SH,
There's yet another layer here that we haven't even touched. Baumgardner's estimates are based on all this continental movement and cooling taking place over thousands of years, which is way more generous than what other creationists have proposed (e.g., most of the events taking place in about a year).
In the "The Thermal Problem" section of his paper, he identifies three main sources of heat. First he notes that identifying the start of the flood as including all Cambrian and later-aged strata means that the current ocean lithosphere had to have gone from a near molten state to its current temperature in "only a few thousand years". Given what we know about the thermal conductivity of those strata, their size, and the temperature difference between being near-molten and their temperature today, even over a "few thousand years" the rock would have only cooled a "negligible" amount. From that he concludes "some additional mechanism is required for cooling the oceanic lithosphere to its present thickness on a brief timescale."
Next he points out that cooling large
magmatic batholiths presents basically the same problem. He specifically notes that
the Sierra Nevada range is one such large formation, and based on what we know of its thermal conductivity he concludes "Again thermal conduction alone simply cannot cool a body so vast in the span of a few thousand years." And again he concludes that "Some other mechanism seems to be needed".
Finally he notes how the present day viscosity of the mantle makes moving it large distances in short periods of time impossible. In order to lower the viscosity to make such movement possible, you'd have to have the entire mantle be significantly warmer followed by rapid cooling, again by some unknown mechanism.
From all that he concludes...
"These observations all point to the need to remove large amounts of heat from extensive bodies of rock in the earth in order to account for the geological change proposed for the Flood. It is the author’s conclusion that this cannot happen within the framework of time-invariant physics. Therefore, an important clue as to the nature of the change that occurred seems to be that it involved a decrease in thermal energy throughout the planet."
IOW, this simply does not work without several miracles. And that's over thousands of years. Imagine what we're dealing with if we're talking within a single year!
There's no polite way to put this....this whole young-earth flood thing is just plain absurd, pretty much on the same scale as flat-earth geocentrism.
