In the Beginning: Compelling Evidence for Creation and the Flood

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The Origin of Oceanic Trenches

SUMMARY: Deep folds, thousands of miles long and several miles deep, lie on the floor of the western Pacific Ocean, directly opposite the center of the Atlantic Ocean. The plate tectonic theory claims that plates drifting on the earth’s surface dive into the earth and drag down the folds. Many reasons will be given why this cannot happen.

As the flood increasingly altered earth’s balanced, spherical shape, gravity increasingly tried to squeeze the earth back toward a more spherical shape. Once a “tipping point” was reached, that portion of the subterranean chamber floor with the most overlying rock removed rose suddenly, almost 10 miles, to become the Atlantic floor. This caused the Pacific floor to subside and buckle inward, producing folds, called oceanic trenches. Measurements and discoveries near trenches confirm this subsidence and the absence of diving plates. Shifts of material throughout the earth produced gigantic amounts of volcanic activity, especially on the western Pacific floor. Slight mass imbalances remain, so earthquakes now occur and continents steadily shift—not drift—toward the trench region of the western Pacific.

Imagine standing at the edge of something that reminds you of the Grand Canyon, but this “canyon” is several times deeper. Its walls are almost as steep as the Grand Canyon’s, but the view across the 60-mile-wide depression is never obstructed by intermediate land forms. This “canyon” is thousands of miles longer than the Grand Canyon and does not have sharp bends. Such depressions, called oceanic trenches, are often shaped like long arcs that connect at cusps. Oceanic trenches would be the leading natural wonders of the world, if water did not hide them. (Average ocean depth is 2.5 miles; the deepest trench is 6.86 miles below sea level.) Sixteen trenches are concentrated on the western Pacific floor. What concentrated so many trenches, and why in the Western Pacific?

Drifting vs. Shifting

The distinction between drifting and shifting is subtle but important. A box drifts on the sea, but a box shifts in the back of a truck. Drifting is a continuing movement on or in a fluid, often for a great distance, while shifting is a slight, limited, but significant lateral movement on or in a solid. Drifting is caused by a steady, unyielding, outside force, while shifting is usually caused by gravity and a sudden change in equilibrium. Drifting requires a continuing energy source, but shifting requires a disturbing event. The plate tectonic theory says continents steadily drift. The hydroplate theory says crustal plates drifted rapidly, but briefly, on a layer of escaping, high-pressure water near the end of the flood. This drifting produced imbalances. Since then, these and other imbalances caused by the flood sporadically shift continents and everything below.

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Surprisingly, trenches contain shallow-water fossils.1

Materials [including fossils] which are usually supposed to be deposited only in shallow water have actually been found on the floor of some of the deep trenches.2

Why are such unlikely fossils in a remote part of the ocean—a thousand times deeper than one would expect?

Most of the earth’s crust is vertically balanced, like blocks of ice floating in a pan of water. Large, dense blocks sink in, while lighter blocks “float” higher up. This is called isostatic equilibrium. However, oceanic trenches are earth’s most glaring departure from this equilibrium. That may be an important clue about how trenches formed. As various authorities have written:

... trenches are characterized by large negative gravity anomalies. That is, there appears to be a mass deficiency beneath the trenches, and thus something must be holding the trenches down or else they would rise in order to restore isostatic equilibrium. 3

The most striking phenomenon associated with the trenches is a deficiency in gravity ... Measurements of gravity near trenches show pronounced departures from the expected values. These gravity anomalies are among the largest found on earth. It is clear that isostatic equilibrium does not exist near the trenches. The trench-producing forces must be acting ... to pull the crust under the trenches downward!4

In other words, something has pulled, not pushed, trenches down. The downward pull of gravity in and above trenches is less than expected, even after adjusting for the trench’s shape, so less mass exists under trenches than one would expect. It is as if something deep inside the earth “sucked” downward the material directly below trenches. This would reduce the mass below trenches. (If you want to show a slight weight loss, weigh yourself while on a ship sailing over a trench.)

A useful illustration is to think of a slight vacuum, or reduced mass, under trenches. While the term density deficiency is more descriptive and accurate, most people understand the consequence of a partial vacuum which “nature abhors.” That is, nature always tries to move material to fill a vacuum. If one waited long enough, material inside the earth must flow in under trenches to fill this “partial vacuum.” Today, crustal plates move an inch or so each year toward trenches, so this “partial vacuum” is being filled in modern times. Later, we will see where the missing mass under trenches went and what created the “partial vacuum.” Clearly, this filling in has not been going on for long.


(Figures 69 through 82 purposefully left out)

Figure 82: Spin. A spinning body, such as a figure skater or the earth, spins faster if it suddenly becomes more compact about its spin axis. This skater starts a spin with outstretched arms. Then, as she pulls her arms in near her spin axis, she spins so fast she becomes a blur.

Gravity tries to make the earth as compact and round as possible. Earthquakes cause the earth to become more compact and spin slightly faster.6 Therefore, the farther back in time we look, the less compact we should find the earth—at least until we arrive at the time the out-of-balance condition arose. Because earthquakes can occur deep within the earth, the out-of-balance condition affected the entire earth and, as you will see, formed trenches.



A technique called seismic tomography has detected slight density increases under continents. The technique uses earthquake waves to see inside the earth, just as a CAT scan uses x-rays from many angles to see inside your body. Each earthquake radiates waves through the earth. Seismometers located throughout the world receive these waves. Knowing the precise time of arrival and the time of an earthquake, each wave’s average velocity along a specific path can be calculated. After many earthquakes and knowing the average velocity along tens of thousands of different paths, a computer can estimate the wave speed at every point inside the earth. Higher than normal speed implies either colder or denser rock at that point. Earthquake waves travel faster under continents. Some increases in speed are too great to be caused entirely by colder temperatures.5

Almost 90% of all earthquake energy is released under trenches. Earthquakes often occur near sloping planes, called Benioff zones, that intersect a trench. These earthquake zones enter the mantle at 35°–60° angles below the horizontal and extend to depths of about 420 miles.

A fault is a long, deep fracture in the ground along which the opposite sides have slipped relative to each other. During an earthquake, opposite sides of a fault “unlock” and rapid sliding begins. If the side of a fault nearest a distant seismometer moves toward the seismometer, a compression wave will be detected first. If that side moves away from the seismometer, a tension wave will be detected first. By examining the first wave to reach many seismometers, one can deduce the orientation of the fault plane and whether the earthquake was triggered by compression or tension. Earthquakes near trenches are almost always due to horizontal tension failures at right angles to the trench axis.7 Measurements also show that microearthquakes on the ocean floor tend to occur at low tide.8

A prominent feature of all ocean floors is the Mid-Oceanic Ridge. One characteristic of the ridge figures prominently in the two competing theories for how trenches formed. As explained in the preceding chapter, the ridge is cracked in a strange pattern. Some cracks are nearly perpendicular to the ridge axis, while other cracks are parallel to it. Their shapes and orientation are best explained by the stretching of the ridge.9 What would stretch the ridge in two perpendicular directions? (These cracks are easily seen along the Mid-Oceanic Ridge in Figure 42 on page 103.)

More than 20,000 submarine volcanoes, called seamounts, litter the Pacific floor. Some rise almost as high from the surrounding seafloor as Mount Everest rises above sea level. Strangely, the Atlantic has few seamounts. If one plate dives (subducts) beneath another, why aren’t seamounts and soft sediments scraped off the top of the descending plate?

About 2,000 flat-topped seamounts, called tablemounts, are 3,000–6,000 feet below sea level. Evidently, as these volcanoes tried to grow above sea level, wave action planed off their tops. Either sea level was once much lower, or ocean floors were higher, or both. Each possibility raises new and difficult questions.

Enormous amounts of melted basalt, called flood basalts, have spilled out on the earth’s surface. They will help us test theories of trench formation. Typically, such a layer could cover the eastern United States to the height of the Appalachian Mountains—from Atlanta to New York City and from the Appalachian Mountains to the Atlantic Ocean. More than a dozen of these convulsions have occurred at different places on earth, dwarfing in volume the total magma used to form all volcanic cones.

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Theories Attempting to Explain the Origin of Oceanic Trenches

Two broad theories include an explanation for how oceanic trenches formed. Each explanation will be described as its advocates would. Then we will test these conflicting explanations against physical observations and requirements.

(Figure 83 purposefully left out)

Figure 83: Hydroplate Explanation for Trenches. (A) Before the flood, the weight of rock and water, pushing down on the subterranean chamber’s floor, balanced the floor’s upward pressure. The rupture destroyed that equilibrium. Directly below the rupture, the imbalance grew as escaping, high-velocity water and crumbling, unsupportable walls widened the globe-encircling rupture hundreds of miles. Eventually, the imbalance overwhelmed the strength of the floor. First, the Mid-Atlantic Ridge buckled, or sprang, upward. As Europe and Africa slid eastward and the Americas slid westward (based on today’s directions), weight was removed from the rising floor, lifting it faster and accelerating the hydroplates even more. Pressure under the floor, represented by the large black arrows, naturally decreased as the floor rose. (B) Friction melted much of the inner earth as mass shifted toward the rising Atlantic. The melt lubricated the shifts, allowed gravitational settling, formed the earth’s inner and outer core, and measurably increased earth’s spin rate. The floors of the Pacific and Indian Oceans subsided as material shifted inside the earth toward the Atlantic. Where land subsided the most, directly opposite the rising Atlantic, the crust buckled downward forming trenches. Gravity is still smoothing out these imbalances—shifting (not drifting) material, including continents, toward trenches.

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The Hydroplate Theory. [For a more complete description of the hydroplate theory, see pages 102–131.] Toward the end of the flood phase, erosion from escaping high-velocity water had widened the globe-encircling rupture to an average of about 800 miles. Exposed at the bottom of this wide, water-filled gap was the subterranean chamber floor, about 10 miles below the earth’s surface. Before the rupture, the gigantic pressure immediately under the floor corresponded to the weight of almost 10 miles of rock and 3/4 mile of water that pressed down on the floor. Afterward, with 10 miles of rock suddenly gone, only the strength of the chamber floor and 10 miles of water on top of it resisted this upward pressure. Consequently, as the rupture widened, the Mid-Oceanic Ridge suddenly buckled up, as described on pages 114–117.

The continental-drift phase began with hydroplates sliding “downhill” on a layer of water, away from the rising Mid-Atlantic Ridge. This removed more weight from the rising portion of the subterranean chamber floor, causing it to rise even faster and accelerate the hydroplates even more. (If you are wondering how the hydroplates could slide away from the Mid-Atlantic Ridge without meeting large resistances on the opposite side of the earth, see the paragraph “Continental plates ...” on page 115.)

As that part of the chamber floor rose to become the Atlantic floor, it stretched horizontally in all directions, just as a balloon stretches when its radius increases. This stretching produced cracks parallel and perpendicular to the Mid-Oceanic Ridge. Because this began in what is now the Atlantic, the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and its cracks are the most prominent of the oceanic ridge system.

Obviously, the great confining pressure in the mantle and core did not allow deep voids to open up under the rising Atlantic floor. So even deeper material was “sucked” upward. Throughout the inner earth, material shifted toward the rising Atlantic floor, forming a broader, but shallower, depression on the opposite side of the earth—what is now the Pacific and Indian Oceans. Just as the Atlantic floor stretched horizontally as it rose, the western Pacific floor compressed horizontally as it subsided. Subsidence in the Pacific and Indian Oceans began a startling 20–25 minutes after the Atlantic floor began its rise, the time it takes a seismic wave to pass through the earth. Both movements contributed to the “downhill” slide of hydroplates.

Centered on the Pacific and Indian Oceans is the trench region of the western Pacific. As material beneath the western Pacific was “sucked” down, it buckled downward in places forming trenches. The Atlantic Ocean (centered at 21.5°W longitude and 10°S latitude) is almost exactly opposite this trench region (centered at 159°E longitude and 10°N latitude).  [See Figure 81 on page 135.]

A simple, classic experiment illustrates some aspects of this event.

A cup of water is poured into an empty 1-gallon can. The can is heated from below until steam flows out the opening in the top. The heat is turned off, and the cap is quickly screwed on the top of the can, trapping hot steam in the metal can. As the steam cools, a partial vacuum forms inside the can. The can’s walls buckle in, forming wrinkles in the metal—“miniature trenches.”

The upper 5 miles of the earth’s crust is hard and brittle. Below the top 5 miles, the large confining pressure will deform rock if pressure differences are great enough. Consequently, as the western Pacific floor subsided (sank), it buckled into “downward creases,” forming trenches. The hard crust and deformable mantle frequently produced deformations with an “arc and cusp” shape. The brittle crust cracked and slid in many places, especially along paths called Benioff zones.10

(Figure 84 purposefully left out)

Figure 84: Trench Cross Section Based on Hydroplate Theory. Notice that the trench axis will generally not be a straight line. Sediments (green) hide the top of a fault plane that should rise above the floor a few hundred feet at most. Other sediments (not shown) and flood basalts (dark gray) cover most of the western Pacific floor. The three large black arrows show the direction of the rising Atlantic and the forces that downwarped the mantle and hydroplate. Earthquakes occur on the many faults produced, especially in Benioff zones and at low tides. Most volcanoes are not above Benioff zones, but are in the center of the western Pacific where downwarping was greatest.

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Deformations throughout the earth slid countless pieces of highly compressed rock over, along, and through each other, generating extreme friction—and, therefore, heat.

To appreciate the heat generated, slide a brick one foot along a sidewalk. Both the brick and sidewalk will warm slightly. Sliding a brick an inch but with a mile of rock squarely on top would melt part of the brick and sidewalk. Earth’s radius is almost 4,000 miles. Place a few thousand of those miles of rock on top of the brick and slide it only one thousandth of an inch. The heat generated would melt the entire brick and much of the sidewalk below.

Small movements deep inside the solid earth would melt huge volumes of minerals, especially those with lower melting temperatures.

Much of this magma squirted up through cracks and flowed on top of the depressed granite hydroplate that formed the western Pacific floor. Researchers have begun to detect this granite under the floors of the Pacific and Indian Oceans.11 Other magma gushed out on the continents as flood basalts. Some magma, unable to escape fast enough, is trapped in pockets called magma chambers.

Let’s suppose the inner earth initially had a more uniform mixture of minerals throughout. Melting, as described above, would cause denser minerals to settle and lighter minerals to rise, a process called gravitational settling. This would generate more heat and produce more melting and gravitational settling—followed by more heating, melting, and settling. After many such cycles, the earth’s core would form with the densest minerals settling to form the solid inner core and the melt rising to form the liquid outer core.  [For details and calculations, see pages 356–358.]

This frictional heating, internal melting, and gravitational settling of the denser components would have increased earth’s rotational speed. Today, the earth spins 365.256 times each year, but there are historical reasons for believing a year once had 360 days.12

We saw in Figure 82 that skaters spin faster as they become more compact. Likewise, as denser minerals settled through the magma toward the center of the earth, the inner core spun faster than the outer earth and the melt moved upward. The inner core is still spinning faster (0.4° per year),13 because the liquid outer core allows slippage between the faster inner core and the slower outer earth.  Other evidence supports these dramatic events.14

Gravity is the basic driving mechanism that formed trenches and slowly shifts the crust. Gravity always tries to make the earth more spherical.15 If you suddenly removed a bucket of water from a swimming pool (or even a 10-mile-thick layer of rock lying above what is now the Atlantic floor), gravity would act to smooth out the irregularity. Because massive volumes of rock inside the earth do not flow as fast as water in a swimming pool, pressure deficiencies, which we might think of as slight partial vacuums, still exist under trenches. Today—especially at low tide—mantle material flows very slightly in under trenches to reduce these “partial vacuums.” This stretches the crust above, produces extensional earthquakes near trenches, shifts plates toward trenches, and makes the earth measurably rounder.16

Both the hydroplate theory and the plate tectonic theory are explained as their advocates would explain the theories. One should critically question every detail of both theories, and not accept either until the evidence has been weighed.

The Plate Tectonic Theory. The earth’s crust is broken into rigid plates, 30–60 miles thick, each with an area roughly the size of a continent. Some plates carry portions of oceans and continents. Plates move relative to each other over the earth’s surface, an inch or so per year.

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(Figure 85 purposefully left out)

Figure 85: Plate Tectonic Explanation for Trenches. Internal heat circulates the mantle causing continental-size plates to drift over the earth’s surface. Consequently, material rises at oceanic ridges (forcing the seafloor to spread), and plates must subduct at oceanic trenches (allowing layered sediments, shown in yellow, to collect). According to plate tectonics, earthquakes occur where subducting plates slide (Benioff zones) and at other plate boundaries. This theory says subducting plates also melt rock, and the magma rises to form volcanoes. [Actually, most volcanoes are not above Benioff zones. If this theory is correct, the yellow sediments hide a cliff face that is at least 30 miles high and the trench axis should be a straight line. W.B.]


Heat is the basic driving mechanism that formed trenches and moves plates. Just as hot water circulates in a pan on a stove, rock circulates inside the earth’s mantle. Heat generated inside the earth by radioactive decay warms some parts of the mantle more than others. The warmer rock expands, becomes less dense (more buoyant), and slowly rises, just as a cork rises when submerged in water. Sometimes, plumes of hot rock rising from the outer core break through the earth’s crust as flood basalts. Conversely, relatively cold rock descends. Rising and descending rock inside the mantle forms circulation cells (convection cells) which drag plates forward. Currents within the mantle rise at oceanic ridges, create new crust, and produce seafloor spreading.

Because new crust forms at oceanic ridges, old crust must be consumed somewhere. This happens when two plates converge. The older plate, having had more time to cool, is denser. Therefore, it sinks below the younger plate and subducts into the mantle, forming a trench. A cold, sinking edge will pull the rest of the plate and enhance circulation in the mantle. Earthquakes occur under trenches when subducting plates slip along Benioff zones. At great depths, subducting plates melt, releasing magma which migrates up to the earth’s surface to form volcanoes. Of course, such slow processes would require hundreds of millions of years to produce what we see today.

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Liquefaction: The Origin of Strata and Layered Fossils

SUMMARY: Liquefaction—associated with quicksand, earthquakes, and wave action—played a major role in rapidly sorting sediments, plants, and animals during the flood. Indeed, the worldwide presence of sorted fossils and sedimentary layers shows that a gigantic global flood occurred.  Massive liquefaction also left other diagnostic features such as cross-bedded sandstone, plumes, and mounds.

Sedimentary rocks are distinguished by sharply-defined layers, called strata. Fossils almost always lie within such layers. Fossils and strata, seen globally, have many unusual characteristics. A little-known and poorly-understood phenomenon called liquefaction (lik-wuh-FAK-shun) explains these characteristics. It also explains why we do not see fossils and strata forming on a large scale today.

We will first consider several common situations that cause liquefaction on a small scale. After understanding why liquefaction occurs, we will see that a global flood would produce liquefaction—and these vast, sharply defined layers—worldwide. Finally, a review of other poorly-understood features in the earth’s crust will confirm that global liquefaction did occur.

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Examples of Liquefaction

Quicksand.  Quicksand is a simple example of liquefaction. Spring-fed water flowing up through sand creates quicksand. The upward flowing water lifts the sand grains very slightly, surrounding each grain with a thin film of water. This cushioning gives quicksand, and other liquefied sediments, a spongy, fluidlike texture.3

Contrary to popular belief and Hollywood films, a person or animal stepping into deep quicksand will not sink out of sight forever. They will quickly sink in—but only so far. Then they will be lifted, or buoyed up, by a force equal to the weight of the sand and water displaced. The more they sink in, the greater the lifting force. Buoyancy forces also lift a person floating in a swimming pool. However, quicksand’s buoyancy is almost twice that of water, because the weight of the displaced sand and water is almost twice that of water alone. As we will see, fluidlike sediments produced a buoyancy that largely explains why fossils show a degree of vertical sorting and why sedimentary rocks all over the world are typically so sharply layered.

Earthquakes.  Liquefaction is frequently seen during, and even minutes after, earthquakes. During the Alaskan Good Friday earthquake of 1964, liquefaction caused most of the destruction within Anchorage, Alaska. Much of the damage during the San Francisco earthquake of 1989 resulted from liquefaction. Although geologists can describe the consequences of liquefaction, few seem to understand why it happens.  Levin describes it as follows:

Often during earthquakes, fine-grained water-saturated sediments may lose their former strength and form into a thick mobile mudlike material. The process is called liquefaction. The liquefied sediment not only moves about beneath the surface but may also rise through fissures and “erupt” as mud boils and mud “volcanoes.” 4


Strahler says that in a severe earthquake:

... the ground shaking reduces the strength of earth material on which heavy structures rest. Parts of many major cities, particularly port cities, have been built on naturally occurring bodies of soft, unconsolidated clay-rich sediment (such as the delta deposits of a river) or on filled areas in which large amounts of loose earth materials have been dumped to build up the land level. These water-saturated deposits often experience a change in property known as liquefaction when shaken by an earthquake. The material loses strength to the degree that it becomes a highly fluid mud, incapable of supporting buildings, which show severe tilting or collapse.5

These are accurate descriptions of liquefaction, but they do not explain why it occurs. When we understand the mechanics of liquefaction, we will see that liquefaction once occurred continuously and globally for weeks or months during the flood.

Visualize a box filled with small, angular rocks. If the box were so full that you could not quite close its lid, you would shake the box, so the rocks settled into a denser packing arrangement. Now repeat this thought experiment, only this time all space between the rocks is filled with water. As you shake the box and the rocks settle into a denser arrangement, water will be forced up to the top by the “falling” rocks. If the box is tall, many rocks will settle, so the force of the rising water will increase. The taller column of rocks will also provide greater resistance to the upward flow, increasing the water’s pressure even more. The topmost rocks will then be lifted by water pressure for as long as the flow continues.

This is similar to an earthquake in a region having loose, water-saturated sediments. Once upward-flowing water lifts the topmost sediments, weight is removed from the sediments below. The upward flowing water can then lift the second level of sediments. This, in turn, unburdens the particles beneath them, etc. The particles are no longer in solid-to-solid contact, but are suspended in and lubricated by water, so they can easily slip by each other.

Wave-Loading—A Small Example.  You are walking barefooted along the beach. As each wave comes in, water rises from the bottom of your feet to your knees. When the wave returns to the sea, the sand beneath your feet becomes loose and mushy. As your feet sink in, walking becomes difficult. This temporarily mushy sand, familiar to most of us, is a small example of liquefaction.

Why does this happen? At the height of each wave, water is forced down into the sand. As the wave returns to the ocean, water forced into the sand gushes back out. In doing so, it lifts the topmost sand particles, forming the mushy mixture.

If you submerged yourself face down under breaking waves but just above the seafloor, you would see sand particles rise slightly above the floor as each wave trough approached. Water just above the sand floor also moves back and forth horizontally with each wave cycle. Fortunately, the current moves toward the beach as liquefaction lifts sand particles above the floor. So sand particles are continually nudged upslope, toward the beach. If this did not happen, beaches would not be sandy.6

Wave-Loading—A Medium-Sized Example.  During a storm, as a large wave passes over a pipe buried offshore, water pressure increases above it. This forces more water into the porous sediments surrounding the pipe. As the wave peak passes and the wave trough approaches, pressure over the pipe drops, and the stored, high-pressure water in the sediments flows upward. This lifts the sediments and causes liquefaction. The buried pipe, “floating” upward, sometimes breaks.7

Wave-Loading—A Large Example.  On 18 November 1929, an earthquake struck the continental slope off the coast of Newfoundland. Minutes later, transatlantic phone cables began breaking sequentially, farther and farther downslope, away from the epicenter. Twelve cables were snapped in a total of 28 places. Exact times and locations were recorded for each break. Investigators suggested that a 60-mile-per-hour current of muddy water swept 400 miles down the continental slope from the earthquake’s epicenter, snapping the cables.8

This event intrigued geologists. If thick muddy flows could travel that fast and far, they could erode long submarine canyons and do other geological work. Such hypothetical flows, called “turbidity currents,” now constitute a large field of study within geology.

Problems with the 60-mile-per-hour, turbidity-current explanation are:

    * water resistance prevents even nuclear-powered submarines from traveling nearly that fast,
    * the ocean floor in that area off the coast of Newfoundland slopes less than 2 degrees,
    * some broken cables were upslope from the earthquake’s epicenter, and
    * nothing approaching a 400 mile landslide has ever been observed—let alone on a 2 degree slope or underwater.

Instead, a large wave, a tsunami,9 would have rapidly radiated out from the earthquake’s epicenter. Below the expanding wave, sediments on the seafloor would have partially liquefied, allowing them to flow downhill.10 This sediment flow loaded and eventually snapped only those cable segments that were perpendicular to the downhill flow.  Other details support this explanation.

We can now see that liquefaction occurs whenever water is forced up through loose sediments with enough pressure to lift the topmost sedimentary particles. A gigantic example of liquefaction, caused by many weeks of global wave-loading, will soon follow.

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Liquefaction During the Flood

The flooded earth had enormous, unimpeded waves—not just normal waves, but waves generated by undulating hydroplates. (The reasons for vibrating or fluttering hydroplates will be explained in the chapter on comets.) Also, a flooded earth would have no coastlines, so friction would not destroy waves at the beach. Instead, waves would travel around the earth, often reinforcing other waves.

During the flood, water was forced into the seafloor in two ways. First, water is slightly compressible,11 so water in the saturated sediments below a wave peak was compressed like a stiff spring. Second, and more importantly, under wave peaks, water was forced, not only down into the sediments below, but laterally through the sediments, in the direction of decreasing pressure. As the wave height diminished, local pressure was reduced and both effects reversed, producing upward flowing water. Water almost completely surrounded each sediment particle deposited on the ocean floor during the flood, giving each particle maximum buoyancy. Therefore, sediments were loosely packed and held much water.

Half the time throughout the flood phase, water was pushed down into the sediments, stored for the other (discharge) half-cycle in which water flowed upward. During discharge, liquefaction occurred if the water’s upward velocity exceeded a specific minimum. When it did, interesting things happened.

(Figure 92 left out)

Figure 92: Liquefaction and Water Lenses. The wave cycle begins at the left with water being forced down into the seafloor. As the wave trough approaches, that compressed water is released. Water then flows up through the seafloor, lifting the sediments, starting at the top of the sedimentary column. During liquefaction, denser particles sink and lighter particles (and dead organisms, soon to become fossils) float up—until a liquefaction lens is encountered. Lenses of water form along nearly horizontal paths if the sediments below those horizontal paths are more permeable than those above, so more water flows up into each lens than out through its roof. Sedimentary particles and dead organisms buried in the sediments were sorted and resorted into vast, thin layers.

In an unpublished experiment at Loma Linda University, a dead bird, mammal, reptile, and amphibian were placed in an open water tank. Their buoyancy in the days following death depended on their density while living, the build-up and leakage of gases from their decaying bodies, the absorption or loss of water by their bodies, and other factors. That experiment showed that the natural order of settling following death was amphibian, reptile, mammal, and finally bird.16 This order of relative buoyancy correlates closely with “the evolutionary order,” but, of course, evolution did not cause it. Other factors, also influencing burial order at each geographical location, were: liquefaction lenses, which animals were living in the same region, and each animal’s mobility before the flood overtook it.


A thick, horizontal layer of sediments provides high resistance to upward flowing water, because the water must flow through tiny, twisting channels between particles. Great pressure is needed to force water up through such layers. During liquefaction, falling sediments and high waves provide the required high pressure.

If water flows up through a bed of sediments with enough velocity, water pressure will lift and support each sedimentary particle. Rather than thinking of water flowing up through the sediments, think of the sediments falling down through a very long column of water. Slight differences in density, size, or shape of adjacent particles will cause them to fall at slightly different speeds. Their relative positions will change until the water’s velocity drops below a certain value or until nearly identical particles are adjacent to each other, so they fall at the same speed. This sorting produces the sharply-defined layering typical in sedimentary rocks. In other words, vast, sharply-defined layers are unmistakable characteristics of liquefaction and a global flood.

Such sorting also explains why sudden local floods sometimes produce horizontal strata on a small scale.12 Liquefaction can occur as mud settles through the water or as water is forced up through mud.

Figure 93: Liquefaction Demonstration. When the wooden blocks at the top of the horizontal beam are removed, the beam can rock like a teeter-totter. As the far end of the beam is tipped up, water flows from the far tank down through the pipe and up into a container at the left which holds a mixture of sediments. Once liquefaction begins, sedimentary particles fall or rise relative to each other, sorting themselves into layers, each having particles with similar size, shape, and density. Buried bodies with the density of plants and dead animals float up through the sediments—until they reach a liquefaction lens. The same would happen to plants and animals buried during the flood.

Their sorting and later fossilization might give the mistaken impression that organisms buried and fossilized in higher layers evolved millions of years after lower organisms. A “school of thought,” with appealing philosophical implications for some, would arise that claimed changes in living things were simply a matter of time. With so many complex differences among protons, peanuts, parrots, and people, eons of time must have elapsed. With so much time available, many other strange observations might be explained. Some would try to explain even the origin of the universe, including space, time, and matter, using this faulty, unscientific “school of thought.” Of course, these ideas could not be demonstrated (as liquefaction can be), because too much time would be needed.

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To understand liquefaction better, I built the apparatus shown in Figure 93. The 10-foot-long metal beam pivoted like a teeter-totter from the top of the 4-legged stand. Suspended from each end of the beam was a 5-gallon container, one containing water and one containing a mixture of different sediments. A 10-foot-long pipe connected the mouths of the two containers.

I lifted the water tank by gently inclining the metal beam. Water flowed down through the pipe and up through the bed of mixed sediments in the other tank. If the flow velocity exceeded a very low threshold,13 the sediments swelled slightly as liquefaction began. Buried bodies with the density of a dead animal or plant floated to the top of the tank. Once water started to overflow the sediment tank, the metal beam had to be tipped, so the water flowed back into the water tank. After repeating this cycle for 10 or 15 minutes, the mixture of sediments became visibly layered. The more cycles, the sharper the boundaries between sedimentary layers became.

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Water Lenses

An important phenomenon, which will be called lensing, was observed in the sediment tank. Some layers were more porous and permeable than others. If water flowed more easily up through one sedimentary layer than the layer immediately above, a lens of water accumulated between them. Multiple lenses could form simultaneously, one a short distance above the other. Water in these nearly horizontal lenses always flowed uphill.14

Throughout the flood, many water lenses formed and sometimes collapsed with each wave cycle. [See Figure 92.] During liquefaction, organisms floated up into the lens immediately above. Water’s buoyant force is only about half that of liquefied sediments, so a water lens was less able to lift dead organisms into the denser sedimentary layer immediately above the lens. In each geographical region, organisms with similar size, shape, and density (usually members of the same species) often ended up in the same lens. There they were swept by currents for many miles along those nearly horizontal channels.15

Coal. Vegetation lifted by liquefaction into a water lens spread out and formed a buoyant mat pressed up against the lens’ roof. Vegetation mats, composed of thin, flat, relatively impermeable sheets, such as intertwined leaves, ferns, grass, and wood fragments could not push through that roof. These mats also prevented sedimentary grains in the roof from falling to the floor of the lens.

Each vegetation mat acted as a check valve; that is, during the portion of the wave cycle when water flowed upward, the mat reduced the flow upward through the narrow channels in the lens’ roof. During the other half of the wave cycle, when water flowed downward, the mat was pushed away from the roof allowing new water to enter the lens. Therefore, throughout the flood, water lenses with vegetation mats thickened and expanded. Vegetation mats became today’s coal seams, some of which can be traced over 100,000 square miles.

Cyclothems. Sometimes, 50 or more coal seams are stacked one above the other with an important sequence of sedimentary layers separating the coal layers. A typical sequence between coal seams (from bottom to top) is: sandstone, shale, limestone, and finally denser clay graded up to finer clay. These cyclic patterns, called cyclothems, are in the order one would expect from liquefaction: denser, rounder, larger sedimentary particles at the bottom and less dense, flatter, finer sedimentary particles at the top. Cyclothem layers worldwide generally have the same relative order, although specific layers may be absent.

Figure 94: Drifting Footprints. Hundreds of footprints, involving 44 different trackways, were discovered in cross-bedded sandstone layers of northern Arizona. Surprisingly, movement was in one direction, but the toes pointed in another direction—sometimes at almost right angles. These and other details made it clear that the animals, probably amphibians, were walking on the sand bottom of some type of lateral-flowing stream.17 This contradicts the standard story that the cross-bedded sandstone layers were once ancient sand dunes. Almost all trackways moved uphill. Obviously, thick sediments must have gently and quickly blanketed the footprints to prevent their erosion—a vexing problem for evolutionists who try to explain fossilized footprints.

How could this happen? Today, salamanders buried in muddy lake bottoms can “breathe” through their skins and hibernate for months. During liquefaction, salamanderlike animals floated up into a liquefaction lens, where water always flows uphill.14 Footprints could be made on the lens’ floor for minutes, as long as the lens stayed open and no more liquefaction occurred to obscure the footprints. When the water lens slowly drained and its roof settled onto the floor, footprints and other marks were firmly protected.

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Fossils. When a liquefaction lens slowly collapsed for the last time, plants and small animals were trapped, flattened, and preserved between the lens’ roof and floor. Even footprints, ripple marks, and worm burrows were preserved at the interface, if no further liquefaction occurred there. A particular lens might stay open through many wave cycles, long after the lens’ floor last liquefied. At other places, the last (and most massive) liquefaction event was caused by the powerful compression event.

Fossils, sandwiched between thin layers, were often spread over a wide surface which geologists call a horizon. Thousands of years later, these horizons gave some investigators the false impression those animals and plants died long after layers below were deposited and long before layers above were deposited. A layer with many fossils covering a vast area was misinterpreted as an extinction event or a boundary between geologic periods.

Early geologists noticed that similar fossils were often in two closely spaced horizons. It seemed obvious that the subtle differences between each horizon’s fossils must have developed during the assumed long time interval between each horizon. Different species names were given to these organisms, although nothing was known about their inability to interbreed—the true criterion for identifying species. Later, in 1859, Charles Darwin proposed a mechanism, natural selection, which he claimed accounted for the evolution of those subtle differences. However, if sorting by liquefaction produced those differences, Darwin’s explanation is irrelevant. 

Questionable Principles.  Early geologists learned that fossils found above or below another type of fossil in one location were almost always in that same relative position, even many miles away. This led to the belief that the lower organisms lived, died, and were buried before the upper organisms. Much time supposedly elapsed between the two burials, because sediments are deposited very slowly today. Each horizon became associated with a specific time, perhaps millions of years earlier (or later) than the horizon above (or below) it. Finding so many examples of “the proper sequence” convinced early geologists they had found a new principle of interpretation, which they soon called the principle of superposition.

Evolutionary geology is built upon this and one other “principle,” the principle of uniformitarianism which states that all geological features can be explained by today’s processes acting at present rates.18 For example, today rivers deposit sediments at river deltas. Over millions of years, thick layers of sediments would accumulate. This might explain the sedimentary rocks we now see.

After considering liquefaction, both “principles” appear seriously flawed. Sediments throughout a tall liquefaction column could have been re-sorted and deposited almost simultaneously by a large-scale process not going on today.

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Testing the Theories

How can we compare and test the two conflicting explanations: liquefaction versus uniformitarianism and the principle of superposition over billions of years?

1. Many sedimentary layers extend over hundreds of thousands of square miles. (River deltas, the largest examples of sedimentation today, are only a tiny fraction of that area.) Liquefaction during a global flood would account for the vastness of these layers. Current processes and eons of time do not.

2. One thick, extensive sedimentary layer has remarkable purity. The St. Peter sandstone, spanning about 500,000 square miles in the central United States, is composed of almost pure quartz, similar to sand on a white beach. It is hard to imagine how any geologic process, other than global liquefaction, could achieve this degree of purity over such a wide area.19 Almost all other processes involve mixing, which destroys purity.

3. Streams and rivers deposit sediments along a narrow line, but individual strata are spread over large geographical areas, not along narrow, streamlike paths. Liquefaction during the flood acted on all sediments and sorted them over wide areas in weeks or months.

4. Sedimentary layers are usually sharply defined, parallel, and horizontal. They are often stacked vertically for thousands of feet. If layers had been laid down thousands of years apart, surface erosion would have destroyed this parallelism. Liquefaction, especially liquefaction lenses, explain this common observation.

5. Sometimes adjacent, parallel layers contain such different fossils that evolutionists conclude those layers were deposited millions of years apart, but the lack of erosion shows the layers were deposited rapidly.  Liquefaction resolves this paradox.

6. Many communities around the world get their water from deep, permeable, water-filled, sedimentary layers called aquifers. When water drains from an aquifer, the layer collapses, unable to support the overlying rock layers. A collapsed aquifer cannot be replenished, so how were aquifers filled with water in the first place?

Almost all sorted sediments were deposited within water, so aquifers contained water when they first formed. Today, with aquifers steadily collapsing globally, one must question claims that they formed millions of year ago. As described in this chapter, liquefaction sorted sediments relatively recently.

7. Varves are extremely thin layers (typically 0.004 inch or 0.1 mm) which evolutionists claim are laid down annually in lakes. By counting varves, evolutionists believe time can be measured. However, groups of varves contain fossils, such as fish. Fish, lying on the bottom of a lake, would decay long before enough varves could accumulate to bury them. (Besides, dead fish typically float, then decay.) Most fish fossilized in varves have been pressed to the thinness of a piece of paper, as would happen to a fish compressed in a collapsing liquefaction lens.

Also, varves are too uniform, show relatively little erosion, and are deposited over wider areas than where streams enter lakes—where most deposits occur in lakes. Lakes would not produce varves.  Varves are better explained by liquefaction.

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 8. In almost all cases, dead animals and plants quickly decay, are eaten, or are destroyed by the elements. Preservation as fossils requires rapid burial in sediments thick enough to preserve their bodily forms. This rarely happens today. When it does, such as in an avalanche or a volcanic eruption, the blanketing layers are rarely water-deposited, are not uniform in thickness, and do not span hundreds of thousands of square miles. Liquefaction provides a mechanism for the rapid, but gentle, burial and preservation of trillions of fossils in sedimentary layers—including fossilized footprints, worm burrows, ripple marks, and jellyfish.  [See also “Rapid Burial” on page 11.]

Thousands of fossilized jellyfish have been found in central Wisconsin, sorted to some degree by size into at least seven layers (spanning 10 vertical feet) of coarse-grained sediments.20 Evolutionists admit that a fossilized jellyfish is exceptionally rare, so finding thousands of them in what was coarse, abrasive sand is almost unbelievable. Claiming that it occurred during storms at the same location on seven different occasions, but over a million years, is ridiculous.

What happened? Multiple liquefaction lenses, vertically aligned during the last liquefaction cycle, trapped delicate animals such as jellyfish and gently preserved them as the roof of each water lens settled onto its floor.

9. Many fossilized fish are flattened between extremely thin sedimentary layers. This requires squeezing the fish to the thinness of a sheet of paper without damaging the thin sedimentary layers immediately above and below.  How could this happen?

Because dead fish usually float, something must have pressed the fish onto the seafloor. Even if tons of sediments were dumped through the water and on top of the fish, thin layers would not lie above and below the fish. Besides, it would take many thin layers, not one, to complete the burial. Today’s processes seem inadequate.

However, liquefaction would sort sediments into thousands of thin layers. During each wave cycle, liquefaction lenses would simultaneously form at various depths in the sedimentary column. If a fish floated up into a water lens, it would soon be flattened when the lens finally drained.

10. Sediments, such as sand and clay, are produced by eroding crystalline rock, such as granite or basalt. Sedimentary rocks are cemented sediments. On the continents, they average more than a mile in thickness. Today, two-thirds of continental surface rocks are sedimentary; one-third is crystalline.

Was crystalline rock, eroded at the earth’s surface, the source of the original sediments? If it was, the first eroded sediments would blanket crystalline rock and prevent that rock from producing additional sediments. The more sediments produced, the fewer the sediments that could be produced. Eventually, there would not be enough exposed crystalline rock at the earth’s surface to produce all the earth’s sediments and sedimentary rock. Transporting those new sediments, often great distances, is another difficulty. Clearly, most sediments did not come from the earth’s surface. They must have come from powerful subsurface erosion, as explained by the hydroplate theory, when high-velocity waters escaped from the subterranean chamber.

11. Some limestone layers are hundreds of feet thick. The standard geological explanation is that those regions were covered by incredibly limy (alkaline) water for millions of years—a toxic condition not found anywhere on earth today. Liquefaction, on the other hand, would have quickly sorted limestone particles into vast sheets.  [See “The Origin of Limestone” on pages 170–175.]

12. Conventional geology claims that coal layers, sometimes more than a 100 feet thick, first accumulated as 1,000-foot-thick layers of undecayed vegetation. Nowhere do we see that happening today. However, liquefaction would have quickly gathered vegetation buried during the early stages of the flood into thick layers, which would become coal after the confined, oxygen-free heating of the compression event.

13. Coal layers lie above and below a specific sequence of sedimentary layers, called cyclothems. Some cyclothems extend over 100,000 square miles. If coal accumulated in peat bogs over millions of years (the standard explanation), why don’t we see such vast swamps today?  Why would a peat bog form a coal layer that was later buried by layers of sandstone, shale, limestone, and clay (generally in that ascending order)? Why would this sequence be found worldwide and sometimes be repeated vertically 50 or more times? To deposit a different sedimentary layer would require a change in environment and/or elevation—and, of course, millions of years. Liquefaction provides a simple, complete explanation.

14. Fossils are sorted vertically to some degree. Evolutionists attribute this to macroevolution. No known mechanism will cause macroevolution, and many evidences refute macroevolution. [See pages 6–21.] Liquefaction, an understood mechanism, would tend to sort animals and plants. If liquefaction occurred, one would expect some exceptions to this sorting order, but if macroevolution happened, no exceptions to the evolutionary order should be found. Many exceptions exist. [See “Out-of-Place Fossils” on page 12.] 

15. Animals are directly or indirectly dependent on plants for food. However, geological formations frequently contain fossilized animals without fossilized plants.21 How could the animals have survived? Evidently, liquefaction sorted and separated these animals and plants before fossilization occurred.

16. Meteorites are rarely found in deep sedimentary rock. [See “Shallow Meteorites” on page 35.] This is consistent only with rapidly deposited sediments.

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Liquefaction During the Compression Event

While liquefaction operated during the flood phase, it acted massively once during the compression event, at the end of the continental-drift phase.  [See pages 102–131.]

Visualize a deck of cards sliding across the table. Friction from the table slows the bottom card. That card, in turn, applies a decelerating force on the second card from the bottom. If no card slips, friction will finally decelerate the top card. But if a lubricant somehow built up between any two adjacent cards, the cards above the lubricated layer would slide over the decelerating cards below.

Similarly, decelerating granite hydroplates acted on the bottom sedimentary layer riding on the hydroplate. Each sedimentary layer, from bottom to top, acted in turn to decelerate the topmost layer. As each water-saturated layer decelerated, it was severely compressed. This was similar to suddenly squeezing a wet sponge. The sediments, forced into a denser packing arrangement, released water. Sedimentary particles were crushed, so broken fragments filled the spaces between particles, releasing more water. The freed water, then forced up through the sediments, caused massive liquefaction. As the sedimentary layers decelerated and compressed, they became more and more fluid. Eventually, some layers were so fluid that slippage occurred above them, as in our deck of cards. Below that level, extreme compression and liquefaction caused fossils to float up and collect at this level where sliding was taking place.

The lowest slippage level was the Cambrian-Precambrian interface. Fossils are found almost exclusively above this interface. [See “Missing Trunk” on page 12.] Therefore, evolutionists interpret the Precambrian as about 90% of all geologic time—a vast period, they believe, before life evolved. Again, time is mistakenly measured by sedimentary layers and their fossils.

Figure 95: Grand Canyon Cross Section. The tipped and beveled layers are part of the Precambrian. The beveled plane, at the Cambrian-Precambrian interface, is sometimes called “The Great Unconformity.” A similar, but much smaller, example of tipped and beveled layers is shown in the cross-bedded sandstone in Figure 97. Beveling implies relative motion. Near the top of the Grand Canyon is a 400-foot-thick layer of cross-bedded sandstone. The white arrow points to the quartzite block shown in Figure 96.

In the Grand Canyon, the Cambrian-Precambrian interface is an almost flat, horizontal surface exposed for 26 miles along the Colorado River. Layers above the Cambrian-Precambrian interface are generally horizontal, but layers below are tipped at large angles, and their tipped edges are beveled off horizontally. Evidently, as slippage began during the compression event, layers below the slippage plane continued to compress to the point where they buckled. The sliding sedimentary block above the slippage plane beveled off the still soft layers that were being increasingly tipped by horizontal compression below the slippage plane.

Figure 96: Transported Block. This large block, made of a very hard, dense material called quartzite, was lifted hundreds of feet, transported horizontally, and deposited on layers which, at the time, were soft mud. Other mud layers then blanketed the block. Notice how the layers were deformed below the lower right corner and above the upper left corner. The easiest way to lift and transport such a heavy block is in a liquefied (and therefore, very buoyant), sand/mud/water mixture. The location of the block relative to its source is shown in Figure 95.22

Apparently, this quartzite block was transported in a sliding sedimentary slurry above the Cambrian-Precambrian interface during the compression event. Peak decelerations occurred in the layers below the sliding slurry. This included the quartzite layer. The sudden deceleration and compression tipped those layers up, allowing them to be beveled off by the overriding layers. (Evolutionists explain the absolutely flat Cambrian-Precambrian interface as a result of hundreds of millions of years of erosion.)

Evolutionists have a different interpretation. In their view, tipped, Precambrian layers are remnants of a former mountain range, because mountains today often have steeply tipped layers. [See Figure 48 on page 106.] The tipped layers are horizontally beveled, so evolutionists say the top of the mountain must have eroded away. That, of course, would take a long time. Millions of years are also needed so seas could flood the area, because fossils of sea-bottom life are found just above the Cambrian-Precambrian interface. Within overlying layers, other fossils are found which required different environments, such as deserts and lagoons, so obviously, even more time is needed. (Unlimited time makes the nearly impossible seem possible—if you don’t think too much about mechanisms.)