Christian RyanWe do not often think of Planet Earth as a living thing. But in a way, it kind of is. The Earth is an active system with volcanoes on land and at the bottom of the sea, fluctuations in sea level, earthquakes, marching and melting of glaciers, and climate changes. Not to mention all of the biological processes. Yes, all of these processes are governed by a phenomenon that lies beneath our feet: plate tectonics.
What is Plate Tectonics?
Looking at Planet Earth from outer space, you might think you are looking at a uniform ball of rock covered in a mosaic of plant life and water. However, let’s remove the flora and water from Earth’s surface. This reveals that the outer surface of the Earth, called the crust, consists of very large broken pieces or fragments called “tectonic plates.” These tectonic plates fit together like pieces of the world’s largest jigsaw puzzle. While you probably don’t feel it right now, these plates are never stationary.
Plate tectonics is a scientific theory that explains the movements and interactions of these tectonic plates. As tectonic plates move in relation to each other across the planet’s surface, they interact in a number of ways. They can spread apart at divergent boundaries. They can also crash into or slide over each other, creating convergent boundaries. Further, they can simply slide past one another at transform boundaries.
There are two main types of tectonic plates: continental plates and oceanic plates. These plates float on the Earth’s mantle, a thick layer of hot, solid rock between the crust. The mantle flows very slowly over very long periods of time, almost like melted plastic. Continental plates are thicker and made of less dense rocks, mostly granite. Meanwhile, oceanic plates are thinner and composed primarily of denser basalt. Because of this, continental plates sit higher on the mantle than oceanic plates. This is why continental plates usually rise above sea level as dry land, while oceanic plates typically form the deeper ocean basins.
How Do Tectonic Plates Move?
The reason tectonic plates move in the first place has to do with what lies underneath the Earth’s surface. If you cut the planet in half, you would see that it consists of layers. Each layer has a different composition and physical behavior. The lithosphere is a rigid, outer layer that includes both the crust and the uppermost part of the mantle. Beneath it is the asthenosphere, a hotter, softer part of the upper mantle. It is so hot it behaves like slow-flowing, putty over long periods of time.
The tectonic plates that make up the lithosphere “float” on the slow-moving asthenosphere below. Driving this motion is a combination of forces, including gravity pulling down oceanic plates into the asthenosphere when they collide with continental plates. We call this process subduction. Another force is the slow circulation of material within the mantle. Scientists are still working to understand how these and other forces interact. Nevertheless, together these forces send plates aloft like ships on a molten sea, though at a pace of just a few centimeters per year. That’s about as fast as your fingernails grow.
How Did We Discover Plate Tectonics?
Plate tectonics itself is a relatively recent geologic discovery. However, the earliest speculations about continental movements go back hundreds of years. Many early advocates of this idea were geographers. They recognized the jigsaw puzzle-like shape of the continents on either side of the Atlantic Ocean.
In 1596, Catholic geographer Abraham Ortilius suggested that the Americas used to be joined up with the other continents until they “[tore] away from Europe and Africa…by earthquakes and floods.”1 Some, such as German professor of Theology Theodor Christoph Lilienthal in 1756, tied this idea to when the earth “divided in the days of Peleg.”2 Others, like French geographer Antonio Snider Pellegrini in 1858, thought this break-up happened during the Noahic Flood.
Such ideas did not move beyond preliminary speculations for centuries. Finally, in 1912, German meteorologist Alfred Wegener put forward his theory of continental drift. He argued that all of the continents were originally joined together into a single continent called Pangaea. This landmass slowly drifted apart over time. He thought it moved independently through the oceanic crust, rather than as part of larger tectonic plates as we do today.
The scientific community rejected his theory for several reasons. For example, Wegener’s model required continents to fracture the seafloor as they moved, like a ship breaking its way through icebergs.
It was not until the 1960’s that mapping of the deep seafloor revealed that the oceanic crust, like the continental crust, had divided into fragments (now called tectonic plates). The movements of these oceanic plates provided the missing mechanism necessary for Wegener’s continental drift idea to work. This led to the fully fleshed-out model known today at plate tectonics.
Plate Tectonics is a Useful Scientific Theory
Though initially the subject of much skepticism, the theory of plate tectonics has become a useful scientific theory. It manages to explain a wide range of natural phenomena. The overall shape of the continents along either side of the Atlantic fit very nicely together, like giant puzzle pieces. The distribution of volcanoes, mountain ranges, and earthquake hotspots closely mirror the edges of tectonic plates. Because seafloors constantly form and recycle, the theory of plate tectonics also explains why oceanic crust is significantly younger than continental crust. And thanks to satellites and GPS stations, we know that plate tectonics is not just a thing of the past. We can directly observe and document the slow and steady movement of continents today.
Although an exceedingly useful scientific model, plate tectonics does pose some questions for those trying to understand the world from a young-earth perspective. Today, tectonic plates move at roughly 1.5 cm/yr. At this rate, it would take hundreds of millions of years for the continents to split and assume their modern configuration. This far exceeds the young-age timeline from Scripture. Is it possible that plate tectonics operated at a much, much faster rate in the past?
Catastrophic Plate Tectonics
In the 1980’s, geophysicist Dr. John Baumgardner began developing the foundation of a plate tectonics model to explain tectonic plate activity on a much shorter timescale.3 A group of geoscientists joined Baumgardner, and the model became known as catastrophic plate tectonics (CPT).4
Given the devastating consequences tectonic activity can have on lifeforms, Baumgardner and his team suggested that most of this occurred during the biblical Flood, rather than after the Flood when life was supposed to be recovering and recolonizing the Earth. According to the CPT model, Earth’s continents originally belonged to a single supercontinent surrounded by denser, cooler oceanic crust. When the Flood began, the oceanic crust suddenly fractured. Large portions sank into the mantle beneath the supercontinent. As these slabs of oceanic crust sank, they pulled more of the ocean floor with them. This triggered a process called runaway subduction.
What is Runaway Subduction?
What differentiates regular subduction from this is that the former is relatively stable and occurs at by-in-large the same rate. Runaway subduction, however, results in a feedback loop. Essentially, the faster an oceanic crustal slab sinks, the weaker it makes the surrounding mantle rock. This decreases the resistance, allowing the slabs to sink even faster, which in turn makes the surrounding mantle rock weaker, which decreases the resistance and allows slabs to sink even faster…and so on and so forth. We can liken it to how struggling in quicksand makes you sink faster.
According to Baumgardner, the subducting oceanic plates sank faster and faster. Eventually their speed reached a human walking pace of several feet per second. This displaced mantle material and forced hot, buoyant rock to rise at divergent plate boundaries and form new ocean floors. The introduction of a new seafloor made the bottom of the pre-Flood oceans sit at a more even level with the continents. Thus, the holding volume of the ocean basins were reduced and sea levels rose. What was once dry land became flooded by a depth of up to a mile (~1.6 km) of seawater.
Once all the pre-Flood oceanic crust had been replaced, the runaway subduction ceased. The seafloor began to cool and sink, increasing the holding capacity of the oceans. This allowed the floodwaters to recede, drawing water back into the ocean basins, where they remain to this day.
Evidence for Catastrophic Plate Tectonics
Plate tectonics accounts for more geologic phenomena than any previously proposed model of the Earth’s structure. Yet, catastrophic plate tectonics can account for all of that, and much more.
Here Comes the Sea
Fossils of fish, ammonites, sea turtles, mosasaurs and so many other sea creatures are often found buried thousands of feet above current sea level. There is nowhere near enough water on Earth for the global sea level to rise this high. Even if all of the glaciers and ice caps melted, the ocean would only rise about 295 feet (90 meters). Additionally, many of these marine fossils are found in undeformed layers of sedimentary rock. This means their presence above sea level cannot simply be explained by mountain uplift. Where did all of this water come from?
The only way to accomplish this is by decreasing the ocean’s holding volume by producing lots of young, hot and buoyant oceanic crust. Even old-earth geologists have come to ackowledge that seafloor tectonics must have been operating much faster than they are today in order to explain this phenomenon. Granted, this on its own is not an argument specifically for catastrophic plate tectonics. But neither does it accord with the fingernail-growth speeds of tectonics we observe in the present. Clearly, seafloor spreading rates have not been uniform across all of Earth’s history.
Mega-Earthquakes
The geologic record is full of evidence for large-scale earthquakes far larger than any observed in recent, historic times. For example, the picture on the bottom left was taken at the Hanson Ranch Bonebed in Wyoming’s Lance Formation. The unit of warped, swirly sandstone layers in the photograph is called a seismite. These occur when an earthquake causes water-laden sediment to disturb the layers.
Many of the deformed layers in the Lance Formation are quite thick, some measuring over 15 feet in thickness!5 To put this into perspective, a 5.5 magnitude earthquake might leave behind a seismite about one-inch in thickness.6 So clearly, the earthquakes that formed the seismites in the Lance Formation were hundreds or thousands of times more powerful than any known from recent hitsory.
Given that earthquakes are caused by adjustments along Earth’s tectonic plate margins, this is indirect evidence that they were much more active in the past.7
Recent & Rapid Rise of Mountains
A planation surface is a large-scale land surface that has been eroded almost flat. Interestingly, many of these surfaces are high-elevation plateaus. This means the erosion that caused the planation surface happened first, followed by an uplift.
This is inconsistent with the idea that slow-and-gradual plate tectonics we observe today was responsible for the uplift of these high-elevation plateaus.8 Over millions of years, erosion would have etched away at the surface of these plateaus, sculpting a topographic landscape into them. The fact that such uneven erosion did not occur suggests that erosion started to carve the planation surfaces into mountain peaks only after they reached their near-current heights.
It’s All in the Physics
Dr. Baumgardner developed a new Fortran-based computer program to better model how CPT could work. Called TERRA, this program allows researchers to mathematically set and manipulate a model of the Earth in both two and three-dimensions. With this program, Dr. Baumgardner has been able to demonstrate that even with all geophysic paramaters and laws of physics in place, runaway subduction is physically possible.9
Computational fluid dynamics expert Dr. Hans Ruppel, from Los Alamos National Laboratory, served as a peer-reviewer for Baumgardner’s 1986 publication on the geophysics of CPT. He expressed strong disagreement with Baumgardner’s attempts to align the geologic record with a biblical timeline. Nevertheless, he still praised the core science, writing: “The proposed mechanism for cataclysmic tectonic upheaval and the discussion of the tempeature dependence of the mantle viscosity are scientifically credible.”10
He further added that the simulations offer “new insight into the history of the Earths mantle and are important to pursue, independent of their theological implications.”11
A Graveyard of Oceanic Crust
We have already discussed the process of oceanic crust disappearing into the Earth’s mantle during subduction. But what happens after that?
For decades, most geologists assumed that they simply accumulated and assymilated into the upper mantle. The temperature of the Earth’s upper mantle ranges from 1,160°F (627°C) to as high as 1,700 °F (930°C) near the top of the lower mantle. This is about 420 miles (670 km) below the Earth’s surface. Surely, subducted oceanic plates should not still be present here after tens of millions of years.
But Dr. Baumgardner disagreed. In the early 1980’s, he argued that if CPT was responsible for runaway subduction only a few thousand years ago, the oceanic crust slabs should still be present. Not only this, but he also predicted that they were being subducted so quickly, that they penetrated downward through the upper mantle and ended up at the base of the lower mantle.
Ten years later, geophycisists using a technique called seismic tomography discovered that slabs of “cold” crustal material were still located at the base of the mantle, despite reaching temperatures in excess of 7,232°F (4000°C). This is exactly where Dr. Baumgardner’s model predicted they would be.12
Areas of Further Research
While plate tectonics, along with its catastrophic variant, are by far the most explanatory tectonic models, many mysteries remain for both old-earth and young-earth geologists to solve.
The Dawn of Plate Tectonics
How and when plate tectonics started is a complex and controversial topic. To date, there is no consensus among old-earth geologists regarding either one. Some think it started as early as four billion years ago, while others think it did not really kick off until one billion years ago.13
As far as young-earth geology is concerned, suggestions for the actual cause are far-ranging. They include asteroid or cometary impacts, a build up of radioactive heat beneath the Earth’s crust, the direct hand of God, and many, many others.14 There is also an open question as to when plate tectonics began. Most young-earth geologists think it initiated with the Flood, when slabs of oceanic crust broke loose and subducted along thousands of miles of pre-Flood continental margins.15 Some have suggested it began sometime between the Fall and the Flood. According to this idea, plate tectonic activity gradually became more and more prevalent, eventually culminating in the Flood.16 Unlike the more widely accepted variant of CPT, this pre-Flood plate tectonics model has not yet been replicated with computer modeling, so more research is needed.
It’s Getting Hot in Here!
In order to form the entire oceanic crust during the year-long Flood, this newly formed rock would need to expel great quantities of heat as it cooled. Estimates suggest this cooling process released some 1.4 x 1029 joules of heat, which is 30 times more than enough heat to completely boil off Earth’s oceans!17
Since Scripture specifically states God’s involvement during the Flood year, some—like Baumgardner—suggest we should remain open to the possibility that some supernatural cooling mechanism may have been involved. On the other hand, gaps in our knowledge do not necessarily mean that no naturalistic explanation exists. Researchers in antiquity assumed many phenomena in nature to have supernatural causes, only for science to later discover a natural cause behind it.
Regardless of how we account for the Flood’s heat budget, the fact remains that there are several lines of evidence suggesting plate tectonics occurred much faster in the past than it does today. The existence of this heat problem does not make this evidence simply vaporize into thin air.
All in Good Time
Most CPT advocates widely agree that Pangaea was not the original supercontinent. Instead, that title usually goes to another, even earlier supercontinent: Rodinia. It had an entirely different continental arrangement from Pangaea.
The logic for this reasoning is simple. The Appalachian Mountains of North American, the Atlas Mountains of North Africa, and the Caledonian Mountains of the British Isles and Scandinavia formed as a single mountain range called the Central Pangean Mountains. These mountains are composed of fossil-bearing rock layers that young-earth geologists think were formed earlier during the Flood. This means the layers were formed in North America, Europe, and Africa first. Afterward, the continents came together to form Pangaea, creating the mountains.18
However, there is a problem with breaking apart Rodinia and reassembling it into Pangaea. Once Pangaea formed, it would be surrounded by newly-formed oceanic crust that is too buoyant to subduct. So to start another cycle of runaway subduction, the oceanic crust would need time to cool. In the Flood model, this cooling would have no more than a few days to elapse. As a result, Pangaea would be unable to break apart again.19
In response, some young-earth geologists have suggested that the original supercontinent was a type of proto-Pangaea, rather than Rodinia. According to this model, proto-Pangaea has a narrow sea running through it that still allows for early Flood subduction and the creation of the Central Pangaean Mountains. It also reduces the plate motio required by not having to transform Rodinia into Pangaea.20,21
Conclusion
Plate tectonics has allowed creationists a greater understanding of Earth’s history than ever before. It allows us to come up with plausible explanations for how God flooded the Earth via catastrophic plate tectonics. Additionally, it provides powerful evidence that plate tectonics operated much faster than it does today. It also opens up new avenues for research. The investigation into how and when tectonic activity began. Timing of when supercontinents formed and were broken up. Discovering how so much heat was expelled from Earth’s system during the Flood. Plate tectonics has been a wonderful discovery for creationists because it allows us to more clearly see just one of the incredible ways God orchestrates geologic change to the surface of the planet He created.
Footnotes
- Kious, W.J.; Tilling, R.I. (2001) [1996]. “‘Historical perspective’. This Dynamic Earth: the Story of Plate Tectonics” (Online ed.). U.S. Geological Survey. ISBN 0-16-048220-8. Retrieved 29 January 2008.; Ortelius, Thesaurus Geographicus (Antwerp, (Belgium): Officina Plantiniana [Plantin Press] 1596), entry: “Gadiricus.” ↩︎
- Meinhold, G., & Celâl Şengör, A. M. (2019). “A historical account of how continental drift and plate tectonics provided the framework for our current understanding of palaeogeography.” Geological Magazine, 156(2), 182-207. ↩︎
- Baumgardner, John R. (1986). “Numerical Simulation of the Large-Scale Tectonic Changes Accompanying the Flood.” Proceedings of the International Conference on Creationism: Vol. 1, Article 56. ↩︎
- Austin, Steven A.; Baumgardner, John R.; Humphreys, D. Russell; Snelling, Andrew A.; Vardiman, Larry; and Wise, Kurt P. (1994). “Catastrophic Plate Tectonics: A Global Flood Model of Earth History.” Proceedings of the International Conference on Creationism: Vol. 3, Article 56. ↩︎
- Snyder, K., McLain, M., Wood, J., & Chadwick, A. (2020). “Over 13,000 elements from a single bonebed help elucidate disarticulation and transport of an Edmontosaurus thanatocoenosis.” PLoS One, 15(5), e0233182. ↩︎
- Austin, S.A., 2012, November. Jerusalem earthquake of 33 AD: evidence within laminated mud of the Dead Sea, Israel. In 2012 GSA Annual Meeting in Charlotte. GSA. ↩︎
- Garner, P. [Biblical Creation Trust]. (2021, October 5). Earthquakes in a scientific and biblical context [Video]. YouTube. ↩︎
- Ollier, C. and C. Pain. 2000. The Origin of Mountains. Routledge, London. ↩︎
- Baumgardner (1986), Footnote 3. ↩︎
- Baumgardner (1986), Footnote 3. ↩︎
- Baumgardner (1986), Footnote 3. ↩︎
- Baumgardner, J.R. 2003. “Catastrophic plate tectonics: the physics behind the Genesis Flood.” pp.113-126 in: Ivey, R.L., Jr. (ed.), Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Creationism. Creation Science Fellowship, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. ↩︎
- Y., Ol, B., & Na, A. (2024). “Geology’s biggest mystery: When did plate tectonics start?” Nature, 632, 491. ↩︎
- Austin, et al. (1994), Footnote 4. ↩︎
- Austin, et al. (1994), Footnote 4. ↩︎
- Coulson, K. P. (2021). “Using Stromatolites to Rethink the Precambrian-Cambrian Pre-Flood/Flood Boundary.” Answers Research Journal, 14, 81–123. ↩︎
- Worraker, W.J., and R. Ward. (2018). “Modeling of Flood and post-Flood ocean floor cooling.” In Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Creationism, ed. J.H. Whitmore, pp. 673–682. ↩︎
- Akridge, A. J., Bennett, C., Froede, C. R., Jr., Klevberg, P., Molén, M., Oard, M. J., Reed, J. K., Tyler, D., & Walker, T. (2007). “Creationism and catastrophic plate tectonics.” Creation Matters, 12(3), 1, 6-8. ↩︎
- Froede, C. (2002). “The Wilson cycle: a serious problem for Catastrophic Plate Tectonics.” Journal of Creation 16(3):108–110. ↩︎
- Baumgardner, J. 2018. “Understanding how the Flood sediment record was formed: The role of large tsunamis.” In Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Creationism, ed. J.H. Whitmore, pp. 287–305. ↩︎
- Clarey, T.L., and D.J. Werner. 2018. “Use of sedimentary megasequences to re-create pre-Flood geography.” In Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Creationism, ed. J.H. Whitmore, pp. 351–372. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: Creation Science Fellowship. ↩︎
Jake Ramgren
Sara Anne
Ken Coulson
Abigail L.
New Creation Staff