In the Beginning: Compelling Evidence for Creation and the Flood

Below is the online edition of In the Beginning: Compelling Evidence for Creation and the Flood, by Dr. Walt Brown.
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[ Technical Notes > Tidal Pumping: Two Types ]

Tidal Pumping: Two Types

The water layer under earth’s preflood crust largely decoupled it from the mantle. That gave the crust (a spherical shell), much greater flexibility than if it had been anchored and bonded over the entire mantle’s surface as it is today. In other words, few shearing stresses acted on the base of the crust, allowing it to flex more easily from a sphere to a prolate ellipsoid during each tidal cycle. Also, as the Moon’s gravity lifted the crust at 12 o’clock, the crust was depressed (pinched in) at 9 o’clock and 3 o’clock. Consequently, the confined subterranean water was always pumped by increasing pressure from low to high tide. (This cannot happen with ocean tides, which only flow down a very slight gravity gradient.) Preflood tidal pumping (also assisted by a gravity flow) provided additional lift of the crust at 12 o’clock.

Figure 206. Tidal Pinch. (Not to scale.) Before the flood, the Moon’s gravity not only lifted the largely decoupled (and, therefore, relatively flexible) crust at 12 o’clock and 6 o’clock, it pinched the crust inward at 9 o’clock and 3 o’clock. Both actions pumped the confined subterranean water toward high tide. Another type of tidal pumping occurred as the pillars near 12 o’clock and 6 o’clock were stretched and those near 9 o’clock and 3 o’clock were compressed. The heat generated in pillars was huge, because twice a day for centuries, much of the crust’s great weight compressed the pillars. (Pillars were portions of the sagging crust that touched the chamber floor. See pages 431–436.)

On page 427, the Hebrew word raqia, which means a hammered-out or pressed-out solid, was identified as the earth’s crust. As one visualizes centuries of tidal pumping—and pillars compressing (being hammered or pressed out) twice a day—raqia seems an apt, descriptive word.

The pillars were compressed and stretched twice a day—a second form of tidal pumping. What force compressed the pillars, and how much strain occurred? The pillars were compressed by a sizeable fraction of the gigantic weight of the crust. Today, even without a decoupling layer of subterranean water, the Global Positioning System can measure solid tides on Earth up to 0.4 meters (1.31 feet).¹ At midlatitudes solid tides are about a foot,² but with a decoupling layer of water, the crust’s preflood deflections would have been greater. If the average pillar’s strain were only a foot, repeatedly compressed and hammered pillars would have produced enormous amounts of heat.³

Of course, some energy expended in compressing pillars was recovered elastically during the expansion half-cycle. However, a fraction of that energy was dissipated as heat and would have steadily raised the water’s temperature, although some of the water’s heat would have been lost by conduction into the chamber’s floor and ceiling. (Later, we will combine these fractions into an “efficiency factor,” e.)

How rapidly did the subterranean water become supercritical? Let Q be the heat generated in pillars that raised the subterranean water’s temperature. Two tidal cycles occur for each of N days. The subterranean water’s mass, volume, and density are m, V_w, and r_w, respectively, and the granite crust’s volume and density are V_g and r_g. Let the specific heat of water at the pressure in the subterranean chamber be c_p and the temperature rise needed for that water to become supercritical be DT. The pillars are compressed by an average of d centimeters and e is the efficiency factor mentioned above. Therefore,

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V_g / V_w = 12.33, r_g/ r_w = 2.7 / 1.14 = 2.37,

c_p = 0.9 cal / gm K, d = 30.48 cm (1 foot),

DT < 374 K, g = 980 cm/sec², e = 0.25,

and because 1 cal = 41,868,000 gm cm²/sec², the water became supercritical in less than

TNpumping 2.jpg Image Thumbnail

The greatest uncertainty in these numbers is the variable e.⁴ However, even if e were an order of magnitude smaller, the subterranean water would become supercritical long before the flood began.

Two moons in the solar system, Saturn’s Enceladus and Jupiter’s Europa, are unusual, because they emit so much heat—far more heat than can be explained by radioactive decay.⁵ Enceladus’ heat produces a jet of water plasma that the orbiting Cassini spacecraft passed through and measured several times. A layer of water under the crusts of both moons explains the great heat that is produced.⁶^,⁷ Other evidence also supports the presence of those layers of liquid water.⁸ [See page 307.]

Heat on Enceladus and Europa is generated by the flexing of their floating ice crusts. Because Earth’s preflood crust was composed not of floating ice, but granite, pillars would have been present. [For details on why, how, and when pillars formed, see pages 431–436.] Therefore, the second form of tidal pumping would have acted continuously on pillars before the flood and produced much more heat than that produced in the deflecting crust.

By understanding how tidal pumping produced supercritical water (SCW), perplexing questions can now be answered, including:

the source of the SCW that has been discovered still jetting up in black smokers on the ocean floor,

the origin and nature of the Moho,

the origin of vast salt, limestone, and dolomite deposits,

the source of the cementing agents that hold sedimentary rocks together, and

the origin of most ore bodies.

For a few details, see pages 112–120.

Without knowing that SCW was present before the flood or how SCW was produced, these rarely addressed topics would continue to seldom be discussed, and the gigantic energy released by all the fountains of the great deep would not be understood.