CPT Q. 034: How do you interpret the magnetic ‘stripes’ on either side of the mid-ocean ridges?

Q. 34. Could you clarify your view on the magnetic “stripes” on either side of the mid-ocean ridges and describe how catastrophic plate tectonics differs from uniformitarian plate tectonics in its interpretation of this phenomenon?

Response: My view on the more or less symmetric pattern of magnetic ‘stripes’ detected on either side to the mid-ocean ridges is, in short, that the pattern is genuine, but the signal is extremely noisy. Some creationists deny the reality of geomagnetic reversals altogether. In response to that position, I would point to the abundant and to me unambiguous evidence for reverse magnetized rocks in continental environments. In 1906 Bernard Brunhes, a French scientist published the first report of volcanic rocks with reversed magnetization. Since then, there have been so many measurements made on continental basalts documenting reversed magnetic polarity that in my opinion the reality of magnetic reversals is beyond dispute.

On the other hand, recent studies of rock magnetization are showing that the earth’s magnetic field has had an extremely complex time history, with many so-called ‘magnetic excursions’ that typically also involve dramatic fluctuations in field amplitude. Just to provide a glimpse into the current conversation on the topic of magnetic excursions I copy below the abstract of a recent paper by J.-P. Valet:¹

Geomagnetic excursions represent short episodes of a few thousand years at most during which the field considerably exceeds its normal range of variability during a polarity state. Paleomagnetic records have now been obtained with extremely high temporal resolution which have improved our knowledge of these short events. We have compiled the most detailed records of excursions that had occurred during the Brunhes and Matuyama chrons. We show that virtual geomagnetic poles (VGPs) of at least one record of each event are able to reach the opposite polarity. In the next step, we have computed different simulations of excursions during which the dipole progressively vanishes before growing back without reversing. This scenario produces very few reversed directions which are only visible at some latitudes. We infer that it is impossible to reach the ratio of reversed to intermediate VGPs present in the paleomagnetic records if the excursions were not associated with a short period of reversed dipole field. Therefore, excursions should be regarded as two successive reversals bracketing an aborted polarity interval. We propose that the same underlying mechanisms prevail in both situations (excursions or reversals) and that below a certain strength the field reaches an unstable position which preludes either the achievement of a reversal or its return to the former polarity.

What these recent high temporal resolution studies seem to be showing is that the history of earth’s magnetic field has not been one of, say, about 50-100 or so clean reversals, with the field amplitude more or less of constant except during the reversal, but instead a history with exceedingly more fluctuation and variation. Of course, the authors of this paper are uniformitarians, so what they interpret as ‘a few thousand years’ is in reality dramatically briefer in terms of the Biblical time scale.

With the earth’s surface magnetic field undergoing such rapid fluctuations, both in its orientation and in its amplitude during the Flood, it is not surprising that the basalts being rapidly emplaced at the mid-ocean ridges and cooling on small spatial scales at strongly varying rates would lock in a very noisy magnetization pattern. But the fact that we know, based on the magnetization record of continental basalts as well as the alternating alignment of the magnetic minerals in lake and deep sea sediment columns, that the earth’s field did indeed undergo a significant number of magnetic reversals means that the reversal pattern detected by ship-towed magnetometers in seafloor rocks is also certainly genuine, with a high degree of confidence.

In regard to how CPT differs from uniformitarian plate tectonics (UPT) in its interpretation of these observations, my view is that the only significant difference is the time scale. In CPT the magnetic reversals associated with all but the topmost portion of the fossil-bearing rock record took place during the year of the Flood, while people adhering to the UPT framework believe it unfolded over some 540 million years.