Hydroplate Theory

UPDATE: I've just now noticed that most of my images have disappeared (my mistake), so rather than recollect/restore them I'll just suggest you look at the pix on this page in the original: http://www.creationscience.com/onlinebook/HydroplateOverview7.html
/End of UPDATE


There's an online book (http://www.creationscience.com/onlinebook/, from which all illustrations below have been taken (apologies that the right-side of the pix are chopped off; go see the originals at the link above)) that presents a "Hydroplate Theory" for the current structure of the earth's surface. I find it fascinating, and although not everyone will want to read the whole book, you might find looking at a few pictures to be interesting.

The basic jist is that prior to the Flood there was a vast underground reservoir about 10 miles below the surface of the earth, and about half a mile deep. There were pillar-like supports dividing this reservoir into interconnected chambers and providing support for the crust above it. During the 1656 years between the Creation and the Flood, tidal forces (from the moon acting on these underground water chambers, just as it acts on today's oceans) caused daily stretching/compressing cycles on these pillars that built up heat and pressure, and that caused partial melting of these pillars allowing iron and nickel to sink to their bottoms while quartz remained nearer the top.



Eventually, in Noah's day, the pressure got so great that some micro-fractures opened up on the surface of the earth. These micro-fractures rapidly spread around the globe (in a matter of hour), causing the beginning of the world-encircling mid-oceanic ridge.






The sudden release of this pressurized water was even stronger than you'd think, because of some interesting physics that take place with water under certain pressures and temperatures, and when the fountains of the deep blew, they blew catastrophically.





The rift quickly eroded, and the eroded portions of the crust formed huge deposits of sediments that quickly buried many organisms, later to become fossils, and that got blown into space to become our modern-day asteroid belt,asteroids, meteoroids (composed largely of iron and nickel), and comets (http://www.creationscience.com/onlinebook/Asteroids2.html), and that blasted craters in nearby planets and moons.

As the heavy overlying crust was eroded away, the underlying pressure forced the remaining crustal plates up; the continents sitting on those plates, lubricated by a still-remaining water layer, slid down the slopes thus created, away from the upraised ridge.



They traveled rapidly, and then came to a rather abrupt slowdown at the end of their trip, causing all sorts of continental crunching and folding and uplifting, giving form to our modern-day folded and up-turned mountain ranges.


The newly exposed thin crustal plates now allowed all sorts of incredible volcanism to burst forth, spewing forth millions of cubic kilometers of lava, giving rise to the vast volcanic deposits we see on the Earth's surface today.

As the continents were compressed by their sudden stop, they thickened (trading thickness for breadth), and rose up out of the flood waters while sinking down to the newly-evacuated underground chambers, choking off further flood-waters. Water rushed off the newly-exposed land into the newly widened space between continents, creating vast sheet-erosion of freshly-laid sediments at first, and then slowing down to a vast "trickle" carving canyons and valleys. Trapped lakes later breached natural dams, causing further erosion (such as the Grand Canyon by the sudden drainage of two vast lakes East of the canyon), or died a slow death of evaporation, leaving great salt flats such as the Salt Flats of Nevada and the Great Salt Lake of Utah.

In the early years after the flood, sea level was much lower than at present, creating land bridges for humans and animals to cross into islands and continents now separated by water barriers. As the continents sank into the underground chambers over the course of several centuries, sea level "rose" to its present level, drowning those land bridges.

The incredible amounts of warm water, leading to high rates of evaporation, combined with the cold atmosphere from all the volcanism and debris and re-radiation of solar heat from so much water reflecting it, and cloud cover preventing solar heat, would have caused centuries of heavy snow, resulting in an "ice age".

All-in-all, a rather fascinating theory that accounts for a lot of observations.