CPT Q. 046: How can one episode of CPT produce multiple openings of the Atlantic basin?

Q. 46. I would like to follow up on an earlier question, number 37, which addressed the likelihood of multiple steam jet episodes contrary to the biblical record of one 40-day period of intense rain. It appears that I either do not understand your response or your previous publications. And since the issue presents a potential logical problem for your model, I would like to make sure that we all understand it. Thank you for your patience.

In your response, you begin by stating: “Nowhere that I am aware have I suggested that there were two separate episodes of runaway subduction.” Let me explain how I (and possibly others) arrived at that conclusion. I perceived CPT as proposing multiple episodes of plate motions, similar to the uniformitarian concept of Wilson Cycles, which would have included reversals of plate motions (i.e., the Atlantic opening and closing and opening again). Perhaps the fault is mine; I had always assumed that plate motion along a single vector implied the creation of crust at a rift zone at one boundary and the offsetting destruction of crust by subduction (to preserve Earth’s size) at another. If multiple episodes of rifting and subduction took place during the Flood, I therefore took this to indicate more than one episode of runaway subduction, because that was your proposed mechanism for any plate motion.

Given the limited time of the Flood, any cycle before the Pangean breakup you show in your modeling would also require accelerated rifting and subduction. Since the only catastrophic mechanism proposed is runaway subduction, then I assumed that there were multiple episodes of that phenomenon. How else could CPT be a model for the entire Genesis Flood?

The bottom line for me is the need to explain: (1) how one episode of runaway subduction would cause the complex plate motions of at least two Wilson Cycles, (2) how multiple iterations of catastrophic rifting would not create corresponding periods of steam jets, and (3) how your mid-to-late Flood breakup of Pangea would create steam jets correlating to the first 40 days of the Flood. I would appreciate your clarification of this issue.

Response: I will attempt to cut directly to what I discern to be the source of this confusion. I suspect it merely has to do with perspective. I have been describing the processes from a global perspective. I suspect you are viewing them from a regional perspective, say, from the eastern coast of North America. Yes, from the perspective of, say, New York, the scenario I am describing involves continental rifting and the opening of the Iapetus Ocean just after the onset of the Flood, with steam jets erupting along the mid-ocean rift in the middle of this newly forming ocean basin. Then, when the mid-Paleozoic sediments are being deposited in various places, what today is North America reverses course and eventually slams back into Europe and northwestern Africa to form Pangea. And, yes, when the spreading in the Iapetus basin ceases, the steam jets in that basin also shut down. Then, as the early Mesozoic Flood sediments begin to be deposited, rifting again takes place between what is today North America and Europe/Africa, and the North Atlantic Ocean basin begins to form, with a second generation of steam jets rising from its median rift. So, from the perspective of this hypothetical observer located somewhere on what is today the U.S. East Coast, there were one and a half “Wilson Cycles” with two distinct nearby episodes of rapid seafloor spreading and two intervals of nearby steam jets, all during the first 40 days of the Flood.

However, the perspective I have been assuming in every paper I have written is the global one. From this global perspective there is but one episode of CPT, one that persists with sufficient vigor for a period of 40 days to produce the violent steam jets everywhere on earth where rapid seafloor spreading was occurring. And for a rapid opening even of the Iapetus Ocean to take place, most of the earth’s mantle must be weakened by many orders of magnitude. This strongly suggests that there was rapid subduction and seafloor spreading in many regions of the earth’s surface simultaneous with the opening and closing of the Iapetus Ocean. Certainly, as the Iapetus basin was closing, to accommodate the subduction of the Iapetus seafloor, there almost certainly had to be seafloor spreading with accompanying steam jets in the vast oceanic area west of Laurentia. Likely, rapid subduction and compensating seafloor spreading were also occurring in several other locations at the same time.

This global perspective is what I have been assuming in all of my papers and presentations since 1986. Because the supersonic steam jets in this framework are causally linked with the very rapid seafloor spreading and because these jets seem to be the logical source for heavy global rainfall, it seems plausible that the 40 days and nights of heavy rainfall mentioned in the Genesis text give us the length of time in which this rapid seafloor spreading and rapid subduction of oceanic lithosphere was occurring on the earth as a whole and hence the length of time the mantle was in this state of being orders of magnitude weaker than it is today. The many types of observations we have that correlate the large-scale tectonic changes that accompanied the Flood with the fossil-bearing sediment record lead me to infer that most of this record likely was formed during this 40 day period. The correlations logically seem to require it.

To be sure, the plate motions as well as the motions of rock within the mantle had to be complex during the Paleozoic portion of the cataclysm to be able to open and then close the Iapetus Ocean and then to open the Atlantic Ocean. On the other hand, the geological observations in both North America and Europe seem to require such a complex tectonic history, with little room for uncertainty, do they not? And this earlier tectonic history must occur during the Flood cataclysm because of the obvious presence of so many spectacularly preserved Paleozoic plant and animal fossils in the resulting layered sediments.

This scenario of a single episode of CPT lasting 40 days that includes the opening and closing of the Iapetus Ocean, where that region represents just a portion of the overall global process, is implied in what I have written during the past ten years. I trust this reiteration will help you grasp that my descriptions and discussion of the CPT process have consistently had this global perspective in view.