1. Was the flood inevitable—“programmed” from the beginning? No. If sin had not entered the world, I believe that the earth would still have its preflood subterranean water and pillars.
If mankind had not sinned, the abundant geothermal energy generated by tidal pumping [explained on page 336] could have been used for people’s benefit, not their destruction. After all, humans needed an energy source to lift, transport, heat, and illuminate—to fully exercise dominion over the earth (Genesis 1:28). Today’s primary energy sources, fossil fuels and nuclear reactors, did not exist before the flood, but are recognized global pollutants.
2. The rock layer—the earth’s crust—would have had some stiffness, because it was about 60-miles thick. However, the crust’s large area would have given it great flexibility. If the crust’s thickness, density, or strength varied horizontally (as a sine wave, for example) with a wavelength of 110 miles, the crust would have sagged downward to the chamber floor at more than 18,000 locations.
The effects of the rock sagging downward through water at one location on earth would spread laterally, but only at the speed of sound in water. Outside that expanding “ring of influence,” other sags could occur simultaneously.
The sagging crust, on DAYS 1 and 2 of the creation week, lost potential energy. Where did that energy go? Most of it heated the subterranean water to an unknown but significant extent.
3. Walter Russell Bowie, “The Book of Genesis,” The Interpreter’s Bible, Vol. 1 (New York: Abingdon Press, 1952), p. 473.
5. See also Pirkę De Rabbi Eliezer, translation by Gerald Friedlander (New York: The Bloch Publishing Company, 1916), pp. 27–28.
The original Hebrew can be found in chapter 5 at www.daat.ac.il/daat/vl/pirkeyeliezer/pirkeyeliezer02.pdf.
6. According to the Masoretic text of the Old Testament, this time period was 1,656 years. [See page 505.] According to the Septuagint (Greek) text, it was 2,242 years. According to the Samaritan text, it was 1307 years. [See Table 33 on page 514.]
7. The Book of the Cave of Treasures, translated from the Syriac Text of the British Museum (MS. Add. 25875) by Sir E. A. Wallis Budge (London: The Religious Tract Society, 1927).
8. Before the flood, the energy added to the pillars every 12 hours by the gravitational pull of the Moon, and to a lesser extent the Sun, was huge. That energy was proportional to the crust’s massive weight times the average lift distance. [For details see "Tidal Pumping: Two Types" on pages 336–337.]
9. Sin has physical consequences (Genesis 3). What might they be when every intent of all humans (except Noah) was evil continually (Genesis 6:5, 7:1)? Could mankind’s activities have caused physical changes that further weakened the crust or a few pillars? After all, “the earth [at that time] was filled with violence.” (Genesis 6:11) A sufficiently large man-made explosion (or many other possibilities which we, thousands of years later, cannot even imagine) might have disrupted the weakened crust and pillar system, and initiated the rupture—which then triggered the flood.
For some, a second possibility is that God could have commanded the earth’s crust to crack or a pillar to collapse. God spoke the universe into existence, so commanding such a small thing at the right place, which is all it would take, is not difficult to imagine.
But, would this second possibility depart from science by injecting a miracle into the physical world? The hydroplate theory does not assume that a miracle happened. (The theory has only three starting assumptions, as listed on page 120. Starting assumptions, often unstated, are part of every scientific theory that tries to explain the past.) A third response is, “We don’t know.”
Creation science tries to explain what we see in the universe with the fewest assumptions and without appeals to miracles not specifically mentioned in the Bible. (Invoking miracles to solve scientific problems irritated many scientists and led to a rigid insistence on uniformitarianism.) Creation science avoids the narrow-minded assumption that “the physical universe is all there is and all there ever will be.” Such a perspective (materialism, scientism. and uniformitarianism) produces scientific contradictions. Creation science, on the other hand, does not invoke self-serving miracles, is more consistent with the evidence and the laws of physics, and recognizes the obvious: there is a Creator (Romans 1:20). [See “How Can the Study of Creation Be Scientific?” on page 438.]
10. For details and supporting evidence, see pages 301–360.
11. Besides iron meteorites, which were once at least 1,300°F, chondrules were once about 3,000°F. [See Figure 185 on page 341 and “Chondrules” on page 410.] Also, the matrix material encasing chondrules shows thermal metamorphism requiring temperatures of at least 750°F. [See O. Richard Norton, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Meteorites (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 92.] While the heat-generating mechanisms for each are different, all three result from the release of gravitational potential energy.
12. “Magnetotelluric measurements show the lower continental crust to be electrically conductive globally ... The most probable candidates for the conduction mechanisms are small amounts of interconnected saline pore fluids and interconnected thin films of graphite. ... We favor the supercritical saline fluid model ...” R. D. Hyndman et al., “The Origin of Electrically Conductive Lower Continental Crust: Saline Water or Graphite?” Physics of the Earth and Planetary Interiors, Vol. 81, 1993, pp. 325, 341.
While these authors favor the supercritical saltwater explanation for this electrical conductivity, they assume that the saltwater is in innumerable microscopic pockets that are electrically and horizontally connected. The authors are puzzled, because so much horizontal connectivity should be accompanied by vertical connectivity. Over long geological ages, this water should have leaked up to the earth’s surface.
The hydroplate theory solves the problem. The preflood subterranean water layer had worldwide (horizontal) connectivity only. Within a century, tidal pumping made that water supercritical, so it began dissolving certain minerals, such as quartz and salt, and expanded vertically into the growing spongelike pockets in subterranean chamber’s floor and ceiling. As water escaped during the flood, the subterranean layer simply became thinner.
u “Nevertheless, the simplest explanation of increased conductivity in the deep crust is the presence of a continuous, lithostatically pressured, water-rich fluid.” Bruce W. D. Yardley and John W. Valley, “How Wet Is the Earth’s Crust?” Nature, Vol. 371, 15 September 1994, p. 206.
After presenting a strong case for the presence of water trapped deep under the earth’s surface, Yardley and Valley point out a problem. Over hundreds of millions of years, that water would leak up to the earth’s surface. It apparently never occurred to these authors that the earth is not hundreds of millions of years old, and most of the subterranean water did escape upward—during the global flood.
13. See the quote by Wenbo Wei et al. in Endnote 83 on page 145.
Note: The hydroplate theory makes 58 explicit predictions. Prediction 1, published in 1980, says that large volumes of pooled saltwater are beneath major mountains. The above study by Wei et al. explains why saltwater appears to be about 10 miles below the Tibetan Plateau (the world’s highest and largest plateau), which is bounded on the south by the most massive mountain range on earth.