© Lloyd, Charles Chandler

 

=RECAP
=SUPERCONTINENT FORMATION
When did it happen?

A creationist sequence of events:

Before the Flood, a water vapor canopy covers the Earth. There is a veil of ice clouds in the mesosphere. Earth's atmosphere is dense (2 or 3 bars at sea level). Many creatures grow to gigantic sizes, and men can live up to 1000 years.

or
=AGE OF DINOSAURS
The "Age of Dinosaurs"
Dinosaurs occupy the protocontinent except for Mesopotamia or East Antarctica, where people and other animals live.

This environment ends when a long swarm of meteorites of all sizes begins striking the Moon and Earth.

Meteorites hitting the ocean raise plumes of water that Noah calls "fountains of the deep". On land, the impacts make large craters such as Vredefort and Sudbury, and unleash the Siberian flood basalts. The bombardment goes on for many days. Rising columns of ash and dust cause the vapor canopy to collapse as rain. Much of the atmosphere is lost. All creatures run for cover, and Noah takes some of each kind living around him into the Ark.

=GREAT FLOOD
The Flood of Noah
A global flood covers the protocontinent, burying the dinosaurs. A few people, and animals that lived near them, survive in the Ark. The protocontinent is not divided. Flood waters do not have to rise very high to cover everything because the topography is relatively low; there are not yet any of the mountain chains we see today.

Before the Flood, there is much sand and mud around the edges (shelf) of the protocontinent and East Antarctica.

During the Flood, massive waves of ocean water wash onto the land, depositing sediment from the continental shelf. Each wave then retreats, but rising water brings the next wave farther inland. As atmospheric pressure falls from 2 or 3 bars to 1, much calcium carbonate precipitates from the sea water by "degassing", forming limestone and cementing the sand and mud. These become the thick sedimentary rock layers that are full of "Paleozoic" and "Mesozoic" fossils.

The first waves bring in sea creatures living in the shallow waters of the continental shelf, as well as land animals living near the ocean. These lowest fossil layers are "Paleozoic".

The next waves overwhelm and bury the dinosaurs. These fossil layers are "Mesozoic".

Once the vapor canopy was gone, rainbows could appear.

The flood waters only had to rise hundreds of feet above sea level to cover the hills, rather than many thousands of feet to cover the mountains we have today. Over a period of months, the water filtered down through the new layers of sediment, revealing dry land to Noah. The sediments eventually hardened into sandstone, limestone, and shale sedimentary rocks thousands of feet thick. The filtered flood waters provide the water table under continents from which we draw well water.

Chicxulub impact
After the Flood is over and the land is dry, the Chicxulub meteorite hits the Earth. Fallout from the impact covers the world with a thin layer of iridium and shocked quartz.

=AGE OF MAMMALS
The "Age of Mammals"
Survivors of the Flood land in Mesopotamia and spread throughout the protocontinent on top of the flat sedimentary rock layers. Their populations grow over several hundred years. Up to this point, there are only 360 days in a year.

=SUPERCONTINENT BREAKUP
The Shock Dynamics event
A giant meteorite impact north of what is now Madagascar divides the protocontinent into the continents and landforms we see today, raises all the mountain chains, and initiates global volcanism. There is widespread extinction of large mammals, many of which are buried and fossilized. These fossil layers are "Cenozoic". All this takes place "in the days of Peleg" (Genesis 10:25).

Much of the continental crust moves away from the equator and towards the poles during the Shock Dynamics event (especially India, Asia, Southeast Asia, Antarctica, and Alaska). Like a figure skater spinning faster as she pulls her arms in, the reduced weight at the equator increases the speed at which Earth rotates on its axis. So days become slightly shorter, and a year grows from 360 to 365.25 days (a 1.46% change). Also, the redistribution of weight at the surface adds a small wobble to the Earth as it spins.

=ICE AGE
Ice Age
Increased evaporation from newly exposed seafloor warms the oceans, filling the atmosphere with moisture. It combines with particulates and gas from the giant impact and global volcanism (including the Deccan flood basalts) to produce cooling and extensive precipitation. Snow falls continuously in high latitudes and altitudes.

Survivors, scattered throughout the world, slowly rebuild civilization. Their stories reflect similar memories of ancient times. Sages watch the night sky for signs of another assault from the stars.

Before the Shock Dynamics event there was no Nile River. Uplift of East Africa around Lake Victoria and where the Horn of Africa was forced inland (Ethiopia) directed river flow to the north to empty into the Mediterranean Sea.

This allowed the civilization of ancient Egypt to arise, with life centered on the Nile.

Why it works:

=DINOSAURS
Dinosaurs - undivided on the protocontinent
There used to be a belief that there were "differences between the Cretaceous dinosaur faunas of Laurasia and Gondwana, with 'characteristic' taxon sets identified in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres." Northern Pangea is called Laurasia; southern Pangea is called Gondwana. But the discovery "of an Australian Cretaceous spinosaurid, in combination with other recent Gondwanan discoveries of clades previously thought to be restricted to Laurasia (e.g. tyrannosauroid and dromaeosaurid theropods, ankylosaurid ankylosaurs, iguanodontian ornithopods), provides evidence for the cosmopolitan [or widespread] distribution of many dinosaur clades during the Early-'middle' Cretaceous." Likewise, researchers have found "many formerly 'Gondwanan' clades in Laurasia, such as rebbachisaurid sauropods, and abelisauroid and carcharodontosaurian theropods." "Analyses have identified sister-group relationships between Cretaceous genera that cross the Gondwanan/Laurasian 'divide': for example, the Australian neovenatorid theropod Australovenator is the sister-taxon of the Japanese Fukuiraptor, and the Australian titanosaurian sauropod Diamantinasaurus is most closely related to Opisthocoelicaudia from Mongolia." So finding the first spinosaurid theropod dinosaur in Australia "is part of a growing body of evidence that seriously undermines the prevalent view of pronounced north-south differences between Early-'middle' Cretaceous dinosaur faunas."2

=GIANT MAMMALS
Mammoths
The Shock Dynamics theory explains the mass extinction of woolly mammoths and other large mammals found in post-Flood sediments. The theory shows how the protocontinent (similar to Pangaea of Plate Tectonics) was shattered by a giant meteorite impact and the pieces flung to their present locations over about 26 hours. Before the impact, what is today North America and northern Asia were below 60 degrees latitude. Overnight they were violently thrown northward. Cross-continental wind storms buried millions of mammoths deep in loose wind-blown soil, while hundreds of thousands more were swept into the ocean onto continental shelves. The Siberian environment quickly changed from temperate grasslands to arctic tundra with permafrost.

Creationist researcher Michael Oard has studied the extinction of the woolly mammoth for many years. Here are some of his findings.8 "There are probably millions of mammoths buried in the permafrost of Siberia alone. The mammoths are found with a wide variety of other mammals, large and small, many of which were grazers. They lived in a grassland environment with a long growing season, mild winters, very little permafrost, and a wide diversity of plants — quite different from the climate in the region today." "They were buried in the dust storms that deposited the loess blankets found in those regions today. Some were entombed in a standing position."

Siberia, Alaska, and the Yukon Territory of Canada, together with the surrounding shallow ocean (Bering Strait), are called Beringia. "Mammoths are commonly found in surficial sediments from western Europe eastward through northern and eastern Asia, Alaska and the Yukon. Mammoth remains are also found on some of the islands in the Bering Sea and are dredged from the shallow continental shelves surrounding Beringia. Enormous numbers of ice age mammals, most commonly mammoths, are dredged up from the unconsolidated sediments of the North Sea by trawlers." "Mammoth and mastodon teeth have been dredged from 40 sites along the continental shelf off the eastern US in water up to 120 meters deep." "It would be conservative... to conclude that several million mammoths are buried in Beringia."

"Woolly mammoths are not the only fossil mammals found in the permafrost of Beringia. There are a wide range of other mammals, large and small, that accompany the mammoths. These include the woolly rhinoceros, wolf, fox, lion, brown bear, camel, deer, ground sloth, pika, wolverine, ferret, ground squirrel, moose, reindeer, yak, musk ox, giant beaver, lemming, porcupine, coyote, skunk, mastodon, antelope sheep, voles, hare and rabbit, plus many species of birds, rodents, horses, and bisons."

"There is abundant evidence that the woolly mammoths in Siberia, Alaska and the Yukon died after the Flood." The surface sediment "lies upon hundreds of meters of consolidated sedimentary rock that a large majority of creationists would attribute to the Flood."

=ATMOSPHERIC DUST
As a result of "great tectonic and volcanic upheaval, the stratosphere would have held great quantities of dust and aerosols." "Thus sunlight would have been partially reflected back to space from the volcanic products trapped in the stratosphere. Less sunlight would have meant cooler land surfaces." "Evaporation would be much greater at mid and high latitude than today due to the much warmer water. Copious evaporation close to the ice sheets would have been most favourable for their rapid growth." Oard is probably not aware of the Shock Dynamics theory and, along with most creationists, believes the "great tectonic and volcanic upheaval" occurred during the Genesis Flood rather than long afterward, as presented here. However, the effects are just as relevant.

=DUST IN ICE CORES
Oard writes, "I believe the secret to their demise and burial can be found in the type of sediment surrounding the woolly mammoths." "The vast majority of the animals are found in the 'yedomas' of Siberia and the 'muck' of Alaska. The yedomas, a Yukut term, are hills 10-20 meters, sometimes up to 60 meters, high." "There is now general agreement that the yedomas and muck are loess — a wind-blown silt! Much data support the wind-blown origin of this sediment." "Thus it seems likely that the mammoths in Beringia were mostly killed and buried by dust storms." "The permafrost would then move upward after the loess was deposited and rapidly freeze the remains, thus accounting for the rapid burial." "Copious wind-blown dust even occurs in the ice age portion of the Greenland and Antarctic ice cores."

"Today, Siberia is well known for its bitterly cold winters." "Siberia today is in the permafrost zone where up to a meter of the surface melts in the summer. Water pools on the surface forming massive bogs and muskegs, making summer travel difficult, if not impossible, for man and beast."8

If only two mammoths survived the Flood, was 300 years enough time to build the population of millions that we find buried? Yes. If we use the elephant life-cycle as a model, a 13 year doubling rate would produce a population at least as large as that which was buried.

Other large mammals
Animals today live in some parts of the world and not in others. In the same way, before the Shock Dynamics event, large mammals occupied different regions of the protocontinent. So along with the woolly mammoth, in Europe and northern Asia the woolly rhinoceros, giant deer, and cave bear are found buried. In North America it is the columbian mammoth, mastodon, saber-tooth cat, giant ground sloth, shasta ground sloth, and yesterday's camel. In South America it is the litoptern, notoungulate, and glyptodon. And in Australia it is the giant kangaroo, marsupial lion, diprotodon, short-faced kangaroo, and giant short-faced kangaroo.7

=CAVES
Caves
After the Flood, receding flood waters would have carved long caves in the newly deposited limestone. Several hundred years later waves carried carcasses of animals deep into these caves during the upheaval of the Shock Dynamics event. The book Cataclysm!1 has a chapter (10) describing the bodies of all kinds of mammals carried deep into limestone caves throughout the world. "The shattered remains of countless 'Pleistocene' (Ice Age) animals and plants were deposited both north and south of the equator, in limestone caves and rock-fissures". "These caves, via narrow fissure-like tortuous passages, often penetrate solid rock for horizontal and vertical distances sometimes exceeding several hundred feet, are intersected by separate fissure systems, and are globally very numerous." "Most of the remains retrieved from these apertures have been deposited in great confusion, with normally incompatible kinds of animals lying in unnaturally close juxtaposition. Often accompanying these organic masses are both rounded and angular stones of dissimilar composition and, less frequently, sizable boulders. All these objects are usually enveloped and united by consolidated muds, earths or hard breccias". They report on caves found in Europe, Asia, North and South America, and Australia. Occasionally human remains are there as well.

Tektites

The Australasian tektite strewn field also appears to be a post-Flood feature (even in uniformitarian literature, from the Pleistocene at 700,000 years before present). A source crater for this, the largest strewnfield by far, has never been found. The fallout area fits the Shock Dynamics impact, just north of Madagascar.

=SEDIMENTARY ROCK FORMATION
Sediment runoff

Continental crust weathers over time, leaving soil, sand, and clay sediment. This is why volcanic islands in the Pacific, are not just islands of barren rock. Rivers and rain wash sediment out to sea, and it settles on the continental slope.

Calcium carbonate from seawater
Surface ocean water is saturated with the elements that form calcium carbonate, and magnesium is present as well. The removal of carbon dioxide from seawater is called degassing. Degassing is a primary method for calcium carbonate precipitation, and it is enhanced by the agitation of crashing waves. In this model, the extended global meteorite bombardment collapses the vapor canopy and Earth loses much of its original atmosphere. The greatly lowered atmospheric pressure causes rapid degassing of the surface waters of the ocean. As the waves roll over the continent, calcium carbonate and calcium-magnesium carbonate precipitate into the sediment carried by the waves, forming limestone, sandstone, mudstone, dolomite, etc., depending on the contents of the waves. These carbonates are the principal "glue" that binds sedimentary rock minerals together.

On the other hand, the much later Shock Dynamics impact did not remove enough atmosphere to lower atmospheric pressure, so calcium carbonate was not produced in vast amounts as before. Cross-continental waves did deposit sediment, but only a little calcium carbonate was released by wave agitation. That is why Cenozoic layers are mostly loose sediment, unlike the hard Paleozoic and Mesozoic rocks. "Cenozoic sediments can be recognized in the field because for the most part they are just that, sediments (rocks composed of unconsolidated [loose] materials). Where lithified, Cenozoic sandstone is usually friable [crumbly] and shale is mechanically weak." --Rance, Hugh. 1999. The Present is the Key to the Past. Queensborough Community College Press, online textbook, page 213. "The sedimentary rocks of the Cenozoic era are, for the most part, quite loose and uncompacted; it is relatively rare to find hard rocks, such as so generally characterize the older formations." --Scott, William Berryman. 1914. An Introduction To Geology. The MacMillan Company, New York, Chapter XXXV.

Folding and faulting
The flat layers of sedimentary rock laid down by the Flood were folded and faulted after they had solidified, not during the Flood. That occurred long after the Flood by Shock Dynamics tectonics.

Mesopotamia
No dinosaur fossils or footprints have been found in Mesopotamia (Iraq).

Noah
Noah reported only what he saw. Many have speculated that what Noah called "fountains of the deep" were vents or cracks in the seafloor from which water flowed to raise the ocean. But Noah could not see below the surface of the ocean. He could see plumes of water shooting high in the air and falling. Noah did not know the maximum depth of the flood waters. The draft of the ark was likely half its height (half of 30 cubits is 15 cubits). Once the flood rose 15 cubits and lifted the ark to float on the water, all he could add was that the waters covered the highest ground (Genesis 7:20). He looked all around, and water covered everything. The animals Noah saved were those that lived in his region. That included all sorts of birds. Most important to his livelihood were cattle, and they are mentioned specifically twice (Genesis 7:14, 7:21).

=DINOSAUR DROWNING POSE
Dinosaur death pose
So many dinosaur fossils have been found with their neck arched way back that this "opisthotonic posture" is often referred to as the "dinosaur death pose". Most are found in sediment laid down by water. To see if water was a factor, an experiment was conducted with dead chicken carcasses and a bucket of water. "Within seconds of submerging the chicken, its head became drawn backwards into a position similar to the death pose. We repeated this procedure six times with fresh and frozen chickens, altering the conditions to rule out confounding variables. Our results were consistent." This supports the idea that dinosaurs all over the world were victims of a very large flood. --Cutler, Alicia, Joshua Cotton, Dr. Brooks Britt, Department of Geological Sciences, Brigham Young University. The classical death pose as a function of aqueous deposition. NCUR 2012 (The National Conference on Undergraduate Research, March 29-31 2012, Weber State University, Ogden, Utah).

Ararat
The ark ran aground on high terrain. However, at the time Ararat was not the desolate region of mountains over 10,000 feet high that exists now. It is implausible that people or animals could have survived if they had to descend those rugged heights. Yet everyone dispersed easily and quickly throughout the land; the hills must have been relatively low before the Shock Dynamics event.

=METEOR IMPACTS
Meteorite bombardment

Over 175 impact crater structures have been found on Earth; 42 are 20 km or more in diameter. It is likely that many others exist in remote regions that have been less studied. We would expect there to be hundreds more on the seafloor since oceans cover most of the planet, yet hardly any have been found. Water depth may be a factor, and they may be difficult to discern. Impact craters are spread throughout the geologic column. For uniformitarians, that means billions of years. For creationists, that means bombardment during the catastrophic events that laid down the strata. So in this model of Earth history, both the Flood and the Shock Dynamics event must have been associated with global meteorite bombardments.

"The Moon and all the terrestrial planets were resurfaced during a period of intense impact cratering." "Only a sudden injection of impacting objects into the terrestrial planet zone could account for the abrupt end of the intense bombardment; thus, this event has been named the Late Heavy Bombardment (LHB), or sometimes the Lunar Cataclysm." "The lunar cataclysm hypothesis postulates that the intense bombardment of the Moon lasted only a very short period of time." "Therefore the LHB was a catastrophic event." "The LHB affected the entire inner solar system, not just the Moon."

Crater size distribution and chemical analyses show that "the source of the LHB impactors was the main asteroid belt and that the dynamical mechanism that caused the LHB was unique in the history of the solar system and distinct from the processes that produce the flux of objects currently hitting planetary surfaces."

"The terrestrial planets have been impacted by two populations of objects that are distinguishable by their size distributions. Population 1 is responsible for the LHB, and Population 2 is responsible for impacts since the LHB period."

"The size distribution of Population 2 projectiles is the same as that of the near-Earth asteroids and quite different from that of the LHB projectiles." Strom, Robert G., Renu Malhotra, Takashi Ito, Fumi Yoshida, David A. Kring. 16 September 2005. The Origin of Planetary Impactors in the Inner Solar System. Science, Vol. 309, pp. 1847-1850.

Of course, the uniformitarian timescale places the LHB nearly 4 billion years ago, and the "very short period of time" is 20 to 200 million years! Nevertheless, the catastrophic nature of the LHB and the distinct populations of craters are still important observations for creationists.

Some Population 1 craters were later obliterated by a few very large impacts on the nearside of the Moon. These huge impacts leveled (modified) parts of the surface inside and beyond the impact craters, forming "basins", such as the Imbrium, Crisium, and Serenitatis basins. No doubt similar large asteroids hit Earth as well.Head III, James W., Caleb I. Fassett, Seth J. Kadish, David E. Smith, Maria T. Zuber, Gregory A. Neumann, Erwin Mazarico. 17 September, 2010. Global Distribution of Large Lunar Craters: Implications for Resurfacing and Impactor Populations. Science, Vol. 329, pp. 1504-1507.