Plate tectonics, mountain building, and the Flood

John S You're quite right that this puts a severe constrint on when the flood peak occurred. I simply haven't done the research, and am unaware of whether any creationists have done it yet. This work should be done, agreed, but I'm not preprared to accept a blanket statement that there was never a period when the Earth wasn't sufficently flat to be covered by the exisiting water. As usual in this debate there is no simple resource to find the answer because the issue is simply not one of specific interest to mainstream researchers.The ocean basins would also have been shallower than mainstream science predicts. During catastrophic spreading and drift the hot newly created sea-floor would have risen. Yes, but how high were these mountains? Who says that they weren't all below 3000 feet for example? I'm not saying they were but it's something that needs to be researched. No, I agree with the mainstream observatons that Pangea itself was formed during what we would call the flood as well as its break-up. I was simply highlighting the most well known event of plate tectonics (Pangea break-up). Agreed. All possibly true but its certinaty becomes less and less eliable the further we go back. We need to study what the actual heights and timing of all of the montain ranges were. We also put down the creation day-3 event (where the land came up out of the sea) to a catastrophic tectonic event, probably also triggered by accelerated radiodecay. There may be a window during which it was possible to cover the Earth. I ahven't seen any data in your posts about the heights of ancient mountain ranges. Agreed with the proviso of the creationist time scale.Thanks for keeping us honest John. Our scenario is quite falsifiable which is a good thing. But we'll have to do more work than these posts to falsify this falisfiable claim.[This message has been edited by Tranquility Base, 01-15-2003]

John S I'm well aware that mainstream researchers are interested in past mountain building but not particularaly if there was a time when the Earth was flat enough to be covered 100%!There is no table of data showing estimates fo all past mountain ranges with estimated age of uplift in some review article. It is the same issue throughout science. ANytime I want an answer I have to collate it myself because it is not of particular interest to mainstream science.Creationists, for example, are interested to see the paelocurrent measurements (let me know if I need to explain that) correlated in global maps for each period. This is of little interest to mainstram researchers who think that these things shouldn't generally be gloablly correlated.For that reason the best colleciton of mainstream paelocurrent data has been organized by the creationist Chadwick on a web site. This is analgous to mainstream genomics reseachers having to go to a creaitionst site, rahter than NCBI, to access the human genome!The best catalogue of global fossil distribution per period geographically illustrated (to a resolution of around 50 miles I think) is also a creationist work (Woodmorappe on this occasion). Interesting but are you sure you aren't missing the more obvious methods such as looking at the deformation of strata etc and determining when it occurred by relative deformaiton vertically? But your method sounds interesting - has it been applied? I think isotope ratios are primarily dependent on temperature aren't they? In our scenario we have all sorts of things going on on that front of course. This all presumes unifromitarianism John (in this case of ocean or perhaps atmospheric temperature). At this point we need to know what has already been reliably done. Then we can prpose schemes for pushing the data. Agreed but the precision will be low. This should all be done but from my general reading I suspect it will be consistent with our scenario. I have actaully searched abstracts and the web for heights of ancient chains in the past and I find very little. This is what made me suspect that it was a hard ask. All possible but I think I'll leave it to the mainstream geologists and we'll see what they come up with. Sure, so when were they uplifted? We'll see. You all said that the geo-col was consistent with uniformitarianism. When we go and check we find incredible evidence of high energy events. Correlated paleocurrents half way across continents, vast sorted beds, no modern equivalents (in scope) for most Paleozoic marine strata in N. America and Mesozoic marine strata in Africa etc and fossil graveyards.So we take those claims that 'seafloors look like non-catastrophic flows' with a few grains of salt. Agreed What you call continuous we call catastrophic at 4000BC (creation day 3) and catstrophic at and around the 2500BC flood. Continuous for all intents and purposes. From both your POV and mine a 1500 year gap would generate a trivial non-confromity and be easily consistent with the tectonic record.[This message has been edited by Tranquility Base, 01-16-2003]

John SI'm happy to psotpone sedemintological aspects (they've been discussed a lot in the past here you realise of course).I agree with everything you've written. I'll just point out that you are yet to come up with any hard data on heights. Your cited 9km is really a theoretical/extrapolated expectation. In our sceanrio these warpings and uplifts happened catastrophically simultaneously with huge flood sruges. So the uplifts could have occurred shattering rock that was catastrophically carried away. It may never have reached the heights you understandably expect even though the left over warping is compatible with such heigths.

Edge Quite true although I got the impression that on average there may have been fewer high mountains in the Paleozoic/early Mesozoic. I may be wrong.Like I said, I've searched for the data and come up empty handed. I have learned quite a bit from John S on the issue and that will help me next time I venture out into the geo-lit on this issue.

As an excesize, can someone here post a clear summary of the evidence that a Paleozoic mountain chain was entirely uplifted prior to the Mesozoic being deposited? Let us look carefully at the actual data. In our sceanrio the uplift could have been occurring gradually during the flood with its peak being achieved only after the 100% covering. Can we really identify the height prior to the Mesozoic or is it actaully a lot of guess work?