of catastrophism, a universal Flood lost its appeal and eventually ended up on the scientific junk heap of old, discarded ideas and beliefs. In its place, gradualism reigned supreme among geologists and almost all scientists. On the other hand, since the 1980s, with more and more sudden, violent geological events being seen around the world, as well as ones now better understood from the recent past, such as volcano eruptions, mountain slides, earthquakes, flooding rains, earth-impact meteors, bursting dams, avalanches, tsunamis and megatsunamis, geology is faced with the return of sudden, catastrophic natural events that cannot be ignored.

Left: Map of New Zealand and the cities and locations mentioned below; Right: The concentrated area of the Kaikoura earthquake and numerous aftershocks

Our last post described a recently determined sudden, catastrophic event that flooded most of the State of Washington and cut a long, wide swatch of land to the Pacific Ocean, referred to as the Channeled Scablands. Very recently, the Mount St. Helen’s eruption, the Mahuika crater, the Indonesia tsunami, the numerous mud slides in Andean South America, Krakatoa earthquake, and most recently, the Kaikōura earthquake in New Zealand have heightened this return to a form of catastrophism among professional thinking.
    The interesting thing about some of these more recent events, is that they look very, very old, as though they have been in place for the typical geologic tens of millions of years. Take the most recent catastrophe, the 2016 New Zealand quake that hit just north of the town of Hikurangi (population 2,080), a subduction zone, which is the North Island’s major plate boundary, where the Pacific Plate dives or "subducts" beneath the North Island. The impact was along the upper South Island east coast of New Zealand triggered by the raising of the seabed as a result of the movement of the Hundalee fault—resulting in the second strongest earthquake in New Zealand history since Europeans arrived. 
    Between the two tectonic systems is a zone of strike-slip where the plates slide laterally past each other creating compression, and where the plate motion is taken up on a complex network of numerous faults in the northern South Island. The Kaikōura earthquake occurred in an area known as the Marlborough fault system, where faults in the north section of this system (the Awatere, Clarence and Wairau) have high slip rates. These faults do not continually move, but sit quietly for long periods, while the land around them gets pushed and pulled, and then they slip a lot all at once, creating an earthquake.
    Astonishingly, the earthquake triggered large slow slip events along much of the Hikurangi subduction zone, and as far away as 375-miles at Gisborne. These events following the Kaikoura earthquake released a large amount of built-up tectonic energy and lasted over the weeks and months following the earthquake, with a southwest to northeast rupture through North Canterbury and Marlborough Fault areas—essentially "unzipping" along an approximately 112-mile length of the northeast coast of the South Island.

A section of the ground dropped 66-feet along several miles of countryside, creating a huge gully

 

The interesting thing about this quake is that it moved the ground and land forms laterally several feet, creating new channels and even rivers. A new gorge, “looking thousands of years old,” was created in months, its lush greenery and rock “never existed before,” nor had a landform that dropped 66-feet forming a low vegetation gully been there before the earthquake, according to the Hurunui District Council. “The land on either side of it used to be level.”
    According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), earthquakes occur frequently in New Zealand as the country is situated in the collision zone between the Indo-Australian and Pacific tectonic plates, part of the Pacific Basin Ring of Fire, where many earthquakes and volcanoes have occurred over the centuries.  And two minutes after midnight on November 14, 2016, a 7.8-magnitude earthquake hit the coast of New Zealand.
    This Kaikōura earthquake and surface rupture involved more than 20 different faults, which is a world record, and, triggered the biggest local-source tsunami recorded in New Zealand since 1947, causing extensive coastal uplift, widespread landslides and landslide dams, as well as slow-slip 'silent' earthquakes
    Extensive uplift and deformation occurred almost instantaneously over 68 miles from Oaro to Lake Grassmere, with over 10,000 landslides occurring in the wider regions of North Canterbury and Marlborough because of the presence of steep slopes in the area. More than 200 landslides blocked rivers and generated landslide dams. One huge valley-blocking landslide travelled more than 1½-miles down slope forming a dam on the Hapuku River.

A new channel was formed, with the rocks on either side looking thousands of years old

In fact, tourism has increased as white-water enthusiasts now can take a new channel through the rocky uplifts that was not there before, yet looks thousands or millions of years old, with no markings of recent change.
    There were a number of faults that ruptured, moving the north-eastern tip of the South Island closer to the North Island by 6½ feet, with others over 20 feet. The quake caused an estimated 80,000 to 100,000 landslips, a number of them blocking rivers in the region. The newly created landforms have amazed those who believe that such things take eons to form. One observer stated:
    “In the space of months, a gorge that looks like it has been there for thousands of years has been gouged from the soft limestone of the Clarence River.” While rivers are always changing, the speed of the transformation wrought by the earthquake has amazed those working on the water.” As one rafting company operator said: “That gorge could have been here for thousands of years, but it was only a few months—the earthquake brought the entire slab of limestone up out of the ground and the river cut through it just like a saw.”
    Of course, age has no appearance. The earth’s features neither ‘look old’ nor ‘look young’ in themselves; such concepts are imposed on the evidence we see depending on the ‘filters’ of assumptions through which we interpret them. For those who, due to the conditioning of our culture, believe that millions of years are involved in such major landform changes, the speed of this change seems extraordinary.

All canyons, gullies, and landforms look pretty much the same as to their age. Few places show signs of recent activity, even when there has been recent activity

For those, however, who understand that landform changes can occur suddenly and quickly, as Flood geological researchers have highlighted time and again, this comes as no surprise. The global Flood as described in Genesis would have been accompanied by almost unimaginable hydraulic and tectonic forces and upheavals.
    Someone coming to this geological formation unaware of what had happened, and with the wrong assumptions, would gain an erroneous impression of its age with no idea how recent were the events that shaped the land around them.