Heat release from tectonic friction

That is based on your statement, a few posts above, to the effect that:

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Having the continents in one place explains things like how the animals got home after the great flood and how humans scattered after the Tower of Babel was destroyed.

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This implies that the continents were all together at the time of the tower, which I am placing at about 4,000 years ago. Not unless Noah and kin managed to produce enough people to reconstitute a civilization capable of supporting themselves and doing massive engineering projects in just 50 years. I gave them the benefit of the doubt, at 350 years. Even that's not possible. From 4,000 years ago to 3,200 years ago you are saying that the continents spread enough that a previously landlocked area formed the Mediterranean sea AND the people adjacent to that new sea learned seafaring? With the water level approaching that fast I'd have guessed they'd still be running for the hills! You still have to do all the tectonic movements in a scant 800 years. People don't develop seafaring cultures until they have a sea to play on. You have the continents together about 4,000 years ago and the oceans and seas by 3,200 years ago. In that time the continents had to have assumed their approximate modern positions. That's just not feasible.You started out on this thread saying it could be done in several thousand years, and that was shown to be impossible. Now you're trying to defend the same events in a scant 800 or so years.Really, there is only so much nonsense I can believe all at once, and you have far exceeded that limit. Don't you have any connection to reality at all?

I did not write the statement about the tower of babel, and don't know who wrote it.

I'm sorry, Coyote, I really am trying to grasp what you are saying but you aren't being very clear. Perhaps your impatience with us idiot creationists causes you to leave out important explanatory information or something like that, but I really am trying and am not getting you.Again, I didn't say anything about the Tower of Babel and have no idea why anyone would think the tectonic plate movement started at that time. That IS what you are saying isn't it?What does the number of Noah's descendants and their engineering ability have to do with tectonic plate movement getting started at the time of the Flood? Water LEVEL? I'm REALLY lost here. In 1100 years (I start at 4300 not 4000 years ago) the continents should have separated quite a distance from each other, and I have no idea why the water LEVEL should have been affected by this movement. From the numbers I gave earlier I'd guess that N America by that time would have been at least a thousand miles from Europe, so surely the Mediterranean Sea would have been formed by that time as well even if it was still possibly widening (I haven't studied the movement of the plates in that area), already there for quite a long time when the Phoenicians started navigating it. You must be picturing something completely other than I'm picturing. It doesn't make a huge difference but just to say it again: I didn't mention the Tower of Babel so by my thinking it's 1100 not 800 years from the beginning of tectonic movement until Phoenicia. And again I have no idea why the continents would have "had to have asumed their approximate modern positions" for there to have existed a seafaring people 1100 years after the Flood.My point is that they didn't have to have the FULL sea that exists now in order to have a sea to play on. For all I know it WAS the full size by then since I've only figured the distance between N America and Europe, not the Mediterranean area, but even at half its current size it would still have been an appreciable "sea to play on." With all due respect, it has NOT been "shown to be impossible,"and this post of yours is just demonstrating that you are envisioning something that has nothing to do with the scenario I have in mind, I have no idea what the Tower of Babel person has in mind. So until you at least GET what is being envisioned you can't say you've shown anything I've described to be impossible. Beg your pardon, but I've been OBJECTING to this bizarre notion of the events happening in only 800 years, or even my 1100 years. The full distances would not have been attained in that time and didn't need to be attained for there to be a seafaring people. In this case, dear Coyote, you are making up the "nonsense" you are attributing to me, and you haven't yet grasped what I'm saying.Give it another go?Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

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Those are al resistive forces.
You are trying to calculate all the possible Forces that resist the motion.

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The energy that it takes to move the weight of the plates through the distance of whatever is the case, over a period of unit time ought give us the answer, right?

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E = 1/2mv^2?

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Yes, this is the formula I have used. The distance is only important inasmuch as it is related to velocity.

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Nor do I. it's only rabid anti-creationists who think that.

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Your words here provide evidence that you actually DO deny reality because of your faith.

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They aren't. The true sciences are clearly in accord with the Bible, there is no conflict at all. What can truly be observed is not hard to affirm by the Bible. The sciences that are the problem are those that deal with the unobservable unmeasurable untestable past.

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Well I'd love to see a scientific demonstration of how sheep's coats are affected by the presence of striped wooden poles where their parents mate (Genesis 30:37-42) but somehow I think you'll find that one rather difficult. I rather suspect that geneticists and developmental biologists would disagree with the Bible on that one.And of course, it is possible to test and measure the past in various ways - you just deny that reality because it contradicts your faith.

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But this is an illusion HBD, you can not in fact OBSERVE anything that has to do with the unwitnessed past. You can only make inferences from what you see now

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But of course what we observe now IS "something to do with the unwitnessed past" - that is WHY we can make inferences. And those inferences can be tested by looking at their implications for the present and checking those. The agreement between the various dating methods as discussed by RAZD is a very good example of testing those methods.

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Hutton's analysis of Siccar Point convinced many of an old earth but all it was was his subjective untestable speculations. He assumed an angular unconformity occurred before the upper strata were built upon it. There's no reason to assume that, tectonic force most likely displaced the lower layers while a very deep stack of layers was in place overhead. Lyell even has an illustration that gave me the model I was looking for to demonstrate this likelihood although of course he doesn't draw this conclusion from it.

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Anyway, Hutton assumed that the lower layers were tilted first and then the upper layers were laid over them, which suggested a lot more time than was usually given to the age of the earth in his day. He claimed some millions of years between the upper and lower portions of the Siccar Point formation, but speaking of observation, the two sections to my sight look identical as far as any imaginable aging processes could be involved, weathering, erosion, etc. IDENTICAL. Rather odd for their being millions of years apart in age.

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Hutton's "assumption" seems eminently reasonable to me, and in fact I cannot see a reasonable alternative. Your scenario is fanciful in the extreme, and I see no reason to consider it even a remote possibility. How exactly could the lower layers tilt while the higher layers were on top WiTHOUT leaving signs that this has happened? What differences would you expect to see in the two sections you refer to, given that your observations are doubtless superficial ? And why? (And let us note that this is all about testing your inferences, proving that it can be done)

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So the earth acquired its extreme age by what is really an indefensible bunch of arguments by Hutton. It just SOUNDED right to people and the idea got elaborated more and more as time went on. Now you have radiometric dating, but since the whole idea was so irrationally established in the first place why should I trust radiometric dating? In principle it's understandable, but in reality who knows? It too can't be verified because you have no way to replicate the past, all you can do is assume your measurements apply.

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Well you've given no reason to think that Hutton we being irrational. And radiometric dating is not founded on the assumption that the Earth is old either. It's another example of how assumptions can be tested, because if the Earth was young the evidence provided by the various dating methods should not be that good. And let us not forget all the non-radiometric dating methods you have to deny, too, like dendrochronology and the counting of varves.And let me add this reply to your later post:

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should be the other way around. You should be insisting that your "scientific evidence" conform to the Bible because the Bible IS God's word. Radiometric dating cannot show that the Bible is incorrect; the Bible shows that radiometric dating is incorrect.

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Why do we have to accept your preferred interpretation of the Bible as absolute truth in spite of the evidence? Isn't it YOUR job to - at the least - convince us that God actually does claim that the Earth is young ? If you can'd do that then why can't we simply take the evidence at face value rather than inventing irrational excuses to protect your dogma?

Actually, I wrote that stuff. I wasn't quoting Faith.I think Faith's point is that she should have most of 4500 years rather than merely 800 to get the continents to their current places. I think we cut into that time frame quite a bit using historical and geological evidence, but to use the Phoenicians we would need some evidence about how far they actually sailed when they traveled.

Thank you. Yes, and they don't have to have been at their current places for many things to have occurred, such as the Phoenicians sailing on the Mediterranean. But not with any accuracy or understanding of the situation I've been picturing. Yes, that is what you need, thank you. But there would also need to be some idea of how long it took to form the full size of the Mediterranean Sea on YEC timing. It might not have occurred by the same increments or percentages as the Atlantic distance did (according to my assumptions, which aren't necessarily correct anyway of course.)Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

*My* interpretation of the Bible is the historical interpretation of the Bible that was accepted in the formative years of Geology. There's nothing peculiar to *me* about my interpretation, it's quite standard. A lot of novel, corrupted and liberal ideas have sprung up over the last century but I'm representing the traditional historical interpretation. I don't see that I should have any obligation to prove that God claims the Earth is young when that was the standard historical Christian understanding of Genesis for all orthodox believers back to the beginning (with the exception of Augustine and a few others who had an allegorical understanding of it). Surely you are aware of this history.

By formative years, you would have to mean prior to the nineteenth century back during the time when people believed that the sun and planets orbited the earth. The fact is that YEC belief was in serious decline before its revival in the twentieth century. You don't have to prove anything. But in a discussion forum it is not unreasonable to make attempts at persuasion, which generally requires evidence. I'm just not sure that such an attempt is really on topic here.As I understand it, the purpose of this thread is to discuss whether tectonic plate friction raises any issues that reject a YEC interpretation.

That is not a Biblical viewpoint, that was the pagan view of Aristotle that came into the ROMAN church via Aquinas.No, I had in mind the historical BIBLICAL view that is still the view of true Christians, has never changed, but I think PaulK is into all the apostate revisionist views which got big since the early part of the 20th century. The true Biblical understanding, again, has always been shared by majority Bible believers and still is. Not among Christians who call themselves Bible believers. It's not. Go for it.

Geocentric astronomy was not just the view of the church. It was the scientific view as well. There is no reason why any Christian would have rejected geocentric cosmology prior to science establishing something else. I understand that. The problem is that what you had in mind is wrong. There was no universal view among Christians in the early twentieth century that the earth was only 6000 years old. I'm not even sure that it was the majority view among Christians. I don't subscribe to it now, although my wife does. I know that you define real Christians to include only those people who are YEC, but IMO, that's complete nonsense.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

Hi TC, There happens to be enough water in the lithosphere, asthenosphere and mantel to fill our oceans 7 times. That water had to get there some way, and sometime in the existence of the Earth.God Bless,

I suggest you don't know a lot about the history of Christianity or of the churches either or what people believe in those churches today.Granted there has been a steady erosion of true Biblical belief for a couple centuries or so, and it may be worse than I know, but the erosion -- the liberalism, the compromising, the revisionist "scholarship" -- accounts for the nonYEC views and the YEC views are clearly the most reasonable reading of the Bible, and that's what makes a Bible believer a Bible believer. I believe this is still the majority view amojng believers today until shown otherwise. I'm on record here in a number of places including nonYEC's among "real Christians" so you are wrong about that. While I think Genesis is extremely important to the gospel itself, I've allowed that there are probably true believers who give in to science on that, although they shouldn't and I think it's sad that this has happened. I regard them as "real Christians" if they hold to the doctrines of salvation nevertheless.

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It seems the main difference in our numbers is that you accounted for cooling of the entire seafloor 100km deep. I assumed that the majority of the seabed would have been cooled prior to the flood, maybe it was created cooled off?

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The trouble with that is that the thermal structure of the Earth is a fossil of transport processes, the history of which can be constrained to impressive precision by observation and experiment. An analogous hypothesis with similar credibility is the suggestion that the universe was created last thursday in the form that we remember.

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I am not sure that heat from below maybe 10km would actually be absorbed into the ocean though? Wouldn't it be more likely to go into surrounding rocks? But even if only half of the heat made it to the oceans it would still raise the temperature by 7,000K.

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Well it is precisely the 'surrounding rocks' which are cooling. Here is a 2D (average transect with age) tomographic inversion for upper mantle temperature over Pacific oceanic lithosphere as a function of lithospheric age: http://ciei.colorado.edu/...piro_research_files/image003.jpgThis thermal structure is clearly a consequence of gradual conductive cooling of the upper mantle with age, corroborated by many other geophysical observations in addition to seismic tomography. No other physical mechanism can account for these observations.

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I am interested in your thoughts regarding this portion of the problem. In order for the plates to move at the proposed speed, the mantle would have to have convection currents that increased proportionally. Theoretically this heat could come from a rapid acceleration of radiogenic decay rates (a favorite of creationist theories). Would it theoretically be possible to produce such convection currents? What kind of heat differential would be required?

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Well, the major heat producing radioisotopes are strongly concentrated in continental crust, so for every 1 K increase you might get from mantle radioactivity, you might increase the temperature of continental crust by 1000 K. Continental crust would expand into vapor long before the viscosity of the mantle decreased significantly. The magnitude of heat produced by accelerating radioisotopic decay is similar or larger than that transported by cooling oceanic lithosphere.If you could explain the geology of the Earth simply by granting accelerated radioisotopic decay, I might have still been a creationist. In reality, it explains nothing while itself generating an endless list of extraordinary problems in the most basic subjects of tectonophysics.

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*My* interpretation of the Bible is the historical interpretation of the Bible that was accepted in the formative years of Geology.

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And one that was rejected when it turned out that the evidence did not fit. That's the reality.

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There's nothing peculiar to *me* about my interpretation, it's quite standard. A lot of novel, corrupted and liberal ideas have sprung up over the last century but I'm representing the traditional historical interpretation.

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So in your mind tradition MUST be believed ? Even if the evidence is strongly against the truth of that interpretation ?

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I don't see that I should have any obligation to prove that God claims the Earth is young when that was the standard historical Christian understanding of Genesis for all orthodox believers back to the beginning (with the exception of Augustine and a few others who had an allegorical understanding of it). Surely you are aware of this history.

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I'm aware that the traditional interpretation was for a young Earth. I am NOT aware that there was a tradition that God said so - and THAT is something that cannot be derived from a plain reading of the Bible.But even if it was a tradition, why should WE believe it ? Just because you hate the other interpretations ?