What Initiated the Flood Cataclysm?

Introduction Baumgardner (1986, 1990, 1994a, 1994b) has advanced the proposition that the essential process responsible for the large-scale tectonic changes contemporaneous with the Genesis Flood was runaway subduction of the pre-Flood oceanic lithosphere. Precursory to the runaway would be some pattern of stress concentration and shear zone formation in the pre-Flood lithosphere, concentrated at plate boundaries, from which a large-scale runaway event could readily emerge. The question we pose and try to address is: Did God during creation week fashion the earth’s lithosphere with built-in internal stresses, zones of weakness, and slow deformations pre-calculated to unleash global tectonic catastrophe on precisely the day Noah and his family would board the Ark, or did God employ other special means to initiate the Flood cataclysm? The question relates to the timing of God’s special action. The point here is that God’s intervention has frequently been assumed to occur just at the moment of the Flood, for example, near collision of a large comet with the earth, asteroids hitting the earth, rapid earth expansion, or something of that sort. Although some type of catastrophic event could have initiated the runaway subduction at the required moment, we illustrate in this paper that finite deformation and creep effects Abstract We report results from a parametric study of various weakening mechanisms that can occur in olivine aggregate materials to help understand how an episode of runaway subduction could be initiated. We use a finite element analysis employing an internal state variable plasticity/damage model to show that temperature contrasts, loading rate, crystallographic damage, water content, and initial anisotropy can all induce significant mechanical instability in olivine rock. Our results indicate that each of these weakening/localization effects may have played an important role in fashioning an initial state for the Earth from which the Flood cataclysm could easily emerge.