Below is the online edition of In the Beginning: Compelling Evidence for Creation and the Flood,
by Dr. Walt Brown. Copyright © Center for Scientific Creation. All rights reserved.
Click here to order the hardbound 8th edition (2008) and other materials.
Probably. Prior to March 2014, I simply assumed the subterranean chamber was 10 miles below the earth’s surface.1 That assumption was based on the volume of rock the escaping subterranean water had to erode from the earth’s crust during the flood to equal today’s sediments and sedimentary rock, plus the rock fragments launched into space by the fountains of the great deep that became comets and asteroids. (Pages 303–385 show that the launched material later merged to became comets and asteroids.)
Trans-Neptunian Objects (TNOs). Since 1992, I have followed with great interest the discoveries of TNOs. So many of their characteristics match those of large asteroids: their low density, color, percentage with moons, and concentration in doughnut-shaped belts (asteroid belt and Kuiper Belt). If TNOs were really large asteroids, then I could see how the Sun’s energy spiraled the larger asteroids out beyond the orbit of Neptune, making them TNOs. [This is explained on pages 360–371.] But there was a problem: their combined mass is huge—a staggering 2–4% of earth’s mass. If the debris launched from earth included the material in TNOs, then much more of the crust was removed during the flood. The subterranean chamber would have been much deeper than the 10 miles I had assumed. Ample energy was available to do this work, as explained on pages 387–441.
In March 2014, Nature published a paper [cited in Endnote 176 on page 384] showing that the twelve most distant TNOs all had a strange orbital characteristic. It was so unusual that the author, an astrophysicist, correctly pointed out that any explanation for TNOs must explain that characteristic. It was immediately obvious to me how, as large asteroids spiraled out beyond Neptune, a few would have received gravity boosts by the giant planets, flinging those TNOs even farther from the Sun and automatically giving them that strange property. Only then did I accept that the mass launched into space was much greater than I had previously thought, so the subterranean chamber must have been far more than 10 miles below Earth’s surface.
A Collapsed Chamber or a Tectonic Plate? As water was expelled from the subterranean chamber during the flood, the chamber’s roof settled onto the chamber’s floor. Sandwiched between them should be a small amount of water that could not escape and magma produced by friction as the hydroplates skidded to a stop at the end of the rapid continental-drift phase. Since this was a geologically recent event, some of that magma should still be molten. One might think that seismic techniques—the analysis of echoes of earthquake waves bouncing off large discontinuities inside the earth—could identify that interface. Likewise, those who believe in plate tectonics might expect that seismic techniques could identify the base of plates that somehow drift over the mantle.
A Seismic Experiment. Unfortunately, earthquake wavelengths are too long to detect a collapsed subterranean chamber or the base of tectonic plates. However, in February 2015, researchers announced that they had produced seismic waves under New Zealand that were 20–50 times shorter by simultaneously exploding 1,100 pounds of dynamite inside each of a dozen deeply-buried, steel containers. Echoes from those waves were collected by 1,178 seismometers. These researchers, using the reigning paradigm—plate tectonics—believe they have detected the base of a subducting tectonic plate almost 50 miles below the earth’s surface, even though that surface is inclined only 12°–15° below the horizontal, rather than the expected 45°.2
Most puzzling to the researchers is a 10-kilometer (6-mile) thick channel containing melted rock (magma) and/or water. If liquids separate a tectonic plate from the mantle below, then the mantle could not be propelling the plate above. The old story that the mantle circulates and drags the plates forward would be false, because a horizontal shearing force from the mantle cannot be transmitted through a liquid.3
Also, below the channel, seismic velocities increase, rather than decrease, as was expected based on plate tectonics.
The very existence of the channel itself is more of an enigma. How and why channelization would occur over a 10-km depth range is not known.4
However, these discoveries are consistent with reflections off the collapsed subterranean chamber. Also, the much slower wave velocities measured in the channel indicate magma and/or water is trapped within the chamber’s roof and floor.4 Therefore, Assumption 1 on page 122 now places the depth of the preflood subterranean chamber at about 60 miles. That also would explain 3% of earth’s mass in TNOs if the escaping subterranean water eroded equal amounts from the porous (and therefore easily erodible) chamber’s roof and floor so that the collapsed chamber is now an average of 30 miles below the earth’s surface.