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.
Ice Age. An ice age implies extreme snowfall which, in turn, requires cold temperatures and heavy precipitation. Heavy precipitation can occur only if oceans are warm enough to produce heavy evaporation. How could warm oceans exist with cold atmospheric temperatures?
Another problem is stopping an ice age once it begins—or beginning a new ice age after one ends. As glaciers expand, they reflect more of the Sun’s radiation away from Earth and lower temperatures, causing glaciers to grow even more. Eventually, the entire globe should freeze permanently. Conversely, if glaciers shrink, as they have in recent decades, the earth should reflect less heat into space, warm up, and eventually melt all glaciers.
Don’t be misled by claims that hundreds of thousands of layers of glacial ice can be counted, and therefore the ice age began hundreds of thousands of years ago. Yes, layers can be seen in ice cores extracted from deep in glaciers in Antarctica and Greenland, but less than 2,000 annual layers can be counted visually for a very simple reason. The weight of the overlying layers have compressed all the layers below. They are now so thin that the eye can no longer count them.
To justify hundreds of thousands of layers, mathematical models are created in which some measured characteristic of the ice core (such as dust content, acidity, or various chemical isotopes) is measured along every millimeter of the core’s length. Then, mathematical curves having hundreds of thousands of cycles are fit to the data. Missing is the statistical analysis showing that the fit is significant—that the data (such as dust content, acidity, or the variation pattern of oxygen-18) is not random noise. If laymen are not impressed by the claim that it took 800,000 “years” for all those cycles to be laid down, those same laymen may be impressed by the technical jargon describing the oxygen-18 or acidity measurements. Hidden is the simple fact that less than 2,000 true annual layers can be counted—even with magnification.19
Major Mountain Ranges. How did mountain ranges form? Mountains are often crumpled like an accordion. [See Figure 50.] Satellite photos of mountain ranges show that some resemble throw rugs that have been pushed against walls. But what force could push a long, thick slab of rock and cause it to buckle and sometimes fold back on itself? Any force large enough to overcome the gigantic frictional resistance at the base of a slab that is longer than 8 miles, would crush the end being pushed before movement could even begin. Therefore, a mountain would not form. [See "Key Requirements for Folding Strata, Buckling Mountains, and Overthrusting" on page 206.]
We can see, especially in mountains and road cuts, thinly layered rocks folded like doubled-over phone books. Other “bent” rocks are small enough to hold in one’s hand. The tiny, crystalline grains in those folds are not stretched. So, how could brittle rock, showing little evidence of heating or cracking, fold? Rocks are strong in compression but weak in tension, so their stretched outer surfaces should have easily fractured. Bent sedimentary rocks, found worldwide, often look as if they had the consistency of putty when they were compressed. They must have been squeezed and folded soon after the sediments were laid down, but before they hardened chemically. What squeezed and folded them?
Figure 50: Buckled Mountain. Textbooks and museums frequently refer to some uplifting force that formed mountains. Can you see that an uplifting force, by itself, would not produce this pattern? Horizontal compression was needed to buckle these sedimentary layers near the Sullivan River in southern British Columbia, Canada. Such layers—seen worldwide—must have been soft, like wet sand, at the time of compression. Today, surface rocks are brittle.
Frozen Mammoths. Fleshy remains of about 50 elephant-like animals called mammoths, and a few rhinoceroses, have been found frozen and buried in Siberia and Alaska. One mammoth still had identifiable food in its mouth and digestive tract. To reproduce this result, one would have to suddenly push a well-fed elephant (dead or alive) into a very large freezer that had somehow been precooled to -150°F. Anything less severe would result in the animal’s internal heat and stomach acids destroying its food. If the animal remained alive for more than a few minutes, one would not expect to find food in its mouth. What could cause such a large and sudden temperature drop? Even if the Sun suddenly stopped shining, earth’s temperature would not drop rapidly enough to produce such effects. Finally, these giant animals would have to be buried in what was presumably frozen ground—quite a trick.
How could large herds of elephant-like animals, each requiring much food, live in the Arctic? Even if the Arctic were warm, the lack of winter sunlight would allow far less vegetation to grow than is needed to sustain so many large animals. Today, the average January temperature in northern Siberia is -28°F. Your nose gets cold after a few minutes in +32°F weather. Consider how you would feel if your nose were a 6-foot-long trunk and the average temperature were a frigid 60°F colder for weeks. Where would you, or a mammoth, find drinking water?
Overthrusts. For over a century, geologists have struggled unsuccessfully to explain overthrusts—large blocks of rock, hundreds of feet thick and hundreds of miles long, that have slid horizontally over other rocks for 50 miles or more. Such blocks should have considerable rubble under them. Many have none. Pushing a large slab of rock with enough force to overcome the gigantic friction would crush the slab before it would move. Those who appreciate this problem simply say that the pore pressure of water in rocks must have lubricated the sliding, and the slab slid downhill. What is overlooked is that rocks do not contain nearly enough water to do this, and overthrusted blocks are seldom on steep slopes.
Volcanoes and Lava. Erupting lava usually exceeds 2,000°F. Where does it come from, and why is it so hot? Earth’s mantle and inner core are essentially solid. Only the outer core, which lies 1,800–3,200 miles below the earth’s surface, is a liquid. The standard explanation is that lava (called magma when it is inside the earth) originates in hot pockets, called magma chambers, at depths of about 60 miles, but how did it get there? Then, how could magma escape to the surface? A key fact to remember is that at depths greater than about 5 miles, pressures are so great that all empty channels through which magma might rise should be squeezed shut.20 Even if a crack could open, the magma must rise through colder rock. Unless this happened quite rapidly, magma would cool, solidify, and plug up the crack. Also, heat diffuses. So, what concentrated enough heat to create the “hot pockets” and melt vast volumes of rock that erupted in the past?
On the Columbia Plateau in the northwestern United States, 64,000 square miles of lava, with an average depth of 2/3 mile, spilled out rapidly under water.21 On the Deccan Plateau in western India, 200,000 square miles have been flooded with lava to an average depth of 3/4 mile. In southwestern Siberia, lava deposits are many times larger. Four times more magma spilled out on the Ontong-Java Plateau (on the floor of the western Pacific) than on the Deccan Plateau. How did so much magma form, and how did it get out?
Two of the world’s deepest drill holes are on the Kola Peninsula in northern Russia and in Germany’s northeastern Bavaria.22 They were drilled to depths of 7.6 miles and 5.7 miles, respectively. Deep in the Russian hole, to everyone’s surprise, was hot, salty water flowing through crushed granite.23 Why was the granite crushed? In the German hole, the drill encountered cracks throughout the lower few miles. All cracks contained saltwater with salt concentrations about twice that of seawater. Remember, surface waters cannot seep deeper than 5 miles, because the weight of overlying rock squeezes shut even microscopic flow channels.20
Geologists are mystified by this deep saltwater. Another surprise was greater-than-expected increases in the granite’s temperature with increasing depth—so much so that each drilling project was terminated early. This raises the question of why the earth’s crust is so hot. The hydroplate theory provides a simple answer.
Geothermal Heat. Heat inside the Earth is called geothermal heat. The deeper man has gone into the earth—first in deep caves and mines and later with drills—the hotter the rock generally gets. What is the origin of geothermal heat? As children, most of us were told the earth slowly grew (evolved) by meteoritic impacts that melted the earth, so geothermal heat is what remains after billions of years.
This popular story has several problems. First, the rate of temperature increase with depth, called the temperature gradient, varies, even in rock far from volcanoes, by at least a factor of six.24 If the earth has been cooling for billions of years, one would expect very uniform temperature increases with depth at most locations. Unusually hot or cold regions should not exist, because heat diffuses from hotter to colder regions.
Mathematical solutions for heat conduction in spheres, such as the earth, are well known. These solutions can incorporate many facts, including the earth’s thermal properties, radioactive heat generation, and temperatures at the earth’s surface. Such analyses are hopelessly inconsistent with the “molten-earth” story and “billions of years of cooling.” [See "Molten Earth?" on page 30 and "Rapid Cooling" on page 41.] What then generated geothermal heat, and why does it still vary so widely?
Strata. Earth’s crust is frequently stratified with layered rock (or strata) composed of cemented sediments. These layers are typically parallel, thin, uniform in thickness, vast in area, and, within mountains and under valleys, tipped at all angles. Often one layer rests on another having a completely different texture, color, and mineral content. What global process sorted and cemented these sediments? Present processes do not.
Why are strata so uniform in hardness? If truckloads of sand and other dry sediments were dumped on your yard and bags of cement were placed in another pile, anyone would have difficulty mixing them uniformly. Without a uniform mixture of cementing agent, concrete (and sedimentary rock) would quickly crumble.
Limestone. A typical cementing agent in sedimentary rock is calcium carbonate (CaCO3)—commonly called limestone. Any geologist who stops to think about it should realize that, based on present processes, the earth has too much limestone. Sediments and sedimentary rock on the continents average about a mile in thickness and contain 10–15% limestone.25 How did so much limestone form—much of it quite pure? Limestone, without the impurities that normally drift in, suggests rapid burial. Most limestone is in vast layers, tens of thousands of square miles in area and hundreds of feet thick. Today, limestone forms either as it precipitates out of seawater or as sea creatures manufacture shells and corals containing limestone. In either case, oceans supply limestone sediments, but oceans already contain about as much dissolved limestone as they can possibly hold. So, where did all the limestone come from, especially its calcium and carbon, which are relatively rare outside of limestone?
Metamorphic Rock. Rocks change structurally and chemically when their temperatures and/or pressures exceed certain high values. The new rock is called a metamorphic rock. For example, limestone becomes marble (a metamorphic rock) when its temperature exceeds 1,600°F and confining pressures correspond to the weight of a 23-mile-high column of rock. Diamonds, another metamorphic rock, form under confining pressures corresponding to the weight of a 75-mile-high column of rock and 1,600°F, yet diamonds are found in crustal rocks that were never deep.26 Most metamorphic rocks were formed in the presence of water, often flowing water.27 What accounts for the extreme temperature, pressure, and abundance of water needed to form metamorphic rock?
The standard answer is that the original rock, such as limestone, was heated and compressed under a tall mountain or deep in the earth. Later, over millions of years, either the mountain eroded away or the deep rock rose to the earth’s surface. It is difficult to imagine mountains 23 or 75 miles high, because the world’s tallest mountain, Mount Everest, is only 5 1/2 miles high. Raising buried layers of rock 23 or 75 miles to the earth’s surface is even more difficult to explain, but with millions of years supposedly available, few consider the problem. Most don’t know of the problem, and almost no one addresses it.
Plateaus. Plateaus are relatively flat regions of extensive area that have been uplifted (not buckled) more than 500 feet relative to surrounding regions. A plateau contains nearly horizontal rock layers. The same sequence of horizontal layers surrounds the plateau, but at a lower elevation. Professor George C. Kennedy clearly explains some problems associated with plateaus.
The problem of the uplift of large plateau areas is one which has puzzled students of the Earth’s crust for a very long time. ... Given an Earth with sialic [granitic] continents floating in denser simatic [basaltic] substratum, what mechanism would cause a large volume of low standing continents to rise rapidly a mile in the air? Furthermore, evidence from gravity surveys suggests that the rocks underlying the Colorado plateau are in isostatic balance, that is, this large area is floating at its correct elevation in view of its mass and density. Recent seismic evidence confirms this, in that the depth to the M discontinuity [the Moho, explained below] under the Colorado plateau is approximately 10 kilometers [6 miles] greater than over most of continental North America. Thus, appropriate roots of light rock extend into the dense substratum to account for the higher elevation of the Colorado plateau. We have then a double-ended mystery, for the Colorado plateau seems to have grown downward at the same time that its emerged part rose upward. This is just as startling as it would be to see a floating cork suddenly rise and float a half inch higher in a pan of water. To date, the only hypothesis to explain the upward motion of large regions like the Colorado plateau is that of convection currents. Slowly moving convection currents in the solid rock, some 40 to 50 kilometers [25 to 30 miles] below the surface of the Earth, are presumed to have swept a great volume of light rock from some unidentified place and to have deposited it underneath the Colorado plateau. A total volume of approximately 2,500,000 cubic miles of sialic rock is necessary to account for the uplift of the Colorado plateau. While it is not hard to visualize rocks as having no great strength at the high pressures and temperatures existing at depths of 40 to 50 kilometers, it is quite another matter to visualize currents in solid rock of sufficient magnitude to bring in and deposit this quantity of light material in a relatively uniform layer underneath the entire Colorado plateau region.
The Tibetan plateaus present a similar problem, but on a vastly larger scale. There, an area of 750,000 square miles has been uplifted from approximately sea level to a mean elevation of roughly three miles, and the Himalayan mountain chain bordering this region has floated upward some five miles, and rather late in geologic time, probably within the last 20,000,000 years. The quantity of light rock which would need to be swept underneath these plateaus by convection currents to produce the effects noted would be an order of magnitude greater than that needed to uplift the Colorado plateau, that is, approximately 25,000,000 cubic miles. Even more troublesome than the method of transporting all this light rock at shallow depths below the surface of the Earth is the problem of its source. The region from which the light rock was moved should have experienced spectacular subsidence, but no giant neighboring depressions are known. A lesser but large problem is how such enormous quantities of light rock can be dispersed so uniformly over so large an area.28
The Moho and Black Smokers. The Mohorovicic discontinuity, usually called the Moho, is the boundary between the earth’s crust and mantle. The Moho was discovered in 1909 by seismologist Andrija Mohorovicic. He noticed that earthquake waves travel noticeably faster below the Moho than above. In the early 1960s, efforts were made to drill deep enough to penetrate and examine the Moho, but cost overruns and alleged mismanagement shut the project down after drilling only 601 feet into the seafloor. Today, drilling efforts are finding that above the Moho the “rock has been thoroughly fractured and is saturated with water; free water normally cannot migrate down to those depths!” 29 What is the Moho, why is the rock above fractured, and why does it contain liquid water? Figure 57 describes black smokers.
Salt Domes. Vast salt layers are sometimes buried as much as several miles below the earth’s surface. Under the Gulf of Mexico is a single salt layer, called “the mother salt layer.” It is at least 20,000 feet below sea level, 100,000 square miles in area, and 1,000 feet thick!30 Many tall salt domes rise several miles above the mother salt layer; some salt domes are taller than Mount Everest! Large salt deposits are not being laid down today, even in the Great Salt Lake. What concentrated so much deep salt? Certainly, 20,000 feet of water did not evaporate.
A thicker “mother salt layer” with dozens of salt domes is also found under the Mediterranean Sea. A codiscoverer of these deposits, using refuted arguments,31 claims that the Mediterranean must have evaporated 8–10 times to deposit so much salt.32 His estimate is probably low, but even so, why didn’t each refilling of the Mediterranean Basin redissolve the salt residue left from prior evaporations, allowing currents to remove the basin’s salt?
Jigsaw Fit of the Continents. For centuries, beginning possibly with Francis Bacon in 1620, many have noticed the approximate jigsaw fit of the continents bordering the Atlantic. It is only natural that bold thinkers, such as Alfred Wegener in 1915, would propose that the continents were once connected as shown in Figure 51, and somehow they broke apart and moved to their present positions. But would continents, including their broad but submerged continental shelves, really fit together as shown in textbooks? Distances are distorted when a globe is flattened into a two-dimensional map. Therefore, to answer this question, I formed two plates on a globe, matching the true shape and curvature of the continents. [See Figure 52.]
Figure 51: Continental Fit Proposed by Edward Bullard. Can you identify five distortions in this popular explanation of how the continents once fit together? First, Africa was shrunk in area by 35%. Second, Central America, southern Mexico, and the Caribbean Islands were removed. Third, Australia is ignored, because its fit anywhere is problematic—and where is Asia? Fourth, a slice was made through the Mediterranean, and Europe was rotated counterclockwise and Africa was rotated clockwise. Finally, North and South America were rotated relative to each other. Notice the rotation of the north-south and east-west lines. Scientific justifications are not given for any of these five distortions.
Overlapping areas are shown in black and gaps in the fit are in white. If a supercontinent simply broke apart, what did the breaking, and how could the pieces (plates) move? Each plate should be locked by friction to the rock it rested on? What accounts for the gaps and overlaps? Evidently, something wore away the edges of the plates after the supercontinent broke into plates.
Do you suppose that water, trapped below the crust, isolated each plate from what would otherwise be its rock foundation, and allowed the plates to move to where they are today? If so, that water, in escaping violently upward would have eroded the edges of the plates, producing the overlaps and gaps.
The classical fit (Figure 51), proposed by Sir Edward Bullard, appears at first glance to be a better fit of the continents than my plates. However, notice in Figure 51’s description the great “latitude” Bullard took in juggling continents. Were these distortions made to improve the fit? Few, if any, textbooks inform us of these distortions.
Figure 52: Poor Fit. Notice that the fit of the actual continents is not as good as Bullard proposed. [See Figure 51.]
Instead of fitting the continents to each other, notice in Figure 53 how well they each fit the base of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. The hydroplate theory proposes that:
a. These continents were once in the approximate positions shown in Figure 53.
b. They were connected by rock that was rapidly eroded and transported worldwide by erupting subterranean water.
c. As these eroded sediments were deposited, they trapped and buried plants and animals. The sediments became today’s sedimentary rock, and buried organisms became fossils.
d. The continents quickly slid on a layer of water (rapid continental drift) away from the rising Mid-Atlantic Ridge and toward the subsiding Pacific floor. They came to rest near their present locations.
Details and evidence will be given later in this chapter.
Figure 53: Best Fit. By far the best fit of these continents is against the base of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge—not as shown in Figure 52. The distortions of Figure 51 are unnecessary and deceptive.
Layered Fossils. Fossils rarely form today, because dead plants and animals decay before they are buried in enough sediments to preserve their shapes. Nor do we see fossils forming in layered strata that can be traced over thousands of square miles. How, then, did so many fossils form? It will soon become apparent why animals and plants were trapped and buried in tens of millions of cubic miles of sediments that were quickly cemented to form the fossil record and why fossils of sea life are found on every major mountain range.
Changing Axis Tilt. George F. Dodwell served as the Government Astronomer for South Australia from 1909 to 1952. In the mid-1930s, he became interested in past changes in the tilt of the earth’s axis. He collected almost 100 astronomical measurements made over a 4,000-year period. Those measurements show that the tilt of the earth’s axis smoothly decayed from 25°10' to its present value of 23°27'. Based on the shape of the decay curve, Dodwell estimated that this axis shift began recently.36
The gravitational forces of the Sun, Moon, and planets do change the tilt of the earth’s axis, but much more slowly than the changes Dodwell measured. An extraterrestrial body striking the earth would provide an abrupt change in axis orientation, not the smooth changes Dodwell measured. Also, only a massive and fast asteroid striking the earth at a favorable angle would tilt the axis that much. However, the resulting pressure pulse would pass through the entire atmosphere and quickly kill most air-breathing animals—a recent extinction without evidence.
Comets, Asteroids, and Meteorites. These strange bodies, sometimes called “the mavericks of the solar system,” have several remarkable similarities with planet earth. They contain considerable water. (About 38% of the mass of comet Tempel 1 is frozen water.37) Water is rare in the universe, but both common and concentrated on earth—often called “the water planet.” Most of the remaining mass of a comet is dust, primarily the crystalline mineral olivine. Solid material that formed in space would not be crystalline. Olivine may be the most abundant of the more than 2,500 known minerals in the earth’s crust and mantle. Asteroids and meteorites are similar in many ways to earth rocks. Surprisingly, a few meteorites contain salt crystals, liquid water, and living bacteria!38 Some asteroids have a chemical substance (kerogen) found in plants.
Earth’s Radioactivity. Few people realize that the origin of earth’s radioactivity and the heavier chemical elements have never been explained.33 Furthermore, radiometric dating assumes that radioactive decay rates have always been constant. A careful understanding of the flood will show how and why earth acquired its heaviest chemical elements and radioactive materials, and why the “constant rate” assumption (and, therefore, radiometric dating) is grossly in error. This understanding will also show (1) just how powerful the fountains of the great deep were and (2) how the flood destroyed the earth in ways that are still being felt.
Summary. These are a few of the mysteries associated with the 25 topics listed on page 113. The hydroplate theory will explain these mysteries and tie together the causes and effects of this dramatic, global catastrophe.