Introduction to Catastrophic Plate Tectonics
With the understanding that the fossil record is a reliable indicator of the portion of the geological record produced by the Genesis Flood, what sort of physical mechanism could have produced such a staggering amount of geological change during such a brief span of time? An extremely important clue comes from today’s seafloor. Multiple lines of evidence show that all of today’s igneous seafloor rocks cooled and crystallized after a significant fraction of the continental fossil-bearing sediment record was already in place. That means that the Flood cataclysm was already well under way before any of the igneous seafloor which exists today had formed via the process of seafloor spreading. It also means that the entirety of the ocean floor that was on the earth before the Flood and much that formed during the early portion of the Flood has been recycled via subduction into the earth’s interior since the Flood’s beginning. The strong conclusion is that the processes of seafloor spreading and subduction must have unfolded at an extremely rapid pace during the Flood. The implication is that the Flood was not only a hydrological cataclysm but a tectonic cataclysm as well. This inference, which follows directly from the ages of today’s igneous seafloor rocks relative to the continental fossil-bearing sedimentary rocks, forms the logical basis for the concept known today as catastrophic plate tectonics. The following set of papers, arranged in chronological order, traces the development of this concept over the past thirty years.
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1986 First International Conference on Creationism Proceedings
This is the initial publication describing the process of runaway subduction as an important aspect of the Genesis Flood. It includes 2D computer modeling of the runaway process as well as 3D modeling of the breakup of an initially intact supercontinent as a consequence of the subduction of ocean plate. Runaway is accounted for in terms of temperature dependence of rock strength together with localized the shear heating that occurs near the sinking slabs of ocean plate. “Numerical Simulation of the Large-Scale Tectonic Changes Accompanying the Flood” 1990 Second International Conference on Creationism Proceedings
This paper describes more realistic 2D simulation of the runaway process as well a 3D simulation that employs as an initial condition subducting ocean lithosphere around the perimeter of a Pangean supercontinent. The resulting motions of rock inside the mantle as the ocean slabs sink into it produce surface motions that break the Pangean supercontinent apart. The motions of the blocks result in an incipient opening of the Atlantic and Indian Ocean basins. “3-D Finite Element Simulation of the Global Tectonic Changes Accompanying Noah’s Flood” |
For a general introduction to Catastrophic Plate Tectonics please see Dr. Baumgardner's articles on Answers In Genesis in the Forum on Catastrophic Plate Tectonics.
Other Related Papers:
Role of a low-viscosity zone in stabilizing plate tectonics: Implications for comparative terrestrial planetology, 2001 |
1994 Third International Conference on Creationism Proceedings
This paper assesses a much more potent weakening mechanism than simple thermal weakening to enable the runaway process, namely, the strongly non-linear, strain-rate dependent deformation mechanism known as power-law creep. This mechanism had already been studied and characterized in silicate minerals for several decades and was known to operate in the earth’s mantle.
“Runaway Subduction as the Driving Mechanism for the Genesis Flood”
1994 Third International Conference on Creationism Proceedings
This paper describes major advances made in the 3D modeling of Flood tectonics relative to the 1990 paper. These advances include a highly realistic representation of the radial variations in mantle properties, including effects of rock compressibility and of mineral phase changes. Another advance is a particle-in-cell method for accurate tracking the identities and motions of surface plates. Yet another advance relates to a new initial mantle temperature distribution involving segments of subducted ocean lithosphere along the perimeter of the Pangean supercontinent. This relatively mild initial temperature variation from a purely uniform lateral temperature distribution leads to motions of the continental blocks amazingly consistent with what data from today’s seafloor indicate actually occurred.
“Computer Modeling of the Large-Scale Tectonics Associated with the Genesis Flood”
1994 Third International Conference on Creationism Proceedings
A joint paper by Austin, Baumgardner, Humphreys, Snelling, Vardiman, and Wise that provides an overview of how the Genesis Flood, with rapid plate tectonics as its primary physical mechanism, resurfaced the entire earth in the time span of only a few months.
“Catastrophic Plate Tectonics: A Global Flood Model of Earth History”
1997 U.S. New and World Report (June 16 issue)
This article, written by a secular reporter, nevertheless presents a surprisingly accurate account of Baumgardner’s conversion and subsequent Christian journey. He writes, “Terra was created by a Los Alamos lab scientist, the world’s pre-eminent expert in the design of computer models for geophysical convection, the process by which the earth creates volcanos, earthquakes, and the movement of the continental plates. Terra is a fascinating program, but perhaps what is most fascinating about it is that it exists because its creator, John Baumgardner, is a fundamentalist Christian who believes, in accordance with the Bible, that the earth was created by God less than 10,000 years ago. In fact, Baumgardner created Terra expressly to prove that the story of Noah and the flood of Genesis 7:18—‘And the waters prevailed, and were increased greatly upon the Earth; and the ark went upon the face of the waters’—happened exactly as the Bible tells it. Not only did he come up with a tool used by geophysicists around the world but his ‘numerical code’ actually proves the Bible is correct. Or at least in Baumgardner’s view it does.”
“The Geophysics of God: A Scientist Embraces Plate Tectonics—and Noah’s Flood”
2000 Geophysical Astrophysical Fluid Dynamics
This highly technical paper reports a portion of the research work of Woo-Sun Yang for his Ph.D. at the University of Illinois, in particular, his development of a numerical scheme able to cope with the extreme viscosity changes that arise in the context of runaway subduction. This scheme made possible for the first time numerical calculations that did not fail due to the extremely large gradients in material strength that commonly arise.
“A Matrix-Dependent Transfer Multigrid Method for Strongly Variable Viscosity Infinite Prandtl Number Thermal Convection”
2002 Journal of Creation --Forum on Catastrophic Plate Tectonics
This paper is the first of six articles in a forum on the topic of catastrophic plate tectonics as a prominent aspect of the mechanics of the Genesis Flood. The forum consisted of three rounds, each with one paper ‘for’ CPT and one ‘against’. Authors are John Baumgardner and Michael Oard, who represent the ‘for’ and ‘against’ position, respectively.
“Catastrophic Plate Tectonics: The Geophysical Context of the Genesis Flood”
2003 Fifth International Conference on Creationism Proceedings
This important paper reports several groundbreaking advances in modeling the runaway subduction phenomenon. First, an even more potent type of silicate weakening known as plastic yield is included in the deformation model. Second, use of the matrix-dependent multigrid method developed by Yang (2000) allows the 2D runaway computation to remain stable from beginning to end. An astonishing result never observed previously is that the runaway sinking of ocean lithosphere together with runaway upwelling of the hot bottom layer of the mantle leads to dramatic non-local weakening throughout the entire mantle! This has huge implications for the reality of global mantle overturn during the few months allowed by the Genesis Flood timescale. 3D modeling of the breakup of a Pangean supercontinent includes all the advances described in the 1994 3D paper, plus a doubling in the spatial resolution (i.e., eight times the number of grid points in the computational mesh), that results in a much more detailed solution.
“Catastrophic Plate Tectonics: The Physics Behind the Genesis Flood”
2003 Fifth International Conference on Creationism Proceedings
This paper poses the question: Did God during creation week fashion the earth’s lithosphere with built-in internal stresses, zones of weakness, and slow deformations pre-calculated to unleash global tectonic catastrophe on precisely the day Noah and his family would board the Ark, or did God employ other special means to initiate the Flood cataclysm? The authors conclude that deformation and creep effects alone, established by God at creation, can account for the onset of the catastrophe.
“What Initiated the Flood Cataclysm?”
2005 Institute for Creation Research Impact Article
This article addresses an ongoing enigma for the standard geological community of why all the high mountain ranges of the world—including the Himalayas, the Alps, the Andes, and the Rockies—experienced most of the uplift to their present elevations in what amounts to a blink of the eye, relative to the standard geological time scale. These mountain ranges have all undergone several kilometers of vertical uplift since near the onset of the Ice Age. The article explains why this rapid and recent uplift is a logical consequence of an episode of catastrophic plate tectonics during the Genesis Flood.
“Recent Rapid Uplift of Today’s Mountains”
2011 Flood Science Review conducted by In Jesus’ Name Productions
This set of 101 questions and answers is an outcome of a major peer review of Flood models that began early in 2009 and continued through the summer of 2011, initiated and led by Joe Bardwell, president of In Jesus’ Name Productions. The review itself included six different Flood models and involved five rounds of questions from a ten-member review panel and answers from the authors of the respective models. The chief objective of the review was to evaluate the technical underpinnings of each model. This was by far the most thorough effort ever undertaken to examine and compare the science behind the various attempts to account for the physical aspects of the Genesis Flood. The questions and answers pertaining to the catastrophic plate tectonics (CPT) portion of the review are included here. The full Flood Science Review can be downloaded at http://www.ijnp.org/flood-science-review.
“101 Questions and Answers Concerning Catastrophic Plate Tectonics”
2012 Journal of Creation
This article focuses on the question of whether or not the primary plate tectonic processes of seafloor spreading and subduction are occurring in the present day. Restricting the scope to the present moment eliminates many of the issues arising from uniformitarian bias on the part of the secular earth science community. The article considers the GPS determinations of present-day plate motions, the present-day distribution of seismicity, the topography and elevated heat flow along the present-day mid-ocean ridge system, the slip and fault plane orientation of present-day mega-earthquakes, and the close association of most present-day volcanism with deep ocean trenches. It concludes that these multiple, largely independent, lines of observational evidence support strongly the premise that coherent plate motions, commonly on the order of centimeters per year, are occurring and that seafloor spreading and subduction are close to undeniable realities.
“Is Plate Tectonics Occurring Today?”
2013 Journal of Creation
This paper is a response to a claim in an earlier Journal of Creation article that the motions documented by NASA’s network of over 2,000 GPS stations do not imply that the plates are moving in a coherent manner, converging at subduction zones, and diverging at mid-ocean ridges, primarily because the required plate driving forces do not exist. This paper provides detailed quantitative analyses of the slab-pull, ridge-push, basal drag, slab penetration resistance forces and shows that these forces do indeed elegantly and convincingly account for observed plate motions.
“Global tectonics—Clarity, Not Confusion”
2013 Seventh International Conference on Creationism Proceedings
This paper applies a well-established engineering method for modeling deformation in crystalline solids study to demonstrate for the first time that a type of solid-state plastic deformation known as dislocation glide is likely the crystallographic phenomenon at the atomic level responsible for buoyancy-driven runaway in the mantle of a planet with a mass and gravity field like that of the earth.
“New Material Model Reveals Inherent Tendency in Mantle Minerals for Runaway Mantle Dynamics”
2018 Answers Research Journal
This paper describes a numerical model for investigating the large-scale erosion, transport, and sedimentation processes associated with the Genesis Flood. The model assumes that the dominant means for sediment transport during the Flood was by rapidly flowing turbulent water. Water motion is driven by large-amplitude tsunamis that are generated along subduction zone segments as the subducting plate and overriding plate, in a cyclic manner, lock and then suddenly release and slip rapidly past one another. While the two adjacent plates are locked, the sea bottom is dragged downward by the steadily sinking lithospheric slab beneath. When the plates unlock, the sea bottom rapidly rebounds, generating a large-amplitude tsunami. Theory for open-channel turbulent flow is applied to model the suspension, transport, and deposition of sediment. Cavitation is assumed to be the dominant erosional mechanism responsible for degradation of bedrock as well as for erosion of already deposited sediment. The model treats the water on the surface of the rotating earth in terms of a single vertical layer but with variable bottom height. Illustrative calculations show that with plausible parameter choices average erosion and sedimentation rates on the order of 9m/day (0.38m/hr) occur, sufficient within a 150-day interval during the Flood to account for some 70% of the Phanerozoic sediments that blanket the earth’s continental surfaces today.
“Numerical Modeling of the Large-Scale Erosion, Sediment Transport, and Deposition Processes of the Genesis Flood” (https://assets.answersingenesis.org/doc/articles/pdf-versions/arj/v11/numerical-modeling-sediment-transport.pdf)
2018 Eighth International Conference on Creationism Proceedings
This paper applies numerical modeling to explore the question of whether repetitive giant tsunamis generated by catastrophic plate tectonics during the Genesis Flood can plausibly account for the Flood sediment record. The modeling suggests with reasonable parameter choices that tsunami-driven erosion during the Genesis Flood can produce considerable volumes of new sediment, 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. The model incorporates a representation of the dynamic history of the continental blocks to explore the consequences of continental motions. It also includes an initial continental topography, with low elevations along the coasts and higher elevations inland. This computational study provides 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, primary sources of the sediment, primary means of sediment transport and deposition across the continent surface, why so little erosional channeling occurred between sediment layers, processes responsible for observed paleocurrent directions, and mechanisms responsible for the abundance of planar erosional features at many scales. Despites its preliminary nature, this study suggests strongly that tsunamis likely played a key role in producing the fossil-bearing sediment record we observe today.
“Understanding How the Flood Sediment Record Was Formed: The Role of Large Tsunamis”(https://digitalcommons.cedarville.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1020&context=icc_proceedings)
2018 Eighth International Conference on Creationism Proceedings
This paper reports results from an investigation of the effects of grain size, recrystallization, creep, and texture on overall rock strength within the Earth’s mantle during the Genesis Flood. The study uses experimental rheological data obtained from the mineralogical literature for olivine, which is an important mantle mineral. An Internal State Variable (ISV) constitutive model within the framework of the TERRA finite element code is applied to capture the subscale structures and their associated dynamics, strength, and viscosity effects during the Flood episode. The numerical investigations, in both 2D and 3D, that include the improved deformation model reveal even more clearly that the potential for mantle instability enabled an episode of catastrophic plate tectonics to occur. This mantle instability arises from the extreme weakening behavior resulting from the relationship between microstructural features (texture, recrystallization, and grain size) and thermomechanical properties (e.g., stress and viscosity) under the conditions of temperature, pressure, and strain rate within the mantle during the Genesis Flood. This study shows more clearly than ever before that this weakening enabled mantle instability played a central role in the global Flood described in Genesis 7-8.
“Numerical Investigation of Strength-Reducing Mechanisms of Mantle Rock During the Genesis Flood” (https://digitalcommons.cedarville.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1067&context=icc_proceedings
2019 International Journal of Plasticity
This paper provides more detail on the latest deformation model for silicate rocks which yields catastrophic mantle runaway behavior under the conditions of the Genesis Flood. This highly technical paper presents a history dependent and physically-motivated internal state variable (ISV) constitutive model that simultaneously accounts for the effects of static recrystallization, dynamic recrystallization, and grain size with respect to the mechanical behavior under different strain rates, temperatures, and pressures. A unique aspect of this ISV constitutive model is that grain size and recrystallized volume fraction can be directly included along with its associated rate of change under deformation and time in a coupled manner. The model has been calibrated to several metals as well as to the geological materials olivine and clinopyroxene. The model calibration shows good agreement with the experimental stress-strain behavior and average grain size data. Validation of the ISV constitutive model has been accomplished by applying the calibrated model to the complex and history sensitive thermomechanical problems of (i) sequential transitions of different loading conditions and (ii) a multistage tubing process. The history dependence naturally provided by the ISV method enables the model to reproduce with good fidelity the experimentally observed behavior for these complex boundary value problems with changing boundary conditions.
A unified static and dynamic recrystallization Internal State Variable (ISV) constitutive model coupled with grain size evolution for metals and mineral aggregates (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0749641918303139)
This paper assesses a much more potent weakening mechanism than simple thermal weakening to enable the runaway process, namely, the strongly non-linear, strain-rate dependent deformation mechanism known as power-law creep. This mechanism had already been studied and characterized in silicate minerals for several decades and was known to operate in the earth’s mantle.
“Runaway Subduction as the Driving Mechanism for the Genesis Flood”
1994 Third International Conference on Creationism Proceedings
This paper describes major advances made in the 3D modeling of Flood tectonics relative to the 1990 paper. These advances include a highly realistic representation of the radial variations in mantle properties, including effects of rock compressibility and of mineral phase changes. Another advance is a particle-in-cell method for accurate tracking the identities and motions of surface plates. Yet another advance relates to a new initial mantle temperature distribution involving segments of subducted ocean lithosphere along the perimeter of the Pangean supercontinent. This relatively mild initial temperature variation from a purely uniform lateral temperature distribution leads to motions of the continental blocks amazingly consistent with what data from today’s seafloor indicate actually occurred.
“Computer Modeling of the Large-Scale Tectonics Associated with the Genesis Flood”
1994 Third International Conference on Creationism Proceedings
A joint paper by Austin, Baumgardner, Humphreys, Snelling, Vardiman, and Wise that provides an overview of how the Genesis Flood, with rapid plate tectonics as its primary physical mechanism, resurfaced the entire earth in the time span of only a few months.
“Catastrophic Plate Tectonics: A Global Flood Model of Earth History”
1997 U.S. New and World Report (June 16 issue)
This article, written by a secular reporter, nevertheless presents a surprisingly accurate account of Baumgardner’s conversion and subsequent Christian journey. He writes, “Terra was created by a Los Alamos lab scientist, the world’s pre-eminent expert in the design of computer models for geophysical convection, the process by which the earth creates volcanos, earthquakes, and the movement of the continental plates. Terra is a fascinating program, but perhaps what is most fascinating about it is that it exists because its creator, John Baumgardner, is a fundamentalist Christian who believes, in accordance with the Bible, that the earth was created by God less than 10,000 years ago. In fact, Baumgardner created Terra expressly to prove that the story of Noah and the flood of Genesis 7:18—‘And the waters prevailed, and were increased greatly upon the Earth; and the ark went upon the face of the waters’—happened exactly as the Bible tells it. Not only did he come up with a tool used by geophysicists around the world but his ‘numerical code’ actually proves the Bible is correct. Or at least in Baumgardner’s view it does.”
“The Geophysics of God: A Scientist Embraces Plate Tectonics—and Noah’s Flood”
2000 Geophysical Astrophysical Fluid Dynamics
This highly technical paper reports a portion of the research work of Woo-Sun Yang for his Ph.D. at the University of Illinois, in particular, his development of a numerical scheme able to cope with the extreme viscosity changes that arise in the context of runaway subduction. This scheme made possible for the first time numerical calculations that did not fail due to the extremely large gradients in material strength that commonly arise.
“A Matrix-Dependent Transfer Multigrid Method for Strongly Variable Viscosity Infinite Prandtl Number Thermal Convection”
2002 Journal of Creation --Forum on Catastrophic Plate Tectonics
This paper is the first of six articles in a forum on the topic of catastrophic plate tectonics as a prominent aspect of the mechanics of the Genesis Flood. The forum consisted of three rounds, each with one paper ‘for’ CPT and one ‘against’. Authors are John Baumgardner and Michael Oard, who represent the ‘for’ and ‘against’ position, respectively.
“Catastrophic Plate Tectonics: The Geophysical Context of the Genesis Flood”
2003 Fifth International Conference on Creationism Proceedings
This important paper reports several groundbreaking advances in modeling the runaway subduction phenomenon. First, an even more potent type of silicate weakening known as plastic yield is included in the deformation model. Second, use of the matrix-dependent multigrid method developed by Yang (2000) allows the 2D runaway computation to remain stable from beginning to end. An astonishing result never observed previously is that the runaway sinking of ocean lithosphere together with runaway upwelling of the hot bottom layer of the mantle leads to dramatic non-local weakening throughout the entire mantle! This has huge implications for the reality of global mantle overturn during the few months allowed by the Genesis Flood timescale. 3D modeling of the breakup of a Pangean supercontinent includes all the advances described in the 1994 3D paper, plus a doubling in the spatial resolution (i.e., eight times the number of grid points in the computational mesh), that results in a much more detailed solution.
“Catastrophic Plate Tectonics: The Physics Behind the Genesis Flood”
2003 Fifth International Conference on Creationism Proceedings
This paper poses the question: Did God during creation week fashion the earth’s lithosphere with built-in internal stresses, zones of weakness, and slow deformations pre-calculated to unleash global tectonic catastrophe on precisely the day Noah and his family would board the Ark, or did God employ other special means to initiate the Flood cataclysm? The authors conclude that deformation and creep effects alone, established by God at creation, can account for the onset of the catastrophe.
“What Initiated the Flood Cataclysm?”
2005 Institute for Creation Research Impact Article
This article addresses an ongoing enigma for the standard geological community of why all the high mountain ranges of the world—including the Himalayas, the Alps, the Andes, and the Rockies—experienced most of the uplift to their present elevations in what amounts to a blink of the eye, relative to the standard geological time scale. These mountain ranges have all undergone several kilometers of vertical uplift since near the onset of the Ice Age. The article explains why this rapid and recent uplift is a logical consequence of an episode of catastrophic plate tectonics during the Genesis Flood.
“Recent Rapid Uplift of Today’s Mountains”
2011 Flood Science Review conducted by In Jesus’ Name Productions
This set of 101 questions and answers is an outcome of a major peer review of Flood models that began early in 2009 and continued through the summer of 2011, initiated and led by Joe Bardwell, president of In Jesus’ Name Productions. The review itself included six different Flood models and involved five rounds of questions from a ten-member review panel and answers from the authors of the respective models. The chief objective of the review was to evaluate the technical underpinnings of each model. This was by far the most thorough effort ever undertaken to examine and compare the science behind the various attempts to account for the physical aspects of the Genesis Flood. The questions and answers pertaining to the catastrophic plate tectonics (CPT) portion of the review are included here. The full Flood Science Review can be downloaded at http://www.ijnp.org/flood-science-review.
“101 Questions and Answers Concerning Catastrophic Plate Tectonics”
2012 Journal of Creation
This article focuses on the question of whether or not the primary plate tectonic processes of seafloor spreading and subduction are occurring in the present day. Restricting the scope to the present moment eliminates many of the issues arising from uniformitarian bias on the part of the secular earth science community. The article considers the GPS determinations of present-day plate motions, the present-day distribution of seismicity, the topography and elevated heat flow along the present-day mid-ocean ridge system, the slip and fault plane orientation of present-day mega-earthquakes, and the close association of most present-day volcanism with deep ocean trenches. It concludes that these multiple, largely independent, lines of observational evidence support strongly the premise that coherent plate motions, commonly on the order of centimeters per year, are occurring and that seafloor spreading and subduction are close to undeniable realities.
“Is Plate Tectonics Occurring Today?”
2013 Journal of Creation
This paper is a response to a claim in an earlier Journal of Creation article that the motions documented by NASA’s network of over 2,000 GPS stations do not imply that the plates are moving in a coherent manner, converging at subduction zones, and diverging at mid-ocean ridges, primarily because the required plate driving forces do not exist. This paper provides detailed quantitative analyses of the slab-pull, ridge-push, basal drag, slab penetration resistance forces and shows that these forces do indeed elegantly and convincingly account for observed plate motions.
“Global tectonics—Clarity, Not Confusion”
2013 Seventh International Conference on Creationism Proceedings
This paper applies a well-established engineering method for modeling deformation in crystalline solids study to demonstrate for the first time that a type of solid-state plastic deformation known as dislocation glide is likely the crystallographic phenomenon at the atomic level responsible for buoyancy-driven runaway in the mantle of a planet with a mass and gravity field like that of the earth.
“New Material Model Reveals Inherent Tendency in Mantle Minerals for Runaway Mantle Dynamics”
2018 Answers Research Journal
This paper describes a numerical model for investigating the large-scale erosion, transport, and sedimentation processes associated with the Genesis Flood. The model assumes that the dominant means for sediment transport during the Flood was by rapidly flowing turbulent water. Water motion is driven by large-amplitude tsunamis that are generated along subduction zone segments as the subducting plate and overriding plate, in a cyclic manner, lock and then suddenly release and slip rapidly past one another. While the two adjacent plates are locked, the sea bottom is dragged downward by the steadily sinking lithospheric slab beneath. When the plates unlock, the sea bottom rapidly rebounds, generating a large-amplitude tsunami. Theory for open-channel turbulent flow is applied to model the suspension, transport, and deposition of sediment. Cavitation is assumed to be the dominant erosional mechanism responsible for degradation of bedrock as well as for erosion of already deposited sediment. The model treats the water on the surface of the rotating earth in terms of a single vertical layer but with variable bottom height. Illustrative calculations show that with plausible parameter choices average erosion and sedimentation rates on the order of 9m/day (0.38m/hr) occur, sufficient within a 150-day interval during the Flood to account for some 70% of the Phanerozoic sediments that blanket the earth’s continental surfaces today.
“Numerical Modeling of the Large-Scale Erosion, Sediment Transport, and Deposition Processes of the Genesis Flood” (https://assets.answersingenesis.org/doc/articles/pdf-versions/arj/v11/numerical-modeling-sediment-transport.pdf)
2018 Eighth International Conference on Creationism Proceedings
This paper applies numerical modeling to explore the question of whether repetitive giant tsunamis generated by catastrophic plate tectonics during the Genesis Flood can plausibly account for the Flood sediment record. The modeling suggests with reasonable parameter choices that tsunami-driven erosion during the Genesis Flood can produce considerable volumes of new sediment, 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. The model incorporates a representation of the dynamic history of the continental blocks to explore the consequences of continental motions. It also includes an initial continental topography, with low elevations along the coasts and higher elevations inland. This computational study provides 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, primary sources of the sediment, primary means of sediment transport and deposition across the continent surface, why so little erosional channeling occurred between sediment layers, processes responsible for observed paleocurrent directions, and mechanisms responsible for the abundance of planar erosional features at many scales. Despites its preliminary nature, this study suggests strongly that tsunamis likely played a key role in producing the fossil-bearing sediment record we observe today.
“Understanding How the Flood Sediment Record Was Formed: The Role of Large Tsunamis”(https://digitalcommons.cedarville.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1020&context=icc_proceedings)
2018 Eighth International Conference on Creationism Proceedings
This paper reports results from an investigation of the effects of grain size, recrystallization, creep, and texture on overall rock strength within the Earth’s mantle during the Genesis Flood. The study uses experimental rheological data obtained from the mineralogical literature for olivine, which is an important mantle mineral. An Internal State Variable (ISV) constitutive model within the framework of the TERRA finite element code is applied to capture the subscale structures and their associated dynamics, strength, and viscosity effects during the Flood episode. The numerical investigations, in both 2D and 3D, that include the improved deformation model reveal even more clearly that the potential for mantle instability enabled an episode of catastrophic plate tectonics to occur. This mantle instability arises from the extreme weakening behavior resulting from the relationship between microstructural features (texture, recrystallization, and grain size) and thermomechanical properties (e.g., stress and viscosity) under the conditions of temperature, pressure, and strain rate within the mantle during the Genesis Flood. This study shows more clearly than ever before that this weakening enabled mantle instability played a central role in the global Flood described in Genesis 7-8.
“Numerical Investigation of Strength-Reducing Mechanisms of Mantle Rock During the Genesis Flood” (https://digitalcommons.cedarville.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1067&context=icc_proceedings
2019 International Journal of Plasticity
This paper provides more detail on the latest deformation model for silicate rocks which yields catastrophic mantle runaway behavior under the conditions of the Genesis Flood. This highly technical paper presents a history dependent and physically-motivated internal state variable (ISV) constitutive model that simultaneously accounts for the effects of static recrystallization, dynamic recrystallization, and grain size with respect to the mechanical behavior under different strain rates, temperatures, and pressures. A unique aspect of this ISV constitutive model is that grain size and recrystallized volume fraction can be directly included along with its associated rate of change under deformation and time in a coupled manner. The model has been calibrated to several metals as well as to the geological materials olivine and clinopyroxene. The model calibration shows good agreement with the experimental stress-strain behavior and average grain size data. Validation of the ISV constitutive model has been accomplished by applying the calibrated model to the complex and history sensitive thermomechanical problems of (i) sequential transitions of different loading conditions and (ii) a multistage tubing process. The history dependence naturally provided by the ISV method enables the model to reproduce with good fidelity the experimentally observed behavior for these complex boundary value problems with changing boundary conditions.
A unified static and dynamic recrystallization Internal State Variable (ISV) constitutive model coupled with grain size evolution for metals and mineral aggregates (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0749641918303139)