ThePythonicCow
12th July 2014, 04:26
I happened on an interesting and very well presented theory that has changed my view of earth's geology.
Retired US Army and Air Force colonel Walt Brown has been developing what he calls the hydroplate theory for a couple of decades now. He postulates that about half of what is now the ocean waters on planet earth was some ten miles underground, when the moon's tidal forces super-heated it, forcing it to erupt through a grand rupture in the earth's granite crust some 5000 years ago. This created the mid-oceanic rifts, flooded the earth in immense rain storms, rose up the higher mountain ranges and sank the Pacific floor, and thanks to the shifting masses on the earth's surface, resulted in a change in the earth's tilt in the following century.
Walt wraps his hydroplate theory in his readings of the Bible, the great flood of the time of Noah, and the Christian Creationist view that the earth was created by God some 6000 years ago.
I choose an entirely different wrapping. I left the church, the Christian faith, and reading the Bible at age 11, and have not looked back. My background since that day has been more materialist and scientific oriented.
I would speculate that there were prior human civilizations that achieved a technical competence and economic scale similar to our present one, and in some ways surpassing. I would speculate that the moon was artificially placed in earth orbit long after the earth formed, and that the earth was created by natural means over a very long period of time (millions or billions of years.)
But, either way, Christian Creationist or Scientific Materialism, once you get past your choice of wrapper, Walt Brown has one damn fine piece of scientific work here. It is logical, cogent, well researched, and provides consistent explanations of many details of the current geological and near-earth astrophysical record that the gradualist and evolutionary "conventional" plate tectonic theory cannot explain or incorrectly predicts.
Perhaps the best introductions to hydroplate theory are in a Youtube video introduction provided by Walt Brown himself and in a derivative work, David Warner Mathisen's The Mathisen Corollary: Connecting a Global Flood with the Mystery of Mankind's Ancient Past (http://www.amazon.com/Mathisen-Corollary-Connecting-Mankinds-Paperback/dp/B00GWR6S2E/).
Here's Walt's Youtube video:
sD9ZGt9UA-U
Here's selected early parts of one chapter from The Mathisen Corollary describing the hydroplate theory:
==============
Earlier in the book, we examined the hydroplate theory of Dr. Walt Brown, a graduate of both West Point and MIT and a former professor at the US Air Force Academy. Dr. Brown begins with one very unconventional assumption – that prior to an ancient cataclysmic global flood, there was salty water trapped in a layer underneath the earth’s crust, under great pressure – and from this single assumption he proceeds to examine the evidence all over the globe which supports his theory that the violent escape of this trapped subterranean water led to the features we see on the earth today.
Dr. Brown’s extensive array of evidence – all of which can be better explained by his theory than by the reigning uniformitarian geological theories, including the widely-accepted theory of plate tectonics – is almost entirely geological in nature. He does occasionally venture into anthropological evidence, such as when he examines briefly the oral traditions of the Hopi people, but in general his writing is concerned with the physical features of the earth (and the solar system) which support his explanation (and which pose tremendous problems for the currently-dominant paradigm).
==============
David Warner Mathisen also presents this overview of Walt Brown's hydrotheory on an article on Graham Hancock's website (http://www.grahamhancock.com/forum/MathisenD1.php?p=4):
==============
Dr. Brown’s hydroplate theory begins with one assumption – that there was once a large amount of water trapped under the earth’s surface. This water was under tremendous pressure (due to the weight of the crust above it) and when a rupture took place which enabled it to burst out, the results were catastrophic. The high-pressure water rushed out with tremendous violence, and the crack of the initial rupture spread rapidly in both directions until it encircled the globe and intersected itself again. The force of the escaping water eroded the crust above it and widened the crack on either side as it blasted away earth from the sides of the rupture, mixing massive amounts of sediments into the water that would eventually blanket the earth, and also removing the weight of the crust along the line of the rupture (which now encircled the earth “like the seam of a baseball,” in Dr. Brown’s words). The removal of so much sediment allowed the basement rock that had been below the line of the rupture to spring upwards, and this caused the massive plates that would become our continents (the now-separated pieces of the crust on either side of the rupture) to begin sliding away from the upward-springing seam in either direction, still lubricated by the escaping water beneath.
This upward-springing action on one end of the globe, however, would not just cause an “air bubble” to open up in the center of the earth, of course: instead, it would cause an equal and opposite “downward-sucking” action on the opposite side of the earth. This process created the Pacific basin, which contains geological features consistent with what you will see if you suck the air out of a metal gasoline can, for instance (creating a suction and a collapse), or if you stick your thumb into the side of a ping-pong ball (there wasn’t a thumb pressed into the Pacific because it wasn’t pressed from above, it was pulled from beneath, but the arc-and-cusp shape of the Pacific trenches, and the fact that they lack the mass that they should have if they were indeed formed by one enormous plate subducting below another, indicates that the Pacific was formed by forces with similar vectors). The continents slid towards the Pacific basin and away from the upward-bulging mid-Atlantic ridge, their steep-sided continental shelves still matching the line of the mid-Atlantic ridge, because that was the line of the original rupture, whose upward-jetting water created the vertical sides of those shelves when the water that had been below the continents escaped.
Eventually, friction (as the subterranean water all escaped) or collision caused these sliding “hydroplates” to grind to a violent stop, creating violent buckling and long parallel mountain ridges roughly perpendicular to the direction of travel, just as you would create “mountains” in the front of your car if you drove it at high speed into a concrete wall. Also, along their forward edges especially, friction melted rock and created magma, which is why the “ring of fire” generally outlines the Pacific basin towards which all these plates were sliding. The thickening of the continents due to this buckling caused the waters to begin to rush off into the ocean basins, although in many places it was trapped and lifted to great elevations as the hydroplates came to a stop. Later, when precipitation continued to fill these trapped bodies of water, some of them breached violently, carving features such as the Grand Canyon (the Vale of Kashmir may have been another example, and the Jhelum River may mark its breach). In other parts of the world, where trapped bodies of water received less precipitation, the inland seas sometimes dried up or receded over the centuries (the Great Salt Lake in Utah may be one such example, and Lake Titicaca in the Andes may be another, although it has not dried up completely but only receded significantly).
Not only does this theory explain the same geological features which the plate tectonic theory tries to explain, and does it in a way which explains geological mysteries that tectonics has difficulties explaining, but it also appears to throw light on many mysterious aspects of mankind’s ancient past. For example, it is no doubt well-known to readers of this website that many ancient monuments are very precisely aligned with celestial phenomena (such as the rise or transit of important stars or constellations), solar stations (such as the rising or setting of the sun on the equinoxes, solstices, or cross-quarter days), and occasionally with significant points on the lunar cycle, or with the cardinal directions (the Great Pyramid being a notable example of alignment with cardinal directions as well as with celestial phenomena). Many of these ancient monuments are thousands of years old. If the theory of plate tectonics is correct, proposing as it does that continental plates often move an inch a year (sometimes more, sometimes less), how is it possible that any of these alignments are still intact? At an inch a year, the Great Pyramid, Stonehenge, and the megalithic temples on Malta would have drifted hundreds of feet, and yet all of them still display astronomical alignments, solar alignments, cardinal direction alignments, or a combination of the above. The hydroplate theory argues that the plates did slide, but that they did so once, and that they are no longer drifting about the way the tectonic theory says they are. They do continue to shift on occasion (which is one cause of earthquakes, especially in those areas next to the Pacific basin), but they do not drift. The monuments mentioned above, of course, were built after the cataclysmic flood, and hence supporters of the hydroplate theory are not surprised that they are still aligned.
This question of the ongoing alignments of ancient monuments is just one example of the intersection of geological theory and ancient human history, and an example of the importance of examining the two in conjunction with one another, because they are intimately connected. Another example is the explanation of the sedimentary layers found around the globe. Conventional theory holds that these were laid down over hundreds of millions of years, but the hydroplate theory argues that they were laid down during the flood event. In fact, many geological features seem to indicate that these layers were all soft and pliable when force was applied to create buckling or folding of these layers, which is consistent with the hydroplate theory and not with a theory of millions of years (in which case the layers would be brittle and would not exhibit the graceful curves and folds seen in many places on earth). Of course, if the strata were all laid down during the flood event, then the assumption that fossils (including human fossils) found in certain layers must be extremely old may well be completely incorrect. Strangely, even alternative researchers who reject the conventional explanations typically assume that human fossils or artifacts found in strata associated with great age are evidence that modern humans have been around for hundreds of millions of years, instead of considering the possibility that perhaps the strata are younger than the conventional theorists assume.
The hydroplate theory argues that the thickening of the continental plates at the end of the flood (when they ground to a halt) could have altered the rotational alignment of the earth. By far the thickest of the continents is found in the region of the Himalayas, home to the highest mountains on the globe. If this region was formed rapidly during a catastrophic event (as the hydroplate theory argues that it was), it would have acted like a big lead weight slapped onto the side of the spinning earth. The laws of physics would argue that this weight would want to move towards the equator by the principle of centrifugal force (if you spin a weight on a string around your head, it will naturally want to spin straight outwards). The Himalayas would have pulled towards the equator, but the bulge of the earth’s extra mass at the equator (the “spare tire” of mass at the equator, also caused by centrifugal force) would have acted to counterbalance this motion, and a kind of “tug-of-war” would have ensued. It was a tug-of-war which the larger equatorial bulge would have ultimately won, but not without a compromise, and in the process the entire earth would have rotated as much as 35o to 45o, moving the areas that were formerly at the poles to new latitudes, and swinging land that had been in temperate latitudes up to the Arctic and down to the Antarctic. This side-effect of the global flood would explain the anomalous fossils of the far north and far south, and it would also explain the submarine feature at the bottom of the Indian Ocean known as Ninety East Ridge, which points generally towards the Himalayas and which is an important supporting piece of evidence for this aspect of the theory.
==============
Walt Brown provides his entire book describing this theory online, and also available for purchase. The main explanation is presented in Part's I and II of In the Beginning: Compelling Evidence for Creation and the Flood (http://www.creationscience.com/onlinebook/PartI.html)
One of many interesting details - he conjectures that the great mountain ranges forced up by this cataclysmic event, such as the Himalayas, caused the earth's tilt to change, moving the North Pole from somewhere near what's now Mongolia to it's current location. Spinning sphere's in free space will tend to tilt so that their greatest mass is nearer their equator.
===
I would also speculate that the Biblical Christian wrapping that Walt Brown puts around his theory provides it a useful bit of immunity from current suppression of "unscientific" thought, as it makes his hydroplate theory easier to ridicule. As court jesters learned long ago, one can get away with telling more inconvenient truths if one enables easier ridicule of one's self or one's words.
===
Walt's presentation is a hallmark of well done science, in my view, presented by someone who has spent years refining their skills at presenting and teaching technical subjects.
===
A number of details of the earth's current geology, fossil record, composition of meteors striking the earth, and other such matters make much more sense to me now.
Retired US Army and Air Force colonel Walt Brown has been developing what he calls the hydroplate theory for a couple of decades now. He postulates that about half of what is now the ocean waters on planet earth was some ten miles underground, when the moon's tidal forces super-heated it, forcing it to erupt through a grand rupture in the earth's granite crust some 5000 years ago. This created the mid-oceanic rifts, flooded the earth in immense rain storms, rose up the higher mountain ranges and sank the Pacific floor, and thanks to the shifting masses on the earth's surface, resulted in a change in the earth's tilt in the following century.
Walt wraps his hydroplate theory in his readings of the Bible, the great flood of the time of Noah, and the Christian Creationist view that the earth was created by God some 6000 years ago.
I choose an entirely different wrapping. I left the church, the Christian faith, and reading the Bible at age 11, and have not looked back. My background since that day has been more materialist and scientific oriented.
I would speculate that there were prior human civilizations that achieved a technical competence and economic scale similar to our present one, and in some ways surpassing. I would speculate that the moon was artificially placed in earth orbit long after the earth formed, and that the earth was created by natural means over a very long period of time (millions or billions of years.)
But, either way, Christian Creationist or Scientific Materialism, once you get past your choice of wrapper, Walt Brown has one damn fine piece of scientific work here. It is logical, cogent, well researched, and provides consistent explanations of many details of the current geological and near-earth astrophysical record that the gradualist and evolutionary "conventional" plate tectonic theory cannot explain or incorrectly predicts.
Perhaps the best introductions to hydroplate theory are in a Youtube video introduction provided by Walt Brown himself and in a derivative work, David Warner Mathisen's The Mathisen Corollary: Connecting a Global Flood with the Mystery of Mankind's Ancient Past (http://www.amazon.com/Mathisen-Corollary-Connecting-Mankinds-Paperback/dp/B00GWR6S2E/).
Here's Walt's Youtube video:
sD9ZGt9UA-U
Here's selected early parts of one chapter from The Mathisen Corollary describing the hydroplate theory:
==============
Earlier in the book, we examined the hydroplate theory of Dr. Walt Brown, a graduate of both West Point and MIT and a former professor at the US Air Force Academy. Dr. Brown begins with one very unconventional assumption – that prior to an ancient cataclysmic global flood, there was salty water trapped in a layer underneath the earth’s crust, under great pressure – and from this single assumption he proceeds to examine the evidence all over the globe which supports his theory that the violent escape of this trapped subterranean water led to the features we see on the earth today.
Dr. Brown’s extensive array of evidence – all of which can be better explained by his theory than by the reigning uniformitarian geological theories, including the widely-accepted theory of plate tectonics – is almost entirely geological in nature. He does occasionally venture into anthropological evidence, such as when he examines briefly the oral traditions of the Hopi people, but in general his writing is concerned with the physical features of the earth (and the solar system) which support his explanation (and which pose tremendous problems for the currently-dominant paradigm).
==============
David Warner Mathisen also presents this overview of Walt Brown's hydrotheory on an article on Graham Hancock's website (http://www.grahamhancock.com/forum/MathisenD1.php?p=4):
==============
Dr. Brown’s hydroplate theory begins with one assumption – that there was once a large amount of water trapped under the earth’s surface. This water was under tremendous pressure (due to the weight of the crust above it) and when a rupture took place which enabled it to burst out, the results were catastrophic. The high-pressure water rushed out with tremendous violence, and the crack of the initial rupture spread rapidly in both directions until it encircled the globe and intersected itself again. The force of the escaping water eroded the crust above it and widened the crack on either side as it blasted away earth from the sides of the rupture, mixing massive amounts of sediments into the water that would eventually blanket the earth, and also removing the weight of the crust along the line of the rupture (which now encircled the earth “like the seam of a baseball,” in Dr. Brown’s words). The removal of so much sediment allowed the basement rock that had been below the line of the rupture to spring upwards, and this caused the massive plates that would become our continents (the now-separated pieces of the crust on either side of the rupture) to begin sliding away from the upward-springing seam in either direction, still lubricated by the escaping water beneath.
This upward-springing action on one end of the globe, however, would not just cause an “air bubble” to open up in the center of the earth, of course: instead, it would cause an equal and opposite “downward-sucking” action on the opposite side of the earth. This process created the Pacific basin, which contains geological features consistent with what you will see if you suck the air out of a metal gasoline can, for instance (creating a suction and a collapse), or if you stick your thumb into the side of a ping-pong ball (there wasn’t a thumb pressed into the Pacific because it wasn’t pressed from above, it was pulled from beneath, but the arc-and-cusp shape of the Pacific trenches, and the fact that they lack the mass that they should have if they were indeed formed by one enormous plate subducting below another, indicates that the Pacific was formed by forces with similar vectors). The continents slid towards the Pacific basin and away from the upward-bulging mid-Atlantic ridge, their steep-sided continental shelves still matching the line of the mid-Atlantic ridge, because that was the line of the original rupture, whose upward-jetting water created the vertical sides of those shelves when the water that had been below the continents escaped.
Eventually, friction (as the subterranean water all escaped) or collision caused these sliding “hydroplates” to grind to a violent stop, creating violent buckling and long parallel mountain ridges roughly perpendicular to the direction of travel, just as you would create “mountains” in the front of your car if you drove it at high speed into a concrete wall. Also, along their forward edges especially, friction melted rock and created magma, which is why the “ring of fire” generally outlines the Pacific basin towards which all these plates were sliding. The thickening of the continents due to this buckling caused the waters to begin to rush off into the ocean basins, although in many places it was trapped and lifted to great elevations as the hydroplates came to a stop. Later, when precipitation continued to fill these trapped bodies of water, some of them breached violently, carving features such as the Grand Canyon (the Vale of Kashmir may have been another example, and the Jhelum River may mark its breach). In other parts of the world, where trapped bodies of water received less precipitation, the inland seas sometimes dried up or receded over the centuries (the Great Salt Lake in Utah may be one such example, and Lake Titicaca in the Andes may be another, although it has not dried up completely but only receded significantly).
Not only does this theory explain the same geological features which the plate tectonic theory tries to explain, and does it in a way which explains geological mysteries that tectonics has difficulties explaining, but it also appears to throw light on many mysterious aspects of mankind’s ancient past. For example, it is no doubt well-known to readers of this website that many ancient monuments are very precisely aligned with celestial phenomena (such as the rise or transit of important stars or constellations), solar stations (such as the rising or setting of the sun on the equinoxes, solstices, or cross-quarter days), and occasionally with significant points on the lunar cycle, or with the cardinal directions (the Great Pyramid being a notable example of alignment with cardinal directions as well as with celestial phenomena). Many of these ancient monuments are thousands of years old. If the theory of plate tectonics is correct, proposing as it does that continental plates often move an inch a year (sometimes more, sometimes less), how is it possible that any of these alignments are still intact? At an inch a year, the Great Pyramid, Stonehenge, and the megalithic temples on Malta would have drifted hundreds of feet, and yet all of them still display astronomical alignments, solar alignments, cardinal direction alignments, or a combination of the above. The hydroplate theory argues that the plates did slide, but that they did so once, and that they are no longer drifting about the way the tectonic theory says they are. They do continue to shift on occasion (which is one cause of earthquakes, especially in those areas next to the Pacific basin), but they do not drift. The monuments mentioned above, of course, were built after the cataclysmic flood, and hence supporters of the hydroplate theory are not surprised that they are still aligned.
This question of the ongoing alignments of ancient monuments is just one example of the intersection of geological theory and ancient human history, and an example of the importance of examining the two in conjunction with one another, because they are intimately connected. Another example is the explanation of the sedimentary layers found around the globe. Conventional theory holds that these were laid down over hundreds of millions of years, but the hydroplate theory argues that they were laid down during the flood event. In fact, many geological features seem to indicate that these layers were all soft and pliable when force was applied to create buckling or folding of these layers, which is consistent with the hydroplate theory and not with a theory of millions of years (in which case the layers would be brittle and would not exhibit the graceful curves and folds seen in many places on earth). Of course, if the strata were all laid down during the flood event, then the assumption that fossils (including human fossils) found in certain layers must be extremely old may well be completely incorrect. Strangely, even alternative researchers who reject the conventional explanations typically assume that human fossils or artifacts found in strata associated with great age are evidence that modern humans have been around for hundreds of millions of years, instead of considering the possibility that perhaps the strata are younger than the conventional theorists assume.
The hydroplate theory argues that the thickening of the continental plates at the end of the flood (when they ground to a halt) could have altered the rotational alignment of the earth. By far the thickest of the continents is found in the region of the Himalayas, home to the highest mountains on the globe. If this region was formed rapidly during a catastrophic event (as the hydroplate theory argues that it was), it would have acted like a big lead weight slapped onto the side of the spinning earth. The laws of physics would argue that this weight would want to move towards the equator by the principle of centrifugal force (if you spin a weight on a string around your head, it will naturally want to spin straight outwards). The Himalayas would have pulled towards the equator, but the bulge of the earth’s extra mass at the equator (the “spare tire” of mass at the equator, also caused by centrifugal force) would have acted to counterbalance this motion, and a kind of “tug-of-war” would have ensued. It was a tug-of-war which the larger equatorial bulge would have ultimately won, but not without a compromise, and in the process the entire earth would have rotated as much as 35o to 45o, moving the areas that were formerly at the poles to new latitudes, and swinging land that had been in temperate latitudes up to the Arctic and down to the Antarctic. This side-effect of the global flood would explain the anomalous fossils of the far north and far south, and it would also explain the submarine feature at the bottom of the Indian Ocean known as Ninety East Ridge, which points generally towards the Himalayas and which is an important supporting piece of evidence for this aspect of the theory.
==============
Walt Brown provides his entire book describing this theory online, and also available for purchase. The main explanation is presented in Part's I and II of In the Beginning: Compelling Evidence for Creation and the Flood (http://www.creationscience.com/onlinebook/PartI.html)
One of many interesting details - he conjectures that the great mountain ranges forced up by this cataclysmic event, such as the Himalayas, caused the earth's tilt to change, moving the North Pole from somewhere near what's now Mongolia to it's current location. Spinning sphere's in free space will tend to tilt so that their greatest mass is nearer their equator.
===
I would also speculate that the Biblical Christian wrapping that Walt Brown puts around his theory provides it a useful bit of immunity from current suppression of "unscientific" thought, as it makes his hydroplate theory easier to ridicule. As court jesters learned long ago, one can get away with telling more inconvenient truths if one enables easier ridicule of one's self or one's words.
===
Walt's presentation is a hallmark of well done science, in my view, presented by someone who has spent years refining their skills at presenting and teaching technical subjects.
===
A number of details of the earth's current geology, fossil record, composition of meteors striking the earth, and other such matters make much more sense to me now.