Proposal
An important aspect of the earth today is the layer of basaltic crust 6-7 km in thickness that forms the igneous seafloor below the earth’s deep ocean basins. All this basaltic ocean crust across about 70% of the earth’s surface appears to have been generated at a mid-ocean ridge, where tectonic plates had pulled apart, basaltic magma had risen to the surface and had cooled and crystalized. A basic aspect of plate tectonics, of course, is that new oceanic plate is produced at mid-ocean ridges where plates are pulling apart and hot rock from below rises to fill the gap between the diverging plates.
A major finding from the 1960’s when radioisotope dating methods were first widely applied to igneous rock samples from the ocean bottom was that the igneous ocean floor rocks everywhere on earth were no older than Mesozoic. That implied that all the continental sediment record containing fossils considered Paleozoic in age had already been deposited before any of today’s basaltic ocean crust had cooled and crystallized. It implied that the entire Atlantic basin had opened since the latest Paleozoic animals had been buried and fossilized.
When understood at face value, Genesis 1-11 reveals that a global Flood cataclysm is responsible for all but the topmost portion of the fossil-bearing portion of Earth’s geological record. This automatically implies that essentially all the Phanerozoic plate motion occurred during that year-long cataclysm. The framework that understands these Phanerozoic plate motions as occurring during this brief interval is known simply as catastrophic plate tectonics (CPT).
One of the major issues that arises in the CPT framework is the need for rapid and extraordinary cooling of the newly forming ocean plates. Silicate rock is a good thermal insulator, and therefore heat diffuses through it very slowly. Using a typical value for the thermal diffusivity of mantle rock of 8x10-7 m2/s, plate cooling time t is given to good approximation by t = 0.01z2, where t is in years and z is in meters ( Sandwell, 2001). From this relation a plate 80 km thick requires 63 million years to cool from the thermal state it had at the spreading ridge from which it originated.
As pointed out in the very first paper proposing CPT (Baumgardner, 1986), extraordinary cooling is required for CPT to be viable. Without enhanced cooling of the newly forming ocean lithosphere, that lithosphere would remain hot and buoyant, the runaway process would stall, and CPT would come to an abrupt halt well before the continents reached their current locations. Since the first paper on CPT in 1986 and until recently, it has been assumed that the required enhanced cooling of the new oceanic lithosphere occurred at a steady and uniform rate and has been modeled simply by increasing the value of the thermal diffusivity by an appropriate factor during the year of the Flood.
Since in the 1960’s, however, data from the petroleum exploration community have revealed that the fossil-bearing sediment record displays a remarkable structure consisting of six massive sediment layer packages known as mega-sequences that are separated from one another by global-scale erosional unconformities. Since 2023 I have realized that a simple causal mechanism for these features exists within the CPT framework (Baumgardner and Navarro, 2023). In contrast to uniform cooling of the new lithosphere, when cooling instead occurs in discrete episodes, it yields abrupt drops in global sea level and produces the spectacular erosional unconformities. This new approach assumes episodes of cooling sufficient to cause a 600 m drop in average sea bottom height and produce the erosional unconformity observed at the base of each of the first five mega-sequences. A final, less abrupt era of cooling beginning at the top of the fifth mega-sequence results in an additional 1,500 m of sea bottom drop that allows the water that had covered the continent surfaces to drain back steadily back into the deepening ocean basins. This talk will describe the latest version of this new perspective.
References
Sandwell, David T. (2001) Cooling of the oceanic lithosphere and ocean floor topography. Retrieved Feb. 28, 2025, from https://topex.ucsd.edu/pub/sandwell/geodynamics_notes/07_1_lithosphere_cooling.pdf
Baumgardner, John R. (1986) "Numerical Simulation of the Large-Scale Tectonic Changes Accompanying the Flood," Proceedings of the International Conference on Creationism: Vol. 1, Article 56.
/="/"> Available at: https://digitalcommons.cedarville.edu/icc_proceedings/vol1/iss1/56
Baumgardner, John and Navarro, Evan (2023) "The Role of Large Tsunamis in the Formation of the Flood Sediment Record," Proceedings of the International Conference on Creationism: Vol. 9, Article 13. DOI: 10.15385/jpicc.2023.9.1.22 Available at: https://digitalcommons.cedarville.edu/icc_proceedings/vol9/iss1/13
Keywords
catastrophic plate tectonics, Genesis Flood, lithospheric cooling, mega-sequences
Submission Type
Oral Presentation
Copyright
© 2025 John Baumgardner. All rights reserved.
How was the Ocean Lithosphere Generated during the Flood Cooled to its Present State?
An important aspect of the earth today is the layer of basaltic crust 6-7 km in thickness that forms the igneous seafloor below the earth’s deep ocean basins. All this basaltic ocean crust across about 70% of the earth’s surface appears to have been generated at a mid-ocean ridge, where tectonic plates had pulled apart, basaltic magma had risen to the surface and had cooled and crystalized. A basic aspect of plate tectonics, of course, is that new oceanic plate is produced at mid-ocean ridges where plates are pulling apart and hot rock from below rises to fill the gap between the diverging plates.
A major finding from the 1960’s when radioisotope dating methods were first widely applied to igneous rock samples from the ocean bottom was that the igneous ocean floor rocks everywhere on earth were no older than Mesozoic. That implied that all the continental sediment record containing fossils considered Paleozoic in age had already been deposited before any of today’s basaltic ocean crust had cooled and crystallized. It implied that the entire Atlantic basin had opened since the latest Paleozoic animals had been buried and fossilized.
When understood at face value, Genesis 1-11 reveals that a global Flood cataclysm is responsible for all but the topmost portion of the fossil-bearing portion of Earth’s geological record. This automatically implies that essentially all the Phanerozoic plate motion occurred during that year-long cataclysm. The framework that understands these Phanerozoic plate motions as occurring during this brief interval is known simply as catastrophic plate tectonics (CPT).
One of the major issues that arises in the CPT framework is the need for rapid and extraordinary cooling of the newly forming ocean plates. Silicate rock is a good thermal insulator, and therefore heat diffuses through it very slowly. Using a typical value for the thermal diffusivity of mantle rock of 8x10-7 m2/s, plate cooling time t is given to good approximation by t = 0.01z2, where t is in years and z is in meters ( Sandwell, 2001). From this relation a plate 80 km thick requires 63 million years to cool from the thermal state it had at the spreading ridge from which it originated.
As pointed out in the very first paper proposing CPT (Baumgardner, 1986), extraordinary cooling is required for CPT to be viable. Without enhanced cooling of the newly forming ocean lithosphere, that lithosphere would remain hot and buoyant, the runaway process would stall, and CPT would come to an abrupt halt well before the continents reached their current locations. Since the first paper on CPT in 1986 and until recently, it has been assumed that the required enhanced cooling of the new oceanic lithosphere occurred at a steady and uniform rate and has been modeled simply by increasing the value of the thermal diffusivity by an appropriate factor during the year of the Flood.
Since in the 1960’s, however, data from the petroleum exploration community have revealed that the fossil-bearing sediment record displays a remarkable structure consisting of six massive sediment layer packages known as mega-sequences that are separated from one another by global-scale erosional unconformities. Since 2023 I have realized that a simple causal mechanism for these features exists within the CPT framework (Baumgardner and Navarro, 2023). In contrast to uniform cooling of the new lithosphere, when cooling instead occurs in discrete episodes, it yields abrupt drops in global sea level and produces the spectacular erosional unconformities. This new approach assumes episodes of cooling sufficient to cause a 600 m drop in average sea bottom height and produce the erosional unconformity observed at the base of each of the first five mega-sequences. A final, less abrupt era of cooling beginning at the top of the fifth mega-sequence results in an additional 1,500 m of sea bottom drop that allows the water that had covered the continent surfaces to drain back steadily back into the deepening ocean basins. This talk will describe the latest version of this new perspective.
References
Sandwell, David T. (2001) Cooling of the oceanic lithosphere and ocean floor topography. Retrieved Feb. 28, 2025, from https://topex.ucsd.edu/pub/sandwell/geodynamics_notes/07_1_lithosphere_cooling.pdf
Baumgardner, John R. (1986) "Numerical Simulation of the Large-Scale Tectonic Changes Accompanying the Flood," Proceedings of the International Conference on Creationism: Vol. 1, Article 56.
/="/"> Available at: https://digitalcommons.cedarville.edu/icc_proceedings/vol1/iss1/56
Baumgardner, John and Navarro, Evan (2023) "The Role of Large Tsunamis in the Formation of the Flood Sediment Record," Proceedings of the International Conference on Creationism: Vol. 9, Article 13. DOI: 10.15385/jpicc.2023.9.1.22 Available at: https://digitalcommons.cedarville.edu/icc_proceedings/vol9/iss1/13