Runaway Subduction vrs The Laws of Physics

"The Terra model will only produce results of rapid crustal motion if one inserts completely non-physical constants into the simulation. For example he uses properties of rock in terms of specific heat, thermal conduction, thermal gradients, tensile strength, shear strength, compressive failure, dynamic loading and mass density profiles that have NO relation to the actual values for these properties of basalt and granite (the two basic types of crustal rock). Some of the values he uses for these constants of nature differ by more than an order of magnitude from reality. When he uses values for these properties of nature that are correct for such materials, his model produces exactly the type of slow motion for the continents consistent with the rest of geological data. Furthermore, his own model shows that if the continents were to move at such rates, the surface destruction would be so great and so prolonged that the earth would STILL be uninhabitable for all the massive earthquakes which would STILL be happening if runaway subduction happened only a few thousand years back. So which part of the model's results do you want to keep for your presuppositions."

"As it happens, computer simulation and finite element modeling is something I do myself in my professional work. Anyone who works with such tools knows that a computer model can be made to produce any result at all simply by changing the model and/or using inputs that produce the desired results. For example, in a model of a satellite flying around the earth, I can easily produce a model that indicates such a satellite can orbit the earth at only ten kilometers altitude. All I have to do is give the atmospheric portion of standard, high-fidelity models constants for the density of air that are off by a factor of 10. But surely everyone understands that satellites cannot orbit at ten kilometers altitude just because a computer model with bad data says so, even if its a really good community-standard computer model that produces high-precision results for orbital mechanics when used with correct data. Computer models can be great. But it is never fair to input a lighter-than-air pig into one and then claim pigs really can fly"

Hill Roberts, Age of the Earth Forum, Accessed 3/18/01

Creationist flood theories attempt to compress half a billion years of [conventionally established] earth history into a single, year-long catastrophe. This temporal compression creates numerous problems, one of which is the massive amount of heat generated by igneous extrusion/intrusion, extraterrestrial impacts, and accelerated nuclide decay.

Heat From Oceanic Crust Basalts

In John Baumgardner's Runaway Subduction Theory, all or virtually all of the world's oceanic crust was formed within a "few weeks or months," during Noah's flood, roughly 4500 years ago. The world's oceanic crust consists of approximately 2 billion km2 worth of mafic igneous rock, and accounts for about 60% of the earth's surface. Assuming a period of 100 days for emplacement of the current oceanic crust, a few months, this equals 20 million cubic km emplaced per day (Strahler, p. 212-213). The heat released by such an event would be sufficient to vaporize the oceans.

Heat From Continental Flood Basalts

And then there are the large volumes of flood/Phanerozoic extrusive and intrusive igneous bodies present on the continents. There are an estimated minimum of 82 million cubic km worth of continental flood basalts, and this represents a lower limit. These represent another huge source of thermal energy that needs to be accounted for in flood theories.

Distribution of flood basalts. 1. Siberian Traps 248-216 my; 2. Karoo basalts 166-206 my; 3. Parana Plateau 119-149 my; 4. Kerguelen Plateau/Broken Ridge 114-109.5 my; 5. Ontong Java/Nauru; 6. Deccan Traps 65-69 my; 7. Snake River Plain 16 my; 8. Columbia River 6-17.5 my; 9. Ethiopian Traps? Coffin, M.F. and O. Eldholm (1993) Large igneous provinces. Scientific American, October, p. 26-41 From Tom de Booij's webpage. http://www.egoproject.nl/Links.html

Heat From Intrusive Igneous Rocks

Massive amounts of intrusive igneous rocks need to be accounted for as well. For instance, the Idaho batholith is areally exposed over an area of 40,000km2, and is at least 3km thick. In Baumgardner's theory, this batholith and numerous others like it were emplaced within weeks or months during the flood. During the melt phase, the magma would have been about 1000 degrees C. Today, only 4500 years later, they are the same temperature as the surrounding rock. In the meantime, all of that thermal energy had to go somewhere.

Heat and Other Problems Created by Impacting Bodies

And then there are the Phanerozoic impact craters. Since many of these craters are sandwiched between supposed flood deposits, these impacts must have occurred during the flood. The hypothesis that these structures are in fact impact craters can often be confirmed by the presence of shatter cones, shocked quartz and tektite fields in and/or around the crater. Over 100 impact craters are known, but in order to be conservative, let's say 30 are demonstrably within flood sediments. Since it is likely that impacts do not preferentially occur on the continents, and since continents account for about 30% of the earth's surface, we can assume by extrapolation that at least 100 impact events occurred during the flood.

What are the effects of such impact events? First of all, impacts large enough to produce craters release enormous heat and powerful shock waves by conversion of the kinetic energy of the impacting object. Powell notes that an impact leaving a 10km crater would release about 10^25erg, a 50km crater impact about 10^28erg, and the Chixlulub impact, with a crater about 150km wide, about 10^31erg (Night Comes to the Cretaceous, p. 52).

"Calculations show that a meteorite with a diameter of 30 m, weighing about 300,000 tons, traveling at a velocity of 15 km/sec (33,500 miles/hour) would release energy equivalent to about 20 million tons of TNT.  Such a meteorite struck at Meteor Crater, Arizona (the Barringer Crater) about 49,000 years ago leaving a crater 1200 m in diameter and 200 m deep.  The amount of energy released by an impact depends on the size of the impacting body and its velocity.  An impact like the one that struck the Yucatan Peninsula, in Mexico about 65 million years ago, thought responsible for the extinction of the dinosaurs and numerous other species, created the Chicxulub Crater, 180 km in diameter and released energy equivalent to about 100 million megatons of TNT. For comparison, the amount of energy needed to create a nuclear winter on the Earth as a result of nuclear war is about 8,000 megatons, and the energy equivalent of the world's nuclear arsenal is about 60,000 megatons." (Meteorites, Impact and Mass Extinction).

L.J. Gibson writes:

"The impact of a 10-km diameter asteroid [such as the one that hit at the K/T boundary - ed.] would cause a catastrophe beyond our ability to envision. The results of such an impact (Clube and Napier 1982, Albritton 1989) might include a blast wave that would kill off any life over half the world, with an air temperature of 500° and windspeed of about 2500 km/hr. The heat of the impact might ignite widespread forest fires, accounting for the layer of soot found in New Zealand, Europe and North America (Melosh et al. 1990). Nitric oxides produced in the fireball would destroy the earth's ozone level, exposing survivors to life-threatening ultraviolet light. Global earthquakes with ground waves 10 m high would result. If the comet hit the ocean, it could generate waves 500-1000 m high at a distance of 2000 km from the impact target. The earth's core would be disrupted, possibly producing magnetic reversals. Plate movement would be accelerated, opening cracks 10-100 km wide in the earth's crust, and causing rapid mountain-building and worldwide volcanism (Clube and Napier 1982). It is difficult to understand how any significant number of species could survive such an event."

And this only one large impact. Yet, if the flood model is correct, many impacts must have ocurred during the flood, although most would not have been as large. How Noah's ark and its inhabitants could survive such repeated catastrophes is an open question.

Heat Generated by Accelerated Nuclear Decay

Baumgardner "explains" radiometric data by supposing that nucleur decay rates were rapidly accelerated during the flood. He says: "The only way to square the radiometric data with a flood that caused all these changes is to conclude that one aspect of the catastrophe was rapid radioactive decay." Never mind the fact that no significant change in decay rates has ever been induced in any of the nuclides used for radiometric dating, much less the sort of temporary, exponential decay rate increase required by such a theory. However, if the decay constants were accelerated during the flood in the manner proposed by Baumgardner, this would add yet another significant source of heat. See Joe Meert's calculations in Were Adam and Eve Toast?

Other Heat Sources: Vapor Canopies, Frictional Heating, etc.

Still more heat would be generated by other processes postulated by flood geologists. Donald Wise (1988) adds:

"To this must be added the frictional heating of the runaway subduction plus the massive heat of condensation of a collapsing vapor canopy. . . [yet] this massive thermal pulse dissipated in a few thousand years by unstated processes to leave most of the earth's surface devoid of hot springs or abnormal heat flow. The authors apologize that their 'model is still in the formative stages and thus is incomplete.' From a thermal viewpoint 'incomplete' seems like gross exaggeration. An incandescent earth with an asbestos ark floating on a sea of molten lava would be more appropriate!"

What Happened to all the Heat?

If all of these processes were to occur in the manner proposed by creationists, the heat and other environmental hazards generated by them would have been more than sufficient to vaporize the oceans, the ark, and all of life on the earth's surface. Baumgardner makes a major understatement when he says: "That no air-breathing life could survive such a catastrophe and that most marine life also perished is readily believable" (1994). As we've seen, however, it is not readily believable that any life at all, much less Noah's boat, could survive such a catastrophe. And even making generous thermodynamic concessions, residual heat flow at the earth's surface today should be many orders of magnitude greater than it is. Thus Baumgardner's theory generates a clear prediction that can be easily falsified. At this point, YECs can abandon either their theory or the laws of physics.

Baumgardner admits that such observations "point to the need to remove large amounts of heat from extensive bodies of rock in the earth in order to account for the geological change proposed for the Flood. It is the author's conclusion that this cannot happen within the framework of time-invariant physics" (1986, p. 21). Baumgardner's theory requires profound changes in the well established laws of physics during the "weeks or months" of Noah's flood. However, there is no evidence for the operation of "variant physics" during Noah's flood.

Thus, in the end, Baumgardner's "scientific" theory actually requires a violation of the well established physical laws of a) thermodynamics, which precisely describes the process of heat transfer, b) quantum theory, which precisely describes the probability per unit time that any given nuclide will decay, and, as Roberts points out c) the empirically derived geophysical values for specific heat, thermal conduction, thermal gradients, tensile strength, shear strength, compressive failure, dynamic loading and mass density profiles.

Other problems, not discussed here, such as the rapid deposition of extremely pure carbonate rocks in sediment-laden turbulent waters, the globally consistent sorting of microfossils, and the need for 100's of geomagnetic reverals to occur within the "weeks or months" of the flood, for example, make it clear that many additional miracles would probably need to be invoked as additional consequences of the model are considered. This is irrelevant, however, for there is no nonarbitrary constraint on the amount of miracles that can be appealed to in order to save a theory from empirical refutation.

Conclusion

Baumgardner offers no new explanation for any of these problems, and seems content to let god "sort it out":

"Finally, it seems evident that the Flood catastrophe cannot be understood or modeled in terms of time-invariant laws of nature. Intervention by God in the natural order during and after the catastrophe appears to be a logical necessity. Manifestations of the intervention appear to include an enhanced rate of nuclear decay during the event and a loss of thermal energy afterward" (ibid., p. 24).

Either Baumgardner's theory can be evaluated in terms of current physical constants, in which case it is falsified by present day heat flow measurements, or it is to be evaluated in terms of an inhomogenous mixture of current physical constants and arbitrarily invoked miracles, in which case it is nonscientific and beyond the range of even potential empirical falsification.

Perhaps Baumgardner's theory would work with some unknown "variant" set of physical laws, but he offers no evidence that physical constants have ever differed from currently measured values, much less that they have varied in the radical and highly specific manner his theory requires. The few attempts which have been made to substantiate such changes, such as Norman and Setterfield's C-decay Theory have been rejected even even by creationists as based on dubious evidence (for instance, Aardsma, G. E., Has the Speed of Light Decayed?, ICR Impact 179, and Webster, C. L. The Implications of the Oklo Phemonenon on the Constancy of Radiometric Decay Rates. Origins 17(2):86-92 (1990); see also The Distance to Supernova SN1987A and the Speed of Light and The Decay of c-decay).