"The distinction between drifting and shifting is subtle but important. A box drifts on the sea, but a box shifts on a ship’s deck. Drifting is a continuing movement on or in a fluid, often for a great distance, while shifting is usually a slight, but limited, lateral movement on or in a solid. Drifting is caused by a steady, unyielding, outside force, while shifting is typically caused by gravity and a change in equilibrium. Drifting requires a continuing energy source, but shifting requires a disturbance. The plate tectonic theory says that continents steadily drift. The hydroplate theory says crustal plates drifted rapidly, but briefly, on a layer of escaping, high-pressure water near the end of the flood. This drifting produced imbalances. Since then, these and other imbalances caused by the flood sporadically shift continents and everything below. Surprisingly, trenches contain shallow-water fossils.
Materials [like fossils] which are usually supposed to be deposited only in shallow water have actually been found on the floor of some of the deep trenches.
Why are such unlikely fossils in a remote part of the ocean—a thousand times deeper than one would expect?
Today, most of the earth’s crust is vertically balanced, like blocks floating in a pan of water. Less dense blocks “float” higher up, while denser blocks sink deeper. This is called isostatic equilibrium. However, ocean trenches are earth’s most glaring departure from this equilibrium and may be an important clue for how trenches formed. As various authorities have written:
... trenches are characterized by large negative gravity anomalies. That is, there appears to be a mass deficiency beneath the trenches, and thus something must be holding the trenches down or else they would rise in order to restore isostatic equilibrium.
The most striking phenomenon associated with the trenches is a deficiency in gravity ... Measurements of gravity near trenches show pronounced departures from the expected values. These gravity anomalies are among the largest found on earth. It is clear that isostatic equilibrium does not exist near the trenches. The trench-producing forces must be acting ... to pull the crust under the trenches downward!
In other words, something has pulled, not pushed, trenches down. Today, the downward pull of gravity in and above trenches is less than expected even after adjusting for the trench’s shape and depth, so less mass exists under trenches than one would expect. It is as if something deep inside the earth “sucked” downward the material directly below trenches. This would reduce the mass below trenches.
Today, crustal plates move an inch or so each year toward trenches, so this “partial vacuum” is slowly being filled in modern times. Clearly, this “filling in” has not been going on for millions of years. A technique called seismic tomography has shown that rock in the upper mantle is denser under continents than under oceans.
Plate tectonic theory claims that earthquakes occur when plates rub against each other, temporarily lock, and then jerk loose. If so, why are some powerful earthquakes far from plate boundaries? Why do local earthquakes sometimes occur when water is forced into the ground after large water reservoirs are built and filled?
Earthquakes near a trench are almost always due to horizontal tension (at the trench location) perpendicular to the trench axis.1 Measurements also show that microearthquakes on the ocean floor tend to occur at low tide.
Furthermore, if slippage has occurred along the San Andreas Fault for eons, friction should have greatly heated the sliding surfaces. Drilling into the fault has not detected that heat. Evidently, movement has not occurred for millions of years and/or the walls of the fault were lubricated.
Almost 90% of all earthquake energy is released under trenches. Earthquakes often occur near sloping planes, called Benioff zones, that intersect a trench. These earthquake zones enter the mantle at 30°–60° angles below the horizontal and extend to depths of about 410 miles.
About 2,000 flat-topped seamounts, called tablemounts, have tops that are 3,000–6,000 feet below sea level. Evidently, as these volcanoes tried to grow above sea level, wave action planed off their tops. Either sea level was once 3,000–6,000 feet lower, or ocean floors were 3,000–6,000 feet higher, or some combination of both. Each possibility raises new and difficult questions.
More than half of the world’s active and dormant land volcanoes and 90% of the world’s earthquakes occur along the ring of fire,... Obviously, that 25,000-mile-long, horseshoe-shaped path is a region that was violently disturbed in the past.
From deep in the mantle, enormous amounts of melted basalt, called flood basalts, rapidly spilled up onto the earth’s crust—especially onto the Pacific basin. Above sea level, some “spills” that we can examine today are large enough to cover the eastern United States to the height of the Appalachian Mountains—from Atlanta to New York City and from the Appalachian Mountains to the Atlantic Ocean. More than a dozen of these convulsions have occurred at different places on land, dwarfing in volume the total magma in all volcanic cones. The volume of all “spills” below sea level may be a hundred times greater.
Rocks are composed of various minerals, some containing molecules of water. These minerals would not feel wet to the touch, because each water molecule is locked separately in a mineral’s crystalline structure, and the water occupies only about one-thousandth of the rock’s volume. Nevertheless, the inner earth is so large that it probably contains several oceans’ worth of water. Some heating process may have released that water, allowing it to collect in larger pockets. That would account for pooled water (with a total volume equal to the water in the Arctic Ocean) that is disbursed 500–750 miles under eastern Asia and part of western North America.
The denser (deeper) magma and the denser unmelted minerals in the magma slowly fell into what grew to become earth’s outer and inner cores, respectively. The less dense magma that formed above the crossover depth tended to escape upward to the earth’s surface as volcanoes or flood basalts. For years after the flood, most eruptions spilled onto the Pacific floor—a floor littered today with 40,000 volcanic cones, each taller than 1 kilometer!
Gravity creates so much compression deep inside the earth that voids cannot open up; rock is always squeezed against rock (including melted rock). Friction from shearing and deformations deep in the earth always melts the sliding surfaces. The magma produced then lubricates those surfaces, so they slip more easily. Island chains often formed where magma escaped upward along these cracks. The Hawaiian Islands and the Emperor Seamounts are prime examples.
For a while, two types of forces resisted the rising of what would become the Atlantic floor: (1) the strength of the rock between that floor and the Pacific side of the earth, and (2) the weight of the stationary hydroplates that still lay above most of what would become the Atlantic floor.
Fractures and melting occurred deeper and deeper beneath the bulging chamber floor on the Atlantic side. Magma produced below the crossover depth contracted, so deeper fracturing, melting, and contraction occurred at an accelerating rate. By the end of the flood phase, the Pacific plate’s sagging foundation had fractured in millions of places, and the magma generated along the deep sliding surfaces instantly contracted. Therefore, the Pacific plate, lacking support, rapidly subsided and sheared around its perimeter—now called the ring of fire. This shearing suddenly increased the upward pressure under the rising Atlantic floor, so the hydroplates began to accelerate away from the rising Mid-Atlantic Ridge. That also removed weight from above the Atlantic floor, so it rose even faster.
After the flood, magma under the Pacific floor, but above the crossover depth, erupted onto the Pacific floor. (To a much lesser extent, eruptions continue today, so in those places, ocean temperatures rise temporarily, a phenomenon called El Niño.) Magma below the crossover depth drains down into the outer core, so the outer core is slowly growing today!
Therefore, the mantle is shifting an inch or so a year, in general, toward the Pacific to replace that escaping volume. These movements and stresses produce earthquakes. Slowly shifting continents led to the mistaken belief that the entire solid mantle somehow circulates as if it were a liquid—and, over millions of years, drifted continents over the face of the earth.
In other words, something has pulled, not pushed, trenches down. Today, the downward pull of gravity in and above trenches is less than expected even after adjusting for the trench’s shape and depth, so less mass exists under trenches than one would expect. It is as if something deep inside the earth “sucked” downward the material directly below trenches. This would reduce the mass below trenches.
Today, crustal plates move an inch or so each year toward trenches, so this “partial vacuum” is slowly being filled in modern times. Clearly, this “filling in” has not been going on for millions of years. A technique called seismic tomography has shown that rock in the upper mantle is denser under continents than under oceans.
Plate tectonic theory claims that earthquakes occur when plates rub against each other, temporarily lock, and then jerk loose. If so, why are some powerful earthquakes far from plate boundaries? Why do local earthquakes sometimes occur when water is forced into the ground after large water reservoirs are built and filled?
Earthquakes near a trench are almost always due to horizontal tension (at the trench location) perpendicular to the trench axis.1 Measurements also show that microearthquakes on the ocean floor tend to occur at low tide.
Furthermore, if slippage has occurred along the San Andreas Fault for eons, friction should have greatly heated the sliding surfaces. Drilling into the fault has not detected that heat. Evidently, movement has not occurred for millions of years and/or the walls of the fault were lubricated.
Almost 90% of all earthquake energy is released under trenches. Earthquakes often occur near sloping planes, called Benioff zones, that intersect a trench. These earthquake zones enter the mantle at 30°–60° angles below the horizontal and extend to depths of about 410 miles.
A prominent feature on all ocean floors is the Mid-Oceanic Ridge. One characteristic of the ridge figures prominently in two competing theories for how trenches formed. As explained in the preceding chapter, the ridge is cracked in a strange pattern. Some cracks are nearly perpendicular to the ridge axis, while other cracks are parallel to it. Their shapes and orientation are best explained by the stretching of the ridge. What would stretch the ridge in two perpendicular directions?
More than 40,000 submarine volcanoes, called seamounts, litter the Pacific floor. Some rise higher above the seafloor than Mount Everest rises above sea level. Strangely, the Atlantic has few seamounts. If, as the plate tectonic theory claims, one plate dives (subducts) beneath another, why aren’t seamounts and soft sediments scraped off the top of the descending plate?
More than half of the world’s active and dormant land volcanoes and 90% of the world’s earthquakes occur along the ring of fire,... Obviously, that 25,000-mile-long, horseshoe-shaped path is a region that was violently disturbed in the past.
From deep in the mantle, enormous amounts of melted basalt, called flood basalts, rapidly spilled up onto the earth’s crust—especially onto the Pacific basin. Above sea level, some “spills” that we can examine today are large enough to cover the eastern United States to the height of the Appalachian Mountains—from Atlanta to New York City and from the Appalachian Mountains to the Atlantic Ocean. More than a dozen of these convulsions have occurred at different places on land, dwarfing in volume the total magma in all volcanic cones. The volume of all “spills” below sea level may be a hundred times greater.
Rocks are composed of various minerals, some containing molecules of water. These minerals would not feel wet to the touch, because each water molecule is locked separately in a mineral’s crystalline structure, and the water occupies only about one-thousandth of the rock’s volume. Nevertheless, the inner earth is so large that it probably contains several oceans’ worth of water. Some heating process may have released that water, allowing it to collect in larger pockets. That would account for pooled water (with a total volume equal to the water in the Arctic Ocean) that is disbursed 500–750 miles under eastern Asia and part of western North America.
The denser (deeper) magma and the denser unmelted minerals in the magma slowly fell into what grew to become earth’s outer and inner cores, respectively. The less dense magma that formed above the crossover depth tended to escape upward to the earth’s surface as volcanoes or flood basalts. For years after the flood, most eruptions spilled onto the Pacific floor—a floor littered today with 40,000 volcanic cones, each taller than 1 kilometer!
Gravity creates so much compression deep inside the earth that voids cannot open up; rock is always squeezed against rock (including melted rock). Friction from shearing and deformations deep in the earth always melts the sliding surfaces. The magma produced then lubricates those surfaces, so they slip more easily. Island chains often formed where magma escaped upward along these cracks. The Hawaiian Islands and the Emperor Seamounts are prime examples.
For a while, two types of forces resisted the rising of what would become the Atlantic floor: (1) the strength of the rock between that floor and the Pacific side of the earth, and (2) the weight of the stationary hydroplates that still lay above most of what would become the Atlantic floor.
Fractures and melting occurred deeper and deeper beneath the bulging chamber floor on the Atlantic side. Magma produced below the crossover depth contracted, so deeper fracturing, melting, and contraction occurred at an accelerating rate. By the end of the flood phase, the Pacific plate’s sagging foundation had fractured in millions of places, and the magma generated along the deep sliding surfaces instantly contracted. Therefore, the Pacific plate, lacking support, rapidly subsided and sheared around its perimeter—now called the ring of fire. This shearing suddenly increased the upward pressure under the rising Atlantic floor, so the hydroplates began to accelerate away from the rising Mid-Atlantic Ridge. That also removed weight from above the Atlantic floor, so it rose even faster.
After the flood, magma under the Pacific floor, but above the crossover depth, erupted onto the Pacific floor. (To a much lesser extent, eruptions continue today, so in those places, ocean temperatures rise temporarily, a phenomenon called El Niño.) Magma below the crossover depth drains down into the outer core, so the outer core is slowly growing today!
Therefore, the mantle is shifting an inch or so a year, in general, toward the Pacific to replace that escaping volume. These movements and stresses produce earthquakes. Slowly shifting continents led to the mistaken belief that the entire solid mantle somehow circulates as if it were a liquid—and, over millions of years, drifted continents over the face of the earth.
Since the flood, magma that spilled up onto the Pacific floor has raised sea level relative to the subsided Pacific plate that lies a few miles below the Pacific floor. This slow rise allowed today’s coral islands on top of tablemounts to grow upward—fast enough to maintain the sunlight they needed for optimal growth. The coral depth below one of these islands, Eniwetok Atoll, is 4,600 feet.
Some claim that if magma spilled out only about 5,000 years ago, heat would still be present. The lack of heat, they assert, shows that millions of years have elapsed. They have overlooked that magma’s contents: (a) crystals of unmelted minerals with high melting temperatures, (b) rock fragments, called xenoliths (ZEN-oh-liths), dislodged by the violent shearing and crushing, and (c) water absorbed by the rising magma as it passed up through what remained of the subterranean water chamber. (This is why volcanoes emit so much water vapor; typically 70% of all the gas released by volcanoes is water vapor.) Because water lowers magma’s melting temperature, the magma remained a liquid at temperatures below the rock’s normal melting temperature. The solid crystals and rock fragments absorbed heat from the magma, so it quickly cooled and solidified.
Afterward, with the overlying rock suddenly gone, only the strength of the upward-bulging chamber floor and the weight of 10 miles of water resisted this upward pressure. Consequently, as the rupture widened, the Mid-Oceanic Ridge suddenly buckled upward. The rising Atlantic floor pulled even deeper material upward. As material shifted within the inner earth toward the rising Atlantic floor, a broader, but initially shallow, depression formed on the opposite side of the earth—the basins of the Pacific and Indian Oceans. Just as the Atlantic floor stretched horizontally as it rose, the western Pacific floor compressed horizontally as it subsided (sank). The trench region of the western Pacific lies near the center of the combined Pacific and Indian Oceans. As material beneath the western Pacific subsided at least 10 miles, it sheared and buckled downward in some places, forming trenches. The Atlantic Ocean (centered at 21.5°W longitude and 10°S latitude) is almost exactly opposite this trench region (centered at 159°E longitude and 10°N latitude).
Frictional heat generated along faults throughout the mantle conducts slowly into the walls of the fault. Above depths of 410 miles (700 kilometers), local instabilities sometimes arise as heat weakens the solid silicate scaffolding and forms more droplets. Once leaks form, the liquid droplets can escape; their buoyancy forces them upward if they are above the crossover depth or downward if they are below the crossover depth. The scaffolding then collapses and generates much more heat and melting. Earthquakes—runaway shocks—result. Gigantic shifts of mass during the flood produced a myriad of fractures within earth’s crust and mantle." by Dr. Walt Brown
....the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up,
and the
windows of heaven were opened.
Genesis 7:11