In the Beginning: Compelling Evidence for Creation and the Flood

Below is the online edition of In the Beginning: Compelling Evidence for Creation and the Flood, by Dr. Walt Brown. Copyright © Center for Scientific Creation. All rights reserved.

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[ The Fountains of the Great Deep > The Hydroplate Theory: An Overview > The Hydroplate Theory: Key Assumptions ]

The Hydroplate Theory: Key Assumptions

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Figure 54: Granite and Basalt. Granite, the primary continental rock, has a grayish-to-pinkish color. Coarse grains of quartz, which have a glassy luster, occupy about 27% of granite’s volume. Basalt, the most common rock beneath oceans today, is solidified lava—a dark, fine-grained rock. The hydroplate theory assumes that before the flood, granite was above the subterranean water and the mantle was below. As you will see, during and after the flood, molten basalt spilled out onto the chamber floor, so most ocean floors today are paved with basalt.

Starting assumptions, as explained above, are always required to explain ancient, unrepeatable events. The hydroplate theory has one major and two minor starting assumptions. All else follows from them and the laws of physics. Proposed explanations for past events always have some initial conditions. Usually they are not mentioned.

Major Assumption: Subterranean Water. About half the water now in the oceans was once in interconnected chambers, 60 miles below the entire earth’s surface. At thousands of locations, the chamber’s sagging ceiling pressed against the chamber’s floor. These solid contacts will be called pillars. The average thickness of the subterranean water was at least 1 mile. Above the subterranean water was a granite crust; beneath that water was earth’s mantle. [See Figure 56.]

Minor Assumption 1: A Global Continent. The earth’s preflood crust encircled the globe. On the crust were deep and shallow seas, and mountains, generally smaller than those of today, but some perhaps 5,000 feet high.

Minor Assumption 2: An Initial Crack. A small initial crack occurred in the earth’s crust. (Several ways this crack could have started will soon be mentioned.) Once a tension crack formed, the high pressures in the chamber and the stress concentrations at each end of the crack would have quickly propagated the crack around the Earth in a great-circle path.

Why does the Mid-Oceanic Ridge also encircle the Earth a great-circle path? The violently escaping subterranean water widened the crack, which removed weight from the chamber floor below. That allowed the chamber floor to bulge upward and form the Mid-Oceanic Ridge. Thus the Mid-Oceanic Ridge also follows a great-circle path.

All 25 major mysteries described earlier, such as major mountain ranges, ice ages, comets, and the Grand Canyon, are consequences of these assumptions. The chain of events that flows naturally from these starting conditions will now be described as an observer might relate those events. The events fall into four phases.

Three Common Questions

Those not familiar with the behavior of high-pressure fluids sometimes raise three questions.

1. How could rock float on water? The crust did not float on water; water was trapped and sealed under the crust. (Water pressure and contact points (called pillars) between the chamber’s sagging ceiling and the chamber floor supported the crust.) The crust was like a thin, dense slab of rock resting on and covering an entire waterbed. As long as the waterbed mattress does not rupture, the dense slab will rest on top of less-dense water. Unlike a waterbed’s seal, which is only a thin sheet of rubber, the chamber’s seal was compressed rock about 60-miles thick. Pressures 5 miles or more below the earth’s surface are so great that rock deforms like highly compressed, extremely stiff putty.²⁰ Therefore, the slightest tension crack could not open from below.

2. Temperatures increase with depth inside the earth. Subterranean water about 60 miles below the earth’s surface would have been extremely hot. Wouldn’t all life on earth have been scalded if that water flooded the earth? No. Today’s geothermal heat is a result of the flood. Let’s first understand what made the subterranean water hot—tidal pumping that produced supercritical water (SCW)—a very high-energy, explosive form of water discovered in 1822.⁵⁰(Besides, the expanding fountains of the great deep became very cold. See "Rocket Science" on pages 598–599.)

Tidal Pumping.⁵¹ Tides in the subterranean water lifted and lowered the massive crust twice daily, stretching and compressing the pillars, thereby generating heat and raising the temperature of the subterranean-water. As quartz and certain other minerals dissolved, this hot, high-pressure water increasingly contained the ingredients that would later produce limestone (CaCO₃), salt (NaCl), other forms of quartz (SiO₂). In a few chapters, you will see why, after the flood, this dissolved quartz petrified some wood and cemented loose flood sediments into sedimentary rocks.

SCW. At a pressure of one atmosphere—about 1.01 bar or 14.7 psi (pounds per square inch)—water boils at a temperature slightly above 212°F (100°C). As pressure increases, the boiling point rises. At a pressure of 3,200 psi (220.6 bars) the boiling temperature is 705°F (374°C). Above this pressure-temperature combination, called the critical point, water is supercritical and cannot boil! Nor will any amount of pressure liquefy the water vapor!

The pressure in the 60-mile-deep subterranean chamber, simply due to the weight of the crust, was about 372,000 psi (25,550 bars)—far above the critical pressure. As the denser and thicker portions of the crust sagged in places and settled to the chamber floor, it lost potential energy which was gained as heat by the subterranean water. That water then became supercritical, exceeding 705°F and to a degree ionized.⁵² [See Figures 237-238 on pages 486-487.]

SCW can dissolve much more salt (NaCl) per unit volume than normal water—up to 840°F (450°C). At higher temperatures, all salt precipitates (out-salts).⁵³ In a few pages, this fact will show why our oceans have so much salt, and how salt domes formed.

SCW consists of microscopic liquid droplets dispersed within very dense water vapor. Hot droplets cool primarily by evaporation from their surfaces.⁵⁴ The cooling rate is proportional to their total surface area. The smaller a droplet, the larger its surface area is relative to its volume, so more of its heat can be quickly transferred to its surroundings. Liquid droplets in SCW have an area-to-volume ratio that is a trillion (1012) times greater than that of the flood water that covered the earth’s surface. Consequently, the liquid in SCW cools almost instantly if its pressure drops, because the myriad of shimmering liquid droplets, each surrounded by vapor, can simultaneously evaporate.⁵⁵ A typical SCW droplet at 300 bars and 716°F (380°C) consists of 5–10 molecules. These droplets evaporate, break up, and reform rapidly and continually.⁵⁶

This explains how the escaping supercritical liquid transferred its energy into supercritical vapor. How did the vapor lose its energy and cool? Rapid expansion. A remarkable characteristic of supercritical fluids is that a small decrease in pressure produces a gigantic increase in volume—and cooling. So, as the SCW flowed toward the base of the rupture, its pressure dropped and the vapor portion expanded and cooled to an extreme extent. [See “Rocket Science” on page 598.] As it expanded, it pushed on the surrounding fluid (gas and liquid), giving all fluid downstream ever increasing kinetic energy.

As the horizontally flowing liquid-gas mixture began to flow upward through the rupture, the pressure steadily dropped in each bundle of supercritical fluid. This released its electrical ionization energy, and some of each liquid droplet evaporated to become vapor. Within seconds, portions of the flow rose above the atmosphere where the pressure was almost zero. This 10,000-fold expansion was a weeks-long, focused explosion of indescribable magnitude—“splitting” the atmosphere and accelerating much of the water, along with rock and dirt, into the vacuum of space.⁵⁷

In summary, as the flood began, SCW jetted up through a globe-encircling rupture in the crust—as from a ruptured pressure cooker. This huge acceleration expanded the spacing between water molecules, allowing flash evaporation, sudden and extreme cooling, followed by even greater expansion, acceleration, and cooling. Therefore, most of the vast thermal, electrical, chemical, and surface energy⁵⁸ in the subterranean water ended up not as heat at the earth’s surface but as extreme kinetic energy in all the fountains of the great deep. As you will see, these velocities were high enough to launch rocks into outer space—the final dumping ground for most of the energy in the SCW.

3. What Happens as a Fluid Becomes Supercritical?

Key Experiments. In 1822, French Baron Cagniard de la Tour performed a famous experiment.⁵⁰ A specific amount of liquid was sealed inside a strong glass tube. The meniscus (the boundary between the liquid below and the vapor above) was visible. As the tube was heated, some liquid evaporated. Therefore, the pressure inside the tube and the vapor’s low density steadily increased, but as temperatures rose, the liquid’s higher density slowly decreased. When the two densities became equal—at a specific temperature and pressure, now called the critical point—the meniscus disappeared! Was the substance a liquid, a vapor, or something else? For almost two centuries, no one knew.⁵⁹

In 2005, the results of sophisticated experiments on supercritical water were published. That work by scientists in Germany, France, Sweden, the Netherlands, and the United States showed that both liquid and vapor were present. The liquid consisted of microscopic droplets dispersed—actually floating—throughout the dense vapor.⁵⁶

A Thought Experiment. What follows is conjecture. To my knowledge, no one has described the microscopic behavior of supercritical fluids (SCFs) as I will below, but based on the 2005 experiments, the physics now seems clear. If we could view the meniscus in microscopic detail as the temperature approached the critical point, I believe we would see the following:

The liquid below the meniscus becomes increasingly agitated and resembles a choppy lake on a windy day. The liquid and vapor are nearly in equilibrium, so about as many molecules evaporate from the liquid as enter the liquid from the vapor. At these very high temperatures, vapor molecules strike the liquid surface at a furious rate and splash droplets of liquid up into the dense vapor. As the vapor’s density approaches the liquid’s density, the droplets float in the vapor! This process continues until all liquid below the meniscus is dispersed as microscopic droplets in the vapor, so the meniscus suddenly disappears. The shimmering droplets, suspended in the vapor, are then bombarded from all directions by vapor molecules acting as bullets. When these “bullets” strike a droplet, they either fragment the droplet, stick to it, or bounce off the droplet. Droplets quickly fragment, merge, or evaporate.⁶⁰

Would these microscopic droplets float to the top of the vapor? No, but let’s assume they did. It would mean that the vapor was denser than the liquid droplets. Vapor molecules would be closer to each other, on average, than liquid molecules. Therefore, vapor molecules would frequently bond with each other and become liquid droplets. The presence of liquid droplets throughout the supercritical vapor contradicts our assumption that all the liquid had floated to the top of the vapor. With a little thought, it should become clear that liquid droplets almost instantly form and disappear within the dense vapor. With water (H₂O), the molecules when fragmented (ionized) become electrically charged particles: H⁺ and OH^-.⁵²

As temperatures rise, the vapor molecules travel faster and fragment more droplets. The droplets become, on average, even smaller.⁶¹ They also collide and merge more frequently, so at each new temperature, an equilibrium is quickly reached between droplets forming and disappearing.

Energy is expended in fragmenting droplets, because work must be done in stretching and breaking molecular bonds in the liquid phase. Most of the energy expended in fragmenting molecules becomes ionization (electrical) energy. If the pressure drops, electrical energy is recovered and surface energy is given up, so the volume expands rapidly and enormously. The faster the pressure drops, the more explosive—and cooler—the expansion.

When the flood began, the pressure in the jetting SCW dropped in seconds from at least 372,000 psi (25,620 bars) to almost zero above the atmosphere. (In a later chapter, you will see how nuclear reactions significantly increased this pressure during the early days of the flood.) The energy released was huge. Because the 46,000-mile-long fountains continued this release for several weeks, one should not think of it as a single explosion. Instead, the jetting water was a powerful, earth-size nuclear engine that launched considerable mass from earth.

Great Solubility. Today, SCFs (usually water or carbon dioxide) are studied primarily because of their great dissolving power. In 1879, J. B. Hannay and J. Hogarth first demonstrated this. When they rapidly dropped the pressure in a SCF, the dissolved material precipitated as “falling snow.”⁶² Why is the solubility of SCFs so great, and why did the solute precipitate so rapidly?

Supercritical liquid droplets impacting solids (like a dense spray of bullets, each slightly larger than a gas molecule) will penetrate, break up, and dissolve more of the solids than will pure liquids.⁶³ Also, as described above, the liquid droplets almost instantaneously form and evaporate. When they evaporate, the dissolved solids precipitate (out-salt) as sediments onto a floor. When new droplets form from merging vapor molecules, they contain no solute and can then dissolve more of the solid they encounter. During the flood, the escaping subterranean waters swept most of these loose, precipitated sediments on the chamber floor up to the earth’s surface.

Therefore, supercritical fluids can dissolve large quantities of organic material and certain minerals.⁶⁴ If the pressure in the supercritical fluid suddenly drops, the liquid evaporates explosively and the solid precipitates as “snow.” Common precipitates from the subterranean water were limestone (CaCO₃), salt (NaCl), quartz (SiO₂), and various ores.

A Puzzle Solved

“What drives the super-rotation [on Venus] is a fundamental physics question.” ⁶⁵

With our understanding of supercritical fluids (from page 124), puzzles not directly related to the flood are now solved, although they still baffle the experts. We will briefly digress from this study of the flood to see another powerful effect of supercritical fluids.

Why does the upper atmosphere of Venus rotate up to sixty times faster than Venus’ solid surface?

The atmosphere of Venus is 96% carbon dioxide (CO₂) by volume. In the extremely hot, high-pressure lower atmosphere, the CO₂ is supercritical. As the sun begins to heat the day side of Venus, the microscopic droplets floating in the dense, supercritical CO₂ vapor quickly evaporate, expanding and lifting the atmosphere on the day side.

The opposite effect occurs on the night side of Venus. That is, as the night side of Venus radiates its heat into space, supercritical vapor condenses into microscopic supercritical droplets that float within the atmosphere on the night side. This shrinks the atmosphere’s volume on the night side, and creates a standing wave in Venus’ atmosphere—a wave stationary when viewed from the Sun.

Therefore, the height of the atmosphere on the day side, is always higher than on the night side, so the upper atmosphere on Venus, in effect, flows “downhill”—super-rotates at up to 220 miles per hour from the higher day side to the lower night side. [See Prediction 1 below.] As mass shifts from the day to the night side of Venus, pressure on the day side drops slightly, expanding supercritical CO₂ even more and accelerating the process.

The gas-giant planets (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune) have supercritical interiors—which accounts for their extremely high wind speeds. (On Jupiter, winds exceed 220 miles per hour (100 meters per second.

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Figure 55: Thermal Images of Venus. In 2016, the Japanese spacecraft Akatsuki took thermal images of Venus. They showed a strange bow shape (highlighted by the dashed red lines) sweeping across the planet for days. The bow “seemed to rotate with Venus’ surface, rather than its much quicker moving atmosphere.” ⁶⁷

A: Day (orange), sulfuric-acid clouds (white streaks).

B: Day (white), night (gray). The greatest heating and expansion occurs near Venus’ equator, on the day side, so the upper atmosphere flows in a bow shape that appears as if it were fixed to the terminator (the day-to-night boundary) that rotates with the planet. The parabolic velocity profile extending into the night side resembles that from a powerful fire hose expelling water into an otherwise still lake.

Venus rotates from east to west (opposite to Earth’s rotation), so the Sun rises in the west and sets in the east. The expansion of colder supercritical night-time atmosphere as it rotates into the rising sun, lifts the atmosphere so it flows to the east, in the direction of the red arrow. To conserve angular momentum, there must be a counter thrust that acts to rotate Venus backward. This contributes to Venus’ backward rotation.

PREDICTION 1: The atmosphere on the day side of Venus will be found to be higher than on the night side.

Two More Puzzles Solved

Iceland and its many volcanoes straddle the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Large amounts of supercritical water (SCW) at 840°F have been found in porous rock a mile below Iceland’s surface, but scientists, interested in using that SCW as a geothermal source for generating electricity, are puzzled by two issues.⁶⁸

1. They believe the SCW must be heated by conduction from a magma chamber far below. However, just as heat rises rapidly in a chimney, hot water convects up from the base of that SCW much faster than heat from the magma chamber could conduct up through rock. How then could the water’s temperature have ever risen—let alone become supercritical?

2. At the high temperatures and pressures required to produce SCW, the flow channels in the porous rock should have already collapsed and not be porous. No convection should occur, but it does.

Based on what you have learned about SCW, especially on pages 124-125 can you resolve these two problems?

Answer: The water became supercritical by tidal pumping in the preflood subterranean chamber, not by a deep magma chamber. Once the water became supercritical, the more soluble minerals, such as quartz in the chamber’s floor and ceiling, dissolved, making that rock porous or spongelike. The subterranean water then filled the hollowed out channels in the chamber’s floor and ceiling with high pressure SCW that kept the channels open. Today, some of that SCW is leaking up to the surface of Iceland. Heat does not need to be conducted up into the water; the heat has been in the water since before the flood.

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Figure 56: Cross Section of the Preflood Earth. (Not to scale.) Several aspects of the early earth are shown here. The thickness of the subterranean chamber varied, because the chamber’s granite roof sagged and pressed against the chamber floor at locations that will be called pillars. Pillars partially supported the roof. (The confined, high-pressure subterranean water provided most of the support.) Unlike cylindrical pillars we see in buildings, the subterranean pillars were tapered downward. [Pages 477–483 explain how, why, and when pillars formed.]

Supercritical water (SCW) in the subterranean chamber dissolved certain minerals in the chamber’s floor and ceiling—giving that rock a porous, spongelike texture. [SCW is explained on pages 124–125.] High-pressure water filled those voids. The Moho, defined as the sudden transition between slow and fast seismic waves, lies about 3 miles below the chamber floor, marks the bottom of that porous, water-filled layer. This is why seismic waves travel more slowly immediately above the Moho.

Quartz was one of the first minerals to dissolve. This opened tiny grain-size pockets totaling 27% of the volume of granite. Other minerals undoubtedly also dissolved, so the chamber floor and ceiling would have looked like rigid sponges—each a few miles thick. [An interesting ancient writing touches on this. See the quote from The Book of the Cave of Treasures on page 479.] Trapped SCW that filled these tiny pockets remains today. In fact, in 2008, SCW was discovered two miles under the Atlantic floor. Scientists were shocked at finding the first naturally occurring SCW.⁴⁴ This vast, steady source of superhot water, thick with dissolved minerals, the rare isotope of helium (³He)⁴⁵, and sometimes hydrocarbons⁴⁶, is jetting up through the ocean floors as black smokers. [See Figure 57.]

When the flood began, these pockets, a few miles above and below the subterranean chamber, contained much water. To escape to the earth’s surface after the flood, that water had to traverse microscopic, tortuous paths through compressed rock—a very slow process even for a gas or SCW. Black smokers we see today show that small amounts of the subterranean water are still escaping from what was the floor of the subterranean chamber.

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Figure 57: Black Smoker. Black smokers, some as hot as 867°F (464°C), were discovered in 1977 jetting up on a portion of the Mid-Oceanic Ridge in the Pacific. Many other black smokers have since been found along the entire, globe-encircling Mid-Oceanic Ridge, even inside the Arctic Circle and near Antarctica. As hot supercritical water (SCW)⁴⁴ [explained on pages 124–125], from deep under the ocean floor, shoots up into the frigid ocean, dissolved minerals (and on rare occasions, asphalt ) precipitate out, giving the smoker its black color. SCW can hold vast volumes of dissolved minerals, such as copper, iron, zinc, sulfur, and sometimes hydrocarbons.⁴⁶ SCW has been produced by man in strong, closed containers, but never before has SCW been seen in its natural state, even around volcanoes.

How do evolutionary geologists explain black smokers? They say water not in a closed container seeps down several miles below the ocean floor—against a powerful and increasing pressure gradient. Magma (molten rock) then heats the water to these incredible temperatures, forcing it back up through the floor. (SCW could not form by such a process, because of the two conditions highlighted in bold above. Uncontained liquid water, heated while slowly seeping downward, would expand, rise, and cool, long before it became supercritical.) Besides, if the evolutionary explanation were true, the surface of the magma body would quickly cool, form a crust, and soon be unable to transfer much heat to the circulating water. (This is why we can walk over lava days after a crust forms. The crust insulates us from the hot lava below.) Obviously, smokers could not be millions of years old, because they are venting so much heat from a finite heat reservoir below. However, black smokers must have been active for many years, because large ecosystems (composed of complex life forms, such as clams and giant tubeworms) have had time to become established around the base of smokers. Figure 56 explains the origin of black smokers.