Addresses of All Authors
John Baumgardner, School of Engineering, Liberty University, 1971 University Blvd., Lynchburg, VA 24515
Evan Navarro, Delta Star, Inc., 3550 Mayflower Drive, Lynchburg, VA 24501
Author's Biography
John Baumgardner has a Ph.D. in geophysics from UCLA and worked in computational physics at Los Alamos National Laboratory for most of his scientific career. Since the 1980’s he has published extensively on catastrophic plate tectonics and the Genesis Flood. He served on the Radioisotopes and the Age of the Earth (RATE) team that documented multiple lines of radioisotope evidence that the earth is young. More recently he has developed software to study the transport and deposition of sediment produced by giant tsunamis during the Flood. He currently is research professor emeritus in the School of Engineering at Liberty University.
Evan Navarro has a B.S. in mechanical engineering from the University of Virginia, with a concentration in materials science. For the past five years he has worked as a design engineer for Delta Star, Inc., in the realm of mobile high voltage transformers. He has a strong desire to honor God by applying his talents and training to issues in creation apologetics, especially to the reality of the Genesis Flood.
Presentation Type
Full Paper Presentation
Proposal
A major challenge for Flood geology is providing a credible explanation for how the staggering volume of fossil-bearing sediment was eroded, transported, and deposited in orderly patterns on the surface of the normally high-standing continents in only a few months’ time. This paper builds upon the numerical modeling work reported at the 2018 ICC utilizing a code named MABBUL which showed that repetitive giant tsunamis generated by catastrophic plate tectonics during the Genesis Flood can plausibly account for the Flood sediment record. That modeling demonstrated that, with reasonable parameter choices, tsunami-driven cavitation erosion during the Flood itself, mostly along the continent margins, can produce most of the sediment in today’s fossil-bearing record. The modeling showed further that tsunami-driven pulses of turbulent water can transport this sediment vast distances across the continental surfaces and that these hydrological processes generate sequences of laterally extensive layers often separated by erosional unconformities. That model incorporated a representation of the dynamic history of the continental blocks to explore the influence of continental motions during the cataclysm. It also included an initial continental topography, with low elevations along the coasts and higher elevations inland. Astonishingly, but not mentioned in the paper, the low-order sediment distribution generated in that model matched in a striking way the actual sediment distribution of today’s world. That computational study provided important insight regarding the primary source of the Flood water, how that water was able to cover the normally high-standing continent surface, what produced and sustained the water flow, the primary source of the sediment, the primary means of sediment transport and deposition across the continent surface, why little erosional channeling occurred between sediment layers, and the processes likely responsible for observed paleocurrent directions.
This paper focuses on the details of the actual generation of the continental sediment record by the complex pattern of tsunamis that invade the continent interior and interact with one another. The MABBUL model now includes a more accurate continent motion history and runs at double the horizontal spatial resolution with grid points spaced only 60 km apart. It also now accounts for an ever-increasing amount of newly produced ocean floor and a corresponding increase in global sea level. To model the erosional unconformities between mega-sequences in the continental sediment record, MABBUL now allows for sudden drops in sea level caused by episodes of cooling of the oceanic lithosphere. Probably the most exciting aspect of the oral presentation of this work at the ICC will be the high frame-rate movies of the tsunami dynamics as they interact with one another across the land surface to leave behind successive layers of new sediment.
Disciplines
Geology
Keywords
Genesis Flood, Flood sediment record, large tsunamis, catastrophic plate tectonics, turbulent sediment transport, open channel flow, cavitation erosion, megasequences
DOI
10.15385/jpicc.2023.9.1.22
Print Reference
363-386
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Recommended Citation
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
Submission Type
paper