Hello everyone!
Well I woke up to mountains of snow both yesterday and today…the most we have had all year. I am glad for the moisture but the shoveling?…well lets just say I made more mountains with the snow I cleared away from the walk.
Why all the talk about mountains? Because it leads us to our question of the week – How could our present day mountains, in such a short amount of time, have gotten so big after the flood?
Let us start by reviewing the secular (uniformitarian) theory of mountain formation. In a nutshell, we learned at public schools that the rock record – since the abrupt appearance of multi-celled organisms (fossils) in the rocks – represents more than 500 million years of time. And this theory is based on the assumption that the forces of classic plate tectonics have been operating steadily (since the beginning) at about the same slow rates as observed in today.
However this presents multiple problems. Let’s examine a few.
First, the explanation of mountain building is thought to be a great achievement of plate tectonics. Yet it is difficult to relate all mountains, volcanoes and deep basins throughout the continents to plate tectonics. It is thought that as these plates collided, the continents were formed and some mountains were created with relative rapid uplift. Uniformitarian beliefs state the main phase of mountain uplift, corresponds to the Ice Age, while brief in the geologic timescale (eons, eras, Pleistocene, etc,) still requires several million years to transpire.
The problem is, observational evidence indicates that the terrain where many mountains now exist, in most cases, was nearly flat and near sea level when the recent intense push of uplift began. According to biblical theory and computer modeling, the regions of the earth’s crust which are thicker usually contain a greater depth of surface topography (i.e. mountains). How? “The huge amount of subduction at continent margins during an episode of runaway sinking of ocean floor leads to considerable thickening of the continental crust.” Then conditions of isostatic equilibrium come into play. Put simply, isostatic equilibrium is like an ice cube floating in water; the weight of a floating object equals the weight of the volume of fluid it displaces. The result? Rapid uplift of mountains.
Uniformitarians are confounded to explain this phenomenon. In addition, the “melting and bubbling up of magma from deep subduction zones has troublesome scientific problems, such as how does the liquid gather together and make room for itself? The plate tectonics model is hard pressed to explain this.”
Another problem with classic plate tectonics is there are dozens of examples of regions where just prior to uplift, were first leveled to nearly flat surfaces by intense erosion. It is “a puzzle how the tectonic forces could have ceased operating long enough for erosion to have abraded away hundreds to thousands of feet of rock to form flat topography and then be unleashed again to uplift rapidly the entire region by many thousands of feet.
The Flood framework provides the obvious answer. The beveling flat of such broad expanses of terrain was the logical consequence of the runoff from the Flood.”
So, the catastrophic processes let loose during the Flood deposited thousands of feet of fossil-bearing sediments on all continents and moved the Americas over 3000 miles westward from Europe and Africa. In addition, it increased the thickness of the buoyant crustal rock in the areas of high extant mountains ranges. “When the catastrophic driving processes shut down, the zones with the thickened crust promptly moved toward a state of isostatic equilibrium, resulting in many thousands of feet of vertical uplift of the surface.”
The Noachian flood explains many questions about our world; a global vs. local floods, fossil evidence, continental drift, the grand canyon and recent rapid uplift of mountains (see previous blogs). If you are interested in more indepth…and believe me it can get much more indepth, explanations, please check out the reference listed at the bottom of all my blogs.
This wraps up my series on the Flood. But look for a related topic next week – Noah’s ark! If you are anything like me, you have a hundred questions about this topic!
Until then,
God bless and take care,
Willow
P.S. If you have been watching the night sky there are two awesome things to look for:
1) Jupiter and Venus are the two most brilliant ‘stars’ (really the two most brilliant planets in our solar system) that have been appearing in the western sky just after sunset. They just reached their closest conjunction and are now moving apart.
2) Rising in the east just after sunset is our nearest neighbor, Mars. After coming up, it then rides high in the southern sky by midnight. It has just made its closest approach to Earth…so get out your telescopes and see if you can view surface features on the planet’s face. You might even be able to see its polar caps and dust storms!
Reference:
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