CPT Q. 054: How does CPT mesh with the 40 days, the 150 days, and the final 221 days of Genesis 7-8?

Q. 54. In your answer to question 46 you responded that you were viewing the processes that supposedly opened and closed and then reopened the Atlantic Ocean from what you call a global perspective, while you claim that I have been seeking to comprehend these dynamics from a regional perspective.

A global perspective does not change the fact that events are regional. For example, you have spreading in one region and subduction in another. I see two problems with this answer: (1) you have not explained how the “global,” single-runaway-subduction-episode can produce the disparate regional plate tectonic events in one coordinated symphony of crustal motion directly related to the proposed lithospheric motions brought on by the episode, and (2) you have not explained how the timing of these events fit your theory. In particular you have explicitly related the opening of the present Atlantic Ocean to the Mesozoic (later Flood). Yet the Bible does not mention the resulting rainfall from the second steam jet at that later stage of the Flood. And taking the global perspective, if we accept the relative chronology of the geological column and your proposed plate motions, steam jets, and by inference, other periods of intense rainfall would occur throughout the Flood. But the Bible only specifies one – the first 40 days.

Response: Somehow there seems to a breakdown in communication. Within the portion of my answer to question 46 to which you refer I thought it was expressing clearly that the opening of the Iapetus Ocean, its closing, and the Mesozoic opening of the present Atlantic occurred “all during the first 40 days of the Flood.” I just do not know how I could have been much clearer. Nowhere in my answer, so far as I can discern, do I intimate in any way that the Mesozoic correlates with the “later Flood”. While this perhaps reflects your own thinking, I do not think it can be construed in any sense from the words in my answer.

Having said that, let me acknowledge that I have struggled over the years regarding the question of just how long the episode of rapid plate tectonics lasted. Up until about ten years ago, based on Genesis 7:24-8:3, I assumed the answer was most likely 150 days. Following immediately after 7:17-23 which summarizes the violent destruction of “every living thing that was upon the face of the land,” apart from what was in the ark, this subsequent passage states:

Gen 7:24 “And the water prevailed on the earth one hundred and fifty days.”

Gen 8:1 “But God remembered Noah and all the beasts and all the cattle that were with him in the ark; and God caused a wind to pass over the earth, and the water subsided.

Gen. 8:2 “Also the fountains of the deep were closed and the floodgates of the sky were closed, and the rain from the sky was restrained;

Gen. 8:3 “and the water receded steadily from the earth, and at the end of one hundred and fifty days the water decreased.”

To me, and I think for most people, the simplest way to unpack the chronology in these verses is first to interpret the beginning of these 150 days as coinciding with the day mentioned in Gen. 7:11 when “all the fountains of the great deep burst open, and the floodgates of the sky were opened.” Verse Gen. 7:12 then states, “And the rain fell upon the earth for forty days and forty nights.” This 40 day period also presumably begins on the day described in Gen. 7:11. Because verses Gen. 7:24 and Gen. 8:3 both mention the 150 days (which presumably is the same 150 day interval in both), and because verses 7:24 and 8:3 surround verse 8:2 so closely, the simplest conclusion is that the events of verse 8:2 occur at the end of the 150 days, or 150 days after the onset of the Flood described in 7:11. In other words, these verses seem to indicate that the fountains of the great deep and the floodgates of the sky were open for this entire 150 day period, These verses also seem to indicate there was substantial rain throughout the 150 days as well, persisting past the initial 40 days during which presumably it was especially intense.

So what has pushed me in recent years to place not only the Paleozoic but also the Mesozoic portions of the geological record into the initial 40 days of the cataclysm? The answer is relatively simple. CPT interprets the data from today’s seafloor to conclude that a vast amount of seafloor spreading, much more even than what generated today’s ocean floor, occurred during the Flood cataclysm. Seafloor spreading sufficiently rapid to generate even today’s ocean floor, whether in 40 days or 150 days, logically implies extremely energetic steam jets emerging from these narrow zones of rapid seafloor spreading. These jets, with velocities along their centerlines several times supersonic, have sufficient power to carry large volumes of entrained liquid water into the stratosphere and therefore almost certainly result in heavy rain over much of the earth.

In earlier years I did not give much attention to the significance of the 40 days and nights of rain, and I therefore saw no need to restrict the CPT time frame to less than 150 days. However, more recently as I have realized more keenly just how powerful these steam jets likely must have been and their ability to entrain so much liquid water, I have concluded that the case is strong (but certainly not air-tight) that the 40 days and nights of rain, so prominent in the description of the Flood, likely corresponds to the interval in which rapid seafloor spreading was occurring. To me this is the best way to mesh CPT with the Biblical text, despite the fact that it requires the vast amount of geological change which most people struggle to fit within 150 days to unfold in an even briefer interval. I am not irrevocably committed to this conclusion. I just feel it is the most consistent way to fit the pieces together if one gives priority to Scripture.

Another consideration that pushes me toward this conclusion is that because of the strong nonlinearity of the rheological weakening mechanism which allows CPT to occur, CPT tends to be either on or off. As soon as most of the buoyancy anomalies driving the runaway reach the boundary to which they are headed, mantle velocities diminish, the stress levels start dropping, the stress weakening that depends of these high stress levels drops, the mantle strength begins to return and the velocities drop rapidly in the face of increasing mantle rock strength. As the surface plate velocities diminish sufficiently, the steam jets shut down. In summary, rapid seafloor spreading tends to be either on or off, steam jets tend to be either on or off, and the rainfall caused by the steam jets tends to be either on or off. Because so much seafloor spreading took place during the Mesozoic, I conclude that the Mesozoic must be part of the primary CPT episode. I conclude the shutdown portion of CPT correlates the Tertiary portion of the rock record.