Q. 31: What mechanism caused the main sea level rise during the Flood?

CPT Q. #31 – 101 Q&A on Catastrophic Plate Tectonics

Question: 31. If in the CPT framework the main sea level rise associated with the Flood was in response to the formation of the present-day ocean plates, a process which postdates the deposition of the continental Paleozoic sediment record, how then were the continents sufficiently below sea level before the modern ocean floor formed to allow these Paleozoic sediments to be deposited?

Response: I can understand why some people are confused on this. Although I have sought in my papers and talks to emphasize that my crude 3D numerical simulations model only the Mesozoic/Cenozoic portion of the Flood and not the Paleozoic portion, many people seemed to have missed this important qualification. One reason that I have not as yet been able to include that earlier portion is that, to have any chance of success, I need to be able to guess what the initial internal state of the earth was at the beginning of the Flood to a fairly high degree of fidelity. That perhaps might be compared in difficulty with the challenge for the wise men of Babylon in declaring to King Nebuchadnezzar both his dream and its interpretation. In both cases, some very specific revelation from God is needed. Not having these crucial details as yet, I have settled for the more modest enterprise of modeling only the Mesozoic/Cenozoic portion.

But suppose one takes what the simulations I have been able to do and applies the results to the plate motion history implied by the sequence of twelve maps by Blakey which I provided in my answer to question 24. What would that look like? First of all, the Biblical brief time frame requires that CPT runaway motions in the mantle begin at the very outset of the Flood to enable the Laurentia, Baltica, and Siberia blocks to move away from the Pannotia supercontinent quickly. Hence this scenario involves rapid seafloor spreading, rapid subduction, as well as supersonic steam jets rising from the mid-ocean ridges from near the very beginning. Since new seafloor is replacing old seafloor at a rapid pace, a progressive rise in sea level and progressive flooding of the continent areas is almost a certainty. My guess is that the rapid motions in the mantle also unleash unstable rotational dynamics of the earth in the earliest stages of this cataclysm, displacing the volumes of water filling the ocean and resulting in tsunami-like waves which quickly begin to invade the continents.

These waves and the rising sea level conspire to cause water to reach further and further into the continent interior, destroying habitat at higher and higher elevations and generating first the Paleozoic sediment record and then the Mesozoic one. The new seafloor formed during the time when the Paleozoic sediments are being deposited gets subducted as the cataclysm continues such that, by the time the Flood waters recede from the continents, none of it remains. Similarly, even most of the seafloor formed while the Mesozoic sediment was being deposited is subducted before the end of the cataclysm, since little of that remains today.

Hence, in regard to your question, the sea level rise that enabled the oceans to invade the land and produce the Paleozoic sediment record was not a result of seafloor spreading during the Mesozoic and Cenozoic portions of the Flood. Obviously that is impossible from a time standpoint. Rather, it was a result of seafloor spreading that unfolded during the Paleozoic portion of the cataclysm.

Let me comment on a couple of related matters. One is that my outlook on the amount of sea level change that may have taken place during the Flood has itself changed over the years. Whereas I once thought that perhaps as much as 1000-1500 m may have occurred, more recently I have come to suspect that the overall changes in sea level were likely much more modest. The main reason for this shift in my outlook is my realization a bit over three years ago that the earth may have experienced rotational instability during the Flood, as I mentioned above and outlined in the original materials I made available for this review process. Although the modeling of the ocean response to such rotational instability is admittedly still primitive and preliminary, it nevertheless does suggest that the resulting currents are powerful enough to erode away the regions of higher topography on the continents rather effectively. So my present guess is that perhaps only 100-200 m of sea level rise above the pre-Flood sea level may have been involved.

Another realization that has emerged from the 2D numerical modeling experiments is that runaway motions in the mantle not only can originate by cold dense material plunging down from above but also by hot buoyant material rising up from below. In the 2D animation included in the 2008 ICC PowerPoint presentation on the Flood, the runaway begins with the upwelling on the outside margins of the domain. As yet I have not attempted any 3D models of the Flood in which a hot plume (or plumes) from the base of the mantle initiates the runaway dynamics, but I consider this a genuine possibility. Especially as I have pondered just what sorts of mantle motions might have caused, at the very beginning of the Flood, Laurentia (North America), Baltica (northwestern Europe), and Siberia to break away from a pre-Flood supercontinent, I have wondered if a mantle upwelling might have been involved. (Again I urge the reader to refer to the sequence of maps contained in my answer to question 24.) It should be fairly obvious that if a mantle upwelling beneath the pre-Flood ocean initiated the Flood, or was an immediate effect of the initiation, such an upwelling would have produced a sea level rise at the very beginning of the cataclysm.