CPT Q. 076: What was the tie between accelerated nuclear decay and other aspects of the Flood?

Q. 76. In earlier discussions regarding “two separate episodes” of runaway subduction, you seem to imply that you believe runaway subduction was largely decoupled from the episodes of accelerated nuclear decay. Yet you hold that the latter of the two episodes of rapid nuclear decay occurred during the Flood. Please elaborate on what the connection there may have been between accelerated nuclear decay and other aspects of the Flood?

Response: As I have insisted on several occasions, especially in response to one of the panelists, I have never—ever— proposed or implied “two separate episodes” of runaway subduction. This is an idea that somehow arose in the mind of this panelist in spite of all my efforts to dispel it. Again, let me emphasize as emphatically as I can—in order to satisfy the tight time constraints of 40 days or even 150 days for the large-scale tectonic changes of the Flood to unfold—the mantle must be approximately a billion times weaker than it is today. Such dramatic weakening can occur, as far as I can determine, only under the runaway conditions of CPT. Two such CPT episodes, distinguishable from one another, within such a brief time window are for me simply unthinkable. Therefore, I have never even entertained that possibility in my own mind, much less speculated to anyone else that two separate episodes might have occurred.

Furthermore, never have I or any of the other members of the RATE team ever suggested or even hinted that there were or might have been two episodes of accelerated nuclear decay during the Flood. The first of the two episodes of accelerated nuclear decay we describe occurs—not during the Flood—but during the early portion of Creation Week, before God had created any life on the earth. This first episode accounts for up to as much as roughly 3.7 billion years’ worth (at presently observed rates) of nuclear decay products in the earth’s pre-Flood rocks. This decay history is nearly indisputable and tends to be especially evident in zircon crystals.

The RATE research also provides compelling evidence for another, a second, episode of accelerated nuclear decay, but this time during the Flood, correlated in time with the deposition of the world’s fossil-bearing sediments. Among the lines of evidence for up to about 600 million years’ worth of nuclear decay (at presently observed rates) during the Flood cataclysm, are the presence of abundant radiohalos, both from uranium and polonium, as well as high concentrations of fission tracks in crystals in volcanic tuffs and in granitic rocks which crystallized from melts during the cataclysm. These two phenomena, radiohalos and fission tracks, represent tangible, visible—essentially indisputable—physical evidence that vast amounts of nuclear decay occurred during the Flood. Again, based on the record of earth history provided by God in the Scriptures, this episode of rapid nuclear decay must be distinct from the episode that took place as God was forming the earth at the beginning of Creation Week.

What might be the connection between this second episode of accelerated nuclear decay and the spectacular tectonic aspects of the Flood? I do not at this point have a good answer to that question. God’s direct intervention seems to be required, without much room for uncertainty, to cause nuclear decay rates to be roughly a billion times higher than they are today during that episode and also to remove the staggering amount of heat released, especially within the continental crust which contains such high concentrations of radioactive elements. CPT primarily involves the rocks in the mantle which contain much smaller quantities of these heat-producing elements. Although it is entirely possible that there could be cause-and-effect connections between the accelerated decay and CPT, just what they might be are not clear to me at this point. The single connection I think might be a good possibility is that the mechanism responsible for the rapid removal of the radiogenic heat from accelerated decay might also be responsible for the rapid cooling of new ocean lithosphere formed so quickly as part of CPT. This lithospheric cooling also seems to require God’s miraculous intervention to explain. Since Peter in 2 Peter 3:3-7 uses the Flood as one of three examples of God’s dramatic supernatural interventions in the natural realm in his refutation of the uniformitarian mindset which Peter is predicting t arise in the last days, I make no apology for pointing to such possible ways that God may have so intervened.