Geology Reference
In-Depth Information
forming Mount Ararat are built upon and are therefore younger than a whole series of sed-
imentary rocks. If the mountain itself postdates the Flood, how could Noah have landed on
it? Mount Ararat itself eloquently refutes the claim that Noah's Flood was responsible for
laying down all the world's sedimentary rock.
Before I read
The Genesis Flood
for myself I had been mystified as to how Whitcomb
and Morris could in good faith advocate the discredited ideas that revived modern creation-
ism. But I now see that they latched onto questions for which geologists lacked compelling
answers.
In the late 1950s, geologists did not have satisfying explanations either for the relation-
ship of continents to one another or for the origin of mountains. Nineteenth-century scient-
ists generally thought that the breakup of the continents happened early on in earth history.
Mountains were thought to have formed as the originally molten planet cooled and con-
tracted. Continents formed in the places in which they were still found, their edges crink-
ling up into mountains. But the discovery that the radioactive decay of minerals produced
substantial heat contradicted the theory that Earth was cooling. And no cooling meant no
contracting.
Others had accepted Hutton's explanation for mountain formation. The deposition of
thick sequences of sediment heated the bottom of the pile enough that its weight converted
material at the bottom to rock. Somehow the heating of the sediment pile then caused uplift
that formed mountains. But the discovery that oceanic crust was made of dense basalt,
whereas continents were made of lighter granitic crust, meant that heating up an ocean
basin couldn't turn it into a continent. Hutton's conception of the immense depth of geolo-
gic time fared better than his mountain-building theory. What then could explain the exist-
ence of mountains and the arrangement of continents?
A German meteorologist, Alfred Wegener, was the first to propose continental drift. He
argued that the continents slowly moved around, sometimes colliding to join together and
other times breaking apart. He thought that all the continents were originally joined in
the supercontinent of Pangea (all Earth) that gradually rifted apart several hundred million
years ago.
Like Bretz's flood, Wegener's unsettling idea of wandering continents was widely ri-
diculed when first proposed. He offered no mechanism to explain how continents split
