Noah's Flood and Catastrophic Plate Tectonics (from Pangea to Today)

To some, the idea of Noah's flood conjures up images from Sunday school Bible stories of a small boat overstuffed with cute animals that gently bobbed in an ocean for 40 days.

Many simply call it a myth. Fewer and fewer these days believe the flood account from Genesis 6 to 9 is actual history.

The Bible frames the flood as an actual historical event, one that involved a specific family of eight.

Genesis says the flood lasted for a full year, engulfed the entire world, and preserved animals, plants, and humanity from well -deserved judgment.

The flood represents the most detailed account of any single event in the Bible. Both the Apostle Peter and Jesus even referred to the

Genesis flood as a real historical event. So it's safe to say that the credibility of the Bible, and even

Jesus himself, hinges on whether the flood account actually happened as described in Genesis. Join us now as we reveal how

Noah's flood lines up with brand new scientific research. Over 1 ,800 oil well boreholes from four continents have all been compiled and mapped.

The newly emerging map tracks the thickness and extent of each rock type as they were laid down by the flood.

This research reveals the same six megasequences of sedimentary rock deposits across multiple continents.

Each megasequence contains a huge stack of rock, often with coarse -grained sandstone on the bottom, then finer -grained deposits like shale, then topped by limestones.

Each megasequence is bounded above and below by flat, eroded surfaces called unconformities.

A few places on Earth have layers that represent all six megasequences. How did they get there?

What do they say about Noah's flood? Catastrophically water -deposited sedimentary layers top most of the world's continents.

Would Noah's flood bring lots of water and lots of mud? Geologists agree on the six megasequences, but they differ on the timescale in which they happened.

If they took millions of years, then they have little to do with the flood. But if they were all deposited rapidly and recently, then the flood should come to mind.

Many also question when a larger landmass, such as a Pangaea -like supercontinent, broke into continents that moved to their current configuration.

For the first time ever, new megasequence maps allow us to see how the flood shaped our entire planet, just like the

Bible said, including reconfiguring the continents. According to Genesis, the

Garden of Eden was a lush paradise, one that was set up for eternal life, worldwide vegetarianism, and harmony with our

Creator. There was no bloodshed, disease, or even death. Plants and trees had no thorns or thistles, and humans tended

God's creation. Then came the fall. We disobeyed God and ate the forbidden fruit.

Sin entered the world, and death threw sin. Suffering, pain, mutations, and cancer now plagued humanity.

Plants and trees grew thorns, and we transitioned from keepers of a lush garden to laboring farmers.

The earth and universe began to decay and groan under the weight of sin's curse. Not even 2 ,000 years later, humanity had turned so corrupt that God sent the flood as a judgment against us.

For God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.

And God said to Noah, The end of all flesh has come before me, for the earth is filled with violence through them, and behold,

I will destroy them with the earth. God instructed Noah to make an ark, a word that means box or chest, to specific dimensions, materials, and construction.

And Noah did according unto all that the Lord commanded him. And Noah and his family entered the ark along with two of every basic kind of land -dwelling, air -breathing animal with nostrils.

These add up to about 5 ,000 pairs of animal kinds needed to reproduce all the variety in animal life we have today.

Then, in the 600th year of Noah's life, in the second month, the 17th day of the month, the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up and the windows of heaven were opened.

These two events, the fountains of the great deep breaking up and the windows of heaven opening, began the first day of a 371 -day -long calamity that resurfaced the earth and killed everything that moved on land.

Hot magma mixed with steam pierced the earth's crust. Giant rifts or tears ran thousands of miles across the planet.

Scalding hot magma vaporized massive amounts of water that jetted into the atmosphere. The water fell back to earth as intense global rain, along with torrential rain from heaven, for 40 days.

Worldwide catastrophic rifting caused massive mud -filled tsunamis to speed across deep ocean floors, then onto shallow ocean floors, killing everything in their path.

The first megasequence wipes out mostly shallow marine habitats. The bursting fountains of the great deep spew out megatons of magma and carbon dioxide.

Sure enough, the first megasequence rocks show a spike in volcanic activity and massive amounts of carbon dioxide.

During these first 40 days, intense water currents overtopped most of the flooded continents. Water -laden sediment travels at highway speeds.

Thick sediment blankets start covering low regions of the continent. Fossils show that the first three megasequences buried the shallow seas that were filled with marine life, as these deposits have almost no trees or land animals.

All three megasequences covered similar environments across North and South America and Africa, the three continents mapped so far.

One global cause, Noah's Flood, best explains this one worldwide effect.

Then by the 40th day of the flood, the Absaroka megasequence began hitting. The maps show that this is when things got much worse.

Something shoves the water over the tops of even the highlands from that ancient world. The newly forming ocean floor offshore is so hot that it starts very thick, pushing up the ocean waters from beneath.

Sea level rises dramatically. Molten magma rises and fills the widening gaps, pushing the mid -ocean ridges wider.

The hot ocean floor shoves against the continents, then slides beneath it, like giant conveyor belts, deep beneath the earth in some places.

Rather than the conventional model that has the seafloor spreading slowly, this runaway subduction actually happened quickly, moving at about 5 miles per hour due to the heat caused by the friction and pressure of the rapidly subducting plates.

As the diving ocean plates subduct under the land, they push down the continental edges and then release them, creating tsunami cycles that blanket the continents, just how tsunamis happen today, only more intense and frequent.

For example, the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in Japan, and the fourth largest in history, was a magnitude 9 .1

earthquake that occurred in 2011. This earthquake was caused by an undersea megathrust about 45 miles east of the

Japanese coast. At the center, there was a 160 -foot slip between the overriding plate that was part of Japan and the underlying

Pacific plate. The sea bottom rose about 23 feet when the fault unlocked, and the resulting earthquake triggered a devastating tsunami that was 133 feet above sea level and traveled inland for six miles.

The tsunamis occurring during the flood, however, were different, much different. With the ocean ridge bursting open rapidly and pushing the ocean floor under land continents on a worldwide scale, tsunamis were happening in cycles, several every hour, and with long stretches of subduction zones active at the same time.

The incoming phase of a tsunami has a much higher speed and is highly turbulent, which keeps the sediment in suspension, but it leaves behind layers of sediment as it slows down in the retreating phase.

This cycle repeats several times every hour during the 150 -day inundation stage of the flood, first entombing the shallow marine life, followed by land creatures in different habitats and elevations, leaving behind what we see today in the fossil record.

These types of tsunamis have even occurred in recent history, such as the tsunami caused by slipping ocean plates that hit the coast of Washington in 1700 and left behind multiple layers representing each wave of the tsunami.

Recent seismic technology actually allows us to investigate whether this type of rapid subduction occurred.

Sure enough, these scans reveal a ring of unexpectedly cold rock at the bottom of the mantle beneath the subduction zones that surround the

Pacific Ocean. The severity and elevation of this stage of the flood is why the first land creatures and plants start showing up in the fossil record laid down by the

Absaroka megasequence. Entire ecosystems are buried in enormous deposits that later turn into coal, such as the extensive

Appalachian coal beds. In fact, the U .S. has over 7 trillion tons of coal reserves.

Where did it all come from? While we know that coal is formed by dead plant material being sandwiched between sediment layers, we only have enough vegetation on the

Earth's surface today to produce just a fraction of the existing coal reserves. This shows that the pre -flood world was mostly covered by lush vegetation.

The rising floodwaters and tsunamis that were necessary to sweep over the land and bury vast amounts of vegetation that turned into coal are best explained by a catastrophe of worldwide proportions.

The fact that over a dozen states in the U .S. are filled with dinosaur fossils buried under heaps of mud also attests to the flood.

In fact, geologists have found a temporarily exposed dinosaur peninsula where the dinosaurs made their last stand, now buried there along with lake and sea life transported by the massive waves.

The earlier flood deposits, the first three megasequences, do not seem to have deposited much material over this dinosaur peninsula.

Only a few hundred yards of sediment remain along the margins. And in many places, no deposition is left at all.

Deposits thousands of feet thick occur east and west of this temporarily exposed peninsula that extends from Minnesota to New Mexico.

Now buried across it are pre -flood wetland plants and animals, including dinosaurs, turtles, frogs, fish, and many birds.

Thousands of dinosaur trackways up and down this peninsula, plus similar temporarily exposed low areas on other continents, suggest that dying dinosaurs and other hardy trackmakers floated, waded, and walked on freshly deposited mud trying to find safe ground.

Next, the massive Zuni megasequence hits. The Absorica and Zuni megasequences are the most severe because the continental plates began to move more quickly from the original

Pangaea -like supercontinent configuration to where they are today. With oceanic rifting and plate subduction increasing dramatically, and the continents traveling apart quickly, the tsunami -like waves began washing across western

North America while virtually no sedimentation is occurring in the east. When coming up over the dinosaur peninsula, the

Zuni catastrophically buries dinosaurs in the Morrison Formation, a 13 -state area encompassing over 700 ,000 square miles.

This Jurassic unit includes at least 141 massive dinosaur boneyards where dinosaurs like Camarasaurus, Diplodocus, Apatosaurus, Stegosaurus, and Allosaurus are found.

The Cretaceous layers, like the Hill Creek Formation, are found on top of the Jurassic and hold hundreds of mass boneyards containing several different types of dinosaurs such as T.

rex, Triceratops, Centrosaurus, and Edmontosaurus that had been living in a different ecosystem, also buried by the

Zuni. The Zuni was so massive and fast that it engulfed entire regions with mud flow, burying giant creatures like this

T. rex under 50 feet of muddy sediment, entombed so quickly that preserved blood cells, blood vessels, and bone cells were found just recently.

How much water does it take to pile 50 feet of mud on top of a dinosaur? The Dinosaur National Monument in Utah contains thousands of visible bones from 11 kinds of dinosaurs that were buried in a jumbled mass in the

Morrison Formation together with crocodiles, turtles, lizards, frogs, and clams. What type of event would it take to bury all these different land animals with millions of clams?

When the Dinosaur Peninsula floods over completely, large herds of dinosaurs are entombed in massive fossil graveyards in the upper

Cretaceous system found in northern Wyoming, Montana, and Alberta, Canada. The dinosaurs had tried to escape by fleeing northward up the peninsula as waters advanced from the south.

This explains this massive graveyard in northern Montana that's over 1 .2 miles long and contains 30 million fossil fragments representing over 10 ,000 adult myosaura that were simultaneously buried.

In this entire collection of bones, not a single baby was found. Every one of these 10 ,000 myosaura was between 9 and 23 feet long.

Does this seem like the adult dinosaurs were stampeding away from the raging floodwaters with 100 % of their young falling behind and being engulfed in a different part of the peninsula?

Just 170 miles northeast of this location is one of the largest dinosaur graveyards in the world, one that even secular scientists admit was caused by a watery catastrophe.

Here, thousands of centrosaurs are buried in 14 megabone beds over an entire square mile, which is nearly 500 football fields.

Looks like a massive herd of these creatures, thousands of them, were simultaneously buried in mud by Noah's Flood.

Just 45 miles west from this location is yet another massive flood deposit, and this one even has 49 different species of dinosaurs buried along with turtles, crocodiles, fish, flying reptiles, birds, and small mammals.

What type of disaster could bury nearly 50 species of dinosaurs and many other types of animals, including marine life, together in mass graves?

These mass burial sites are common in the U .S. as well. For example, look at this dinosaur dig site in Wyoming, where a 1 meter thick layer of mudstone stretches for 80 acres, with over a million bones buried in a graded, sordid bed, where big bones are found at the bottom and little bones on top.

The only way to develop a graded bed like this is by a catastrophic process that transports these bones and deposits them during a single event.

Large flying creatures like pterosaurs were able to fly to escape the rising floodwaters, delaying their demise until the later stages of the flood.

The fossil record shows they are buried in many different layers all over the world. There's no doubt that widespread volcanism was also involved in finishing off the dinosaurs, as many of these mass graves are literally packed with volcanic ash, ash that in many cases was mixed with water when it emplaced the dinosaurs in their tombs.

One section of the Morrison Formation, called the Brushy Basin Member, spreads across five states and includes over 4 ,000 cubic miles of volcanic materials, without a single volcano in the

Morrison Formation. Geologists believe this material had to be carried all the way from volcanoes on the west coast.

Volcanoes created by the magma rising from the subducting ocean crusts plunging under the land.

Today, these subduction zones form the ring of fire, responsible for over 90 % of our earthquakes.

The Bible records that on the 150th day of the flood, God made a wind to pass over the earth.

The water started to recede. The fountains of the deep and the windows of heaven were stopped, and the rain from heaven was restrained.

Now enters the final megasequence, the Tejas. Here, after the water peaked over the top of the highest remnant of the pre -flood world, it began to rush off the continents, eroding and reworking some of the deposits laid down in the previous megasequences, especially carving away at the

Zuni deposits. This final sequence appears to have been different than the others, because there was a reversal in flow direction as the waters began to sheet off the continents.

This flow reversal transported much of the fossils deposited earlier off the highest uplands, spreading them towards the edges of the continent.

The evidence points to the Tejas draining the floodwaters southward off of the U .S. towards the

Gulf of Mexico, with a sheet wash pattern all at once. This is why we find massive sand deposits in the deep water of the

Gulf of Mexico. Billions of barrels of oil have been discovered there, with much of it found within a massive 1 ,100 foot thick bed of pure sand in over 7 ,000 feet of water over 200 miles offshore.

In addition, plants swept off the pre -flood lands formed massive coal beds, such as in the

Powder River Basin of Wyoming and Montana. These Tejas layers contain the largest coal deposits in North America that currently supplies over 40 % of the coal in the

U .S. Some of these stacked coal beds are up to 200 feet thick and cover areas that are 60 miles long by 60 miles wide.

The sheer volume of plant material required to form such a massive layer of coal testifies to catastrophic circumstances.

The massive runoff that began with the Tejas may also explain the lack of human fossils in the rock record.

Any residual human remains left buried in earlier deposits were totally destroyed by the erosive, retreating floodwaters.

In line with God's promise to wipe them from the face of the earth, any residual remains were ground up and likely spread in all directions over great distances by the

Tejas, lessening the likelihood of finding any human fossil remains. Because humans were impacted earlier by the floods violence, they were destroyed and thus not buried whole deep in the sediments, leaving no fossil traces.

Erosion in the Tejas sequence would have affected the strata beneath, wiping away even traces of human remains buried in earlier layers.

When God stopped the fountains of the Great Deep on day 150, the new ocean surface began cooling and sinking, allowing the floodwaters to lower as they sheeted off the continents into the new ocean basins.

Psalm 104 describes the mountains being raised at the end of the flood and the waters draining down valleys and off the emerging new land surfaces.

The seafloor rifting process and the resulting mountain forming process explains why sea creatures are found on mountaintops all over the world, high above current sea levels.

For the remaining 220 days of the flood, the water recedes from the earth and it dries out, allowing time for earth to be replenished with vegetation for the animals to eat when they eventually come off the ark.

This year -long catastrophe left behind a vast number of proofs that, quite frankly, make its occurrence obvious.

First, we have the staggering volume of fossil -bearing sedimentary rocks around the world. Over one mile thick on average, billions of dead things buried in rock layers laid down by water all over the earth.

And the sediment they're found in lies above sea level. What sort of water process could emplace so much sediment above sea level on top of the land surface?

Another clue is the vast horizontal extent of individual sediment layers with little to no erosional channeling between successive layers.

What sort of transport and depositional process could conceivably generate such uniform layers over such vast horizontal distances?

Many of these layered beds are separated by bedding planes on the scale of inches to feet, a feature so common that few stop to think about how it happened.

It's as if the sediment is being deposited in pulses in a repeating manner, with each pulse producing a thin layer commonly found around the world.

The flood tsunamis provide a perfect explanation, and it happened so quickly that there was no time between deposition of the layers for surviving critters to burrow into the layers and turn them over.

What has been discovered, both from a creationist as well as from a secular understanding, is that much of the continental fossil record was already in place before any of the present -day ocean crust had come into existence at a rift zone.

For example, all of the trilobite fossils had been deposited, plus all of the older coal deposits had already been formed before any of the present -day ocean crust had formed.

Since in creationist understanding, the presence of fossils is a completely trustworthy indicator of the action of the flood, this means that much of the flood cataclysm had already unfolded and had generated fossil -bearing sediments on the continental surface before any of the present -day ocean floor had appeared.

It further implies that all of today's ocean floor formed since the onset of the flood during roughly the latter half of the cataclysm.

It also means that all of the pre -flood ocean floor, plus the ocean floor formed during the earlier portion of the flood, must have been recycled into the

Earth's interior during the cataclysm. These considerations indicate in a compelling way that rapid plate tectonics must have been a major aspect of the year -long flood catastrophe.

This six -megasequence worldwide flooding process perfectly set the stage for the subsequent ice age.

The oceans had been tremendously heated by the rifting that had taken place across the 145 ,000 mile ridge system and the creation of a completely new seafloor of hot lava as a consequence.

This caused an abnormal amount of evaporation and thus continuous rain that was likely worldwide.

The volcanic activity created by the subduction zones that created the ring of fire would have spewed volumes of ash and aerosols high into the atmosphere, resulting in cooling, especially in the higher latitudes.

These factors combined to produce an ice age that lasted a few hundred years, but ended as the conditions that caused it waned.

The ark came to rest on the mountains of Ararat in the seventh month on the 17th day of the month.

Just as Noah and his family entered through the single door of the ark to be saved from the flood, there's only one way of salvation today.

Jesus Christ in the book of John says, I am the door, by me if any man enter in, he shall be saved.

Through his death and resurrection, Christ paid the penalty for our sins, offering salvation to those who will receive him.

With so much evidence supporting the historical foundation of the Christian faith, we pray that you will consider following Christ as the only way for salvation.

As many as received him, to them gave he power to become children of God, even to them that believe on his name, which were born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.

John 1 12 -13 Are you a Christian student looking for answers about what the

Bible teaches about creation, the fossil record, dinosaurs? Download the Genesis Apologetics app from the iTunes or Google Play stores for answers to these questions and more.