Catastrophic Plate Tectonics

"If released near the earth's surface, this amount of energy is sufficient to melt a layer of silicate rock 12 km thick or to boil away a layer of water 25 km deep over the entire earth." — John Baumgardner, stating his own model's energy budget, 1990¹

"The measured thermal diffusivity of rock is much too low to cool the newly forming lithosphere at the rate implied by CPT. Moreover, there is no adequate sink for so much heat even if the thermal diffusivity were somehow much higher. ... This, as far as I can see, represents a supernatural solution." — John Baumgardner, 2012²

"It's not that they have found any mistakes in Baumgardner's math—on the contrary, his math is correct—or in his computer models, they just flat out don't believe it." — Timothy Clarey and Davis Werner, Institute for Creation Research, 2023³

Summary

Catastrophic Plate Tectonics — CPT for short — is the leading young-earth model of how Noah's Flood happened. It says the continents really did move, the ocean floors really did form by seafloor spreading, and the slabs of old ocean floor really did sink into the mantle — but that nearly all of it happened in a few months during the Flood, at meters per second instead of centimeters per year.

The model was built by John Baumgardner, a geophysicist who earned a UCLA Ph.D. and spent twenty years at Los Alamos National Laboratory for the stated purpose of finding the Flood's mechanism. It was named in a six-author 1994 paper by Austin, Baumgardner, Humphreys, Snelling, Vardiman and Wise.⁴ Today it is the preferred Flood model of the Institute for Creation Research, Answers in Genesis, and Creation Ministries International.

This article walks through the model, its physics, the evidence claimed for it, the evidence against it, and the debate it has caused among creationists. The research behind every claim is in the literature review and the dossiers beside this article. The conclusions, in order of confidence:

The model's starting deduction is genuinely strong — given a global Flood. No ocean floor anywhere on earth is older than the fossil-bearing rocks. So if the Flood deposited those rocks, the pre-Flood ocean floor must have gone somewhere, and the only place it could go is down into the mantle, fast. Baumgardner's logic here is sound, and it is why every Flood model must either accept rapid subduction or deny plate tectonics altogether.
The physics CPT invokes is real — at the wrong scale. Thermal runaway in rock that weakens as it heats is documented physics. But where it has been measured and modeled outside CPT, it makes an earthquake in a shear zone about two meters wide, lasting seconds.⁵ The "catastrophic" mantle avalanches in the secular papers CPT cites last about ten million years.⁶ CPT needs the same physics to weaken the entire 2,900-km-deep mantle a billionfold for months. No measurement supports that extrapolation, and the largest transient weakening ever observed in the earth is a factor of about twenty.⁷
The runaway has never been produced from realistic starting conditions. Baumgardner's own 1994 paper reports that his simulation needs about 20 million years of ordinary convection to build the unstable pile of cold rock that then runs away. His solution was to assert the pile as a starting condition, created in place on Day 3.⁸ Every 3-D global simulation from 1986 to 2003 got its meters-per-second speeds by dialing viscosity down up to nine orders of magnitude by hand.¹ The newest and best model gets runaway from a 300-km-wide cold blob but ordinary centimeters-per-year tectonics from a 100-km one — the initial condition selects the outcome.⁹
The heat problem is conceded, by the model's own author, to require a miracle. The energy CPT releases is roughly 49 times what it takes to boil every ocean on earth. Even spread evenly over all 4,500 years since the Flood, radiating it away would hold the earth's average surface near 180 °C. Baumgardner has said since 1986 that no natural mechanism can remove this heat, and in 2012 he called the required heat removal "a supernatural solution."² His one proposed natural mechanism — steam jets reaching escape velocity — he retracted himself in 2012 after finding a factor-of-1,000 error.²
The evidence claimed for CPT has mostly collapsed. Its flagship confirmed prediction — rapid magnetic field change recorded in Steens Mountain lava — was retracted in 2014 by Robert Coe, the scientist who discovered it, who named the creationist use of his result as a misinterpretation.¹⁰ The "3–4% density contrast" Baumgardner cites at the base of the mantle does not appear in either paper he cites for it, and the 3,000–4,000 K temperature contrast he derives from it would put the rock below absolute zero.¹¹ The megasequences ICR maps across continents are Sloss's 1963 mainstream framework, relabeled.¹²
The strongest outside evidence is unanswered — and the heat-problem rescue would destroy CPT's own best evidence. Plate speeds measured by GPS over about fifteen years agree with speeds averaged from the last three million years of magnetic stripes to within a few percent, across nineteen plate pairs at once.¹³ Ocean depth follows the square root of crustal age exactly as slow conductive cooling predicts.¹⁴ A creationist modeler, William Worraker, reports that no heat sink fast enough to solve CPT's heat problem can reproduce those depth and heat-flow patterns — the very data Clarey lists among CPT's six proofs.¹⁵
Creationists themselves are split, and the popular presentations hide the problems. Michael Oard, John Reed, Carl Froede and much of the Creation Research Society reject CPT outright. Snelling's 900-page Earth's Catastrophic Past, the standard young-earth reference work, presents CPT without ever mentioning the heat-removal miracle its own architect calls a logical necessity.¹⁶

The verdict: CPT is the most developed Flood model ever produced, built by a genuinely capable scientist whose numerical code is still used in mainstream geophysics. But it is a research program with a conceded supernatural step at its center, not a demonstrated mechanism. Its arithmetic is honest — and its arithmetic is what shows it does not work as physics. It should not be cited as settled evidence for the Flood, and belief in the Flood should not be staked on it.

What survives

The young ocean floor is real and shared. Every side agrees no ocean crust is older than about 180 million years on the conventional scale, while continents reach 4 billion. Mainstream geology explains this by continuous subduction. A Flood model must explain it too, and CPT at least engages the data instead of denying it.

Baumgardner's candor is exceptional. He published his model's energy problem in 1990, his 20-million-year initiation problem in 1994, and his retraction of his own steam-jet solution in 2012. He states plainly where he needs God to intervene. Most of the hardest numbers in this article come from him.

The code is respected. TERRA, the mantle-convection program Baumgardner wrote for his thesis, is still used by mainstream research groups and was called "widely-used and powerful" in a peer-reviewed paper in December 2025.¹⁷ MIT geophysicist Brad Hager: "Baumgardner is seen as one of the world leaders in numerical models of mantle convection." UCLA's Gerald Schubert: "As far as the code goes, Baumgardner is a world-class scientist."¹⁸ The qualifier is the point: a good instrument does not vouch for the numbers fed into it, and Baumgardner told the same journalist that the results "are dependent on the numbers fed into it in the first place."

Some observations CPT points at are genuinely underexplained. Derek Ager's documentation of rock formations with near-identical properties stretching from England to Bulgaria to Texas is real, and mainstream geology explains it at the level of framework more than mechanism.¹⁹ These are fair things for a catastrophist to press. They are arguments for large-scale correlated deposition, though — not for runaway subduction specifically.

What the model claims

CPT's story of the Flood year runs as follows, assembled from the 1994 six-author paper and Baumgardner's own papers.⁴²⁰

Before the Flood, the earth already had continents, ocean basins, a core, mantle and crust. Cold, dense slabs of pre-Flood ocean floor sat poised at the continental margins — or, in the version Baumgardner now prefers, a belt of cold rock created in place on Day 3 sat trapped above the mantle's 660-km phase boundary, "on the knife edge of catastrophe."¹⁶

The Flood began when these slabs broke loose and started to sink. Sinking rock sheared the mantle around it and heated it. Silicate rock weakens exponentially as it heats, so the sinking sped up, which heated the mantle more, which weakened it more. This feedback — thermal runaway — dropped the mantle's effective viscosity by a factor of about a billion, and the slabs fell through the mantle at meters per second. All the pre-Flood ocean floor was consumed in weeks.

At the surface, the consequences were everything Genesis describes, on this reading. New molten rock rose along tens of thousands of kilometers of spreading ridges. Ocean water flashing to steam at these ridges produced supersonic jets — the "fountains of the great deep" — which lofted water that fell as the forty days of rain, "the windows of heaven." The new seafloor was hot and buoyant, so the ocean bottoms rose, displacing the sea over the continents by a kilometer or more. Tsunamis from runaway subduction swept sediment across the continents in repeated pulses, laying down the fossil-bearing megasequences. Cold slabs reaching the core-mantle boundary chilled the outer core, driving the rapid magnetic-field reversals recorded in the seafloor stripes. When the last pre-Flood ocean floor was consumed, the engine stopped. The new seafloor cooled and sank, the water drained off the continents, mountains rose by isostatic rebound, and a warm post-Flood ocean drove the Ice Age.

The model's own numbers, from Baumgardner's papers:

Quantity	Value	Source
Energy released by sinking the pre-Flood ocean floor	3–3.4 × 10²⁸ J	Baumgardner 1986, 1990¹
Same energy, expressed as damage	melts 12 km of rock, or boils 25 km of water, over the whole earth	Baumgardner 1990¹
Peak plate speeds in the simulations	0.3–2.5 m/s	Baumgardner 1986, 1994, 2013²¹
Viscosity drop required	8–10 orders of magnitude ("about a billion times")	Baumgardner 2002, 2012²²
Duration of the runaway	weeks; simulation snapshots at 5–25 days	Baumgardner 2003²⁰
Sea-level rise	2,500 m (1986) → 1,200–1,800 m (1990) → ~1 km, "no longer convinced" it is needed (2012)	see below²
Rainfall claimed	1 m per hour, globally, for 40 days	Baumgardner 1990¹
Post-Flood ocean warmth	20 °C or more above today	Austin et al. 1994⁴

Two details in that table deserve flags. The sea-level mechanism has been quietly downgraded over the years — from 2,500 m of thermal uplift in 1986 to Baumgardner's 2012 statement that he is "no longer convinced" a large rise was needed at all, with tsunamis from a rotationally unstable earth doing the work instead. And the one-meter-per-hour rain claim collides with a limit Baumgardner himself later published: radiating away the heat that condensing water vapor releases caps rainfall at about 1.75 mm per hour — 570 times less.²² His escape is that the jets loft liquid water ballistically, so it never has to condense. No published calculation shows this can deliver the claimed rate.

Where it came from

The idea that the continents split apart during the Flood is older than mainstream plate tectonics. In 1859 — the same year as On the Origin of Species — Antonio Snider-Pellegrini published a map of the continents fitted together and proposed they were torn apart rapidly during Noah's Flood.²³ Alfred Wegener proposed slow continental drift in 1912 and was ridiculed for decades; the 1926 American Association of Petroleum Geologists symposium on his theory was overwhelmingly hostile. Vindication came from the sea floor in the 1960s — the Vine-Matthews prediction that spreading crust would record the field's reversals as symmetric magnetic stripes, made before the stripe pattern was mapped, was confirmed within three years²⁴ — and by about 1968 plate tectonics, with a slow timescale, was the new consensus.

Creationists were late and divided in responding. Whitcomb and Morris's The Genesis Flood (1961) predates plate tectonics and could not engage it. The turn came through one man. John Baumgardner, then a Campus Crusade for Christ staff member with degrees in electrical engineering, realized in the spring of 1978 that if all today's ocean floor is Mesozoic or younger, a global Flood requires massive, rapid subduction. He enrolled at UCLA specifically "to obtain the training and credentials to work on the mechanism behind the Genesis Flood at a professional level," by his own account having "never taken even one undergraduate course in geology."² His 1983 thesis produced TERRA, a pioneering 3-D spherical mantle-convection code, and Los Alamos National Laboratory hired him in 1984, where he stayed twenty years.

The model developed through the International Conference on Creationism: 1986 (the mechanism and the energy budget), 1990 (3-D simulations), 1994 (two papers — the runaway physics, and the six-author synthesis that named "catastrophic plate tectonics"), and 2003 (the first runaway simulation carried to completion).²⁵¹⁸²⁰ In 1997 U.S. News & World Report profiled him — the article that recorded both the technical respect of named geophysicists and the verdict that "among geologists, there is universal agreement that Baumgardner's views are simply wrong."¹⁸ Snelling's Earth's Catastrophic Past (2009) made CPT the standard young-earth textbook position, and since the 2010s Tim Clarey at ICR has built a stratigraphic program around it, compiling nearly 3,000 stratigraphic columns across five continents organized into megasequences.³

One provenance fact should be stated rather than left for a skeptic to discover: the model's author entered the field to prove a conclusion he already held. That does not make the physics wrong — motivation is not evidence — but it is true, it is documented in his own words, and honesty requires saying it.

The physics, honestly stated

The real part

Silicate rock genuinely weakens as it warms and as it deforms faster. Laboratory deformation experiments on olivine, the mantle's main mineral, map three regimes — diffusion creep, power-law creep, and plastic yield — and across them the strength of solid rock spans many orders of magnitude without melting.²⁶ A sinking cold slab releases gravitational energy as heat in the sheared rock around it; heat weakens the rock; weaker rock lets the slab sink faster. If the heating outruns thermal diffusion, this feedback can run away. The criterion goes back to a 1963 paper by Gruntfest on sheared liquids,²⁷ and mainstream geophysicists explored slab thermal runaway in the 1970s.²⁸

There is also a real mainstream literature on episodic mantle catastrophes. The 660-km phase boundary can dam cold sinking material until it avalanches into the lower mantle.²⁹³⁰ Baumgardner's energy bookkeeping is also sound. Every number he publishes — the 3.4 × 10²⁸ J, the 12 km of melted rock, the steam-jet arithmetic — was recomputed for this article from his stated inputs and checks out. The heat problem is not a critic's construction. It falls out of his own published inputs, which is why he has acknowledged it since 1986.

The scale problem

Everything above is real at scales CPT cannot use.

Take the secular "catastrophe" papers CPT cites. Weinstein's 1993 paper is titled "Catastrophic overturn of the Earth's mantle" — and reports that the catastrophic burst of convection lasts about 10 million years.⁶ Solheim and Peltier's avalanches "recur at intervals separated by hundreds of millions of years."³¹ The closest mainstream analogue to CPT's overturn — Moresi and Solomatov's "episodic overturn regime" — produces sinking speeds Baumgardner himself describes as "modest."³² The Venus resurfacing event Baumgardner offers as a planetary precedent is dated by crater counts at roughly 300 million years ago, ending over an interval of less than 10 million years — and Venus has no subduction.³³ A paper Baumgardner himself co-authored in 2001 explains Venus's lack of plate tectonics by its dryness, not by a completed runaway.³⁴ "Catastrophic" in these papers is a geological word. CPT needs weeks. The gap is a factor of about 100 million.

Take thermal runaway where it has actually been modeled with measured rock properties. Kelemen and Hirth's 2007 Nature paper builds exactly the feedback CPT invokes — shear heating against temperature-dependent strength in olivine — and gets an instability in a shear zone two meters wide, recurring every 200–250 years, generating intermediate-depth earthquakes. Their model caps itself: above about 1,400 °C the rock starts melting, which collapses the stress and shuts the heating off.⁵ CPT needs the same feedback to operate through the whole mantle for months without melting it.

Take the viscosity numbers directly. A simple Stokes-sinking calculation with Baumgardner's own slab parameters shows meters-per-second tectonics requires the mantle's effective viscosity to fall to roughly 10¹²–10¹³ Pa·s — about the viscosity of pitch. Present estimates are 10²⁰–10²¹ Pa·s for the upper mantle and 10²²–10²⁴ for the lower. So the whole model reduces to one question: can solid silicate reach 10¹² Pa·s without melting? The largest transient weakening ever observed in the earth — mantle relaxation after the 2004 magnitude-9.2 Sumatra earthquake — is a factor of about 20.⁷ Laboratory data give dry, melt-free rock viscosities above 10²⁰ Pa·s at the strain rates where they have been measured. Baumgardner's answer is that mainstream models simply have not included "a deformation law that accommodates realistic levels of weakening."²⁰ But the power-law weakening he cites is weakening with strain rate: the rock is only that weak if it is already deforming ten billion times faster than today. Using it to explain how the fast deformation started is circular unless the shear-heating feedback closes the loop — and where that feedback has been modeled with measured properties, it closes at two meters, not 2,900 kilometers.

What the simulations actually did

The published simulations are routinely described, by supporters, as demonstrations that runaway happens. Their own texts say something more modest.

The 1986 and 1990 3-D global runs used constant viscosity, set by hand — 10¹⁴ Pa·s in 1986, and in 1990 "reducing the viscosity everywhere by nine orders of magnitude," with thermal conductivity and radiogenic heating both inflated by a factor of 10⁸ to keep the calculation stable.¹ The meters-per-second speeds were an input, not a discovery. The 1994 3-D run — the one whose continent-motion pictures are most often reproduced — used what Baumgardner calls the "Newtonian analog method" and describes as "far from satisfying ... merely suggestive," and he adds that "a moderate amount of trial and error was involved in finding the special set of conditions" that let the continents separate without colliding.²¹ The 2-D runs that contained the real nonlinear physics crashed at the onset of runaway in 1986 and 1994. Only in 2003, with a new solver, did a 2-D calculation carry a runaway to completion.²⁰ No 3-D global simulation with the real rheology has ever been run.

The newest work, Sherburn, Baumgardner and Horstemeyer 2013, is the most instructive. Using a materials-engineering constitutive model fitted to mantle rock, they ran two cases. A cold blob 300 km wide and 650 km deep ran away at 1–2 m/s. A 100-km-wide blob — the size of an actual subducting slab — "displayed no hint of runaway" and produced velocities "on the order of a few cm/yr which is similar to what is inferred for today's mantle."⁹ The model does not predict a Flood from the earth as it is. It predicts today's plate tectonics — unless a triple-width cold anomaly is supplied as a starting condition.

The evidence offered for it

CPT's literature is large, but most of it is defense of the mechanism. The affirmative case — observations put forward as evidence the runaway actually happened — is short. Here is each claim, with its current status.

Rapid magnetic reversals: the flagship prediction, retracted at its source

In 1986 Russell Humphreys predicted that thin lava flows would be found recording magnetic-field change too fast for mainstream theory — the field flipping in weeks during the Flood year.³⁵ In 1989 and 1995, Robert Coe and Michel Prévot reported directional change of 3–6° per day recorded within single Steens Mountain lava flows.³⁶ Creationist literature has cited this ever since as a fulfilled prediction; Austin et al. 1994 called it "most impressively" confirmed.⁴

The rest of the story is usually left out. In 1999 the original authors themselves published a paper asking whether their result was "geomagnetic fact or rock-magnetic artifact." In 2011, new sampling filled the gaps in the Steens record and showed the transition path was five times longer than thought — the "jumps" were gaps in the lava record, not the field.³⁷ And in 2014, Coe and colleagues published "Demise of the rapid-field-change hypothesis at Steens Mountain," showing by rapid continuous demagnetization that the directional streaking was an alteration artifact created during the laboratory measurement itself: "the case for two episodes of extraordinarily rapid field change ... is now untenable." The same paper states that the result "was misinterpreted by creationists in their attempts to reconcile the geological and biblical time scales (e.g., Humphreys, 1990)."¹⁰ Snelling's 2015 Answers in Genesis article, written six months after Coe's retraction, waves it off as "a relatively new technique."³⁸

What survives in the mainstream literature is modest: one Nevada flow suggesting field change around 1° per week — twenty to forty times slower than the Steens claim, and not a full reversal³⁹ — and a contested Italian sediment claim whose rebuttal found the section unreliable.⁴⁰ Meanwhile the measured duration of actual polarity reversals is around a thousand years for the transit, embedded in a process lasting about 22,000 years.⁴¹⁴² Nothing in paleomagnetism today supports hundreds of reversals inside one year. A creationist reviewer, Mark McGuire, adds an internal contradiction: the reversal stripes begin at the very start of seafloor spreading — before any slab could have reached the core-mantle boundary to trigger Humphreys' mechanism.⁴³

Status: the claim is dead, and it was killed by its own discoverer.

Cold slabs at the base of the mantle: the numbers are not in the cited papers

Baumgardner's second headline evidence: seismic tomography shows a ring of dense material at the bottom of the mantle under the rim of the Pacific, where subducted slabs should be. He argues the density contrast is "on the order of 3-4%," implying a temperature contrast of "3000-4000 K," which cold rock could only retain if it sank thousands of years ago, not 100 million.²⁰

Four things are wrong with this, in escalating order. First, the two papers he cites for the density figure — Grand, van der Hilst and Widiyantoro 1997, and Su, Woodward and Dziewonski 1994 — are seismic velocity models. Neither reports a density contrast at all. The actual velocity anomalies in Grand's paper peak at 0.35–0.5% through most of the lower mantle.¹¹ Second, where deep-mantle density has been measured (by the earth's free oscillations), the dense regions turn out to be the hot piles, not the cold ring — the anomalies are compositional, which is now the standard result.⁴⁴ Third, the derived number refutes itself: rock at the core-mantle boundary sits in surroundings of roughly 2,500–3,000 K, so material 3,000–4,000 K colder would be below absolute zero. An impossible temperature is proof the assumption behind it — "similar chemical composition" — is false, which is exactly the mainstream conclusion. Fourth, the thermal-diffusion arithmetic goes the other way: slabs imaged at 300–600 km thick have conductive decay times of roughly 250 million years, so staying cold is expected on the slow timescale. Indeed CPT makes the opposite failed prediction here: slabs emplaced cold a few thousand years ago should produce velocity anomalies of several percent; the observed maxima are under half a percent.

There is a supreme irony available to whoever notices it: the low thermal diffusivity of rock that keeps deep slabs cold for 250 million years is the same low diffusivity that, by Baumgardner's own admission, makes it impossible to cool CPT's new ocean floor without a miracle. The same physical property cannot be evidence in one paragraph and suspended in the next.

Status: fails on its own citations.

Megasequences and continent-wide strata: a mainstream framework, relabeled

ICR's Tim Clarey has compiled stratigraphic columns across five continents showing six great unconformity-bounded packages of sediment — Sauk, Tippecanoe, Kaskaskia, Absaroka, Zuni, Tejas — and presents them as pulses of the Flood.³ The packages are real. They were also defined, named and mapped by Laurence Sloss in 1963, within conventional geology, as products of slow sea-level cycles over hundreds of millions of years.¹² Adopting a mainstream framework and compressing its timescale is not independent evidence for the compression. And the internal features of the sequences are the evidence against a one-year reading: the basal sheet sands are demonstrably time-transgressive (older at one end than the other, tracked by trilobite zones); they contain dense in-place burrow horizons that require living communities between depositional events; and the boundaries between sequences carry karst surfaces and paleosols — subaerial weathering that a continuously rising Flood cannot produce on a surface it is covering.

Nothing about continent-scale strata, even granting a catastrophic reading, is evidence for runaway subduction in particular. This argument belongs to the general Flood-geology debate, not to CPT.

Status: real observation, no discriminating power, and the fine structure cuts against the timescale.

Ultra-high-pressure minerals: rocks that visited the mantle

Austin et al. 1994 argue that "rapid deformation, burial, and subsequent erosion of mountains possible in the Flood model might provide the only adequate explanation" for coesite — a form of silica that only forms under crushing pressure — found in the cores of mountain belts.⁴ The intuition behind the argument, as it circulates popularly, is that rock carried to mantle depth and back records violence beyond anything slow tectonics can supply, and that the delicate high-pressure minerals would have re-equilibrated unless the round trip was fast.

The underlying facts first, because they are genuinely spectacular. Chopin's 1984 discovery at Dora-Maira in the Alps found coesite requiring at least 28 kbar at about 700 °C — continental crust taken down to roughly 94 km, into the mantle, and returned.⁴⁵ Later finds added metamorphic diamond. These rocks are real, the depths are real, and mainstream geology itself calls their return "problematic" in the discovery paper. But each step of the creationist inference fails on the published record:

Preservation is armor, not speed. The free coesite did not survive — Chopin's own paper says the whole rock matrix had once been coesite and reverted to quartz; the laboratory back-reaction consumes a loose grain in hours. What survives are micrometer-scale grains sealed inside garnet and zircon, whose rigid hosts act as pressure vessels: coesite inclusions sitting in hand specimens today are still under 19–23 kbar of internal pressure, because the zircon around them never let go.⁴⁶ Survival requires staying below about 375–400 °C during the climb — cooling during ascent, which the petrologic record shows — not a fast trip. A meters-per-second trip through a violently shearing channel is, if anything, the regime least likely to keep the rock cold.
The trips are dated, at plate speeds, over millions of years, by five independent clocks. Rubatto and Hermann's Dora-Maira result — "exhumation as fast as subduction" — is 3.4 then 1.6 cm/yr, in two dated stages spanning over three million years, with the rock still 15 km down when the clocks stop.⁴⁷ Across eleven ultra-high-pressure terranes the measured burial-to-mid-crust durations run 4 to 58 million years, from uranium-lead, lutetium-hafnium, samarium-neodymium and argon-argon systems in different minerals — five parent-daughter clocks that land in the right order (peak → deep crust → shallow crust) every time.⁴⁸
One of Austin's own five citations answers him. Hsü 1991, cited in the founding CPT paper as part of the coesite problem, is itself a conventional plate-tectonic exhumation mechanism for these very rocks.⁴⁹ The mainstream's difficulty is choosing among six candidate mechanisms, not finding one.
The energy framing is a category error. Work is force times distance and does not depend on how long the trip takes. Raising the whole Dora-Maira ultra-high-pressure unit from 100 km over its measured 3.3 Myr averages about 1.3 megawatts — two wind turbines. Compressing the identical work into a year changes only the power — and enormous power release is precisely CPT's unsolved heat problem, so pressing the UHP argument makes the model's worst difficulty worse.⁵⁰
The escape hatch closes both branches. A live mainstream debate asks whether "tectonic overpressure" lets these minerals form shallower than lithostatic arithmetic implies; its own advocates cap the effect near twice lithostatic, which still puts Dora-Maira's coesite at ~47 km — below the Moho.⁵¹ Either overpressure is real, and the rocks never went to 100 km, and no extraordinary burial is needed — or it is not, and they went deep and returned at measured plate speeds over millions of years. On neither branch is coesite evidence for a Flood.

There is also an internal problem the movement has not noticed: its three most prominent geologists hold three incompatible positions on these rocks. Austin and Baumgardner need deep, fast burial; Oard argues the minerals formed at less than 50 km via overpressure or meteorite impacts, explicitly to avoid deep subduction; Snelling's regional-metamorphism program attributes metamorphic minerals to precursor composition and hydrothermal fluids, never engages pressures above 5 kbar, and the word "coesite" appears nowhere in his 900-page Earth's Catastrophic Past.⁵² Across nine ICC volumes and the entire ICR/AiG/CMI/CRSQ literature, the case that coesite supports CPT consists of one sentence, hedged with "might," never developed by anyone.

The Franciscan mélange of California — the example Baumgardner himself discusses — must be kept separate, because it contains no coesite at all: its eclogites peak near 1.2–1.8 GPa (45–70 km), and the current literature states flatly that "coesite has not been found in rocks from the Franciscan Complex."⁵³ One correction that cuts in CPT's favor, found while checking Baumgardner's concession of "articulated ichthyosaur and plesiosaur fossils" in the mélange: the Franciscan's entire vertebrate record is three specimens, and every one was found as loose float — two ichthyosaur snouts in chert cobbles redeposited into Quaternary stream gravels, and two plesiosaur vertebrae in a limestone concretion "found as float." The complex is "notoriously barren" in its own describer's words, so neither side should lean on Franciscan reptiles.⁵⁴ The real juxtaposition is still striking: fossil-dated, barely metamorphosed sediments enclose eclogite and blueschist blocks at hundreds of localities, and identical high-pressure blocks sit in the unmetamorphosed, richly fossiliferous Great Valley forearc beds next door. Mainstream mapping explains the mixture by submarine landslides shedding already-exhumed blocks into ordinary sediment across 140 million years of continuous subduction — blueschist pebbles inside Franciscan conglomerates show the recycling caught in the act. Sorting mantle-depth rocks and fossil-dated sediment into one deposit within weeks remains an unsolved problem for CPT, not a trophy.

Status: the observation is real and impressive; the argument from it is one hedged sentence that fails on preservation physics, measured durations, its own citations, and a three-way creationist contradiction.

Giant seismites: do "mixed-up layers" record monster earthquakes?

A newer claim, made twice by Answers in Genesis's director of research, argues from seismites — beds whose soft layers were churned by earthquake shaking before they hardened. In Wyoming's Lance Formation, creationist geologists Arthur Chadwick and Kurt Wise documented deformed beds up to 9 m thick, against typical seismites of a few centimeters. Snelling's conclusion: "Not even an asteroid impact can explain such huge seismites, especially in rapid succession … Creation geologists postulate that continents broke apart rapidly and collided, generating humongous earthquakes during the Genesis Flood."⁵⁵ Popular retellings escalate it: the earthquakes "must have been hundreds to thousands of times more powerful than any modern earthquakes."⁵⁶

This is a real observation and the right kind of argument — a physical trace, in the field, needing a cause. It deserved a full workup, and got one. Five findings, each checkable:

Thickness is not magnitude, and the creationists' own calibration says so. Steven Austin's careful Dead Sea work — the creationist community's only seismite-to-magnitude calibration — ties an 8-cm seismite to magnitude ~6.0 and a 1-m seismite to ~7.2.⁵⁷ Extrapolating Austin's own curve, a 9-m bed lands near magnitude 8 — a great earthquake, not a super-terrestrial one. The mainstream's showcase "giant seismites," bus-sized blocks floated on liquefied sand in the East African Rift, are read by their own describers as magnitude ~6+, "similar to the M7.4 earthquake at the same location in 1910."⁵⁸
There is a physical ceiling near magnitude 9.5, and nothing in the rocks breaches it. Magnitude is set by fault area times slip; the largest event ever recorded (Chile 1960, Mw 9.5) ruptured a fault nearly 1,000 miles long, and the USGS states flatly that "no fault long enough to generate a magnitude 10 earthquake is known to exist."⁵⁹ No paleoseismic study anywhere infers a tectonic earthquake above 9.5. Only an impact plausibly exceeds it — the Chicxulub impact works out to about magnitude 10 on the best treatment⁶⁰ — and an impact is not fault slip, so it does not help a subduction-driven model. The one published claim of an M>10 seismite, which Snelling's own footnote cites, states in the same sentence that such a magnitude "is incompatible with known terrestrial mechanisms (fault, volcano)" and proposes a bolide⁶¹ — and the field has since reattributed that deposit to ordinary magnitude 5–9.5 volcanic-rift earthquakes, in beds "partly separated by undeformed beds" and confined to one horizon, with deformed beds "absent in older or younger strata."⁶² On CPT's own stratigraphy those older and younger strata are also Flood deposits, laid down days away under the same shaking. They are undisturbed.
CPT's own published numbers require magnitude-11 earthquakes, forty per hour, for five months. Baumgardner and Navarro's 2023 tsunami model — CPT's only quantified statement of Flood seismicity — has 40 subduction segments, each 1,250 km long, locking for 60 minutes and then slipping with 6,235 m of seafloor rebound: "144,000 over the course of five months."⁶³ Converting those parameters by the standard moment formula gives Mw 10.7–11.1 per event — sixty to two hundred times the seismic moment of Chile 1960, with a rupture that would need to run a third to half way around the planet.⁶⁴ The slip also requires the rock to store about 600 times the elastic strain at which crust is known to fail⁶⁵ — and Baumgardner himself wielded exactly this style of elastic-limit argument, at 51 bars, to sink Walt Brown's hydroplate model.
The record's structure points the opposite way — the discreteness problem. A seismite is recognized by being bracketed in undeformed beds; "deformed zones surrounded by undeformed strata" is criterion five of the standard identification list.⁵⁸ In the best-measured seismite archive on earth — annually layered Dead Sea muds on an active plate boundary — deformed layers make up 5–11% of the section; the other ~90% is undisturbed varve.⁶⁶ The densest record ever published, water-saturated glacial sands shaken as often as every 6–7 years, shows one to three seismites per meter.⁶⁷ Wise's Lance data — the Flood argument's own flagship — show 43 megaseismites in ~707 m: one per 16 m.⁶⁸ CPT's 144,000 events distributed through its own 1,000–2,000 m sediment column require one deformed horizon every 7–14 millimeters — a factor of 1,200–2,400 above what its showcase formation contains. And since every Flood bed is still soft (Snelling's chapter-75 argument states this as a virtue), continuous magnitude-11 shaking should leave not seismite horizons but one structureless, homogenized mass — no laminae, no trackways, no vertical burrows. The Flood-assigned column is instead full of all three, a point pressed from inside creationism by Isaacs's Answers Research Journal takedown of hydroplate liquefaction, every step of which transfers to CPT.⁶⁹ Wise himself, publishing his field data at GSA, calls the Lance seismites "an enigma … leaving no apparent cause" and reports that "correlative megaseismites are absent" elsewhere.⁶⁸
Snelling has already stated this argument's conclusion — as a reductio against somebody else. Arguing against post-Flood continental separation, he wrote that rapid separation "would have involved continuous earthquakes with magnitudes far exceeding the worst earthquakes experienced today, and therefore would have resulted in devastating consequences for all life on the earth's surface."⁷⁰ Exactly so. Relocating the same process into the Flood year does not relocate the consequence out of the sediment.

What survives is the modest version, and it is worth granting: some ancient liquefaction genuinely exceeds modern experience — the giant sandstone pipes of Utah record liquefaction whose depth "far exceeds depths usually considered in earthquake engineering"⁷¹ — and seismite-to-trigger inference is admitted on all sides to be weak,⁷² which cuts against the mainstream's magnitude estimates and against Snelling's alike. "Bigger than any earthquake in recorded history" is defensible in places. "Bigger than physics allows," and "a year of continuous global mega-seismicity," are refuted — the second one by the arithmetic of two creationist sources this article simply placed side by side.

Status: the strong claim fails on the creationists' own calibration and their own field counts; the seismite record's discreteness is positive evidence against a Flood-year shaking regime.

The rest, briefly

Near-synchronous recent uplift of mountain ranges (from Ollier and Pain's geomorphology) is a contested premise; Molnar and England argued in 1990 that the signal is late-Cenozoic climate change increasing erosion, not synchronized uplift, and modern thermochronology gives range-by-range histories that are not synchronous.⁷³ Venus was covered above. The magnetic stripes themselves are, by Baumgardner's own statement, not discriminating: "the only significant difference is the time scale."² Seafloor sediment thickness is treated by Baumgardner not as evidence but as a conceded problem; the measured deep-ocean average of about 404 m of sediment, over crust averaging 64.2 million years old,⁷⁴ works out to 6.3 mm per thousand years — squarely inside measured slow accumulation rates.⁷⁵ Fossil order is not offered as evidence for CPT by anyone; Baumgardner concedes the order is real and reinterprets it by ecological zonation.²

An honest scorecard of the affirmative case: one retracted result, one number that does not exist in its cited sources, one borrowed mainstream framework, a planetary analogue with the wrong timescale and no subduction, and a seismite record whose deformed-horizon density falls three orders of magnitude short of the model's own stated earthquake count. What remains is the model's internal coherence and the shared observation that ocean floor is young relative to continents.

The evidence it must answer

The case for slow plate tectonics does not rest on assumed ages. It rests on independent measurements agreeing with each other. These are the four hardest, stated with their numbers, followed by what CPT says about each.

Ordered ages on the ocean floor

In 1968–69 the drilling ship Glomar Challenger drilled a transect across the South Atlantic. The sediment resting directly on volcanic basement was dated by its microfossils — no radioactivity involved — and the basal ages march outward from the ridge in order: 11 million years at 191 km from the axis, 24 at 380 km, 33 at 643 km, 49 at 990 km, 67 at 1,270 km, more than 76 at 1,617 km. A straight line through them gives a spreading rate of about 2 cm per year, matching the magnetic stripes. Two sites were drilled on the far flank specifically to test symmetry, and fit.⁷⁶ Baumgardner accepts this pattern without reservation: "the case to me is incontrovertible that the age of the ocean crust increases in a systematic way as one moves away from the spreading ridges. How can anyone now doubt that basic finding?"² His reading is that the ordering is real but the timescale is compressed a hundred-million-fold — which requires the entire ordered succession of marine microfossil species to be a deposition sequence laid down laterally in months.

GPS against the magnetic stripes

Plate speeds are now measured directly by satellite geodesy. The decisive comparison was engineered to be a blind test: the MORVEL model of 2010 deliberately used no data at all from the Pacific–North America boundary, then predicted its motion purely from magnetic-stripe averages (0.78–3.16 million years, on a polarity timescale anchored by radioisotopic dates and astronomical cycle counts⁷⁷) carried around the global plate circuit. The prediction: 50.2 ± 1.1 mm/yr. The GPS measurement: 49.4 ± 0.3 mm/yr — agreement to 1.6%. Across eight blind-tested boundaries the rms difference was 4.1 mm/yr.¹³ A single Iceland baseline crossing the Mid-Atlantic Ridge lengthens at 20.3 ± 0.2 mm/yr against a predicted 19.8 ± 0.2.⁷⁸

Under CPT, the stripe-derived "3-million-year average" is actually an average over seafloor laid down during the tail of a runaway that spanned nine orders of magnitude in speed. There is no reason such an average should land on today's instantaneous rate to a few percent — for one plate pair, let alone nineteen simultaneously. Baumgardner's answer is that today's motion is residual sinking of the frozen-in slabs;² Clarey's is that satellites verify "ongoing slow, residual plate motion."⁷⁹ Neither addresses the coincidence of the averages. The one creationist who noticed the shape of the problem, Worraker, could cite only a 35% slowdown in crust production over the last 15 million conventional years — eight to nine orders of magnitude short of the required deceleration curve.⁸⁰ Honesty requires the other side too: the residuals are real — India–Eurasia runs 7.9 mm/yr slower today than its 3-Myr average — and mainstream geophysics attributes them to collision-driven slowing, which is the sign and size its own mechanics predicts.¹³

Ocean depth follows the square root of age

Cooling rock contracts and sinks. If seafloor ages are real elapsed time, depth should increase as the square root of age near the ridges and flatten far from them, and heat flow should fall as one over the square root of age — the relation first fitted globally by Parsons and Sclater in 1977.⁸¹ It does, globally, with striking precision: depth (m) = 2,600 + 365 √age(Myr) out to 20 Myr, leveling toward 5,651 m.¹⁴ Ridge crests at 2,600 m and old abyssal plains at 5,600 m — a three-kilometer subsidence tracking stripe age — is thermal physics with no free timescale parameter. Under CPT all seafloor is the same 4,500 years old, and the depth-age curve must instead record emplacement order during the Flood year, with the entire cooling compressed since. That is precisely what Worraker and Ward tried to model at the 2018 International Conference on Creationism, introducing arbitrary heat sinks of any strength they liked. Their result: "no such heat sink formulation was found which could duplicate the observed patterns of bathymetry and heat flux," because any sink strong enough to do the cooling destroys the smooth age-dependence of the surface heat flux. They also concede the mainstream fit is "genuine, and in this case is not due merely to circular reasoning."¹⁵ Since Clarey lists seafloor bathymetry and ocean heat flow among his six empirical proofs of CPT,⁸² the situation is that CPT's own best evidence is reproducible only on the timescale CPT denies.

Hotspot chains and drowned atolls

The Hawaiian-Emperor volcano chain gets older to the northwest, linearly: Kauai 5.1 Ma at 519 km from Kilauea, Midway 27.7 Ma at 2,432 km, Suiko seamount 64.7 Ma at 4,860 km — a propagation rate of 9.2 ± 0.3 cm/yr over five thousand kilometers.⁸³ Today's Pacific plate moves about 10 cm/yr by GPS. Same number, different instruments, different timescales. The honest caveat cuts against everyone's simple story, and it is worth stating as a three-part sign test, because a decelerating Flood model predicts one sign and the record shows the other. The current Pacific rotation is about 50% faster than its 47-million-year average.⁸⁴ The older Emperor segment propagated at 7.2 cm/yr and the younger Hawaiian segment at 9.2 — a 28% speed-up, forward in time, across the interval where CPT requires the steepest deceleration in earth history.⁸³ And the newest paleomagnetic work reports that the Pacific's polar-wander path "does hint at an acceleration of the Pacific plate in the Cenozoic."⁸⁵ And the chain's old end is drowned: Midway's volcanic basalt is capped by 384 m of shallow-water reef limestone, and Enewetak atoll by about 1,287 m, with Eocene shallow-water fossils at the bottom of the pile.⁸⁶ Darwin predicted in 1842 that atolls are reefs that grew upward on sinking volcanoes; drilling confirmed it. For CPT the atolls are a compound problem: 1.3 km of in-place, organically built, shallow-water reef must accumulate on a subsiding pedestal entirely after the Flood — about 29 cm per century sustained for 4,500 years, on a foundation whose measured subsidence follows the slow cooling curve above.

The heat problem

This is the center of the article because it is the center of the model, by its author's own account.

CPT has two heat loads of its own, before anything from accelerated nuclear decay is added. Load one: the gravitational energy of the sinking pre-Flood ocean floor, dissipated as heat in the mantle — Baumgardner's own figure is 3.4 × 10²⁸ J, "sufficient to melt a layer of silicate rock 12 km thick or to boil away a layer of water 25 km deep over the entire earth."¹ Load two, about four times bigger: the new ocean floor. CPT creates an entire world's ocean lithosphere — roughly 100 km thick, near melting temperature — during the Flood year, and today that rock is cold to about the same depth. The heat that had to leave is about 3.9 × 10¹⁴ J per square meter of seafloor, or 1.4 × 10²⁹ J in total.⁸⁰

Some scale, computed for this article from standard values. Boiling every ocean on earth — all 1.35 × 10²¹ kg, from 4 °C through total evaporation — takes 3.6 × 10²⁷ J. CPT's two loads together are 49 times that. They equal about 25,000 years of the total sunlight falling on earth. If the whole amount were radiated smoothly into space over the entire 4,500 years since the Flood, the earth's surface would have to hold a blackbody temperature near 454 K — 181 °C — for all of post-Flood history. Releasing it in one year requires radiating at about 3,700 K, hotter than the surface of a red dwarf star.

Every escape route has been checked, most of them by creationists.

Conduction cannot do it, as Baumgardner showed first. Using his own published formula, rock cools to half its initial temperature contrast at 50 km depth in 87 million years. In 4,500 years, conduction reaches about 360 m — one-third of one percent of the lithosphere's thickness.²⁵

The ocean cannot absorb it. Seafloor temperature proxies — oxygen isotopes, and independently Mg/Ca ratios, alkenones and clumped isotopes — cap the post-Flood deep ocean below about 13 °C. That allows the oceans to absorb about 6 × 10²⁵ J: 0.04% of the load. Worraker again: "the remaining 99.96% must have been removed or absorbed elsewhere."⁸⁰

Hydrothermal circulation makes it worse. Baumgardner: moving the heat into seawater "would vaporize the oceans several times over."²

The steam jets were retracted. Baumgardner's 2003 proposal was that supersonic steam jets at the spreading ridges reached escape velocity, carrying the heat off the planet entirely. In 2012 he retracted the escape-velocity claim: "I incorrectly included a factor of density ... I overestimated the available thermal specific energy by a factor of 1000. It was an embarrassing error."² The corrected jets reach about 2 km/s — supersonic, but a factor of 31 short in energy of escaping. Steam that does not escape condenses and gives its heat straight back. Carrying load two on the corrected jets would require launching about 18 oceans' worth of water.

What remains is a miracle, and Baumgardner says so. From 1986: "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."²⁵ From 2012: "The only solution I can envision is a rapid volumetric removal of heat, at least in the top 50-100 km of the earth, during the Flood. This, as far as I can see, represents a supernatural solution" — and, in the same document, "Honesty drives me to infer that God must have intervened in the physical laws He ordained in this particular aspect of the Flood cataclysm."² Asked in 2012 whether anything had changed since 1986, he answered: "In my assessment nothing has changed since 1986."²

One clarification, to avoid attacking the wrong thing. The heat problem is not frictional heating during the runaway itself. Baumgardner has a real answer there: heating from deformation is proportional to the rock's strength, and the runaway collapses the strength a billionfold, so the runaway does not cook the mantle.²² The problem is the total energy released plus the cooling of the new ocean floor — quantities no rheological cleverness can reduce, because they are set by gravity and by the temperature difference between magma and today's rock.

And one observation about how this is communicated. Snelling's Earth's Catastrophic Past — the two-volume standard reference that presents CPT to the young-earth world — reproduces Baumgardner's good answer about frictional heating and never mentions the cooling problem or the miracle at all. A full-text search of the CPT chapters finds no statement that heat removal requires divine intervention.¹⁶ The technical literature concedes what the popular literature omits. Readers deserve the concession.

The initial-conditions problem

Runaway subduction needs something to run away. Specifically, it needs a large mass of cold, dense rock already inside or atop the upper mantle, poised to sink. Where did it come from, 1,656 years after a creation pronounced "very good"?

Baumgardner's 1994 simulation answered the question inadvertently: "Some 2 × 10⁷ years is needed before the instability occurs ... Most of this time is involved with the accumulation of a large blob of cold, dense material at the barrier created by the phase transition at 660 km depth. This time span disappears when the initial condition consists of a large belt of cold material already trapped above this phase transition in the pre-Flood mantle."⁸ In other words: the configuration that triggers the Flood takes 20 million years of ordinary convection to build, so the model asserts it as given. Baumgardner's considered position is that God built it in: "the simplest possibility is that the initial state from which the runaway emerged was built into the Earth as God originally formed it. In fact, I believe this almost certainly had to have been the case."²⁰ Snelling's textbook version places the cold ring's creation on Day 3, sets it slowly sinking at the Fall, and has it reach "the knife edge of catastrophe" precisely when Noah boards the ark.¹⁶⁸⁷

State what this is, plainly. A structure whose only known natural formation route is millions of years of subduction is created in place, mature, with catastrophe pre-loaded. This is the "appearance of age" device — the same move as creating starlight in transit — deployed inside the one Flood model whose selling point was that it runs on real physics. It also has an unexplained timer: if the cold belt was gravitationally unstable, it should have sunk immediately; if stable, nothing in the physics changes in 1,656 years to destabilize it (conduction alters a 200-km-thick anomaly by about 200 m in that time). "It began slowly to sink after the Fall" is theology carrying a load the physics cannot.⁸⁸

The 2013 Sherburn results sharpen the point: a 300-km-wide cold blob runs away; a 100-km blob — the actual thickness scale of ocean lithosphere — gives today's tectonics.⁹ The model requires an initial condition of a kind the present earth does not exhibit and the created earth had no natural way to acquire. Fairness requires noting that subduction initiation is genuinely hard in mainstream geodynamics too — one published model needed 41 million years to start a subduction zone⁸⁹ — but the mainstream's difficulty is starting subduction over millions of years; CPT's is starting a planetary runaway on a schedule.

What other creationists say

CPT is not "the creationist position." It is one side of a live, twenty-year, sometimes sharp intra-creationist dispute — and several of the strongest critiques of CPT anywhere in print are by young-earth creationists.

The foundational exchange is a six-paper written debate between Baumgardner and Michael Oard in Journal of Creation in 2002.⁹⁰ Oard's objections: CPT is "sped-up plate tectonics" inheriting uniformitarian assumptions including the dating framework; the runaway "depends upon this initial condition" that cannot be verified; the resurfacing of the ocean floors with 1,200 °C lava is a heat problem he wanted Baumgardner to model (Oard named the dominant heat load sixteen years before Worraker computed it); and post-Flood cooling of that lava implies centuries of catastrophic subsidence and earthquakes that Noah's descendants somehow survived. Baumgardner's counterattack was equally blunt: Oard's vertical-tectonics alternative "is technical nonsense ... It is as if he just pulled words out of the air."²²

The dispute institutionalized. Froede and Akridge announced "a developing schism in Flood geology" in 2013, dividing the field into "remodellers" (who compress the mainstream column and accelerate its processes — CPT, RATE) and "reconstructors" (who build only from Scripture), and charging that acceleration of plate tectonics and of nuclear decay "individually and separately generate sufficient heat to melt the entire earth."⁹¹ Clarey replied for ICR that the critics invoke their own miracles when convenient, and that "the only 'schism' in Flood geology is one perceived by the scientists who fail to acknowledge all of the empirical data."⁸² Oard pressed a clean internal point in 2012: on CPT's own mechanism, when runaway ended the viscosity returned to normal, so plate motion should have stopped — "There should be no residual CPT motions today."⁹² McGuire computed that the subducted area CPT requires — about 669 million km² in 40–150 days — is "enough crust to go around the earth's core four times," and asked where it all went.⁴³

The Hawaiian chain illustrates how deep the split runs. Baumgardner accepts the hotspot mechanism outright and reads the chain's "systematic" ages as Flood-year plate motion at "about 1 km/hr"; Snelling builds a deceleration argument on the same track; and Oard, Walt Brown, Tas Walker and Real Science Radio reject the hotspot interpretation altogether — Oard suggests the linear age sequence was "singled out because they matched the idea," and concludes from Pacific seafloor features that "PT and CPT did not occur."⁹³ The same track is Flood evidence in one camp's hands and a uniformitarian artifact in another's.

Two ironies complete the picture. Creation Ministries International's own primer, Biblical Geology 101 (2022), declares CPT "the most modern, up-to-date Flood model, and the one with the most explanatory power" — in a book co-authored by Michael Oard, its most persistent published opponent, a fact the book never mentions.⁹⁴ And the third camp, Walt Brown's hydroplate theory, attacks CPT for relying on miracles while carrying a heat problem of its own that is roughly forty times worse — see the companion article on the hydroplate theory's heat problem. Brown himself conceded on video, "I agree he's got a terrible viscosity problem."

Where is the mainstream in all this? Largely absent. CPT has never been published in a peer-reviewed geophysics journal, so it has never received a peer-reviewed rebuttal. The most quantitative critiques in existence are creationist (Worraker's heat papers) and ex-creationist (Glenn Morton, a professional geophysicist, who pointed out that on CPT's own accepted paleomagnetic data the continents were not assembled into Pangea when the Flood began — the model starts halfway up the geologic column and leaves the entire Paleozoic unmodeled, which Baumgardner concedes⁹⁵²).

Objections and responses

"CPT is religion dressed up in equations." No. It is a real physical model, built with a respected code, making claims specific enough to fail — several of which have failed, and one of which (the steam jets) its author retracted with an arithmetic mea culpa. That is science being done, whatever one thinks of the motivation. The accurate criticism is narrower: at its load-bearing points — heat removal and initial conditions — the model substitutes divine action for mechanism, and its author says so.

"Mainstream scientists reject it only because it implies the Bible is true." Clarey's version is quoted at the top of this article: Baumgardner's math is correct, so rejection must be unbelief.³ The math being correct is precisely the problem — the correct math shows 49 ocean-boilings of heat with no natural sink, which is why the model's own author invokes a miracle. A model that requires suspending thermodynamics is not being rejected out of prejudice when physicists decline to accept it. The burden does not shift by pointing at the referee's worldview.

"Miracles are legitimate — the Flood was a miracle." This deserves a careful answer rather than a scoff. Scripture presents the Flood as divine judgment; a Christian is not embarrassed that God acted. But note three things. First, Genesis nowhere states the specific miracles CPT requires — silent removal of 10²⁹ J of heat, a pre-loaded mantle timed to Noah's boarding. These are auxiliary miracles invented to save a model, not read from the text. Second, a model that may insert unstated miracles wherever its physics fails can explain anything, and a model that can explain anything predicts nothing. Third — and this is the practical point for apologetics — CPT is routinely presented to lay audiences as scientific evidence that the Flood happened. A model whose central step is conceded to be supernatural cannot serve as independent scientific evidence. Using it that way, while the popular literature omits the concession, is not honest argument.

"The consensus was wrong about continental drift; it can be wrong about the timescale too." True, and worth more than a concession: plate tectonics itself was the ridiculed heresy for fifty years, and geology has since absorbed other catastrophes it once mocked — Bretz's Missoula floods, the Alvarez impact. But look at how those turned: measurements — magnetic stripes, drill cores, an iridium layer — forced each reversal. The lesson is symmetric. A CPT that wins will win by measurement, and the measurements reviewed above currently run the other way.

"Plate speeds have changed in the past — doesn't that fit a decelerating Flood?" This argument circulates informally, and it turns out to have a real published pedigree: Snelling argues from the Hawaiian chain that "as the Flood was waning, the plate motions decelerated from tens of feet (meters) per second to their current snail's pace," with the growing island sizes as the record of the slowdown;⁹⁶ Clarey presents Dalton's measured 35% slowdown in global seafloor spreading since 15 Ma as "exactly what we predicted … These two recent studies appear to document the very moment when the plates slowed."⁹⁷ This article set out deliberately to build the strongest version of this argument — documented rate changes are real, and "rates were always what they are now" is genuinely not something the record supports — and the attempt failed on four independent grounds.

Circularity: every rate change is a distance divided by a conventional age; Dalton's timescale is astronomically tuned, India's slowdown comes from magnetic-anomaly rotations.⁹⁸ CPT rejects that timescale — non-uniformly, by nine orders of magnitude across the Flood boundary — which destroys even the rate ratios the argument needs, since the apparent rate curve then reflects the assumed decay-rate history, not tectonics. The argument cannot be stated in CPT's own terms.

Magnitude: CPT needs deceleration by a factor of 10⁸–10⁹. The largest documented change is India's, from 15 to 4 cm/yr over fifteen million conventional years as the Himalayan collision loaded the plate.⁹⁹ In logarithms: 8.8 decades needed, 0.57 supplied.

Sign: the sign test above (three independent Pacific speed-ups) runs the wrong way, and the one right-signed datum — Dalton's 35% — falls at 15–6 Ma, inside the Flood on Baumgardner's own 5 Ma Flood/post-Flood mapping. Clarey quotes Dalton's ">20% over 5 Myr" accurately, but stops one sentence short: Dalton's next sentence attributes such changes to local plate-boundary forces — mountain belts loading plate edges — "since mantle convection responds slowly."⁹⁷

Datum quality: the Hawaiian-Emperor bend, the argument's centerpiece, may not record plate motion at all — whether it is a plate turn or drift of the hotspot itself (~47 mm/yr southward) is an open dispute in Nature Communications⁸⁵ — and a large creationist camp (Oard, Walt Brown, Tas Walker, Real Science Radio) rejects hotspot tracks entirely, which would make the argument unavailable.⁹³

Two further checks turn the argument's own evidence around. The chain's age-distance correlation is 0.992 — the signature of constant speed on a constant timescale; Snelling sees the requirement and asserts that plate speeds and decay rates changed "apparently in lockstep," which is the needed coincidence named, not explained.⁹⁶ And the island-size claim fails on the USGS data the claim's own subject matter rests on: lava volume per kilometer of chain varies tenfold while propagation rate varies 1.5-fold, is non-monotonic with a deep minimum mid-chain, and the largest shield volcano on earth (Puhahonu) sits in the middle of the chain — as ICR's own reporting notes — where Snelling's logic requires sizes to be smallest.⁸³ Verdict, documented here so no one repeats the attempt: invalid as CPT support; valid only as a caution against overstating rate constancy — and that caution licenses factors of a few over millions of years, not factors of a billion in one.

"Doesn't mainstream geology have unsolved problems of its own?" Yes. How subduction initiates is genuinely unsettled; plate rates demonstrably change over millions of years; the mainstream account of continent-scale sheet sandstones is a geometry more than a mechanism. Unsolved problems are normal science. The asymmetry is that mainstream geology's open problems are gaps in an otherwise quantitatively successful framework, while CPT's open problems are its energy budget and its starting state — the trunk, not the branches.

"If CPT fails, doesn't the Flood fail?" No — and this may be the article's most important point for a Christian reader. The historical claim of Genesis does not stand or fall with any modern model of its mechanism. Models are human constructions; Oard, no skeptic, has spent his career insisting that Flood geology is not ready to settle on one. Tying the credibility of Scripture to a specific geophysical simulation — one whose author says it needs miracles at its center — is bad strategy and worse epistemology. The proper ground for the Flood lies elsewhere; a mechanism model is a hypothesis to be tested, and this one, tested, is not holding.

"Then what is the young-earth alternative?" Honestly: there is no current Flood model that survives its own heat budget. CPT concedes a miracle; the hydroplate theory's budget is worse; Oard's vertical tectonics and impact models have, per Baumgardner's own calculation, enough impact energy "to melt the topmost kilometer of the earth's surface and completely vaporize the ocean."¹⁰⁰ Worraker — a creationist writing in a creationist journal — concludes that the ocean-floor heat "cannot be removed from the biosphere within a biblically-compatible timescale by known natural processes."⁸⁰ The honest young-earth position at present is Oard and Reed's: multiple working hypotheses, none adequate, work continuing.¹⁰¹ That is uncomfortable, and it is the truth.

Verdict

Catastrophic Plate Tectonics deserves respect as the most serious attempt ever made to give the Flood a mechanism. Its author is capable and, in the technical literature, unusually honest. Its central deduction — a global Flood plus young ocean floors requires rapid subduction — is valid. Its code is real science.

But the model does not currently work, and the decisive evidence for that conclusion comes from its own side. The runaway has never been produced from a realistic starting state; the starting state it needs must be specially created, mature, and timed. The energy it releases would boil the oceans dozens of times over, and its author has stated for nearly forty years that only divine intervention can dispose of it. Its flagship confirmed prediction was retracted by the scientist who made the observation. Its remaining evidences are either borrowed mainstream frameworks or numbers that do not survive checking against their own cited sources. And the sharpest test anyone has run — Worraker's attempt to reproduce the ocean-floor depth and heat-flow data on a short timescale — failed in a way that shows the heat-problem rescue would destroy the model's own best evidence.

Cite CPT, when it is cited at all, as what it is: an ambitious, unfinished, internally contested research program that presently requires miracles at its center. Do not cite it as evidence.

RATE and Helium in Zircons — the accelerated nuclear decay proposal CPT is paired with, and its own conceded heat problem.
Does the Hydroplate Theory Solve the Heat Problem? — the rival creationist model, whose heat budget is worse.

Sources

Full annotated bibliography with which-way-it-cuts notes: literature review. Research dossiers with verbatim quotes and independent recomputations are in the research/ folder beside this article.

1.
Baumgardner, John R. “3-D Finite Element Simulation of the Global Tectonic Changes Accompanying Noah's Flood.” Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Creationism II:35–44. 1990. A 1990 conference paper with a three-dimensional computer simulation of the sinking of the pre-Flood ocean floor. It assumes the mantle was less viscous than it is today, and it says the sinking raised the sea by as much as 1,500 m and turned seawater into steam that produced intense global rain. The article uses it for the energy budget, for the viscosity drop that the simulation needed, and for the rain claim. ↩
1. 1a.
  Page 3: “we obtain a value of 3.4 × 10²⁸ J for the amount of associated gravitational potential energy. If released near the earth's surface, this amount of energy is sufficient to melt a layer of silicate rock 12 km thick or to boil away a layer of water 25 km deep over the entire earth. It is equivalent to the kinetic energy of 170,000 asteroids, each 10 km in diameter and travelling at 15 km/s.” ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩
2. 1b.
  Page 6: “the higher velocities implied by thermal runaway of sinking lithospheric slabs are obtained in a crude manner by reducing the viscosity everywhere by nine orders of magnitude,”. The paper says that radiogenic heating and thermal conductivity were. “both increased by a factor of 10⁸.” ↩ ↩
3. 1c.
  Page 3: “easily enough to produce rain over the entire surface of the earth at a rate of a meter per hour continuously for the 40 days and nights.” ↩
2.
Baumgardner, John R. “101 Questions and Answers Concerning Catastrophic Plate Tectonics.” globalflood.org. Apr 2012. Baumgardner's answers, from April 2012, to questions that ten scientists put to the catastrophic plate tectonics model in a peer review organized by In Jesus' Name Productions, a Christian film ministry. The panelists asked written questions over several rounds, and this document keeps only the answers on the model, with the questions shortened. The article uses it for the author's own statements on heat, on the steam-jet retraction and on sea level.
1. 2a.
  Page 7. ↩
2. 2b.
  Section Q39, page 73: The sentence beginning 'Honesty drives me' is on page 95. ↩ ↩ ↩
3. 2c.
  Section Q33, page 66: This is the retraction. Section Q27, page 51: The corrected 2.0 × 10⁶ J/kg and ~2,000 m/s jet speed. Escape velocity needs 6.27 × 10⁷ J/kg. ↩ ↩
4. 2d.
  Section Q32, page 66. ↩
5. 2e.
  Section Q88, page 136: The slabs. “were effectively frozen in place as the mantle's viscosity rapidly rose to its non-runaway value,”. and still sink at. “a few millimeters per year.” ↩
6. 2f.
  Page 96: “While I once believed a rise in global sea level of several hundred meters or more was needed to account for the sedimentation and erosion patterns on the continents, I am no longer convinced this is so.” ↩
7. 2g.
  Section Q34: “my view is that the only significant difference is the time scale.” ↩
8. 2h.
  Section Q65: “Most creationists acknowledge a genuine sequence of fossil types, at least at some level, indeed does exist in the rock record. ... We creationists have long attributed this general pattern to what we refer to as 'ecological zonation.'” ↩
9. 2i.
  Section Q58: “from the vast number of holes drilled since 1977, the case to me is incontrovertible that the age of the ocean crust increases in a systematic way as one moves away from the spreading ridges. How can anyone now doubt that basic finding?” ↩
10. 2j.
  Page 94: “the quantity of heat that must be removed to cool 30-80 km thickness of lithosphere by 500 K would vaporize the oceans several times over.” ↩
11. 2k.
  Section Q31, page 64: Modeling the Paleozoic portion would require initial conditions knowable only by. “some very specific revelation from God”. The author has. “settled for the more modest enterprise of modeling only the Mesozoic/Cenozoic portion.” ↩
3.
Clarey, Timothy L., and Davis J. Werner. “A Progressive Global Flood Model Confirmed by Rock Data Across Five Continents.” Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Creationism 9:412–445. 2023. A 2023 conference paper by two Institute for Creation Research authors who compiled nearly 3000 stratigraphic columns (records of rock layers) from five continents, using oil wells, measured sections and seismic data. They sort the record into Sloss's megasequences and place the Flood's end at the top of the Pliocene, the N-Q boundary. The article quotes its statement that Baumgardner's math is correct, and uses its column data to show how the Flood is mapped onto the rock record.
1. 3a.
  Page 415. ↩ ↩
2. 3b.
  Page 414: “Nearly 3000 stratigraphic columns were compiled”. Across five continents, organized into Sloss's six megasequences. Their boundary also moves: the 1994 six-author paper put the Flood's end near the K/T boundary, while Clarey & Werner put it at the top of the Pliocene ("N-Q"), a disagreement spanning most of the Cenozoic. ↩ ↩
4.
Austin, Steven A. et al. “Catastrophic Plate Tectonics: A Global Flood Model of Earth History.” Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Creationism, 609–621. 1994. A six-author framework paper proposing that the crust's rigid plates spread apart rapidly during the Flood, by authors who all had some association with the Institute for Creation Research. The authors say the model is "still in its formative stages, and is thus incomplete." The article uses it as the paper that named the model and as a source for its account of the Flood year. ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩
1. 4a.
  Austin et al. 1994, writing of Humphreys' model and citing Coe & Prévot 1989 and related reports, say it. “also predicted and uniquely explains the rapid reversals found imprinted in lava flows of the Northwest,”. ↩
5.
Kelemen, Peter B., and Greg Hirth. “A periodic shear-heating mechanism for intermediate-depth earthquakes in the mantle.” Nature 446:787–790. Apr 12, 2007. The model's shear-zone width is 2 m inside a 1-km elastic zone, and its events recur every 200–250 years. “At and above ~1,400 °C ... melting would rapidly decrease viscosity, stress, and the amount of shear heating, so we impose an upper bound for temperature.” A Nature letter by two scientists at Columbia's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and at Woods Hole that models a fine-grained shear zone in olivine rock, using measured flow laws, and finds that shear heating makes the zone repeatedly weaken and release stress. The model is limited to a pre-existing shear zone, and it caps the temperature at about 1,400 °C because melting would sharply reduce the heating. The article uses it as the best modelled case of the thermal feedback that CPT invokes. ↩ ↩
6.
Weinstein, Stuart A. “Catastrophic overturn of the Earth's mantle driven by multiple phase changes and internal heat generation.” Geophysical Research Letters 20(2):101–104. Jan 22, 1993. “this occurs as a catastrophic burst of convection lasting ∼10 Myr, with elevated heat transfer rates lasting ∼100 Myr.” A short paper in Geophysical Research Letters by a researcher in the Department of Geological Sciences at the University of Michigan. It runs a two-dimensional computer model of the mantle with two phase changes and internal heat, and finds that slab material builds up in the transition region until it is released in a burst of convection. The article uses it because the "catastrophic" avalanches in the secular papers CPT cites last about ten million years. ↩ ↩
7.
Bürgmann, Roland, and Georg Dresen. “Rheology of the Lower Crust and Upper Mantle: Evidence from Rock Mechanics, Geodesy, and Field Observations.” Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences 36:531–567. 2008. “dry and melt-free rocks have viscosities greater than 10²⁰ Pa s at strain rates of approximately 10⁻¹² s⁻¹.” Transient viscosity 5 × 10¹⁷ Pa·s against steady-state 1 × 10¹⁹ after the 2004 Sumatra earthquake, a factor of 20. A review in the Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences by two geophysicists, one at Berkeley and one at the GeoForschungsZentrum Potsdam. It brings together rock-mechanics experiments, geodetic measurements and field studies of how the deep crust and upper mantle deform, and it finds that deformation depends strongly on stress, grain size and fluids. The article uses it for the laboratory viscosity of dry rock and for the largest transient weakening ever observed in the earth. ↩ ↩
8.
Baumgardner, John R. “Runaway Subduction as the Driving Mechanism for the Genesis Flood.” Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Creationism, 63–86. 1994. A 1994 conference paper with two-dimensional finite element calculations of a cold layer of rock at the top of the mantle that peels away and sinks, using rock-deformation behavior measured in the laboratory. It proposes that such a runaway was the mechanism of the Flood. The article uses it for the time the starting state takes to build, about 2 × 10⁷ years, and for the barrier at 660 km depth. ↩
1. 8a.
  Page 9: “Some 2 × 10⁷ years is needed before the instability occurs in the second calculation. Most of this time is involved with the accumulation of a large blob of cold, dense material at the barrier created by the phase transition at 660 km depth. This time span disappears when the initial condition consists of a large belt of cold material already trapped above this phase transition in the pre-Flood mantle.” ↩ ↩
9.
Sherburn, Jesse A. et al. “New Material Model Reveals Inherent Tendency in Mantle Minerals for Runaway Mantle Dynamics.” Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Creationism. 2013. A 2013 conference paper with a two-dimensional computer model of mantle flow, whose rock law was borrowed from metal engineering and fitted to lab measurements of upper-mantle rock (lherzolite). The runaway appears when dislocation glide, a kind of crystal slip, is switched on, and co-author Baumgardner has argued for catastrophic plate tectonics since 1986. The article uses it because a 300-km-wide blob runs away while a 100-km blob, the scale of ocean lithosphere, does not.
1. 9a.
  Case 1 (300-km blob) runs away at 1–2 m/s. Case 2 (100-km blob). “displayed no hint of runaway”. and its velocities were. “on the order of a few cm/yr which is similar to what is inferred for today's mantle.” ↩ ↩ ↩
10.
Coe, Robert S. et al. “Demise of the rapid-field-change hypothesis at Steens Mountain: The crucial role of continuous thermal demagnetization.” Earth and Planetary Science Letters 400:302–312. 2014. A 2014 laboratory study that re-sampled Steens Mountain lava flows and heated the samples continuously in a vibrating sample magnetometer. It finds that the critical flow carries the same direction as the flow below it, and that a normal-polarity overprint, not a fast change in the field, made the pattern look rapid. Coe, a coauthor of the 1989 study, is the first author, and the article uses it to show that the rapid-change case is no longer tenable.
1. 10a.
  Page 311: “The case for two episodes of extraordinarily rapid field change ... is now untenable”. Page 304: “was misinterpreted by creationists in their attempts to reconcile the geological and biblical time scales (e.g., Humphreys, 1990)”. ↩ ↩
11.
Grand, Stephen P. et al. “Global Seismic Tomography: A Snapshot of Convection in the Earth.” GSA Today 7(4):1–7. Apr 1997. A short review in the magazine of the Geological Society of America. Two global maps of the mantle's seismic velocity were built independently, one from P waves and one from S waves, using different methods and data. They show that the fast zones in the lower mantle are long linear features that the authors link to ancient subduction, and they suggest slabs may reach the core-mantle boundary. The article uses it because Baumgardner cites it for a density figure, but the paper reports seismic velocity and no density.
1. 11a.
  “Using an upper mantle subduction rate of 10 cm/yr implies an average lower mantle slab descent rate of 1–1.5 cm/yr.” Figure 2: Figure 2 maxima: P anomalies 0.35–0.5%, S anomalies 0.45% through the mid-lower mantle, and 1.75% in the D″ layer, where the authors flag likely "chemical heterogeneity". ↩ ↩
12.
Sloss, Laurence L. “Sequences in the cratonic interior of North America.” Geological Society of America Bulletin 74(2):93–114. 1963. A 1963 journal paper that names and defines the Sauk, Tippecanoe, Kaskaskia, Absaroka, Zuni and Tejas sequences within conventional geology. The article uses it because ICR's six packages of rock are these same sequences, relabeled. ↩ ↩
13.
DeMets, Charles et al. “Geologically current plate motions.” Geophysical Journal International 181:1–80. 2010. A long paper that builds MORVEL, a new set of present-day plate motions for 25 plates. Seafloor spreading rates and fault directions set the motions of the 19 plates bordered by mid-ocean ridges, and GPS sets those of six smaller plates; the authors deliberately kept the geologic and GPS data apart so that the two could be compared. The article uses it for the blind test of the Pacific–North America boundary and for the paper's note on India–Eurasia and Arabia–Eurasia speeds.
1. 13a.
  Pages 70–72: “no data from the Pacific–North America plate boundary are used to determine the MORVEL angular velocities ... can therefore be compared with independent estimates without any circularity.” The geologic estimate is 50.2 ± 1.1 mm/yr and the GPS estimate is 49.4 ± 0.3 mm/yr. The root-mean-square dispersion across eight blind pairs is 4.1 mm/yr. ↩ ↩
2. 13b.
  Page 73: India–Eurasia 7.9 mm/yr and Arabia–Eurasia 7.6 mm/yr faster in the 3.16-Myr average than in GPS, attributed to collision-driven deceleration (citing Iaffaldano et al. 2006). ↩
14.
Stein, Carol A., and Seth Stein. “A model for the global variation in oceanic depth and heat flow with lithospheric age.” Nature 359:123–129. Sep 10, 1992. Page 127: Depth is d(t) = 2,600 + 365 √t for t under 20 Myr, and 5,651 − 2,473 exp(−0.0278t) after that; heat flow is q(t) = 510/√t for t under 55 Myr. A short Nature paper by two geologists, one at Chicago and one at Northwestern, that refits seafloor depth and heat flow against age together. It finds a hotter, thinner lithosphere than earlier models, and it fits old seafloor better than the Parsons and Sclater model, which predicts deeper depths and lower heat flow than observed for old lithosphere. The article uses it for its depth and heat-flow formulas, which it sets against CPT's claim that all seafloor is the same young age. ↩ ↩
15.
Worraker, William J., and Richard Ward. “Modeling of Flood and Post-Flood Ocean Floor Cooling.” Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Creationism, 673–682. 2018. A 2018 conference paper by two Biblical Creation Trust authors who model how the ocean floor cooled within a biblical timescale of no more than 4500 years, using a spreadsheet of heat flow through rock. A tailored heat sink reproduces the general shape of the observed heat flux and depth profiles, but predicts heat flux near the ridges far too high and ridge profiles too sharp. The article uses it, with the 2023 restatement, for the claim that no heat sink fast enough to solve CPT's heat problem reproduces those depth and heat-flow patterns, a claim the paper's own abstract qualifies.
1. 15a.
  The same finding is restated in Worraker's 2023 article in Answers Research Journal 16 (2023), which says. “no such heat sink formulation was found which could duplicate the observed patterns of bathymetry and heat flux”. and that the uniformitarian fit is. “genuine, and in this case is not due merely to circular reasoning.” ↩ ↩
16.
Snelling, Andrew A. Earth's Catastrophic Past: Geology, Creation & the Flood. Institute for Creation Research. 2009. A two-volume book by Andrew A. Snelling that defends the Genesis record of creation and the Flood. The article uses volume 2, whose chapters on catastrophic plate tectonics (CPT) present the model.
1. 16a.
  Pages 694–695: In volume 2 the passage reads: “the earth could be viewed as being on the knife edge of catastrophe. Very little would have been required to lose it on a trajectory leading to the Flood cataclysm. Perhaps that release occurred at the time of the Fall.” ↩ ↩
2. 16b.
  Chapter 86–87: The two CPT chapters in volume 2 do not discuss the cooling problem. Their only heat problem is pluton cooling (the cooling of a body of magma that has solidified underground), which they answer with hydrothermal convection (water circulating through hot rock). The article uses this to show that the book leaves out the heat-removal miracle that CPT's own architect calls a logical necessity. ↩ ↩
17.
Nowacki, Andy et al. “terratools: A Python package to analyse TERRA mantle convection simulations.” Journal of Open Source Software 10(116). Dec 15, 2025. “TERRA is a widely-used and powerful simulation package which underlies a large amount of research into the Earth's mantle,”. A short software paper by seven scientists at Leeds, Cardiff, Bristol and Oxford that presents terratools, a free Python package for analysing the output of the TERRA mantle-convection code. The paper states that TERRA is widely used and powerful, and it cites Baumgardner's 1985 paper for the program. The article uses it for the point that mainstream groups still run TERRA, so the code is respected even though its results depend on the numbers put into it. ↩
18.
Burr, Chandler. “The Geophysics of God.” U.S. News & World Report, 55–58. Jun 16, 1997. A 1997 magazine feature on Baumgardner and his catastrophic plate tectonics model. It records both the technical respect that named geophysicists gave his computer code and their verdict on his conclusions. The article uses it as the source of its quotations from geophysicists about Baumgardner.
1. 18a.
  This is the source of the Hager and Schubert quotations in the article. “among geologists, there is universal agreement that Baumgardner's views are simply wrong”. “dependent on the numbers fed into it”. ↩ ↩
19.
Ager, Derek V. The Nature of the Stratigraphical Record. Macmillan. 1973. Pages 4–6: The German Triassic formations are traceable "from one end of Europe to the other" and into North America, the chief stratigraphic exhibit of Baumgardner 2003. “from one end of Europe to the other”. A 1973 book on the stratigraphical record, the sequence of rock layers. The article uses it for the rock formations with near-identical properties that stretch from England to Bulgaria to Texas, which mainstream geology explains at the level of framework more than mechanism. ↩
20.
Baumgardner, John R. “Catastrophic Plate Tectonics: The Physics Behind the Genesis Flood.” Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Creationism, 113–126. 2003. A 2003 conference paper that reports two- and three-dimensional computer simulations of the catastrophic runaway. It says a new numerical solver let the runaway be carried to completion for the first time. The article uses it for the timing of the runaway and for the view that the runaway's starting state was built in. ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩
1. 20a.
  Page 117: “One reason most researchers in the mainstream geophysics community have not yet obtained such dramatic runaway solutions is that a deformation law that accommodates realistic levels of weakening has yet to be included in their models.” ↩
2. 20b.
  Page 122: “The density difference is estimated to be on the order of 3-4% [14, 26]. This translates, assuming these regions have a similar chemical composition, to a temperature difference on the order of 3000-4000 K!” The references [14] and [26] are Grand et al. 1997 and Su et al. 1994, both velocity models. ↩
3. 20c.
  Page 124: “In my opinion the simplest possibility is that the initial state from which the runaway emerged was built into the Earth as God originally formed it. In fact, I believe this almost certainly had to have been the case.” ↩
21.
Baumgardner, John R. “Computer Modeling of the Large-Scale Tectonics Associated with the Genesis Flood.” Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Creationism, 49–62. 1994. A 1994 conference paper with a three-dimensional computer model of the earth's mantle and lithosphere, the cold outer rock layer. It aims to show that runaway sinking of the pre-Flood ocean floor could drive plate motion within the Bible's timescale. The article uses its peak plate speeds and its statement that finding the model's conditions took trial and error.
1. 21a.
  The figures show peak velocities of 0.37–2.54 m/s. ↩
2. 21b.
  The Newtonian-analog approach is. “far from satisfying ... merely suggestive of what the more accurate treatment would provide”. The paper also says. “A moderate amount of trial and error was involved in finding the special set of conditions that leads to the results shown in Fig. 4 and 5.” ↩
22.
Baumgardner, John R. “Catastrophic plate tectonics: the geophysical context of the Genesis Flood.” Journal of Creation 16(1):58–63. 2002. A 2002 article in Journal of Creation on the geophysical context of the Genesis Flood. The article uses it for the viscosity drop that the catastrophic model requires.
1. 22a.
  “the effective viscosity throughout the mantle is reduced by some eight to ten orders of magnitude.” ↩
2. 22b.
  From Baumgardner's 2002 writing in Journal of Creation 16(1); the arithmetic is σT⁴/L = 1,098 W m⁻² ÷ 2.26 × 10⁶ J/kg = 1.75 mm/hr. “Simple radiation at 373 K of the latent heat of water vapor condensation to space limits the rainfall rate to about 1.75 mm/hr, or 4.4 cm/day.” ↩
3. 22c.
  From Baumgardner's "Dealing carefully with the data" in Journal of Creation 16(1):68–72. “the heat generated in deforming a solid material is directly proportional to its strength. In the runaway process, the strength drops by as much as 8–10 orders of magnitude, and therefore the deformational heating remains modest.” ↩
4. 22d.
  From Baumgardner's "A constructive quest for truth" in Journal of Creation 16(1):78–81. “Although he uses technical terminology, what he is presenting is technical nonsense! ... It is as if he just pulled words out of the air.” ↩
23.
Snider-Pellegrini, Antonio. La Création et ses mystères dévoilés. 1859. A book published in Paris in 1859. It fits the continents together on a map and proposes that they split apart rapidly during the Flood, 53 years before Wegener. The article uses it to show that the idea of continents splitting during the Flood is older than mainstream plate tectonics. ↩
24.
Vine, Fred J., and Drummond H. Matthews. “Magnetic Anomalies Over Oceanic Ridges.” Nature 199(4897):947–949. Sep 7, 1963. A short letter in Nature by two Cambridge geophysicists. It analysed a magnetic survey of the Carlsberg Ridge in the Indian Ocean and found that one volcano-like feature has a reversed magnetic signature, which suggests its rock was magnetized in the opposite direction to today's field. The article uses it as the source of the Vine-Matthews prediction that spreading crust would record the field's reversals as symmetric magnetic stripes; the classic symmetric-stripe map is in Vine 1966, Science 154:1405, not in this letter. ↩
25.
Baumgardner, John R. “Numerical Simulation of the Large-Scale Tectonic Changes Accompanying the Flood.” Proceedings of the First International Conference on Creationism II:17–28. 1986. A 1986 conference paper that proposes a mechanism for the Flood and reports a numerical simulation of it. It proposes that the cold ocean floor sank into the mantle, breaking up a single pre-Flood supercontinent and raising the sea by some 2,000 m. The article uses it as the first step in the model's mechanism and energy budget. ↩
1. 25a.
  Page 5: “the temperature at a depth of 50 km reaches a temperature representing half the original temperature difference between the mantle and ocean at a time of 87 million years.” Inverting the formula t = 1.10x²/κ for t = 4,500 years gives x = 359 m. ↩
2. 25b.
  Page 9: “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.” ↩
26.
Kirby, Stephen H. “Rheology of the lithosphere.” Reviews of Geophysics and Space Physics 21(6):1458–1487. 1983. A review article on the strength of the lithosphere, the rigid outer layer of the Earth. The article uses it for the olivine deformation map of three regimes, diffusion creep, power-law creep and plastic yield, which is the basis of Baumgardner 2003's Figure 1. Baumgardner's 2003 reference conflates this paper with Kirby and Kronenberg 1987, Rev. Geophys. 25:1219–1244. ↩
27.
Gruntfest, Irving J. “Thermal Feedback in Liquid Flow; Plane Shear at Constant Stress.” Transactions of the Society of Rheology 7:195–207. 1963. A 1963 paper on heat feedback in sheared liquids. The article uses it because the criterion for runaway heating in sheared rock goes back to it. Baumgardner's reference lists give volume 8, but the paper is in volume 7. ↩
28.
Anderson, Orson L., and P.C. Perkins. “Runaway Temperatures in the Asthenosphere Resulting from Viscous Heating.” Journal of Geophysical Research 79:2136–2138. 1974. A short paper that proposes runaway temperatures in the asthenosphere, the weak layer under the plates, caused by viscous heating. The authors proposed it for episodic Cenozoic volcanism over tens of millions of years. The article cites it among the mainstream studies of thermal runaway. ↩
29.
Machetel, Philippe, and Patrick Weber. “Intermittent layered convection in a model mantle with an endothermic phase change at 670 km.” Nature 350:55–57. 1991. A Nature paper on a model mantle with an endothermic phase change at 670 km depth, which produces intermittent layered convection. The article cites it with Tackley 1993 for the mainstream idea that the 660-km phase boundary can dam cold sinking material until it avalanches into the lower mantle. ↩
30.
Tackley, Paul J. et al. “Effects of an endothermic phase transition at 670 km depth in a spherical model of convection in the Earth's mantle.” Nature 361:699–704. Feb 25, 1993. A Nature paper by four scientists at Caltech, Los Alamos and UCLA that runs a three-dimensional computer model of the mantle with a phase change at 670 km depth. The model shows cold material piling up above 670 km and avalanching into the lower mantle, which the authors say may help reconcile the model with seismic tomography. The article uses it as an example of the mainstream literature on episodic mantle catastrophes. ↩
31.
Solheim, Larry P., and W. Richard Peltier. “Phase boundary deflections at 660-km depth and episodically layered isochemical convection in the mantle.” Journal of Geophysical Research 99(B8):15861–15875. 1994. “recur at intervals separated by hundreds of millions of years.” A paper on deflections of the phase boundary at 660 km depth and on episodically layered convection in the mantle. The article cites it as one of the secular "catastrophe" papers that CPT draws on, and quotes it for the timing of the avalanches. ↩
32.
Moresi, Louis, and Viatcheslav Solomatov. “Mantle convection with a brittle lithosphere: thoughts on the global tectonic styles of the Earth and Venus.” Geophysical Journal International 133(3):669–682. 1998. A research paper in Geophysical Journal International by two geophysicists, one at the Australian National University and one at New Mexico State University, that models mantle convection with a brittle lithosphere. At low yield stress the lithosphere breaks and moves with the mantle like plates, and at intermediate yield stress the thick lithosphere cycles between stagnant and mobile states. The article uses it as the closest mainstream analogue to CPT's overturn; Baumgardner calls the regime the "episodic overturn regime" and concedes that the "sinking velocities they report are modest." ↩
33.
Strom, Robert G. et al. “The global resurfacing of Venus.” Journal of Geophysical Research 99(E5):10899–10926. 1994. “a global resurfacing event about 300 m.y. ago ... This global resurfacing event ended abruptly (<10 m.y.).” A paper in the Journal of Geophysical Research on the global resurfacing of Venus. The article uses it for the Venus resurfacing event that Baumgardner offers as a planetary precedent. ↩
34.
Richards, Mark A. et al. “Role of a low-viscosity zone in stabilizing plate tectonics: Implications for comparative terrestrial planetology.” Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems 2:2000GC000115. Aug 23, 2001. “Venus is dry and lacks both an LVZ and plate tectonics.” A paper in Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems by four authors, one of them John Baumgardner, whose catastrophic plate tectonics model the article examines. It runs two-dimensional and three-dimensional computer models of convection with a low-viscosity zone and a yield stress that lets the cold outer layer fail locally, and it finds a plate-tectonic style of convection with about 30% toroidal surface motion in the 3-D case. The article uses it because Baumgardner offers Venus as a precedent for CPT, and this co-authored paper says Venus is dry and lacks plate tectonics. ↩
35.
Humphreys, D. Russell. “Reversals of the Earth's Magnetic Field During the Genesis Flood.” Proceedings of the First International Conference on Creationism, 113–123. 1986. A 1986 conference paper arguing that the Flood laid down about 50 magnetic reversals, so the model must average about one reversal per week, and that the field's decay fits free decay in a conducting core. The article uses it for Humphreys's 1986 prediction that thin lava flows would record fast field change, which creationists later cited as fulfilled. ↩
36.
Coe, Robert S., and Michel Prévot. “Evidence suggesting extremely rapid field variation during a geomagnetic reversal.” Earth and Planetary Science Letters 92(3–4):292–298. 1989. A 1989 paper on very rapid change of the geomagnetic field during a reversal. A second paper by Coe, Prévot and Camps, in Nature 374:687–692 (1995), is titled "New evidence for extraordinarily rapid change of the geomagnetic field during a reversal." The article uses the two papers for its claim that the Steens Mountain flows recorded directional change of 3–6° per day. ↩
37.
Jarboe, Nicholas A. et al. “Evidence from lava flows for complex polarity transitions: the new composite Steens Mountain reversal record.” Geophysical Journal International 186(2):580–602. 2011. A 2011 paper that builds a new composite record of the Steens Mountain reversal from lava flows, arguing that the polarity transition was complex. The article uses it for the resampling that filled the gaps in the Steens record and showed the transition path to be five times longer than thought. ↩
38.
Snelling, Andrew A. “More Evidence of Rapid Geomagnetic Reversals Confirms a Young Earth.” Answers in Genesis. Jan 8, 2015. A web article from Answers in Genesis, dated 2015, arguing that rapid reversals of Earth's magnetic field confirm a young Earth. The article uses it as the popular creationist version of the Steens Mountain evidence, which the article says leaves out the rest of the story. ↩
39.
Bogue, Scott W., and Jonathan M.G. Glen. “Very rapid geomagnetic field change recorded by the partial remagnetization of a lava flow.” Geophysical Research Letters 37:L21308. 2010. Coe et al. 2014 say its rock magnetics and method are entirely different from Steens and call the general question of fast field change. “very much alive and debated.” A 2010 paper on a lava flow that was partly remagnetized, which records a field change of about 1° per week. The article uses it as the one modest mainstream finding of fast field change, one that it puts twenty to forty times slower than the Steens claim and not a full reversal. ↩
40.
Sagnotti, Leonardo et al. “Extremely rapid directional change during Matuyama–Brunhes geomagnetic polarity reversal.” Geophysical Journal International 199(2):1110–1124. 2014. Michael E. Evans and Adrian R. Muxworthy rebutted it in Geophysical Journal International 213(3):1744–1750 (2018), in a paper titled. “A re-appraisal of the proposed rapid Matuyama–Brunhes geomagnetic reversal in the Sulmona Basin, Italy.” The paper writes that the section. “does not carry a reliable high-resolution record of the geomagnetic field.” Contested and unresolved. A 2014 paper claiming extremely rapid directional change during the Matuyama–Brunhes reversal, as recorded in a section in the Sulmona Basin, Italy. The article uses it as the contested mainstream claim of fast change, one whose rebuttal found the section unreliable. ↩
41.
Valet, Jean-Pierre et al. “Dynamical similarity of geomagnetic field reversals.” Nature 490:89–93. 2012. “The actual transit between the two polarities does not last longer than 1,000 years.” A 2012 paper in Nature on the similarity of geomagnetic field reversals. The article uses it for the measured length of the transit between the two polarities, which it puts at about a thousand years. ↩
42.
Singer, Brad S. et al. “Synchronizing volcanic, sedimentary, and ice core records of Earth's last magnetic polarity reversal.” Science Advances 5(8):eaaw4621. 2019. “The 22 ka evolution of this reversal.” A 2019 paper that lines up volcanic, sedimentary and ice-core records of the last magnetic polarity reversal. The article uses it for the roughly 22,000-year length of the whole reversal process, which it sets against the transit of about a thousand years. ↩
43.
McGuire, Mark. “Catastrophic Plate Tectonics and Plate Tectonics—a comparison of two theories.” Journal of Creation 29(3):104–112. 2015. A 2015 Journal of Creation paper that compares CPT with the mainstream plate tectonics model and lists unsolved problems in both, such as how many plates there are. The article uses it for McGuire's objections to CPT's subduction volume and to the timing of the reversal stripes.
1. 43a.
  Page 106: “Approximately 669,000,000 km² must be subducted in 40–150 days. That is enough crust to go around the earth's core four times! ... What happened to the other 500,000,000 km² of slab?” ↩
2. 43b.
  McGuire says the stripe record. “is there at the very start of sea floor spreading, which would correspond with Day 1 of the Flood,”. and so. “this may be an argument that the reversals were not caused by subducting slabs.” ↩
44.
Trampert, Jeannot et al. “Probabilistic tomography maps chemical heterogeneities throughout the lower mantle.” Science 306:853–856. 2004. “chemical variations contribute to the overall buoyancy and are dominant in the lower 1000 kilometers of the mantle.” A research paper in Science that used probabilistic seismic tomography to map chemical differences throughout the lower mantle. The article cites it for the point that the dense regions found in the deep mantle are compositional, not simply cold. ↩
45.
Chopin, Christian. “Coesite and pure pyrope in high-grade blueschists of the Western Alps: a first record and some consequences.” Contributions to Mineralogy and Petrology 86(2):107–118. 1984. The abstract says the pressures were checked by three independent mineral equilibria, and. “The formidable pressures of formation implied (≧28 kbar)”. The abstract adds that. “continental crust may also be subducted to depths of 90 km or more. The return back to the surface is problematic.” The depth arithmetic, from Bose and Ganguly's (1995) calibrated transition (P(kbar) = 21.945 + 0.006901 T(K)), gives 28.7 kbar at 700 °C, about 94 km on a layered lithostatic column. A research paper by Christian Chopin that reports the first find of coesite, a dense form of quartz that forms only at very high pressure, in blueschist rocks of the Western Alps. The rocks come from the Dora-Maira massif, where the author resampled and reinvestigated a pyrope-quartzite first described in 1966. The article uses it as the discovery at Dora-Maira, which it accepts as real. ↩
46.
Mosenfelder, and Bohlen. “[title not given in the old footnote].” EPSL 153:133–147. 1997. The abstract says: “coesite should not be preserved on geologic time scales if it reaches the quartz stability field at temperatures above 375–400°C. The survival of coesite has previously been linked to its inclusion in strong phases, such as garnet, that can sustain a high internal pressure during decompression.” Perrillat et al. (Journal of Petrology 44(4):773–788, 2003) write that above 400 °C preservation "is mainly controlled by the 'pressure vessel' effect of the host phase," and, citing Parkinson and Katayama (1999), give "present-day ultrahigh-pressure conditions (19–23 kbar) in coesite inclusions in zircon." Warren (Solid Earth 4:75–92, 2013, on exhumation of UHP terranes, p. 83) says the free quartz-coesite transition "takes place instantaneously, at least on geological timescales." Chopin (2003, on UHP metamorphism and tracing continental crust, EPSL 212:1–14) writes that "Decompression occurred in most instances under continuous cooling." A paper by Mosenfelder and Bohlen on the kinetics of the coesite-quartz transformation, that is, how long coesite, a dense form of quartz, survives once it rises out of the pressure field where it formed. The article uses it to show that preservation depends on armor, not speed: free coesite does not survive, but grains sealed inside garnet and zircon do. ↩
47.
Rubatto, Daniela, and Jörg Hermann. “Exhumation as fast as subduction?” Geology 29(1):3–6. 2001. A radiometric dating study by two mainstream geologists of one rock from the Dora-Maira massif in the Western Alps. They date titanite, a mineral that grows as rock is buried and as it rises, and find the rock reached about 3.5 GPa of pressure before rising in two stages. Their mean rates for the rise are 3.4 and 1.6 cm per year, which they say are at plate-tectonic speeds, similar to subduction. The article uses it as the first of its dated examples of deep rock returning at plate speeds. ↩
48.
Kylander-Clark et al. “Size and exhumation rate of ultrahigh-pressure terranes linked to orogenic stage.” EPSL 321–322:115–120. 2012. Table 1: The total burial-to-mid-crust durations run from about 4 Myr (Dora Maira, Papua New Guinea) to about 58 Myr (Qaidam). The authors write: “large terranes that evolved slowly (over 10–30 Myr), and small terranes that formed and were exhumed on timescales of < 10 Myr.” Rates span about 0.7 cm/yr (Western Gneiss Region; Kylander-Clark et al. 2008) to 3–8 cm/yr (Dora Maira, Kaghan; Warren 2013; Kokchetav, where Hacker 2003 is the reference). A research paper by three geologists comparing the size and exhumation rate of ultrahigh-pressure terranes, which are slices of crust that were pushed deep and came back up. The article uses it for the spread of durations across eleven terranes, which shows that deep rocks took millions of years to return to the surface. ↩
49.
Hsü, Kenneth J. “Exhumation of high-pressure metamorphic rocks.” Geology 19(2):107–110. 1991. The abstract says: “Accepting the conclusion that coesite-bearing eclogites and other high-pressure minerals were formed when a sliver of continental crust was subducted down to 100 km, I propose that their uplift was caused by a shift of the Benioff zone.” The full menu of mainstream mechanisms is in Hacker and Gerya (2013, Tectonophysics 603:79–88), which lists six burial processes and six exhumation processes, and they write that. “all have been invoked to explain the exhumation of at least one UHP terrane.” A short paper in Geology by Kenneth Hsü of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, proposing how coesite-bearing rocks came back up. Austin et al. (1994) cite it as reference 53. The article uses it as a conventional plate-tectonic exhumation mechanism for these very rocks, answering Austin's own citation. ↩
50.
Computed in research/uhp-minerals.md §6: the Dora-Maira UHP unit (~50 km² × 1 km, ~1.4 × 10¹⁴ kg) raised through 100 km costs ~1.4 × 10²⁰ J; over the measured 3.3 Myr that is ~1.3 MW average power. The gravitational energy of subducting the world's ocean lithosphere is the same ~10²⁸ J on any timescale — Austin et al. 1994 state the figure themselves — and releasing it in a year instead of ~200 Myr is a power increase of ~2 × 10⁸, which is CPT's conceded heat problem. No creationist has published a thermal model of a meters-per-second subduction channel that keeps a crustal sliver below the ~400 °C coesite-survival threshold. ↩
51.
Moulas et al. [title not given in the old footnote]. 2013. Three papers that the article calls the overpressure school. Moulas et al. (Petrology 21(6):527–538, 2013) say "pressures up to two times the lithostatic value were estimated under special mechanical conditions." Gerya (Journal of Metamorphic Geology 33(8):785–800, 2015) says magnitudes "may potentially reach up to ±100% of the lithostatic pressure," with "some controversy … concerning overpressure magnitudes for the ultrahigh-pressure (UHP) rocks." The best field case is 0.8 ± 0.3 GPa (Luisier et al., Nature Communications 10:4734, 2019). Oard's creationist use of this literature, "possibly at depths shallower than 50 km" (J. Creation 29(2), 2015), is the two-times number restated, and no creationist calculation of overpressure at CPT strain rates exists. The article uses it because, at the maximal two-times multiplier, Dora-Maira's 2.87 GPa still requires about 47 km, which is below the Moho. ↩
52.
Oard. “Ophiolite Conundrums.” CRSQ 54:121–124. 2017. “Meteorite impacts can also account for UHPm”. Oard's CRSQ paper contains no occurrences of "coesite," "eclogite" or "blueschist," and the 2009 book Earth's Catastrophic Past contains no occurrence of "coesite." No paper in nine ICC volumes deals with UHP metamorphism. A creationist journal article by Oard, arguing that meteorite impacts can account for ultrahigh-pressure minerals, and that overpressure can form them at less than 50 km, which avoids deep subduction. Austin et al. (1994) and Baumgardner need deep, fast burial. Snelling, "Towards a Creationist Explanation of Regional Metamorphism," CEN Tech. J. 8(1):51–77 (1994), says "composition is the primary factor in metamorphism" and gives a maximum engaged pressure of 5 kbar. The paper with overpressure at less than 50 km is Oard, J. Creation 29(2):86–91 (2015). The article uses it to show that the three most prominent creationist geologists hold incompatible positions on these rocks. ↩
53.
Cisneros, Miguel et al. “Quartz-in-garnet barometry constraints on formation pressures of eclogites from the Franciscan Complex, California.” Contributions to Mineralogy and Petrology 177. 2022. The paper says: “coesite has not been found in rocks from the Franciscan Complex.” Its measured peaks are 1.2–1.8 GPa. Baumgardner's concession in 101 Questions Q40 is that unmetamorphosed sediments and articulated ichthyosaur and plesiosaur fossils lie in the same mélange as high-grade blocks. Wakabayashi (2015, International Geology Review 57(5–8):669–746) describes the 140-million-year framework and the sedimentary mixing mechanism, writing of "over 150 million years of continuous E-dipping subduction" and of exotic-block mélanges that "have sedimentary origins as submarine mass transport deposits." A research paper by four geologists from ETH Zurich, the University of Southern California and the Polish Academy of Sciences, which measures the pressures at which garnet trapped quartz inside eclogites from the Franciscan Complex of California. The method reads pressure from the stress that the host garnet keeps on the quartz inside it. It is article number 12 in its volume. The article uses it because the Franciscan contains no coesite at all, and its eclogites peak at 1.2–1.8 GPa, which the article converts to 45–70 km of depth. ↩
54.
Camp, Charles L. “Ichthyosaur rostra from central California.” Journal of Paleontology 16(3):362–371. May 1942. Welles's paper is titled. “Jurassic plesiosaur vertebrae from California”. Bailey, Irwin and Jones (Franciscan and Related Rocks, CDMG Bulletin 183, 1964, p. 115) say that megafossils generally. “they have been found in only about a dozen localities.” Page 362: Camp writes: “The two rostra of ichthyosaurs herewith described are enclosed in chert cobbles redeposited from the Franciscan into Quaternary gravels”. Page 369: He writes that they. “are the only vertebrate remains yet recovered from that complex series of rocks. The Franciscan is notoriously barren.” A paleontology paper by Charles L. Camp of the University of California, Berkeley, describing two ichthyosaur (ancient marine reptile) snouts from central California. Both were in chert cobbles washed out of the Franciscan rocks into Quaternary gravels. Welles (Journal of Paleontology 27(5):743–744, 1953) reports two plesiosaur vertebrae in a "Limestone concretion found as float." The Paleobiology Database confirms these are the only Franciscan marine-reptile records, all flagged as surface float. Fox (USGS Professional Paper 1198, 1983, on melanges and subduction, p. 18) reports blueschist pebbles in Franciscan conglomerates, and Hitz and Wakabayashi (Tectonophysics 568–569:124–134, 2012, abstract on unmetamorphosed melange) report high-pressure blocks in unmetamorphosed Great Valley beds. The article uses it, with Welles (1953), to show that the Franciscan's entire vertebrate record is three specimens, all found as loose float. ↩
55.
Snelling, Andrew A. “When Continents Collide.” Answers magazine. 2017. His definition says a seismite records shaking of soft layers. “before any new deposits are laid on top”. His comparison figure is a 23-cm seismite from. “one of the largest recorded earthquakes in modern times, centered near Alaska”. It is given without any citation. A popular magazine article from January–February 2017, updated 18 August 2018, by Andrew Snelling, the director of research at Answers in Genesis. It argues that thick deformed sandstone beds in Wyoming's Lance Formation are seismites, layers shaken by earthquakes while still soft, and that not even an asteroid impact could explain them. His own definition concedes the discreteness requirement, that the shaking is recorded before the next layer is laid down. The article uses it as the source of Snelling's conclusion that continents broke apart and collided during the Flood, generating huge earthquakes. ↩
56.
Ryan, Christian. “A Biblical Perspective on Plate Tectonics.” New Creation Blog. Sep 10, 2025. Paul Garner, in "A Puzzle of Mud & Bones" (Answers magazine, 1 March 2020), wrote: “the earthquakes must have been hundreds to thousands of times more powerful than any modern earthquakes.” Ryan's calibration reads: “a 5.5 magnitude earthquake might leave behind a seismite about one-inch in thickness”. A blog post by a creationist writer, and the only source connecting the Lance seismites to catastrophic plate tectonics specifically. It repeats a magazine claim about earthquake size and adds a calibration that is spurious. Ryan's cited source for the calibration is Austin's 2012 Dead Sea abstract, which says something quite different. The article uses it as a popular retelling that escalates Snelling's claim. ↩
57.
Austin, Steven A. “Jerusalem Earthquake of 33 A.D.: Evidence within Laminated Mud of the Dead Sea, Israel.” GSA Abstracts with Programs 44(7):559. 2012. The 31 BC earthquake, M~7.2, left a breccia seismite. “in places greater than 1 m thick”. The abstract says the AD 33 seismite is. “8-cm-thick”. and that it. “indicates the biggest 33 A.D. earthquake was M~6.0.” Extrapolating those two points, as the article does, puts a 9-m bed near M8. A short conference abstract for a poster at the 2012 Geological Society of America meeting in Charlotte, North Carolina, by Steven Austin, a creationist geologist at Cedarville University. It dates two seismites in Dead Sea mud, one from the 31 BC Jericho-fault earthquake and one from AD 33, and ties each to a magnitude. The article uses it as the creationist community's only seismite-to-magnitude calibration. ↩
58.
Hilbert-Wolf, Hannah L., and Eric M. Roberts. “Giant Seismites and Megablock Uplift in the East African Rift.” PLoS ONE 10(6):e0129051. Jun 4, 2015. The fifth of the recognition criteria for a seismite is. “deformed zones surrounded by undeformed strata”. The authors also say. “relating seismites to earthquake magnitude is equivocal”. and that their giant features yield. “a minimum earthquake of M ~6+”. which is. “similar to the M7.4 earthquake at the same location in 1910.” A research article on soft-sediment deformation, meaning layers of wet sand and mud bent and broken by shaking, in the Lake Beds of the Rukwa Rift basin in Tanzania. The authors describe megablocks, blocks of intact strata some more than 20 m across that sit on liquefied sediment, and read them as signs of large earthquakes. They recall the 1910 Lake Rukwa earthquake, the most powerful in Africa in the twentieth century, at Ms 7.4. The article uses it as the mainstream's showcase of giant seismites, which its own authors read as magnitude 6 or more. ↩ ↩
59.
U.S. Geological Survey. Can 'MegaQuakes' really happen? 2026. “No, earthquakes of magnitude 10 or larger cannot happen … No fault long enough to generate a magnitude 10 earthquake is known to exist, and if it did, it would extend around most of the planet.” The USGS public FAQ on whether megaquakes are possible, a plain-language answer for the public rather than a research paper. Research-level treatments put subduction-zone corner magnitudes at 9.0–9.7 (Kagan and Jackson 2013; Rong et al. 2014). The largest paleo-earthquake inferred anywhere matches the instrumental record at Mw ~9.5 (Salazar et al. 2022, in the Atacama region of northern Chile, about 3,800 years ago). The article uses it as the plain statement that no known fault can produce a magnitude 10 quake. ↩
60.
Toon, Owen B. et al. “Environmental perturbations caused by the impacts of asteroids and comets.” Reviews of Geophysics 35(1):41–78. 1997. Page 51: With realistic seismic efficiency, the Chicxulub-scale impact earthquake is. “about 10, which is only about one magnitude larger than that of the largest known earthquake.” A long review by five atmospheric and planetary scientists at NASA Ames, UCLA and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, of how asteroid and comet impacts damage the environment at each energy scale. It works through the proposed mechanisms of the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction, including dust, fires, tsunamis and earthquakes. It also criticises earlier estimates of impact damage as inflated. DePalma et al. 2019, on a seismically induced surge deposit, estimate Mw 10 to 11.5; that rests on two citations, one of which (Meschede et al. 2011, on antipodal focusing) contains no magnitude estimate at all. The article uses it as the careful source for the Chicxulub impact's earthquake, about magnitude 10 once realistic seismic efficiency is applied. ↩
61.
Simms, Michael J. “Uniquely extensive seismite from the latest Triassic of the United Kingdom: Evidence for bolide impact?” Geology 31(6):557–560. 2003. “a seismic event of M > 10 … The magnitude of the event is incompatible with known terrestrial mechanisms (fault, volcano) but is consistent with a major bolide impact.” A short paper in Geology by Michael Simms on a seismite, a layer of soft sediment shaken by an earthquake, in the latest Triassic rocks of the United Kingdom. Its abstract argues that the shaking was far stronger than any fault or volcano could produce, so that only a major bolide impact fits. Snelling cites it in support of continent-collision superquakes. The article uses it as the one published claim of an M>10 seismite. ↩
62.
Lindström, Sofie et al. “Intense and widespread seismicity during the end-Triassic mass extinction due to emplacement of a large igneous province.” Geology 43(5):387–390. May 2015. “The repetitive nature of the seismites rules out an origin by an extraterrestrial impact”. The magnitudes are bounded by. “the largest known fault-sourced earthquakes of ~9.5 ML”. At Larne the deformed strata are. “partly separated by undeformed beds”. and. “Deformed beds appear absent in older or younger strata.” A research paper by fifteen researchers, mostly from the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, on layers of soft sediment shaken by earthquakes across Europe at the end of the Triassic. The shaking is linked to the Central Atlantic magmatic province, a huge outpouring of lava, and the authors argue that magma intruding into sediment released gases that helped cause the extinction. They argue the repeated layers rule out a single impact, and that Simms's bolide reading of the UK seismites is wrong. The article uses it as the published rejection of the claimed M>10 bolide seismite. ↩
63.
Baumgardner, John R., and Evan Navarro. “The Role of Large Tsunamis in the Formation of the Flood Sediment Record.” Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Creationism 9:363–386. 2023. Page 365: Its inputs are a plate speed of 2 m/s, 60-minute locking, 6,235 m of seafloor rebound, and 40 segments of 1,250 km. The authors write: “40 mega-tsunamis unleashed each hour, 960 each day, and 144,000 over the course of five months.” A conference paper by John R. Baumgardner of Liberty University and Evan Navarro, presented to the Ninth International Conference on Creationism. It extends a computer model called MABBUL, which simulates giant tsunamis that erode sediment off the continents and spread it across them, with a more accurate continent motion history and grid points 60 km apart. Its 2018 predecessor, in ICC 8 at pp. 287–305, had 36,000 events with 6,520–8,140 m of seafloor rebound and stated the elastic assumption explicitly. The sediment thicknesses used in its density calculation, about 2,000 m on continental platforms and 800–1,000 m as a global mean, are Baumgardner's own citations of Prothero and Schwab. The article calls it CPT's only quantified statement of Flood seismicity. ↩
64.
Computed in research/paleoseismites.md §1.4 from Baumgardner & Navarro's stated parameters via the standard moment-magnitude formula (Hanks & Kanamori 1979): slip 6,235/sin 60° = 7,200 m on a 1,250-km rupture of 50–200 km down-dip width gives Mw 10.69–11.09. Chile 1960's moment is 2.27 × 10²³ N·m; each Flood event carries 60–240 times that. The rupture-length table (from McCaffrey 2008's own equation) shows Mw 11 requires a single coherent rupture of 15,000–26,000 km. Caveat stated in the dossier: standard scaling relations are calibrated only to M 7.9, so all such extrapolation is indicative — which cuts against every party using them, including this article. ↩
65.
Kanamori, Hiroo, and Don L. Anderson. “Theoretical basis of some empirical relations in seismology.” Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America 65(5):1073–1095. Oct 1975. Page 1080: The authors write: “a gross average of 60 bars may be used as a representative value of stress drop for large earthquakes. This stress drop corresponds to a strain drop of … ≈ 2 × 10⁻⁴ which agrees, within a factor of two or so, with a value suggested by Tsuboi (1956) for the critical strain of the Earth's crust.” Baumgardner and Navarro's slip requires stress drops of 1,080–4,320 MPa, 300 to 700 times that, and elastic strain of about 12%, about 600 times the critical value. Baumgardner's own elastic-limit critique of Walt Brown (Flood Science Review, 2011, p. 524) rejected Brown's mechanism at 51 bars. A theory paper by two seismologists explaining why large earthquakes follow the rules they do, using earthquakes of magnitude 6 and above. Stress drop is the stress a fault releases in one slip, measured in bars, where one bar is about the pressure of the air at sea level. The paper takes a typical value of 60 bars for large earthquakes. The article uses it as the benchmark against which Baumgardner and Navarro's slip is measured. ↩
66.
Marco, Shmuel et al. “Long-term earthquake clustering: A 50,000-year paleoseismic record in the Dead Sea Graben.” Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth 101(B3):6179–6191. 1996. Marco and Agnon's companion paper in Geology 23(8):695–698 (1995) is titled. “Prehistoric earthquake deformations near Masada, Dead Sea graben”. and says: “The undisturbed laminated layers between these mixed layers represent the interseismic interval.” Table 2: Its Table 2 gives 29–34 mixed layers per section of about 28–39 m, with mean thicknesses of 5–15 cm, a deformed fraction of 5–11% of an active plate boundary's record over 50,000 years of annual layers. A research paper by four Israeli geologists on a 50,000-year record of earthquakes kept in the laminated mud of Lake Lisan, the Late Pleistocene lake that filled the Dead Sea basin. Each seismite, a layer of mud mixed up by an earthquake, is taken to mark a quake of magnitude above 5.5, with a mean interval of about 1,600 years. The authors call it possibly the longest continuous paleoseismic record on Earth. The article uses it as the best-measured seismite archive, in which deformed layers make up only a small share of the section. ↩
67.
Van Loon, A.J. (Tom), and Małgorzata Pisarska-Jamroży. “Seismites resulting from high-frequency, high-magnitude earthquakes in Latvia caused by Late Glacial glacio-isostatic uplift.” Journal of Palaeogeography 5(4):363–380. 2016. A research paper by two sedimentologists on sand layers in Latvia that were shaken by earthquakes after the land rose when the Late Glacial ice sheet melted. The authors count 7 seismites in a 7-m section and 12 in a 4.5-m section. They estimate earthquakes of magnitude 4.5 to 5.0 or more recurring perhaps every 6–7 years, which makes it the densest seismite record published, in the most liquefiable sediment there is. The article uses it to show that even the densest record has about one to three discrete seismite horizons per meter, with undeformed sand between them. ↩
68.
Wise, Kurt P. “Megaseismites in the Type Area of the Lance Formation (Maastrichtian, Cretaceous; Niobrara County, Wyoming).” GSA Abstracts with Programs 50(6). 2018. Wise says the Lance megaseismites are an enigma, and that. “their high frequency in the Lance seems to rule out astronomical impact, leaving no apparent cause for such enormous earthquakes. Furthermore, such earthquakes should have left considerable seismic evidence, but reports of correlative megaseismites are absent.” “At least 43 distinct megaseismites … averaging a megaseismite every 40-50' up section”. A conference abstract, presented as paper 208-5 at the 2018 GSA meeting in Indianapolis, by Kurt Wise, a creationist geologist at Truett McConnell University. It counts at least 43 megaseismites (deformation greater than 3 feet) in the Lance Formation, roughly one every 40 to 50 feet up the section. The article uses it as the creationist field count behind the Lance argument. ↩ ↩
69.
Isaacs, Edward A. “Ichnofossils Refute Hydroplate Theory's Liquefaction Submodel.” Answers Research Journal 15:97–108. May 11, 2022. The author says liquefaction. “is inherently a destructive process … erasing key information from the original stratigraphy”. A paper in the research journal of Answers in Genesis, a creationist ministry, by Edward A. Isaacs, written against Walt Brown's Hydroplate Theory, which says the Flood sorted the rock record by liquefying it. It uses trace fossils, such as tracks and burrows that record living animals, to test that claim. The author argues that tracks with undeformed rock above and deformed rock beneath, and Skolithos burrows that cut vertically through cross-beds at every angle, show the host sand was never liquefied again after deposition. The article argues that every step of this transfers to CPT's shaking regime. ↩
70.
Snelling. Earth's Catastrophic Past. Volume 1. 2009. Page 284: Arguing against post-Flood continental division, he says. “Such rates of separation would have involved continuous earthquakes with magnitudes far exceeding the worst earthquakes experienced today, and therefore would have resulted in devastating consequences for all life on the earth's surface.” Across both volumes, the words "seismite" and "liquefaction" occur zero times. The soft-sediment-deformation chapter (chapter 75) argues about lithification timing, not shaking. A two-volume creationist textbook of Flood geology by Andrew Snelling, about 1,100 pages across both volumes. The article uses it as Snelling's own argument against rapid continental separation after the Flood. ↩
71.
Huuse, Mads et al. “Giant sandstone pipes record basin-scale liquefaction of buried dune sands in the Middle Jurassic of SE Utah.” Terra Nova 17(1):80–85. 2005. “The depth of liquefaction recorded by the pipes far exceeds depths usually considered in earthquake engineering.” The companion paper, Netoff 2002 in Sedimentology 49:65–80, says: “most probably caused by large-magnitude seismic events during the Middle Jurassic, although other possibilities cannot be ruled out.” A research paper by Mads Huuse and colleagues on giant sandstone pipes, columns of sand pushed up through the rock above, which cover an area of 20,000 km² in Middle Jurassic dune sands of southeast Utah. The article uses it as the modest version of the case, since some ancient liquefaction does exceed modern experience. ↩
72.
Shanmugam, Ganapathy. “The seismite problem.” Journal of Palaeogeography 5(4):318–362. 2016. “liquefaction can be induced by any one of 21 triggers”. Lateral extent is. “also unreliable.” The author writes: “there are no specific sedimentologic criteria to distinguish SSDS formed by earthquakes from those formed by other mechanisms”. Van Loon (2014, p. 64) says that where quakes outpace deposition, deformed layers can stack and. “the criterion 'sandwiched between undeformed layers' is then invalid”. That describes slow deposition with frequent quakes, and it softens the discreteness argument. The article argues that CPT's fast deposition, with 40 quakes an hour, predicts stacked deformation everywhere, which is the same problem stated more strongly. It also says this cuts against mainstream paleo-magnitude inference and against Snelling's Lance argument equally, since thickness and lateral extent are the two criteria his case rests on. A review by G. Shanmugam of the University of Texas at Arlington, arguing that the word "seismite" is obsolete, because the sand and mud structures it names have many causes. Liquefaction, the process that makes wet sediment flow, can be set off by any one of 21 triggers, including earthquakes, meteorite impacts, tsunamis and sediment loading. The article uses it because it admits that seismite-to-trigger inference is weak on all sides, which cuts against the mainstream magnitude estimates and against Snelling's alike. ↩
73.
Molnar, Peter, and Philip England. “Late Cenozoic uplift of mountain ranges and global climate change: chicken or egg?” Nature 346:29–34. 1990. A Nature paper that reads the apparent global synchrony of mountain uplift as a global climate signal acting on ranges of different ages. The article uses it as the counter-argument to the idea of near-synchronous recent uplift of mountain ranges. ↩
74.
Seton, Maria et al. “A Global Data Set of Present-Day Oceanic Crustal Age and Seafloor Spreading Parameters.” Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems 21:e2020GC009214. 2020. “the mean age of oceanic crust is 64.2 Myr.” A data paper from a team at the University of Sydney and partner institutions that presents a new global map of the age of today's ocean floor, with spreading rates and related grids. The map is built from magnetic stripe identifications and a plate motion model. The article uses it for the mean age of the ocean floor, which it divides into the sediment thickness to get a sediment accumulation rate. ↩
75.
Straume, Eivind O. et al. “GlobSed: Updated Total Sediment Thickness in the World's Oceans.” Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems 20:1756–1772. 2019. Oceanic crust more than 200 km from the shelves averages 404 m of sediment. The article's arithmetic divides 404 m by the 64.2 million year mean crust age to get 6.3 mm per thousand years, inside measured pelagic rates. A data paper in Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems that presents GlobSed, a new global map of how thick the sediment on the ocean floor is. It is built from earlier maps and new data, and it finds that sediment is thicker on older crust, raising the total ocean sediment volume by 29.7% over earlier maps. The article uses it for the average sediment on crust more than 200 km from the continental shelves. ↩
76.
Maxwell, A. E. et al. “Summary and Conclusions.” Initial Reports of the Deep Sea Drilling Project III. 1970. Chapter 13, pages 458–463: “the age of the sediments recovered from immediately above the basalt basement at each Mid-Atlantic Ridge site has been shown to increase with distance from the Ridge-axis.” The summary chapter of the Deep Sea Drilling Project report on its third expedition, written by the expedition's Shipboard Scientific Party, drawn from several universities and institutes. It sums up the sediment cores drilled on the Sierra Leone Rise and the Rio Grande Rise in the Atlantic. The age table is Table 5, on page 459. The article uses it because the sediment ages increase with distance from the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, the pattern Baumgardner accepts without reservation. ↩
77.
Cande, Steven C., and Dennis V. Kent. “Revised calibration of the geomagnetic polarity timescale for the Late Cretaceous and Cenozoic.” Journal of Geophysical Research 100(B4):6093–6095. Apr 10, 1995. A three-page revision by two geophysicists, one at Scripps and one at Lamont-Doherty, of the timetable of Earth's magnetic reversals. It takes its ages from radioisotope dates and from astronomical cycle counts, and it moves the Cretaceous/Paleogene boundary from 66 to 65 million years. The article uses it because the magnetic-stripe ages in the blind test depend on this timetable, which is anchored by dates rather than an assumed spreading rate. ↩
78.
Sella, Giovanni F. et al. “REVEL: A model for Recent plate velocities from space geodesy.” Journal of Geophysical Research 107(B4):2081. Apr 2002. “Two thirds of tested plate pairs agree with the NUVEL-1A geologic (3 Myr average) velocities within uncertainties”. Iceland hofn–reyk baseline 20.3 ± 0.2 vs predicted 19.8 ± 0.2 mm/yr. A global model of present-day plate motion built from GPS and other space-geodesy data collected from 1993 to 2000, covering 19 plates and continental blocks. The authors compare it with NUVEL-1A, a geologic model averaged over the last 3 million years of seafloor stripes. The article uses it for the Iceland baseline that crosses the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. ↩
79.
Clarey, Timothy L. “Plate Tectonics After Fifty Years.” Institute for Creation Research. 2018. Clarey writes that. “Today, geologists can measure the post-Flood movement of the plates using satellite data, verifying there is still ongoing slow, residual plate motion.” A 2018 web article on the Institute for Creation Research site, arguing that satellite data show plates still move slowly after the Flood. The article uses it as Clarey's answer to why today's plate speeds match the average from magnetic stripes, an answer which the article says does not address that coincidence. ↩
80.
Worraker, William J. “Heat Problems Associated with Genesis Flood Models—Part 4: Heat Deposited by Magmatic Activity.” Answers Research Journal 16:201–251. 2023. The fourth paper in a series on the heat that the Flood would have produced, covering the heat deposited by ocean-floor formation and by large igneous provinces (LIPs). Its main conclusion is that this heat cannot be removed by known natural processes within a biblically compatible timescale. The article uses it because a creationist writing in a creationist journal reaches that conclusion about the heat of the ocean floor.
1. 80a.
  The ocean-floor formation heat is 1.4 × 10²⁹ J, from Furlong & Chapman's ~3.9 × 10¹⁴ J/m². ↩
2. 80b.
  The oceans could absorb. “of order 6 × 10²⁵ J at most ... This is only 0.04% of the total heat deposition: the remaining 99.96% must have been removed or absorbed elsewhere.” The 13 °C ceiling comes from Answers Research Journal 11 (2018) and is confirmed by proxies independent of oxygen isotopes in Answers Research Journal 12 (2019). ↩
3. 80c.
  In its conclusions the paper says the heat. “cannot be removed from the biosphere within a biblically-compatible timescale by known natural processes.” ↩
4. 80d.
  Citing Dalton, Wilson & Herbert 2022 on. “a slowdown of 35% in the global production rate of oceanic crust over the last 15 Ma,”. asking. “whether this could represent the final stage of deceleration from the high-speed peak (~1 ms⁻¹).” ↩
81.
Parsons, Barry, and John G. Sclater. “An analysis of the variation of ocean floor bathymetry and heat flow with age.” Journal of Geophysical Research 82(5):803–827. Feb 10, 1977. The fitted depth relation is d(t) = 2500 + 350 √t, with t in millions of years. A long paper in the Journal of Geophysical Research by two geophysicists at MIT that asks whether cooling alone can explain how the depth and heat flow of the seafloor change with its age. The authors fit depth data from the North Pacific and North Atlantic out to 160 million years, and they find that depth grows with the square root of age and levels off on the oldest seafloor. The article uses it because this is the first global fit of depth and heat flow to seafloor age, the relation that the article tests CPT against. ↩
82.
Clarey, Timothy L. “Empirical data support seafloor spreading and catastrophic plate tectonics.” Journal of Creation 30(1):76–82. 2016. A 2016 journal article arguing that empirical data support seafloor spreading and catastrophic plate tectonics. The article uses it for ICR's reply to critics, who the article says invoke their own miracles when convenient.
1. 82a.
  The six data sets include. “the ocean heat flow pattern observed”. and. “the bathymetry pattern of the seafloor”. The list does not address heat disposal. ↩ ↩
83.
Clague, David A., and G. Brent Dalrymple. “The Hawaiian-Emperor Volcanic Chain, Part I: Geologic Evolution.” USGS Professional Paper 1350:5–54. 1987. Table 1.4: The age-distance data. “Volcanic propagation rates along the chain are 9.2 ± 0.3 cm/yr for the Hawaiian Chain and 7.2 ± 1.1 cm/yr for the Emperor Chain.” A chapter in a U.S. Geological Survey professional paper on Hawaiian volcanoes, written by two geologists, that describes how the Hawaiian-Emperor chain formed. The chain runs nearly 6,000 km across the North Pacific and contains at least 107 volcanoes, with the volcanoes getting older toward the northwest. The article uses it for the age and distance data behind the chain's propagation rate, which it sets against the Pacific plate's GPS speed today. ↩ ↩
1. 83a.
  Table 1.6: “Eruptive rates along the Hawaiian-Emperor Chain”. Lava volume per unit distance falls from 1,500 × 10³ km³/km (Kilauea–Hualalai) to a minimum of 20 just before the bend, then rises to 160 in the older Emperor segment, a tenfold range against a 1.5-fold range in propagation rate over the same segments. Puhahonu is the largest shield volcano on earth, and it sits mid-chain among the submerged volcanoes: Clarey, "World's Largest Volcano Found Hiding Under the Ocean" (ICR, 2020), reporting Garcia et al. 2020 (EPSL 542:116296). Old edifices are also not original sizes: Midway's subaerial basalt now lies 384 m below sea level under reef limestone (see the atoll drilling above). The article uses it to test the island-size claim against the USGS data. ↩
84.
Gripp, Alice E., and Richard G. Gordon. “Young tracks of hotspots and current plate velocities.” Geophysical Journal International 150:321–361. 2002. “about 50 per cent faster (1.06 ± 0.10 deg Myr⁻¹) than the average (0.70 deg Myr⁻¹) since the 47-Myr-old bend.” A long paper in Geophysical Journal International that measures how the plates move relative to the hotspots under them, over about the last 4 to 7 million years, using the tracks left by volcanoes such as the Hawaiian chain. It finds that the current Pacific plate rotation is faster than its average since the bend in the Hawaiian-Emperor chain 47 million years ago. The article uses it for the Pacific plate's current speed against its 47-million-year average. ↩
85.
Torsvik, Trond H. et al. “Pacific plate motion change caused the Hawaiian-Emperor Bend.” Nature Communications 8:15660. Jun 5, 2017. The authors write that the bend. “cannot be explained without invoking a prominent change in the direction of Pacific plate motion around 47 Ma.” The rival paper, Bono, Tarduno and Bunge (2019, Nature Communications 10:3370), is titled. “Hotspot motion caused the Hawaiian-Emperor Bend and LLSVPs are not fixed”. It argues that hotspot drift at "~47 mm yr⁻¹" caused the bend, that plate motion changes "played only a minor role," and that there is a "lack of clear geological evidence for a profound event … corresponding to the age of the HEB"; it also says the Pacific path "does hint at an acceleration of the Pacific plate in the Cenozoic." A research paper by six geoscientists testing whether the 60-degree bend in the Hawaiian-Emperor chain formed because the Pacific plate changed direction or because the hotspot under Hawaii drifted. They conclude that hotspot drift cannot be the sole or dominant cause, and that the bend needs a change in plate direction around 47 million years ago. The article uses it as a live, unresolved dispute, and takes no side. ↩ ↩
86.
Ladd, Harry S., and Seymour O. Schlanger. “Drilling Operations on Eniwetok Atoll.” USGS Professional Paper 260-Y:863–905. 1960. “olivine basalt beneath shallow water limestone of Eocene age at a depth of more than 4,000 feet”. The solid basalt core is at 4,208–4,222 ft in hole E-1. A second USGS paper, Ladd, Tracey & Gross, "Deep Drilling on Midway Atoll," Professional Paper 680-A (1970), reports reef-hole basalt at 1,261 ft. A USGS professional paper on the drilling through Eniwetok Atoll. It reports volcanic basalt lying beneath the atoll's limestone. The article uses it as atoll drilling evidence. ↩
87.
Horstemeyer, Mark F., and John R. Baumgardner. “What Initiated the Flood Cataclysm?” Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Creationism, 155–163. 2003. A 2003 conference paper that uses a computer model to test how olivine rock becomes unstable. It varies temperature, loading rate, crystal damage, water content and initial anisotropy, and finds that each can make the rock unstable. The authors ask whether God built such instability in at creation, the view the article attributes to Baumgardner. ↩
88.
Albright, Jane. Noah's Flood – The Bible, the Science & the Controversy, Part 3 – Catastrophic Plate Tectonics. 2017. Baumgardner's statement that the cold zone. “must date back to God's original creation of the earth ... on Day 3”. and that. “after the Fall, this cold rock began slowly to sink.” A 2017 piece, part 3 of a series on Noah's Flood, that covers catastrophic plate tectonics. Baumgardner reviewed the draft, and the piece is where Baumgardner's statements about the cold rock appear. The article uses it to show that the cold belt is presented as created in place, mature, with its catastrophe already loaded. ↩
89.
Albert, R. A. et al. “A test of the validity of yield strength envelopes with an elastoviscoplastic finite element model.” Geophysical Journal International 140:399–409. 2000. Horstemeyer and Baumgardner 2003 cite it with the words. “41 Myr were required for subduction to occur.” A 2000 geophysics paper that tests a computer model of how strong rock is, using a finite element model. The article uses it to show that mainstream models also find subduction hard to start. ↩
90.
“Forum on catastrophic plate tectonics.” Journal of Creation 16(1):57–81. 2002. A 2002 forum in Journal of Creation of six papers in three rounds, with Baumgardner arguing for catastrophic plate tectonics and Oard arguing against it. The article uses it as the foundational exchange between the two, in which Oard's objections are set out against Baumgardner's model. ↩
91.
Froede, Carl R. Jr., and A. Jerry Akridge. “A developing schism in Flood geology.” Journal of Creation 27(2):49–54. 2013. Page 51: The authors say the accelerations. “individually and separately generate sufficient heat to melt the entire earth during the global Flood.” A 2013 Viewpoint article arguing that Flood geology is splitting into two camps: a remodelled naturalistic approach that adapts mainstream ideas, and a reconstructed Bible-based approach. The article uses it for the authors' charge that accelerated plate tectonics and accelerated nuclear decay would each melt the earth. ↩
92.
Oard, Michael J. “Is plate tectonics really occurring today?” Journal of Creation 26(3):120–127. 2012. Page 121: “Once the runaway subduction stopped, mantle viscosity returned to its normal value and CPT plate motions should have come to a complete stop. There should be no residual CPT motions today.” A 2012 reply to John Baumgardner's article on whether plates move today. Oard argues that GPS data show only surface movement and that the forces proposed to move plates are inadequate, so CPT's driving force should have stopped after the Flood. The article uses it for Oard's point that CPT predicts no residual motion today. ↩
93.
Oard. “Difficulties with Plate Tectonics: The Pacific Ocean Bottom.” Journal of Creation 29(2):86–91. 2015. Page 90: Oard says the linear ages were. “singled out because they matched the idea”. and concludes from Pacific seafloor features that. “This lack of significant lateral movement indicates that PT and CPT did not occur.” A creationist journal article by Oard, arguing against plate tectonics from features of the Pacific seafloor. Other creationists in the same camp say the same: Brown, in In the Beginning, 9th ed. draft, pp. 167–168, calls hotspots "an old, now discredited, idea"; Walker, "The Hawaiian hot spot and the Bible" (CMI, 2011), calls it "a speculative story about the past"; and Enyart and Williams, "Hawaii Hotspot Hypothesis Widely Discredited" (Real Science Radio, 2018), also reject it. Baumgardner's contrary use, in 101 Questions Q98, calls the hotspot reading "the most obvious and viable explanation within the CPT framework," with the chain recording "about 1 km/hr" of Flood-year plate motion. The article uses it as one of the creationist rejections of hotspot tracks, which would make the Hawaiian argument unavailable. ↩ ↩
94.
Oard, Michael J., and Robert Carter. Biblical Geology 101. Creation Ministries International. 2022. Chapter 5, 7: “Creation Ministries International does hold a preferred view: that of catastrophic plate tectonics. ... CPT is the most modern, up-to-date Flood model, and the one with the most explanatory power.” A 2022 primer from Creation Ministries International. The article uses it because the book calls CPT the most up-to-date Flood model, although Oard, one of its co-authors, is CPT's most persistent published critic. ↩
95.
Morton, Glenn R. “Runaway Subduction is a Sham.” Old Earth Ministries. 2004. “The continents were NOT in the Pangean configuration at the Cambrian when most Creationist believe the flood began. ... It doesn't account for the motion of the continents PRIOR to the Permian.” A web article by Glenn R. Morton on the Old Earth Ministries site, which quotes Baumgardner's 1986 and 1990 papers as assuming one supercontinent before the Flood and then tests that assumption against the paleomagnetic positions of the continents. The article uses it as one of its most quantitative critiques, noting that the model starts halfway up the geologic column and leaves the Paleozoic unmodeled. ↩
96.
Snelling, Andrew A. “Hawaii's Volcanic Origins—Instant Paradise.” Answers 9(1). 2014. “as the Flood was waning, the plate motions decelerated from tens of feet (meters) per second to their current snail's pace”. He also writes. “if the plate motion had been uniformly slow at today's rate, all the volcanic islands should have been of similar sizes”. and concedes. “just as plates accelerated during the Flood and then decelerated, so radioactive decay rates accelerated, apparently in lockstep, and then decelerated.” A magazine article by Dr. Andrew A. Snelling, arguing that the Hawaiian islands were built in a few years after the Flood, when the plates were moving fast. He says the plates slowed from meters per second to centimeters per year as the Flood waned, and that the growing island sizes record that slowdown. The article uses it as the source of the decelerating-Flood argument, and calls his concession about decay rates the one that carries the whole scheme. ↩ ↩
97.
Clarey, Timothy. “Seafloor Spreading Matches Creation Predictions.” Institute for Creation Research. May 23, 2022. Clarey writes: “It's exactly what we predicted”. “These two recent studies appear to document the very moment when the plates slowed.” Dalton's next sentence, which Clarey does not quote, reads. “Most studies of abrupt plate-motion changes assume that local plate-boundary forces are responsible, since mantle convection responds slowly.” A short article by Tim Clarey, a research scientist at the Institute for Creation Research with a doctorate in geology from Western Michigan University, reacting to the Dalton et al. 2022 slowdown study. A companion piece by Clarey, "Slowing Plates Support High Flood Boundary" (ICR, 13 October 2025), is cited alongside it. The article uses it as the creationist claim that the slowdown was predicted. ↩ ↩
98.
Dalton, Colleen A. et al. “Evidence for a Global Slowdown in Seafloor Spreading Since 15 Ma.” Geophysical Research Letters 49:e2022GL097937. 2022. Its timescale is. “astronomically tuned ATNTS2012.” “spreading rate decreased along 15 of 18 major ridge systems”. Globally averaged, spreading fell. “38% (28%–49% at 95% confidence) since 19 Ma”. Three ridges sped up. The authors write: “It is possible that there is not one single explanation … but rather several different causes”. and name. “such as the emergence of the Andes.” A research letter that rebuilds how fast new seafloor spread at 18 mid-ocean ridges over the past 19 million years, using the magnetic stripes in the rock and astronomically tuned ages (ATNTS2012). The authors suggest there is not one single explanation for the slowdown. A companion paper, Dalton et al. 2025 in G-cubed 26:e2024GC011773, finds the slowdown's effects are 26–32 m of sea-level fall and 8% less heat loss, detectable only by careful stratigraphy. The article uses it for the slowdown data, and notes that its timescale is one that CPT rejects. ↩
99.
Copley, Alex et al. “India-Asia collision and the Cenozoic slowdown of the Indian plate: Implications for the forces driving plate motions.” Journal of Geophysical Research 115:B03410. 2010. The paper says India's plate motion changed between 50 and 35 Ma, with. “the rate of convergence between India and Asia dropping from 15 to 4 cm/yr”. and concludes that. “crustal thickening in the Tibetan Plateau was the dominant cause”. A research paper by three geophysicists who model the forces acting on the Indian plate as it collided with Asia, balancing the pushes and pulls on its edges and base. The article uses it as the largest documented plate slowdown, India's, which it links to the Himalayan collision. ↩
100.
Baumgardner, John R. “Global tectonics—clarity, not confusion.” Journal of Creation 27(1):99–106. 2013. A 2013 reply in Journal of Creation to an article by Michael Oard in the same journal. It uses GPS data from over 2,000 stations and seismic data from over 150,000 earthquakes to argue that plates move together and that slabs sink into the mantle, and it says the impact energy in Oard's model would melt the topmost kilometer of the earth's surface and completely vaporize the ocean. The article uses it for that calculation. ↩
101.
Oard, Michael J., and John K. Reed. “Working on a Global Flood Model.” Creation Matters 25(3):4–6. 2020. “runaway subduction would require a powerful mechanism to initiate it, and that mechanism is still uncertain”. A 2020 Geology Matters column in Creation Matters, a publication of the Creation Research Society, which commends several working hypotheses rather than one model. The article uses it as Oard and Reed's admission that the mechanism for starting runaway subduction is still uncertain. ↩