continental drift

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Originally posted by Joe Meert:
He's being generous to the ye-creationist crowd. If they drifted apart during the 40 days of tumult it would be more like 3 miles/hour.

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Cheers

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Joe Meert

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What I find even more interesting is how the rate of drift suddenly dropped to a more sedate cm/yr pace just before humans began to observe and navigate the oceans. Kind of the same way that the speed of light suddenly stopped decreasing in the 1960's when we began to be able to get accurate measurements. These were just lucky coincidences, I guess.

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Originally posted by TrueCreation:
"someone demonstrate that this kind of drift is possible, and the mechanism driving it."
--Magma upwelling (I'm sure you've studied geology and the pangea breakaway) and heavy oceanic crust pushing against continental plates resulting in rapid subduction.

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So, where are the subduction zones bounding the Atlantic Ocean where the oceanic plates are pushing the continents along? Do you really think that you can push lithospheric plates from the spreading zones?

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Originally posted by TrueCreation:
edge: "So, where are the subduction zones bounding the Atlantic Ocean where the oceanic plates are pushing the continents along?"

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--In the Atlantic, If my mind serves me right, there is only one subduction zone and that is above cuba, which is one of the deepest in the world, the pacific plate (the ring of fire) is quite known for its subduction zones encompassing its perimeter. Magma upwelling is what forced the continents to split to form the mid-atlantic ridge and the atlantic ocean.

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In case you didn't notice, the Cuban trench does not exactly bound the entire Atlantic Ocean. Your earlier statement said that the oceanic crust pushing against the continents would result in rapid subduction as I remember. My point is that this is not always the case. So how does your model work for the Atlantic Ocean?

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"Do you really think that you can push lithospheric plates from the spreading zones?"

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--Why not? It happens all the time (otherwize the phenomena of plate tectonics would not exist).

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It does? Just because you say so? Don't you think there are other mechanisms? I can think of three others without spraining a neuron. A lack of knowledge helps you overlook numerous facts in the geology of the earth and allow you to reconcile an ad hoc, flimsy concept of plate tectonics.

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[This message has been edited by edge, 03-16-2002]

Let's go back to your schematic:

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Originally posted by TrueCreation:
This is my time-scale:
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1--2--3--4--5--6--7

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And this is your time-scale:
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1-----2-----3-----4-----5-----6-----7

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What evidence do you have to support your time scale? Are you saying that because "3" happened suddenly, that the "-----" also happened suddenly?Also why do you think the "3" happened suddenly when there has been no evidence to support this assertions and the authors you reference have withdrawn that theory based on subsequent work.Furthermore, if the "3" happened suddenly, what is the evidence that the "4" happened suddenly? Are you some kind of uniformitarianist?

Heh, heh...

Oooops! I thought your last post was a spoof.Okay, well, a couple of things. First of all we know that relative motions of lithospheric plates change.For instance we know that parts of North America collided with North Africa sometime in the Ordovician and then broke up as Pangea fragmented. Consequently, we KNOW that the relative motion not only stopped, but the reversed. So, projecting current motions too far into the past simply doesn't work.Second the rate you are working with is a half-rate. In other words it is only half the story of the diverging rate between North American and Africa. You need to refine your calculations.Third, we are pretty certain that rates of relative motion varied with time. This is shown by radiometric dating of the seafloor volcanic rocks which shows that during the Cretaceous Period, the Pacific Ocean opened at a faster rate than since then. In other words, more kilometers per million years of crust formed in the Cretaceous.

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i also aded how evolution and the billions of years of the earth cannot be true because of other universal changes.

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What are these changes?

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in the 1500's astronomers also accounted that the earth moved farther from the sun and the moon from the earth, therefore, my assumptions are chronologically and scientifically correct.

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Could you document this please? And why are your assumptions correct. I think we have refuted this already.

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you cannot argue with the facts. just admit it. you're grasping at straws.

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We are not arguing the facts. We are arguing your assumptions and your calculations.

As I mentioned previously, I thought this post was a spoof on YEC reasoning, so I did not respond.But no. You have used only half the divergence rate between North America and Europe/Africa. And that rate has changed anyway, so you need a little refinement in your calculation. Actually, no. I don't know much about the earth receding from the sun, but lunar recession is due to conservation of angular momentum where the rotation fo the earth is slowing down due to tidal friction.

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which all concludes that at the beginning of time, the earth...

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I don't think the earth existed at the beginning of time.I could be wrong...

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... rotated much, much faster, and that we were VERY close to the sun.

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I don't think the earth's rotation has much to do with the distance between the earth and the sun. Could you show us a reference, maybe some calculations?

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... those combined together make the earth uninhabitabe by ANYTHING up until 125 miles in space closer to the sun than our current position.

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Please document. AFAIK, the earth's orbit now varies more than that amount from the sun. I think you are making things up.

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now i'm too lazy to look anything more up so you'll have to do it yourself,

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Oh really? You can make bizarre claims and then tell us that we have to prove them for you? I don't think so.In the meantime, you will find that lots of folks here are not so lazy and spent years in college studying this stuff.But...I suppose...you could know more than them.

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... and do the math. but i'm estimating that we were approximately where mercury currently is, and the days would be going as fast as you can snap your fingers. one hundred years from now, the day will be 2 milliseconds longer than it is now. i just did the math(on a calculator) and the days at the beginning of earth's history would be 252.2222..... hours faster. that's about ten minutes.

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Except that you have to be the ultimate uniformitarianist in order to think that the rate of rotational decay of the earth has been constant for 4 billion years. There are excellent reasons why it wasn't.

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so evolution CAN't be true and the flood obviously happened.

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Ummm.... sure.... That follows....Now, if that was a spoof. It was very funny.

Mmm, yes. That's good consilience. I thought about getting into that, but it seemed a bit too much for our friend to bite off. I'll see if I can track some down. So much of what I post is from memory of class work many years ago. I'll check into it today if enough time becomes available. Maybe I can create some google strings that would be useful.

Here is a reference that explains the reasoning. I haven't found anything with real data yet.http://myweb.cwpost.liu.edu/vdivener/notes/cz_climate.htm