While it is shocking at first to consider—and try to grasp—the vast amount of energy in the subterranean chamber, one should also reflect on the answers it provides.
1. Comets, Asteroids, and TNOs. Pages 310– 375 cite dozens of evidences showing that the material that merged in the years after the flood to become comets, asteroids, and TNOs was launched from Earth. The energy in the chamber was sufficient for that task.
2. Hot Origin for Cold Comets. Tiny rocks and dust recovered from comet Wild 2 (pronounced “Vilt 2”) in 2004 were found to have been forged in white-hot heat. This contradicts the standard story, taught since 1950, that comets formed in the coldest portion of the solar system.11 (In 2005, the Deep Impact space mission made similar discoveries in comet Tempel 1.) These rocks should not have been crystalline, and yet they were crystalline and earthlike, as I predicted they would be in the 7th edition (2001, page 201). The subterranean chamber provided not only the white-hot heat and launch energy, but also the crystalline material for comets, asteroids, and meteoroids. [See “Deep Impact Mission” and “Stardust Mission” on page 318 and Item 7 on page 318.]
3. Heavy Hydrogen. A hydrogen nucleus contains one proton. Most hydrogen nuclei have no neutrons, but some of these nuclei (one out of every 6,400) have absorbed a neutron. They are called deuterium; hydrogen that has absorbed two neutrons is tritium.
Comets generally contain 20–100 times the concentration of heavy hydrogen as interstellar space and the solar system—and twice the concentration as Earth’s surface waters. Therefore, comets did not provide Earth with its water. [See “Heavy Hydrogen” on page 320.]
Only nuclear reactions produce heavy hydrogen.12 Therefore, Earth’s water (as opposed to water or hydrogen in the rest of the universe) must have been exposed to extreme nuclear reactions. Furthermore, for comets to have so much heavy hydrogen, the water that ended up in comets must have been exposed to a high flux of neutrons. How did that happen?
Actually, all the water in comets and about half the water in our oceans came from the subterranean chamber—a chamber that absorbed a high flux of neutrons from nuclear reactions as the flood began. Therefore, our oceans contain considerable heavy hydrogen, and comets have twice that concentration.
4. Irregular Moons. Most astronomers recognize that irregular moons are captured asteroids. But, how were so many captured? (Invoking long periods of time will not work, because those moons are being rapidly destroyed or stripped from their planets.) The same energy that launched water and rocks that later merged to become comets and asteroids also scattered an “ocean” of water vapor into the solar system. That gas provided the aerobraking that allowed planets, asteroids and TNOs, and a few comets to capture moons. Today, too little water vapor is in interplanetary space, to make aerobraking possible. This baffles astronomers, but is explained by the hydroplate theory.
5. Ore Deposits. Geologists have difficulty explaining the origin of Earth’s ore deposits. “Ore deposits of sufficient richness to be economically extracted require very unusual and powerful geologic processes which are rarely explained,”13 other than vague references to “hydrothermal solutions.” Yes, extremely hot water containing valuable dissolved metals (gold, silver, copper, aluminum, mercury, platinum, zinc, and a dozen others) has escaped up onto Earth’s surface where, as the water cooled, the dissolved metals precipitated into small pockets called ore bodies. But how did this happen—and when? Why don’t we see all these metals being deposited today? Evolutionists can only say that ore bodies must have formed slowly millions of years ago. Because it is difficult to imagine Earth’s conditions millions of years ago, or what has transpired since then, that vague explanation ends the inquiry.
The hydroplate theory has already answered these questions. Supercritical water (SCW) was generated by tidal pumping in the subterranean water chamber. From there, it dissolved various minerals in the ceiling of the subterranean chamber, which allowed the mineral-rich water to migrate up through the spongelike lower crust. Of course, most of that hot water escaped during the flood, but hot, mineral-rich water contained in those spongelike pockets also escaped along major faults after the flood. For example, dissolved minerals spilled out of a major fault in Jerome, Arizona, where billions of dollars worth of gold, silver, copper, and zinc ore were mined from 1876–1953.14 Jerome lies at the southern edge of the Colorado Plateau. Undoubtedly, the geologic disturbances caused by the uplift of the Colorado Plateau produce that fault. Because the flood was recent, we can still see this SCW escaping up from the ocean floor as black smokers. [See Figure 56 on page 132.]
6. Gold Deposits. Why are gold veins at the Earth’s surface? If extremely hot water (932°F or 500°C) circulated under and through the lower crust, gold in high concentrations would go into solution. If the solution then came up to the Earth’s surface fast enough, most gold would precipitate. About 250 cubic miles of water must have burst forth to account for the gold found in just one gold mining region in Canada.15 With less-extreme pressure-temperature conditions, even more water must come up faster to account for the Earth’s gold deposits. These are hardly the slow, uniformitarian processes that evolutionists visualize. When the hydroplates crashed, vast amounts of hot water still under the crust burst up through faults and deposited concentrated minerals, including gold.
About 40% of all gold mined in the world is from the Witwatersrand Basin in South Africa. This gold, deposited in compressional fractures (gold veins) within the basin, precipitated from water whose temperature exceeded 300°C.16
7. The Quartz Problem. Geologists acknowledge their inability to explain where enough silica could come from to cement most of the Earth’s sediments into rocks. This is called “the quartz problem.” [See page 268.] SCW dissolved much of the quartz in the rocks bordering the subterranean chamber. That dissolved silica, cooling at the Earth’s surface soon after the flood, cemented rocks—and petrified wood.
8. Salt Deposits. Thick salt deposits on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean were not formed by evaporation but by hot brines deep in the Earth. Among the many reasons for this conclusion are the absence of organic remains in those deposits and the presence of ore minerals that are not found in evaporating basins today.17 Again, hot, erupting, mineral-rich subterranean water explains what we see.
9. Geothermal Heat. As one descends deeper into the Earth, temperatures increase. Many scientists and laymen believe that Earth’s geothermal heat is left over from the formation of the Earth by meteoritic bombardment. A few simple calculations show that if Earth formed that way, too much heat would have been released; the entire Earth would have melted several times over. [See Endnote 45a on page 91 and "Melting the Inner Earth" beginning on page 625.] Others believe that billions of years of radioactive decay produced the temperature patterns we see inside the Earth. The flaws in this thinking are explained in “The Origin of Earth’s Radioactivity” on pages 391– 429.
10. Understanding Accelerated Decay. For more than 20 years, I, along with a few other creationists, have cited evidence that rates of radioactive decay were much faster sometime in the past. In 2005, some creationists, citing several additional evidences, correctly reached the same conclusion. However, they did not know what produced Earth’s radioactivity, what caused accelerated decay or when either happened (during the creation,18 the fall, or the flood). They realized that the decay, whenever it happened, would have produced a vast amount of heat—enough, they thought, to melt much of the Earth and evaporate all the oceans. Because this did not happen, they believe that a miracle occurred or some strange, new physics removed the heat. (Miracles should not be invoked to solve a scientific problem. See Figure 255 on page 559.)
In fact, normal physics was involved. These researchers never addressed the larger question: What was the origin of Earth’s radioactivity? They were also unaware of all the preflood subterranean water and why it became electrically conductive SCW and increasingly permeated the lower crust. That SCW absorbed most of the nuclear energy and converted it primarily to kinetic energy, without a huge rise in temperature. Furthermore, the extremely powerful fountains of the great deep expelled most of that energy into outer space. Some of these researchers completely missed the cataclysmic nature of the flood’s beginning—saying that when, “on the same day all the fountains of the great deep burst open” (Genesis 7:11), the fountains were simply like geysers. These individuals also did not realize that the hydroplate theory explains the accelerated decay and energy removal, and places that decay at the beginning of the flood.19