Re: Terra

Glenn Morton (grmorton@waymark.net)
Tue, 06 Jan 1998 18:19:28 -0600

At 09:26 PM 1/5/98 -0800, Robert L. Miller wrote:
>I am seeking information about a story in the June 16 US News and World
>Report. Our denominational paper, SBC Life, (Southern Baptist) in their
>January issue reported on a geophysicist who developed a computer
>program called Terra, to model Noah's flood and demonstrate that a
>10,000 year age for the earth was possible. The scientist is John
>Baumgardner, PhD from UCLA in geophysics. He is described in the article
>as a "world class scientist."
>
>The basic mechanism seems to be a surge of magma coming to the surface
>as a bubble at high velocity displacing a tidal wave (sic) of seawater
>over the continents. After 150 days the bubble retreats with equally
>high velocity back into the earth's core and as the continents emerge
>water running off at 100 mph can quickley cut grand canyons and deposit
>the sedimentary layers in about one week.
>
>I would like to supply the editor of SBC Life with some substantive
>information about Baumgardner's thesis if some of you can give me some
>references. Is it alright if I suggest your wed site Glenn?

This would be great.

I have several of Baumgardner's articles if you need them and/or could
digest them for you if you want.

Baumgardner's model has the flood ending at the end of the mesozoic era. He
says:

"Assuming that the end of the Flood year corresponds approximately
with the end of the Mesozoic portion of the record, it follows that
a significant portion of the pre-Flood ocean floor sank into the
mantle during the Flood year itself."~John R. Baumgardner,
"Numerical Simulation of the Large Scale Tectonic Changes
Accompanying the Flood," Proceedings of the First International
Conference on Creationism, Vol. 2, (Pittsburg: Creation Science
Fellowship, 1986), p. 18

The problem with this, is that this leaves at least 30,000 feet of Tertiary
strata to be deposited AFTER the flood in the Gulf of Mexico. I know of oil
wells in the Gulf that have drilled to 20,000 feet and have just gotten into
the Miocene rocks (for those who don't know the oldest Tertiary is Paleocene
then Eocene, then Oligocene then Miocene, then Pliocene, then Pleistocene
then Recent). The well I am referring to drills through the Recent, the
Pleistocene, the Pliocene and stops in the Miocene. Almost 4 miles of
sediment which must be POST flood. This would take a lot of time.

There is also a heat problem with Baumgardner's view.

"Because all current ocean lithosphere seems to date from Flood or
post-Flood times, we feel that essentially all pre-Flood ocean
lithosphere was subducted in the course of the Flood.
Gravitational potential energy released by the subduction of this
lithosphere is on the order of 10^28 J. This alone probably provided
the energy necessary to drive Flood dynamics."~Steven A. Austin, D.
Russell Humphreys, Larry Vardiman, John R. Baumgardner, Andrew A.
Snelling and Kurt P. Wise,"Catastrophic Plate Tectonics: A Global
Flood Model of Earth History," in Robert T. Walsh, editor, The
Third International Conference on Creationism, (Pittsburgh:
Creation Science Fellowship, 1994), p. 612

Somebody should check me on this but I calculated 3231 K for the temperature
of the surface of the earth after this event. This is approximately 3000
deg. centigrade.

10^28 J/5.11 x 10^14 m^2=1.95 x 10^14 J/m^2 must be radiated in a year. or
6.1 million J/m^2/second for the year of the flood. Dividing this by the
Stefan-Boltzman constant 5.667 x 10^-8 W/m^2/K^-4 = 3231 K. This is
approximately 3000 deg. C I would say that they would cook.

With my penchant for mathematical error would somebody please check me???

The authors of the above conclude: "Most significantly we still need to
solve the heat problem." p. 616 Indeed.

glenn

Adam, Apes, and Anthropology: Finding the Soul of Fossil Man

and

Foundation, Fall and Flood
http://www.isource.net/~grmorton/dmd.htm