CPT Q. 073: If granites did not cool from a molten state, would CPT still have a heat problem?

Q. 73. It seems to me that a major heat problem of both your CPT model and the RATE team’s conclusions of accelerated decay, could be resolved simply by removing the highly questionable (many would argue impossible) assumption that granites (and the granite batholiths) formed from a melt. I recognize that there is still the issue of cooling the newly forming ocean lithosphere, but assuming that granites did not form from a melt, would your model (and the RATE team’s accelerated decay model) still have a heat problem from radioactivity? How much of a heat problem is dealt with if granites did not form from a melt?

Response: First let me say that I believe the main heat issues in CPT (cooling of the newly forming ocean lithosphere quickly enough) and in the RATE conclusions (not vaporizing the continental crust by the heat released in the amount of nuclear decay that occurred during the Flood) are entirely separate from the issue of whether or not granites form from melt. As pointed out in a 1998 paper by Snelling and Woodmorappe entitled “The cooling of thick igneous bodies on a young earth,” in the proceedings of the fourth ICC and referenced in the article by Walker I cited in my answer to the preceding question, the volume of water required to cool and crystallize a body of granitic magma does not exceed by that much the volume of the magma body itself. This is because the latent heat of crystallizing the magma is 65 cal/g and its specific heat is only 0.3 cal/g-°C, compared with a latent heat of vaporization of water of 540 cal/g and a specific heat of 1 cal/g-°C for water. So it really does not take that much water to cool even the large batholiths in the world. Moreover, there is no requirement that they cool completely during the year of the Flood. So in my assessment, the cooling of the batholiths is a minor issue compared with these other two.

Let me make a brief comment on your proposal that perhaps the approximately 4 billion years’ worth of nuclear decay the RATE team places during the first days of creation week might be spread out over the 1656 years prior to the Flood. That scenario would imply that the level of background radiation from the granitic rocks beneath everyone’s feet, on average, would have been $4\times {10}^9/1656=2.4\times {10}^6$ times higher than it is today. In my assessment, that would have been devastating to life on earth during that time. The fact that human longevity, according to the genealogy of Genesis 5, did not decrease during that interval between the Fall and the Flood, seems to argue against such extreme levels of radiation in the environment.

Finally, it seems to me that you may be unaware of the breadth of evidence the RATE team used in reaching its conclusio that hundreds of millions of years’ worth of nuclear decay at today’s rates occurred during the Flood itself. You mention the radiohalos, but not our fission track work. The fission track study utilized zircons extracted from volcanic tuff beds in Flood-aged rocks from the Colorado Plateau. Fission tracks are annealed away at high temperatures and do not begin to persist until the volcanic material cools to below the annealing temperature. So the tracks in the tuff beds that exist today in Flood-aged sediments cannot have been inherited from pre-Flood rocks.

Also, I’m not sure that you fully appreciate just how much heat would have been released in the rocks of the continental crust if, as the RATE team concluded, roughly 600 million years of nuclear decay at today’s rates occurred during the Flood. The heat generation rate from decay of radioactive elements in typical continental crust rock today is about $1\times {10}^9\text{W/kg}$.¹ Six hundred million years’ worth of heat generation at this rate correspondsyy to $1\times {10}^{-9}\text{J/s-kg}\times 3.15\times {10}^7\text{s/yr}\times 6\times {10}^8\text{yr}=2\times {10}^7\text{J/kg}$. The amount of heat energy needed to raise the temperature of granite from room temperature to its melting point plus the latent heat of fusion to melt it is about $900\text{°C}\times 800\text{J/kg-°C}+300\text{J/kg}=1\times {10}^6\text{J/kg}$. Hence, the amount of heat released is approximately twenty times the amount that is required to melt granite, and it is about four times what it takes to vaporize granite. This is why the RATE team concluded that, just as supernatural action on God’s part is required to increase nuclear decay rates roughly a billion-fold during the Flood, so also is His supernatural action needed to remove the staggering amount of heat that is released in the rocks of the continental crust. Again, the amount of heat involved i enough to vaporize the entire 40-km thickness of continental crust some four times over.