Addresses of All Authors
William J. Worraker, Biblical Creation Trust, P.O. Box 325, Ely, CB7 5YH, United Kingdom
Richard Ward, Biblical Creation Trust, P.O. Box 325, Ely, CB7 5YH, United Kingdom
Author's Biography
William J. Worraker is a part-time Research Associate with Biblical Creation Trust in the UK. He was employed as a computational physicist at AWE, Aldermaston, UK until retiring in March 2017. He has a BSc (Hons) in Physics from Bristol University, and a PhD, also from Bristol University, in fluid instability modeling. He has been an active amateur astronomer for over 25 years and has participated in collaborative professional-amateur observing projects and in writing the resulting peer-reviewed publications. He has written articles on astronomy and astrophysics in Journal of Creation, and a booklet entitled Water in the Cosmos published by Genesis Agendum in 2006. He gave two presentations at Origins 2016, the annual conference of the Creation Biology and Creation Geology Societies.
Richard Ward graduated in 1969 from Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, where he studied mathematics and physics. After training at Leicester University he spent most of his life teaching physics to boys at Bishop Wordsworth’s School, Salisbury, UK. Since retiring from teaching he has provided technical support at two schools, and has authored six articles published in the Institute of Physics (UK) journal Physics Education.
Proposal
Given that the earth’s ocean basins are geologically young, few areas being older than early Jurassic, and that most creation scientists regard Jurassic rocks as Flood deposits, these basins must have formed during and since the Flood, i.e. within no more than 4500 years. This paper represents a first attempt at modeling ocean basin formation by the separation of the continents and cooling of mantle material emplaced at spreading centres well within that limited time. We use a spreadsheet-based finite difference solution of the heat diffusion equation applied to a simple widely-used plate model of ocean lithosphere formation. Having verified our model by reproducing in detail the results of published uniformitarian calculations, we use it to demonstrate the effects of enhanced heat conduction and of a variety of heat sinks, both uniform and tailored in space and time, within a biblical time scale. Enhanced heat conduction is physically unrealistic and delivers an overwhelming heat load to the oceans, thus requiring two extraordinary changes to normal physics. A tailored heat sink reproduces surface heat flux and bathymetry profiles of the observed general forms, but predicted heat fluxes in the broad near-ridge region are far too high, and ridge profiles are too sharp. These problems stem from the presence of an apparently unavoidable near-surface thermal boundary layer. Including more realistic initial conditions and taking account of hitherto neglected geophysical processes (e.g. phase changes during magma depressurization, water production and fluid convection) to construct more sophisticated models are suggested as possible ways forward from this impasse.
Disciplines
Geology | Physics
Keywords
Ocean floor, Jurassic, lithosphere, conduction, heat flow, spreading rate, modeling
DOI
https://doi.org/10.15385/jpicc.2018.8.1.45
Print Reference
Pages 673-682
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Recommended Citation
Worraker, W.J., and R. Ward. 2018. Modeling of Flood and post-Flood ocean floor cooling. In Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Creationism, ed. J.H. Whitmore, pp. 673–682. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: Creation Science Fellowship.