2. The Flood

“In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, on the seventeenth day or the second month – on that day all the springs of the great deep burst forth, and the floodgates of the heavens were opened. And rain fell on the earth for forty days and forty nights.”

Moses, Genesis 7: 11-12

Hollywood has produced films showing global cataclysms as the result of global warming. They show a subzero cold front freezing a helicopter instantaneously to temperatures hundreds of degrees below zero causing it to fall from the sky while its crew members are nothing more than ice statues. They showed New York and California being flooded and frozen, a volcano erupting in the middle of LA, and much more. Yet, little creativity on their part is afforded to the efforts of demonstrating the reality of the Flood, God’s first (but not final) Judgement upon the earth. In this e-mail, you will see science and scripture walk hand in hand as the reality of the “springs of the great deep bursting forth” had cataclysmic effects resulting in it raining for forty days and forty nights; the ice age; the rapid formation of oil, coal, and the fossil record; the creation of the modern day mountains, volcanoes, canyons, oceans, and continents.

The Hydroplate Theory

Any scientific assumption that cannot be proved in a lab on a regular basis is a theory. Evolution is a theory. Electromagnetism is a theory. The existence of black holes is a theory involving a lot of math and assumption, yet we all for the most part find their existence certainly plausible. Even the way a radio works is a theory because let’s face it, we may have big ideas about how it works with tried and true measurements to support what we all believe in, but let’s face it, no one has ever seen a radio wave. There could be even deeper mysteries to it.

Even in Creationism, we have theories of our own. The difference is that our theories yield to the Word of God which we know to be true. One of these theories is the Hydroplate theory. Hydro meaning water and plate involves the many layers of sediment, dirt, and rock which make up the crust and mantle of the earth. So, the theory involves a subterranean layer of water that is underneath the earth’s surface constituting the water mentioned in Genesis that burst forth from the Great Deep. The theory was developed by a Dr. Walter Brown (Former Air Force Academy Professor, Professor Emeritus of Physics, and Director of the Center of Scientific Creation) who is also a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ. He has created various computer simulations and mathematical models that uncover what we see in scripture with what we see today.

According to Dr. Brown’s theory, 10 miles below the earth’s surface, a subterranean layer of water that was a ½ mile thick existed in various interconnected chambers. This water constituted half of the water in the oceans today existed in this thin spherical shell of interconnected chambers. Subterranean pressures began to build up which caused the earth’s crust to stretch and expand like a balloon causing failures in the earth’s crust in between the hydroplate and the earth’s surface causing a crack to form. The crack went in two different directions: one moving north and one moving south at the rate of 3 miles per second. The cracks followed the path of least resistance as it encircled the globe in about two hours time. As the crack formed, the subterranean water began to vent through the small crack as 10 miles of earth and rock pressing down upon it accelerated the water to hypersonic speeds. Enormous amounts of pressure and hundreds of degrees of heat due to friction took its effect upon the water making its rocketing ascent all the more explosive. As it spewed forth from the crack at speeds breaking the sound barrier, it sprayed 20 miles upward into the earth’s atmosphere giving birth to this global cataclysm. According to Dr. Brown, this event would have the energy release of 10 billion hydrogen bombs. Some of the water coming out of the crack just fell down to the ground as a tidal wave. Some of it began to change weather patterns and set the stage for the forty days and nights of torrential rainfall that the world has never seen before or after. Some of the large volumes of water quickly froze in the earth’s atmosphere and fell back down to earth as a freezing blast instantaneously freezing, suffocating, and burying all life in its path. This is why in places like Siberia and Alaska, you find perfectly preserved mammoths that were instantly frozen in place. The ice age was not global. In caves in Nebraska, evidence can be found for an ice age, while in Arkansas caves, you cannot find evidence for the ice age. So, the effects of the ice age did have north and south limits and would not have affected places like Israel and Mesopotamia, but the Flood did.

The Sedimentary Mudslide

As this high pressure water spewed forth, another thing began to happen. Erosion occurred at the cracks and they were continuously widened as sediments began to spew forth with the water creating a large mudslide on both sides of the cracks covering the continents. The mudslide engulfed plants and animals leading as it spread forth over the land with a tremendous amount of heat and pressure. This set of dynamics led to the rapid production of coal, oil, and the current fossil record. If it were not for this sedimentary burial of animals today, the mineralization process could not have occurred to preserve the animals that are being dug up today. This fact alone challenges evolutionary beliefs in how the fossils got to be in a position to be fossilized in the first place.

The Significance of the Mid Oceanic Ridge (MOR)

The Mid Oceanic Ridge (MOR) is the tallest and largest mountain range in the world and traces the globe like a seam on a baseball. Where is it? It’s on the ocean floor. How did it get there? It’s one of the cracks from the Flood. As the cracks eroded to a certain width, subterranean rocks began to spring upward to form this mountain range. As it gained in height, it elevated the earth’s crust in that region. A small portion of the water left behind from the subterranean hydroplate began to act as a lubricant causing the continents to begin to drift away from the crack. The continents accelerated to a speed of 45 miles per hour until they met resistance. Once resistance is met, the crust began to compress and buckle up and down. Where it buckled up, a mountain was formed. Where it buckled low, a trench was formed. The rising of the MOR continued to push the earth to form the rise of continents, mountains, and oceanic trenches throughout the period of the flood. All major mountain ranges today are parallel to the Mid Oceanic Ridges from where they slid. Eventually water drained off from the rising land into the deep ocean basin.

In Conclusion

Before the Flood, there was no rain: “for the Lord God had not sent rain on the earth . . . but streams (also can be translated as a mist or a spring) came up from the earth and watered the whole surface of the ground.” (Genesis 2:6). Plant life found from this period is described to have very broad leaves in order to catch the mists which supplied the earth its daily allotment of water. God’s Judgment brought change. This cataclysmic Flood left the earth, its climate, and everything now different. Now we have a hydrologic cycle which did not exist before the Flood. In the hydrologic cycle, you have rain falling on the land, then it gets evaporated into the air, it condensates, it rains, and so on. As a result, a dramatic reduction in the size of leaves is noted between the plant life of today and Pre-Flood. Only God could put together something so violent and altering, and could make it so life giving.

In His next and final Judgment according to the book of Revelation, the earth and the universe as a whole shall undergo an intense fire causing them to pass away and leaving us with a New Heaven and a New Earth. There we shall have no tears and no sorrows. There will be no seas for the water that flows there shall be the Water of Life flowing from the Throne of God established on the New Earth. We also will not have any light except for the Light of God. Another Judgment is coming: more severe, more intense, more violent, and much more altering. But, the life it will yield will be all the more exquisite for those who know that Christ is their Ark through the coming storms.