Creationist Baumgardner: one of the top mainstream mantle/plate tectonics simulators!

Since Edge has posted part of my runaway subduction heat analysis on this thread I thought I would chime in here.Tranquility Base Wrote

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Yes runaway subduction is our standard model. We think it is in the ballpark. You can rule it out if you want but that's like ruling out Schrodinger becasue his equaiton didn't account for spin. It is early days, runaway subduction is a hint in the right direction. It's not the be all and end all.

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If you weren't so antagonistic instead you would use the boiling away as a constraint on the model and say - oops - maybe not all of the oceran floor was subducted, perhaps it happened over decades etc etc. Your approach is very much overly simplistic. We already know the whole shebang wasn't completed until after the tower of Babel. I would not insert plate tectonics into a one year period like you are trying to force us to do. That gives time for the energy to disipate not even mentioning errors in the estimate of the energy.

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The model rules itself out. Since the energy is far more than that required to cook the earth to death many times over errors are not that significant. Since boiling only a tiny fraction of the oceans will kill off air breathing life the model is so contrained as to be completely unrealistic. Since the model releases at least 2500 times as much energy as the earth gets from the sun each year spreading it over a few decades won't help and the process has to happen quickly to get the flood over and done in a year anyway.

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Those points raised on talk.origins are clearly very antgonistic and seem to have the same over simplification bias. I'm not a geophysicist. Has Baumgardner ever rebutted?

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Baumgardner has no refutation of the heat problem with the runaway subduction model. In fact the model releases more than enough heat to boil the oceans away several times over. I have listened to a lecture by Kurt Wise who is also and author of the model. I get it herehttp://216.176.228.162:9037/ramgen/991102wise.rmThis is a close to a transcription as I could make of a part near the end.Transcription from Wise: "One of our bigest challenges right now is explaining where in the world all the heat went. There is an enormous amount of heat released in this process, and enough heat to in fact boil the oceans away several times over so the question is how did the heat get out with out doing that."Wise also says that the entire ocean floor was replaced by molten mantle material that was so hot that it was enough thicker than the original floor to raise the sea level by a kilometer increasing the height of the flood. Presumably this material had to release its heat for the food to go back down.Further Baumgardner admits that a significant fraction of the ocean would boil. You can’t boil even a tiny fraction of the water in the ocean without transferring enough heat to the air to cook the earth to death. In fact it is easy to calculate that the condensation of of much less than 1 percent of the water in the ocean from steam will release enough latent heat of vaporization to heat the atmosphere by 100 C.Baumgardner’s web page on Runaway Subduction
COMPUTER MODELING OF THE LARGE-SCALE TECTONICS ASSOCIATED WITH THE GENESIS FLOOD | The Institute for Creation Researchcontains something that is so illogical that I don’t see how anyone could take him seriously when he writes about this stuff.It plausibly leads to intense global rain as hot magma erupted in zones of plate divergence, in direct contact with ocean water, creates bubbles of high pressure steam that emerge from the ocean, rise rapidly through the atmosphere, radiate their heat to space, and precipitate their water as rain.Anyone with a basic knowledge of science should see that is not at all plausible and has serious problems. The first is that high pressure steam is heavier than air so it won't rise until it expands a lot, the second is that steam pressure tends to equalize at about the speed of sound so the steam will spread rapidly in all directions before beginning to rise and the third is that the steam will radiate its heat in all directions not just up into space, the forth is that whatever steam condenses in the atmosphere will release its latent heat of vaporization increasing air tempertaures beyond the point that life could survive.Models need evidence. Evidence for the Runaway Subduction flood model would be no life on earth.Randy

Taz,
Venus may be a good place to start but the Earth after runaway subduction would probably make Venus seem pleasant by comparison. Imagine an atmosphere of supercritical steam containing a significant concentration of sulfuric acid.As Tranquility Base has pointed out the Runaway Subduction Model has become the standard flood model for mainstream YECs. Though primarily associated with Baumgardner, the ICR paper is authored by a veritable who’s who of creation science. I think it is actually hard to overstate the total absurdity of this "standard" YEC model. I have come to calling it the BFM (boiling flood model as suggest by EdenNod on MSN talkorgin). First the mantle viscosity drops by a factor of one billion presumably because it is superheated by some miracle. Then runaway subduction occurs releasing 10^28 J of gravitational potential energy, then the entire ocean floor is replaced with super hot mantle material, probably releasing at least another 10^28 J of heat. The ocean (or at least a significant fraction of it as admitted by Baumagardner) boils converting the atmosphere to high pressure steam. 10^28 J is more than twice the energy needed to boil all the water in all the oceans. The gases released from the massive volcanism would probably kill everything except that everything would already already be dead from the heat.10^28 J is about 2500 times the amount of energy that the earth receives from the sun in a year. It is released on the surface of the earth and the air is pumped full of water vapor, a very effective greenhouse gas (as well as a lot of outgassed CO2). And what happens next? Why a massive ICE AGE of course!!What I find interesting is that all these famous YECs seem to have totally forgotten the first law of thermodynamics. 10^28 J is about 20,000 times the heat required to heat the atmosphere by 100C. You just can’t release that much heat on the surface of the earth without killing off all life. And BTW boiling the oceans is a very efficient way to transmit this heat to the atmosphere. Rejecting the RSM/BFM model is not like rejecting Shroedinger’s equation because it doesn’t predict spin as TB says. It is more like rejecting the idea that the earth is supported by 4 giant turtles. I find it amazing that people with any scientific training can have anything to do with this ridiculous model but it does seem to be the best that top YEC "scientists" can come up with.Randy

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Originally posted by Tranquility Base:
Randy et al

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I've explained that our confidence in Scripture comes from outside of science. We have hints of how mainstream sceince has got it wrong and how the flood etc may have happened but we are not claiming to have all of the answers.

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Your problem is not that you don't have all the answers. It's that you don't really have any of the answers. There is no worldwide flood model that makes the least bit of physical sense. You can't begin to explain where the water came from or where it went and of course this only one of many insoluble problems for flood believers. You might as well have God create the water for the flood and then uncreate it. Just don't call it science. At least you admit that your confidence comes outside of science.While Baumgardner may have writen the code for a program that gives a resonable model of plate tectonics over time scales of hundreds of millions of years when realistic numbers are plugged in, I don't see how anyone can respect the science of someone who says that bubbles of high pressure steam will rise quickly through the atmosphere and radiate their heat into space and puts forth a flood model that cooks the earth to death many thousands of times over. I am sure you know that old adage GIGO regarding computer programs and mathematical models in general. Runaway subduction is a classic example and it is Baumgardner who put in the garbage. Baumgardner et al's boiling flood model with racing continents falsifies itself so thoroughly and is so absurd that it would seem like satire if there weren't people who take it so seriously.Randy

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Yes we have a heat problem, I'll agree with you on that. But so many other apects of the model work nicely. Same problem with every model - conflicting data.

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The heat problem is so severe that it totally falsifies the model. It is not just conflicting data. The existence of life on earth shows that the model is false. The inability of the model to predict a correct sea floor profile, as Joe has pointed out is another example of conflicting data. I suspect there are some other conflicting data as well. When you have enough conflicting data you should reject the model not the data.

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From my readings Baumgardner has a very good plate tectonics simulaiton engine. During the day it is used to simulate mainstream plate tectonics and after hours, after tweaking a few paramters, he uses the same engineto test runaway subduciton.

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I would call dropping the mantle viscosity by a billion fold more than tweaking. Using totally unrealistic parameters is not tweaking. GIGO. But don't you claim that there are no good mainstream tectonic simulators? I don't know exactly how good Baumgardner's mainstream model is compared to others but it is obviously far better than his boiling flood model.

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I quoted a plate tectonics guy several months ago saying that deterministic simulations of plate tectonics 'reproduce nothing like' the continental history we have.

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I'll bet they all do a far better job than runaway subduction which predicts a sterilized planet with shallow oceans.

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Protein folding is not much better. Take protein sequences, fold them deterministically on computer and you get a Nobel prize. I'm working on it!

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And are you working on a model to show how proteins might have folded a hundred million times faster in the past than they do today in order to justify a religious belief? I rather doubt it.

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Saying you know the underlying forces is one thing. Qualitatively showing they reproduce the detailed phenomenon is another. It's so easy to say that protein folding is dictated by the hydrophobic effect and hydrogen bonding. Using this to predict protein 3D structure is another ball game called the 'protein folding problem'.

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And how far would you get trying to publish a protein folding model that used hydrogen bond strengths a billion times higher or a billion times lower than the measured values? This is essentially what Baumgardner is doing with mantle viscosities in his boiling flood model.
Randy

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Not quite a billion, but rather a hundred million. However, the parameters are not unrealistic-

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From
COMPUTER MODELING OF THE LARGE-SCALE TECTONICS ASSOCIATED WITH THE GENESIS FLOOD | The Institute for Creation ResearchFor the calculation described below, a reference viscosity mo of 1 x 10^13 Pa-s, a thermal conductivity of 2 x 10^10 W m-1K-1, and a radiogenic heat production rate of 0.02 W/m3 are used. Now I seem to recall that the mantle viscosity is about 10^22 Pa-s so this is a billion times lower. Joe can correct me if I am wrong. However, more than 100 million times lower as Baumgardner admits is unrealistic enough to show that the calculation is totally unrealistic as well.This model would be falsified by its other problems even if it didn’t inevitably autoclave the earth. Steamed Ark Soup anyone?Randy

from Joe Meert

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I somehow never noticed those. If the model was absurd before, it now borders on the ridiculous.

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I thought it crossed that border a long time ago.Randy

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Tranquility Base
I quoted a plate tectonics guy several months ago saying that deterministic simulations of plate tectonics 'reproduce nothing like' the continental history we have.

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Are you talking about this thread?
http://EvC Forum: Mainstream plate tectonics model is nowhere near quantitatively correct -->EvC Forum: Mainstream plate tectonics model is nowhere near quantitatively correctI looked through it and it looks to me like you got pretty severely criticized for out of context quoting and weren't really able to defend what you posted. I also see that Joe posted my analysis of the magnitude of the heat problem with runaway subduction on that thread. I suggest you look at it again. You should eventually begin to grasp the true absurdity of the boiling flood model considering all that was said there and here.
Randy

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Originally posted by Tranquility Base:
Randy

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The whole point of runaway subduction is that it is . . runaway. It is like a chain reaction. Subduction above a certian threshold will lead to further subduction and further heating and so on. How the subduciton got to that threshold is presumably the put-off for you understandably. Nevertheless if, through e.g. accelerated radiodecay, we can get such an initial threshold then runaway subduciton can take it from there.

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I'm not saying that runaway subduction must be the answer - it is a possibility and it works very nicely with accelrated decay - if only we didn't kill everything! Further work is clearly needed if this were to become more than just a toy model. I see it simply as a hint in the right direction. Nevertheless the concept of runaway subduction could be completely correct.

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The put off for me is that the boiling flood model necessarily destroys all life on earth as you seem to admit. If runway subduction ever had gotten started on earth we wouldn't be here to discuss it.As to the heat, think about this. The only way to get such unrealistic mantle viscosities is to get the mantle super hot. Much hotter than it is now. If you do this with accelerated radioactive decay you will cook the earth to death even without runaway subduction as Joe has pointed out. With runaway subduction it just adds to an already insoluble heat problem. In addition to the 10^28 J of released by the subduction process, the entire ocean floor is replaced with the super hot mantle material that is generating even more heat constantly because of radioactive decay. If the radiogenic heating rate were as high as Baumgardner claims why would it ever cool down let alone cool down fast enough so that the sea floor could solidify and contract enough to lower the flood water back down? Even replacing the sea floor with normally hot mantle material will probably cause the release of another 10^28 J or so of heat. As Kurt Wise says, enough heat is released to boil the oceans several times over. Boiling even a small fraction of the oceans will sterilize the atmosphere.You just don't seem to get it. Baumgardner's boiling flood model is really, really absurd. It is not even a hint in the right direction. Every time I discuss this model more fatal flaws(pun intended) show up. If I were you I wouldn't keep saying "We" when discussing this model until you think a little more about it. It might make some wonder about your ability to think at all at least where the subject of the worldwide flood is concerned.
Randy

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From Joe Meert
Heat production in the crust (where most of the radioactive material resides) is variable, but generally units of 1-10 micro-watts per m^3 are used so his values here are overestimates by 10^6-10^7 compared to the earth. Are those numbers correct? I somehow never noticed those. If the model was absurd before, it now borders on the ridiculous.

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If I understand the model correctly this magically high heat production rate is what he uses to get the mantle hot enough to reduce mantle viscosity by 10^8-10^9 to get runaway subduction going. He also uses non Newtonian viscosity with power law creep but you need to get thing pretty hot to start the flow going. I think the question I asked TB is an interesting one in this regard. If 0.02 W/M^3 are being generated how did this super hot mantle material cool down by the end of the flood year so that it would contract to let sea levels fall back down? Why didn't it keep getting hotter? It seems to me that a totally replaced ocean floor would take a while to cool even without all that heat being generated in it. Maybe Baumgardner thinks the heat production rate dropped to 0 or somehow went negative the instant the mantle material flowed out over the ocean floor. That would no more nonsensical than most of his stuff I guess. Since you have to violate the conservation of energy to keep the earth alive during the subduction process you might as well violate it big time and have a magic heat sink appear in the mantle.
Randy

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I fully agree with you that the heat is a huge constraint. But there just aren't enough people working on this to rule it out yet. If the entire process of continental drift is carried over decades rather than a year it might all work. With Noah disembarking at a high elevation then the tectonic aftermath of the flood could have gone on for decades afterward (and decades before).
If one spreads the energy to boil the ocean over a longer period it will not boil the ocean!

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Sure, if you spread it over 150 million years you probably don’t have much problem at all.

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I don't have a problem with Noah disembarking at the end of the flood year at high elevation (as suggested in Scripture) while the flood tectonically sorts itself out over decades and even centuries at lower elevations. Simple solutions like this often exist and that is why it is improper to rule out possibilties with such quick shrugs. Such a Biblically consistent time extension of the flood might easily save the model and account for the actual prehistory of our planet.

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Calculation on heat radiation from an earth sized planet indicate that to shed 10^28 J of heat (probably less than the total released) in 100 years requires an average surface temperature over the whole time of about 300 C and even then you must ignore the effect of all the greenhouse gases that would have been pumped into the atmosphere. There is no saving this absurd model and the actual prehistory of our planet does not include Noah’s flood so there is no need to try to save it.But in any case Buamagardner says that the subduction process was fastHere’s a quote from an interview here.
Page not found – Creation In The CrossfireThat's correct. Exactly how long is something I'm working to refine. But it seems that once this sinking of the pre-Flood ocean floor starts (in a conveyor-belt-like fashion down into the earth, pulling things apart behind it), it is not a slow process spanning millions of years. It's almost certain that it runs to completion and, recycles' all of the existing floor in a few weeks or months.I added the bold. Baumgardner also says that a significant fraction of the oceans boiled away. Anyone who thinks that a significant fraction of the oceans could boil without killing off all life on earth is ignoring some very basic science and in my opinion does not deserve to be taken seriously.

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PS - 6 generations after Noah we have 'Peleg' who was so named becasue 'the earth was divided in his time'. During this few hundred years longevity also dropped from 600 years or so to about 120 years. Perhaps the dregs of accelerated decay extended through these several hundred years after the flood seperating the continents and depositing the last of the flood layering in the low-lands.

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Now you are leaving Baumgardner and the runaway subduction model completely. It is explicitly stated that virtually all of the continent movement occurred during the flood year. In fact, I think most of it was supposedly over in 150 days. The division of the lands in the time of Peleg clearly refers to a political division and I doubt that any serious Bible scholars have ever thought it referred to physical separation of the lands. Even AiG rejects this one.
Randy

[QUOTE]Originally posted by Dr_Tazimus_maximus:
[B][QUOTE]Originally posted by Randy:
Calculation on heat radiation from an earth sized planet indicate that to shed 10^28 J of heat (probably less than the total released) in 100 years requires an average surface temperature over the whole time of about 300 C and even then you must ignore the effect of all the greenhouse gases that would have been pumped into the atmosphere. Randy [/B][/QUOTE]Please do not forget the acidization due to sulfates blowing through the seawater at high temperatures(I believe that I posted a link to this earlier). Likely it would have made the acid rain in the US and Canadian Northwest look very mild in comparison .[/B][/QUOTE]I haven't forgotten it. It's just that its hard to kill things that are already dead. I think I said before that the final result will be supercritical acid steam.
Randy

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Is the 10^28 J from runaway subduction, 500 million years worth of radiodecay or both?

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I think we have been over this before. Here is what the ICR paper says

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Because all current ocean lithosphere seems to date from Flood or post-Flood times [88], we feel that essentially all pre-Flood ocean lithosphere was subducted in the course of the Flood. Gravitational potential energy released by the subduction of this lithosphere is on the order of 10^28 J [6]. This alone probably provided the energy necessary to drive Flood dynamics."

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This potential energy will mostly be converted to heat by friction during the subduction process. It has to be dissipated somehow. However, this is only a fraction of the heat released. The entire ocean floor is supposedly subducted and replaced by mantle material. The mantle material is so hot that it’s viscosity is far lower than mantle is now and it is supposed to be enough thicker due to thermal expansion to raise sea level another kilometer or so. The only way the sea level can come back down is for the new crust to contract and solidify. To do this it must release its heat content. I have seen estimates that this would release another 10^28 J or so but have not done the calculation myself. Remember that this mantle supposedly has a radiogenic heat production of 0.02 W/M^3 going on as well which will generate another 6.2*10^5 J/M^3 of mantle during the flood year. Not all of the radiogenic heat will be released to the surface but enough must be released to solidify the crust. You have heat sources on top of heat sources. Kurt Wise admits that the runaway subduction process releases enough heat to boil the oceans several times over and these along with massive vulcanism that must be occurring are the sources of the heat. That’s why it should be called the boiling flood model but I usually call it a recipe for steamed ark soup. As Taz points out it would be steamed ark soup flavored with sulfuric acid.Randy

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^ Let's just remember how hard it was for continental drift to become accepted. Sniff . . sniff. I am detecting high levels of irony around here.

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And did anyone say that continental drift was easy to falsify because it cooked the earth to death thousands of times over? I don't think so. The irony here is how otherwise intellegent people can so steadfastly refuse to apply logical scientific analysis to the boiling flood model in the vain hope that it may somehow be used to support their religious beliefs.BTW to try to put 10^28 J in perspective a megaton of TNT is 4.18*10^15 J. 10^28 J is energy equivalent to 2.4 trillion one megaton hydrogen bombs.Randy

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Originally posted by Tranquility Base:
Our faith that Noah et al somehow survived on the ark is not much different than you believing that the first cell somehow popped out of the proverbial soup.

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And what makes you think I believe this. I'll let the others speak for themselves but I think it might be possible that life arose naturally though we may never figure out how and I accept the overwhelming evidence for evolution and common descent but these are really separate issuses. I do notice that this claim is the last refuge of the cornered creationist. When faced with overwhelming evidence against the global flood don't give up. Just attack abiogenesis.Your faith in old Noah is a purely religous belief that obviously can never be swayed in spite of the fact that there is massive evidence against a global flood and none for it.
Randy

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Originally posted by Tranquility Base:
^ Interestingly I didn't retreat to a miracle of the sort you are insinuating. The occupants of the ark 'somehow' surviving I suspect was due to the dedicated preparation. Sure, 'God was with them' but they still had to go to the bother of bulding the ark, collecting the food and applying the pitch. If Noah et al didn't do this then we would not be here typing away.

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Why don’t you tell us how to prepare wooden ark to withstand atmospheric temperatures in excess of 100 C in a steam atmosphere? Remember it has to have a widow. I think you need more than one miracle. [quote]And the species that didn't become extinct are the species that didn't become extinct![/B][/QUOTE]And of course they just happened to either survive or go extinct in such a way as to make it look like they had died out over geological time,http://www.glenn.morton.btinternet.co.uk/fish.htmfor both fish and land animals. Here are some data on mammalian genera from Glenn’s page.Triassic there are 4 genera--no living members
Jurassic, 43 genera-no living members ,Cretaceous 36 genera-no living members, Paleocene 213 genera-no living members, Eocene 569 genera-3 extant genera, Oligocene 494 genera 11 extant genera, Miocene 749 genera 57 extant genera,Pliocene762 genera 133 extant genera, Pleistocene, 830 genera 417 extant generaBut the main point that has been hammered on again and again is that there should be NO LIFE ON EARTH if runway subduction had occured. You need miracles to save Noah but you also need miracles to save marine life. You can retreat to miracles all you like but you just continue to prove that creation science is an oxymoron.Randy

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Originally posted by Tranquility Base:
^ That data of yours looks very consistent with a global flood. The deeper we first see them in the flood rocks the less likely they are to be alive today.

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Sorry but weren't they all supposed to be represented by either 2 or 7 of each kind on the ark? All others were killed in the flood. They all came off the ark together so the data are not at all consistent with the ark myth. It seems to me that you are tying yourself in knots trying to defend the indefensible.Randy