Fourteenth Post
The Hydroplate Theory (HPT)
Glory to Jesus Christ!
A grace-filled Roman and Byzantine Feast, y'all, of Pope Innocent I, Confessor, with the Martyr Pope Victor I also on the Roman Calendar. (The Martyrs Nazarius and Celsus fill out today Roman-wise, while the Byzantine is filled out with four of the Martyred Deacons of Acts 6:5: Prochorus, Nicanor, Timon, and Parmenas.)
As a geologist by passion and training, this writer has been habitually gazing at the ground as well as admiring cliffs, roadcuts, and rock outcrops since childhood. No greater outdoorsy joy than tramping around in badlands! (Like the one in Montana pictured in an earlier post!)
As a cradle Ukrainian Byzantine Catholic who grew up in a thoroughly Traditional Catholic (despite the decline in practicing the Faith among many in it) Old World Ukrainian subculture in Philadelphia, and as a Thomistic theologian by training later in life, this author has strongly held the Truth of Sacred Scripture, and sought to integrate it with the Geology he both personally witnessed and was trained in.
He was led astray for a good chunk of his life by evolutionary Old Earth thinking bc of wicked, heretical “reinterpretation” of the plain, literal sense of Genesis into mythology, a mythology temporal-snobbishly thought to be all that the Almighty God could say to the supposedly primitive, uncomprehending, stupid ancient Israelites, a mythology that us Godless majorly superior bein's of Modern times alone can properly interpret!
In learning of the natural world, especially when it comes to Geology, there's no substitute for seeing. The problem is seeing with a mistaken paradigm. Today, having dealt with the mistaken paradigm of the Old Earth in previous posting, we will consider a second popular paradigm that is consistent with the literal Truth of Genesis: the Hydroplate Theory (HPT).
(All images from free on-line book mentioned immediately below. 😀)
Proposed by engineer Walt Brown, this theory focuses on the “fountains of the great deep” as drivers of the Great Flood cataclysm. (again, CATACLYSM…a violent upheaval, overturning). (It's explained in great detail, including many technical notes, in a free on-line book at creationscience.com.)
Like all theories that try to explain a process, initial conditions are necessary.
One can say that theories are an intellectual reverse engineering from observed phenomena (the data set) to the initial conditions that led to the process that had the said observed phenomena as the outcome.
The initial conditions vary with the theory for the same data set. Good Natural Science can have multiple theories floating around, their respective proponents duking it out (hopefully politely! 😂) until one prevails bc it best explains things. The discovery of new data can discredit a theory outrightly or simply cause an existing one to be slightly tweaked.
The Hydroplate Theory's initial (pre-Flood) conditions will, unlike Catastrophic Plate Tectonics’ familiar-to-everyone plate-tectonics Earth set-up, have to be bullet-pointed here. They assume:
— a solid basalt-composition (medium to low silicon with lots of iron and magnesium) interior of the Earth. No liquid outer core.
— a granitic (high silicon with lots of aluminum and sodium and calcium) crust about 60 miles thick, with an undulating surface that had low mountains, as well as bodies of water that covered roughly a third of the surface. Globally lush vegetation, abundant critters (land, air, and water), and people dwelt atop the granite, which had a bit of soil on land and a bit of sediment under water.
— a mile-thick layer of water between the granitic crust and basaltic interior. Now the granitic crust didn't float on the water, but sagged down in multiple places to sit upon the basalt, thus anchoring the crust: this would be consistent with the “pillars of the earth” that are written about in the Old Testament.
Now, this subterranean water layer is crucial to the HPT:
— Because of solar and lunar tidal flexing daily, it was very hot, like glowing orange hot, but, because confined by a 60-mile roof of rock, it couldn't boil. So highly pressurized, like thousands of atmospheres pressurized, water, besides very hot.
-- At that temperature, water becomes SUPERCRITICAL, neither vapor nor fully liquid, but gas molecules mingling amid liquid drops of only about ten molecules each, the droplets repeatedly evaporating and recondensing.
— At such a high tempetature, water is a super dissolver, so it had honeycombed the overlying granite with cavities. The dissolved mineral material, because the droplets evaporate so frequently, ended up flaking down to the bottom of the chamber and protecting the basalt from dissolution.
— As a result, the whole water layer contained lots of different mineral slurries that came from the dissolving: salt, gypsum, limestone, dolomite (magnesiumized limestone), iron hydroxide (rust), silica…
When God had had quite enough of human sin, He caused the granite crust to crack…
(Remember, the Great Flood was a supernatural event with many natural processes and tangible results.)
…that crack racing around the Earth like a giant baseball seam. The confined water blasted upward violently, some going into space but most condensing very high up and falling back as blindingly torrential rain. It was tepid when falling bc, as with air coming out of a pressurized tire and steaming, the expansion of the water on the way up drastically cooled it. Here you have the Scriptural “fountains of the great deep” having been “broken” and the “windows of Heaven” opened.
In the meanwhile, the sides of the global crack, bc unsupported, kept collapsing into the escaping water, which behaved like a gargantuan power washer, pulverizing the granite into sediment of various sizes, some sediment blasting vertically, but most of it running sideways with some of the laterally-moving water to violently cover the original land. Of course, the vegetation and critters were caught up in the chaos, ending up fossilized with evidence of violent and/or sudden demises.
The cracks in the granite crust continued to widen as their edges were blasted out and, because of the violent exit of the subterranean water, the crust vibrated, like a ginormous water hammer in old plumbing, causing tsunamis on the increasingly submerged and sedimented-over land, plus the water and sediment ran across the land in pulses, all under torrential rain. All this actually sorted and layered sediments, and their fossils.
Forty days is almost SIX WEEKS. The land did not all get submerged immediately, but when it did the fountains stopped bc the subterranean water had mostly run out of its chamber.
(The top image is of a limestone quarry exhibiting upward buckling after overlying limestone removed. Imagine this in an ocean-sized area with sixty MILES of overburden gone!)
At this point the initial crack was very wide, likely hundreds of miles. The now-widely-exposed basalt bottom with sixty miles of heavy granite blasted away, rebounded upward most of those miles: not much to hold it down anymore. It is the present-day bottom of the North and South Atlantic Ocean, a few miles deep.
If something goes up on one side of the world, something else has to go down on the other side: it resulted in the Pacific Ocean basin. “WAIT! STOP THE BUS! It takes me fourteen hours to fly across the Pacific, but only seven for the Atlantic. I mean, the Pacific is GINORMOUS!!!” Indeed it is! Spherical geometry is such that if you pull a little material out of one side it, the other side will sink, but in a BROADER area that is LESS DEEP. The Pacific side sank, but not by fifty-something miles: its bigger sinkage area compensated for the depth.
The enormous energy involved in the whole shifting of material from Pacific to Atlantic side ended up melting an outer core, plus the million pieces of the shattered Pacific side, likely granite atop basalt, etc., experienced a lot of melting themselves from the frictional downward motion, and, as a result, the Pacific bottom was paved with basalt and studded with roughly a million volcanoes. PLUS, the sinking created numerous trenches.
Now, all this was happening under water, so not affecting Noah, his family, nor his Ark faunal entourage.
(This orientation is deliberate: visualize the Americas sliding downward on the map! (Map credit in online book given to Marie Tharp.))
Because the Pacific side was now lower than the Atlantic, and there was still a thin layer of subterranean water left under the granite plates (proven by deep drilling), these plates (the original granite shell now broken into pieces) slid toward the Pacific basin on the thin layer of water still left under them (why they're called HYDROplates) until they snagged on something (Recall the irregular pillars underneath.) and they and their now two-mile thick sediment covering buckled into mountain ranges mostly near the leading edge of the sliding.
Then the water ran off. How?! The whole Earth is covered! Well, the big, deep Pacific basin made a lot of room for it, plus the buckling of the hydroplates reduced their area and left even more ocean bottom available. It took a while to finish draining.
OK, let's all take a breath! That was quite the ride!!!
The big advantage of HPT is that it's very detailed in initial conditions, and is comprehensive as an explanatory tool bc it even accounts for the cratering of the moon and asteroids! (Too much for a short post. Consult the book online.)
Nostra Mater de Perpetuo Succursu, adiuva nos!
Мати Неустанньої Помочі, поможи нам!