Dr. Walt Brown on the Hydroplate Theory

[Stripe]

I think it's all hydroplate (possibly covered in secondary basalt flows) except right around where the rift blew through.

 

[aharvey]

I think it's all hydroplate (possibly covered in secondary basalt flows) except right around where the rift blew through.

Here are a few thoughts about each of the four possibilities. There's a non-existent link at the moment; I've got the pictures but not the time to put the page together.

 

[aharvey]

Here are a few thoughts about each of the four possibilities. There's a non-existent link at the moment; I've got the pictures but not the time to put the page together.

Okay, a draft of that link is now on line. And I do want to reiterate that I'm fully aware that just because I haven't found the answers in that mess of an on-line book doesn't mean they're not in there somewhere!

 

[Stripe]

Now, you'll notice I haven't illustrated step 5. That's because I don't see how to do so! Because the rift completely encircles the globe, both pieces of the hydroplate are completely encircled by the rift and its resulting Ridge. If a piece of hydroplate is being pushed from all sides by a rising ridge, then how far, and in which direction, can it actually slide? Given the chaotic organization of the on-line version of In The Beginning, it wouldn't amaze me if I've simply missed something, but most of the easy answers seem to create more problems than they solve. For example, if the rift reached its peak width on the "Atlantic" side long before the "Pacific" side, then the plate could first reach a tipping point on the "Atlantic" side and start gliding towards the "Pacific." However, doing so would inevitably close up the rift on the "Pacific" side from both directions, which would of course interfere with ridge formation along the "Pacific" rift.

I think you've left parts out of your model. Your problems would be an issue if the rift had formed immediately and simultaneously all round the Earth, but the hypothesis demands that one point fails first. That point will generate the greatest pressures and erosion rates. The areas away from it will donate material and energy toward that point.

That initial tear is also the place that will allow underlying material an escape route because the pressure released there would physically deny the same pressure being released on the other side of the planet. This accounts for the slope that the hydroplates can slide on as uplift here is offset by slumping elsewhere.

I'm beginning to suspect that Walt's assertion that the rift encircled the globe and met its own tail at some point is wrong. I've looked at those maps of the undersea ridges and cannot make them link up. I wonder how that change in hypothesis would alter things...

 

[aharvey]

I think you've left parts out of your model. Your problems would be an issue if the rift had formed immediately and simultaneously all round the Earth, but the hypothesis demands that one point fails first. That point will generate the greatest pressures and erosion rates. The areas away from it will donate material and energy toward that point.

That initial tear is also the place that will allow underlying material an escape route because the pressure released there would physically deny the same pressure being released on the other side of the planet. This accounts for the slope that the hydroplates can slide on as uplift here is offset by slumping elsewhere.

First, let's not forget that according to the model the rift is complete, world-wide, in about one hour! I'm no physicist, but it seems improbable that the pressure being released on one side of the planet will be enough to prevent pressure from being released on the other side of the planet an hour later, or that it would take less than an hour for the initial site to go from microscopic surface crack to 800-mile wide rift complete with elevated Mid-Atlantic Ridge.

Second, let me note that your last sentence at least sounds like you're ignoring the fundamental problem here: for a plate to slide, it needs at least three things, a slope upon which to slide, a mechanism to reduce friction enough to slide, and somewhere to slide to. I'm not at all sure what object you think is "slumping elsewhere," but even if it's the hydroplate itself plus the crust and mantle below, increasing the slope in this fashion will not cause the hydroplate to slide unless there is somewhere for it to go i.e., "at the bottom of the hill."

Third, allow me to cut and paste a paragraph from my last link above:

Given the chaotic organization of the on-line version of In The Beginning, it wouldn't amaze me if I've simply missed something, but most of the easy answers seem to create more problems than they solve. For example, if the rift reached its peak width on the "Atlantic" side long before the "Pacific" side, then the plate could first reach a tipping point on the "Atlantic" side and start gliding towards the "Pacific." However, doing so would inevitably close up the rift on the "Pacific" side from both directions, which would of course interfere with ridge formation along the "Pacific" rift.

So, your explanation would prevent the formation of the MidOceanic Ridge wherever the plates would be sliding towards the rift (i.e., opposite all those places where the plates are sliding away from the rift).

I'm beginning to suspect that Walt's assertion that the rift encircled the globe and met its own tail at some point is wrong. I've looked at those maps of the undersea ridges and cannot make them link up. I wonder how that change in hypothesis would alter things...

Don't know. I'm still far from understanding what the original hypothesis is, so I can't begin to guess how changing it would affect things.

 

[aharvey]

I'm beginning to suspect that Walt's assertion that the rift encircled the globe and met its own tail at some point is wrong. I've looked at those maps of the undersea ridges and cannot make them link up. I wonder how that change in hypothesis would alter things...

Actually, something just occurred to me. You don't get hydroplate pieces unless they are completely encircled by the rupture. A rupture that only partially splits a plate, even if it leads to the same 800-mile wide rift plus ridge, seems unlikely to be able to cause the two still-connected sides of the plate to slide apart (even if they had somewhere to go!).

 

[Stripe]

First, let's not forget that according to the model the rift is complete, world-wide, in about one hour! I'm no physicist, but it seems improbable that the pressure being released on one side of the planet will be enough to prevent pressure from being released on the other side of the planet an hour later, or that it would take less than an hour for the initial site to go from microscopic surface crack to 800-mile wide rift complete with elevated Mid-Atlantic Ridge.

Agreed. But the initial point of rupture would remain the focal point for a greater proportion of the energy released. This will automatically introduce an imbalance to the rest of the event..

Second, let me note that your last sentence at least sounds like you're ignoring the fundamental problem here: for a plate to slide, it needs at least three things, a slope upon which to slide, a mechanism to reduce friction enough to slide, and somewhere to slide to.

The slope we have (upwelling of the mantle centered on the initial rupture point).
The reduced friction we have (water escaping from the subterrainean chamber).
The place to slide we have (excavation from the rift as it extends to the other side of the Earth).

My uncertainty arisese from not quite being able to conceptualise where the tear in teh crust propogated to and if it came full circle. Like you I am having trouble figuring out how plates can slide given distances without being blocked by other plates. Have you read any of Walt's discourse that might suggest how fat plates slid?

I picked the South America example for an earlier post because it looked like a clear case of rift and uplift on one side with rift and slump on the other. The crash zone is there in the Andes. I would appreciate further input on the matter.

I'm not at all sure what object you think is "slumping elsewhere," but even if it's the hydroplate itself plus the crust and mantle below, increasing the slope in this fashion will not cause the hydroplate to slide unless there is somewhere for it to go i.e., "at the bottom of the hill."

The Pacific basin is a large slump in response to the upwelling of the mantle under the Atlantic ridge.

Third, allow me to cut and paste a paragraph from my last link above: Given the chaotic organization of the on-line version of In The Beginning, it wouldn't amaze me if I've simply missed something, but most of the easy answers seem to create more problems than they solve. For example, if the rift reached its peak width on the "Atlantic" side long before the "Pacific" side, then the plate could first reach a tipping point on the "Atlantic" side and start gliding towards the "Pacific." However, doing so would inevitably close up the rift on the "Pacific" side from both directions, which would of course interfere with ridge formation along the "Pacific" rift. So, your explanation would prevent the formation of the MidOceanic Ridge wherever the plates would be sliding towards the rift (i.e., opposite all those places where the plates are sliding away from the rift).

The slumping probably accounts for this according to Walt. I don't have a firm enough grasp on the hypothesis to describe what's happening.

 

[aharvey]

Agreed. But the initial point of rupture would remain the focal point for a greater proportion of the energy released. This will automatically introduce an imbalance to the rest of the event..


The slope we have (upwelling of the mantle centered on the initial rupture point).
The reduced friction we have (water escaping from the subterrainean chamber).
The place to slide we have (excavation from the rift as it extends to the other side of the Earth).

Again, these two arguments appear to work against each other, namely: 1) the rift has an hour head start on the Atlantic side vs. the Pacific side, which means that rift expansion and ridge rising is further along enough on the Atlantic side to cause the plate to slide towards the not-so-far-along Pacific side, and 2) by the time the plate starts sliding, the rift on the Pacific side is big enough to give it somewhere "worthwhile" to go (but to be frank, even the 400 miles of a fully expanded rift is hardly enough to account for the distance between the continental margins and the middle of the Mid-Atlantic rise).

My uncertainty arisese from not quite being able to conceptualise where the tear in teh crust propogated to and if it came full circle. Like you I am having trouble figuring out how plates can slide given distances without being blocked by other plates. Have you read any of Walt's discourse that might suggest how fat plates slid?

Here's the best I can come up with. In the section called The Origin of Oceanic Trenches (which, despite the title, seems to deal only with the origin of Pacific trenches), he says the following (with my emphasis added):

The continental-drift phase began with hydroplates sliding “downhill” on a layer of water, away from the rising Mid-Atlantic Ridge. This removed more weight from the rising portion of the subterranean chamber floor, causing it to rise even faster and accelerate the hydroplates even more. (If you are wondering how the hydroplates could slide away from the Mid-Atlantic Ridge without meeting large resistances on the opposite side of the earth, see the paragraph “Continental plates ...” on page 115.)
​

Clicking on that link takes you to this paragraph:

Continental plates accelerated away from the widening Atlantic. (Recall that the rupture encircled the earth, and escaping subterranean water widened that rupture about 400 miles on each side of the rupture, not just on what is now the Atlantic side of the earth but also on the Pacific side. Thus, the plates on opposite sides of the Atlantic could slide at least 400 miles away from the rising Mid-Atlantic Ridge.
​

Again, I think this makes "sense" only if a mid-oceanic ridge rose almost immediately in the 800-mile rift in the Atlantic but did not rise in the middle of the 800-mile wide rift in the Pacific! And again, even if the rift did not rise in the Pacific rift, the 400 miles of a fully expanded rift is hardly enough to account for the distance between the continental margins and the middle of the Mid-Atlantic rise.

I picked the South America example for an earlier post because it looked like a clear case of rift and uplift on one side with rift and slump on the other. The crash zone is there in the Andes. I would appreciate further input on the matter.


The Pacific basin is a large slump in response to the upwelling of the mantle under the Atlantic ridge.

In these examples, though, what's slumping? The hydroplate? If so, just because one side's high and the other side's low/slumping doesn't mean the plate will be able to go anywhere. If not, then where did all the hydroplate that used to be on top of the now slumping crust/mantle/etc. go?

And there's something else that's bothering me. I think that the section on the origin of (the Pacific) trenches is supposed to account for some of these concerns, but I'm first of all having a lot of trouble mapping his words onto the map (for example, the fact that the mid-Pacific Ridge runs between the western Pacific trenches and the western American pieces of the hydroplate seems to make it extra hard incorporating sliding plates and rearrangement of matter under the crust into a single event). Second, just like his discussion of the mid-Oceanic Ridge focuses almost entirely on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, his discussion of oceanic trenches focuses almost entirely on the Pacific trenches. But there are ridges outside of the Atlantic and trenches outside the Pacific, and it really seems to me that the processes he describes in the one region would actively work to prevent the same processes from happening in the other regions.

The slumping probably accounts for this according to Walt. I don't have a firm enough grasp on the hypothesis to describe what's happening.

Well, thanks for hanging tough on this. I'm not shy about asking Walt himself about the hydroplate theory, but I don't really want my first question to be "So what is it that the hydroplate says happened?"!

 

[aharvey]

When is the model no longer The Model?

When is the model no longer The Model?

Walt calls the layer of subterranean water that covers the pre-Flood crust the "hydroshell." On Bob's show he says it's about a half mile deep, on his web site he says it's about 3/4 a mile and contained about half the world's water supply, with the other half being on top of the hydroplate (don't recall if he gave these proportions on the radio). Granting some major ambiguities in estimates of this type (this is an assumption, after all), let's play with the numbers:

Total amount of water on earth today: 332,500,000 cubic miles
Total amount of water in a half-mile thick hydroshell: 49,000,000 cubic miles
Total amount of water in a 3/4-mile thick hydroshell: 74,000,000 cubic miles

Hydroshell thickness required to contain half the world's water: 1.7 miles

So there's a fair amount of slop in Walt's numbers. I have a couple concerns here: the first is that the nature of this model suggests that he didn't just pluck the values for his key assumptions out of thin air, but rather needed these values to hold other parts of the model together. So what would happen if the hydroshell was 2 or 3 times thicker than he assumes, or if only it contained only an eight to a quarter of the world's water? I don't know, but if you've struggled through this model you'll know that there are a lot of calculations that ultimately all have to fit together. And that makes it difficult for someone to try to make sense of the rest of the model. Do we stick with his numbers or do we try to update them with numbers that try to keep with the spirit of the model but more accurately reflect known parameters?

Let me give you an example of the quandary. I've been thinking about the torrential "rains" that would result from the hydroplate disaster. This rain is all water from the hydroshell, but it of course would also contain the salts in this water (which we'll ignore for the moment) as well as the eroded rock from the granitic hydroplate and basaltic crust. Let's put some numbers on these statements, using Walt's website values: i.e., a 3/4-mile hydroshell, 10-mile thick hydroplate, 800-mile wide and 46,000 mile long rupture, and eroded sediments with a 65:35 ratio of hydroplate:crust.

First, how much hydroshell water was released? We can err on the side of generosity and say all of it (even though the sliding part of the model says this can't be true), which gives us those 74,000,000 cubic miles of water in the atmosphere.

How much rock did this water take with it? The granitic component is 10*800*46,000 = 368,000,000 cubic miles. The basaltic component would add another 198,000,000 cubic miles, for a total rock volume of 566,000,000 cubic miles (yes, almost eight times the volume of the water that removed it).

Now, the specific gravity of granite is roughly 2.75 (that means one cubic mile of granite has a mass 2.75 times that of a cubic mile of water). Basalt's is slightly higher, but if we just stick with 2.75, we find that the, er, "rain" resulting from such an event would consist of less than 5% water and more than 95% rock by mass.

Of course one can dispute these numbers, e.g., by claiming that for some reason most of the rock but not the water went into outer space (increasing the proportion of "rain" water), or by noting that a significant amount of the hydroshell water had to stay behind to lubricate the sliding plates (decreasing the proportion of "rain" water).

Though I have a ready reply to that type of response, here I want to note that a thicker hydroshell would increase the amount of water in the "rain" and be more in line with current global water volumes (though we'd still be only at 11% "rain" water!). But that would require using values different from what the model itself uses, in which case are we really evaluating that model any more?

 

[Stripe]

Slumping is the Pacific ocean sinking as the Atlantic chamber floor rises.

Interesting numbers though I don't think they make intuitive sense to me. Does the hydroplate model require all the granite deposits to be the result of erosion and deposition from the rupture? I wouldn't have thought so. The sliding hydroplates and their actions would account for a lot more.

 

[aharvey]

Slumping is the Pacific ocean sinking as the Atlantic chamber floor rises.

stipe, this is critical: when you're talking about the events that form the foundation of the hydroplate model, you shouldn't really be referring to "the Pacific ocean," because that doesn't exist yet, so its floor can't really be sinking. Please restate the above sentence in terms of the hydroplate, oceanic crust, and mantle (as needed), since we're trying to figure out to which the Pacific Ocean floor corresponds!

Interesting numbers though I don't think they make intuitive sense to me. Does the hydroplate model require all the granite deposits to be the result of erosion and deposition from the rupture? I wouldn't have thought so. The sliding hydroplates and their actions would account for a lot more.

I think you're missing the point. That quantity of granite is simply what would have to have been removed from the ten mile deep, 800 mile wide, 46,000 mile long rupture carved out of the hydroplate by the subterranean water escaping through the rift. Those are Walt's dimensions, I just calculated the volume and mass of the granite that used to be there. Interestingly, if you want to add granite from other sources to the world's sediment loads, you have to increase the amount of basalt somehow scoured off of the oceanic crust accordingly to keep the 65:35 granite:basalt ratio in Walt's model.

 

[Clete]

Sure.

I made it into a video, you can watch it here:

http://www.christian-revolution.net/studyRender.php?studyID=38

Some of the visuals may help some

The link doesn't seem to work! What gives?

 

[Stripe]

stipe, this is critical: when you're talking about the events that form the foundation of the hydroplate model, you shouldn't really be referring to "the Pacific ocean," because that doesn't exist yet, so its floor can't really be sinking. Please restate the above sentence in terms of the hydroplate, oceanic crust, and mantle (as needed), since we're trying to figure out to which the Pacific Ocean floor corresponds!

When the rupture started the process of redistributing the mass of the Earth started. Mass was first removed from the Atlantic (region) which created instability balanced by pressure from below (the Pacific region .. ie the other side of the Earth.)

I think you're missing the point. That quantity of granite is simply what would have to have been removed from the ten mile deep, 800 mile wide, 46,000 mile long rupture carved out of the hydroplate by the subterranean water escaping through the rift. Those are Walt's dimensions, I just calculated the volume and mass of the granite that used to be there. Interestingly, if you want to add granite from other sources to the world's sediment loads, you have to increase the amount of basalt somehow scoured off of the oceanic crust accordingly to keep the 65:35 granite:basalt ratio in Walt's model.

Ah. I understand your point now.

 

[Jukia]

How long does it take for the crack to spread around the world? How long does it take for the continents to move into their current positions?

 

[aharvey]

When the rupture started the process of redistributing the mass of the Earth started. Mass was first removed from the Atlantic (region) which created instability balanced by pressure from below (the Pacific region .. ie the other side of the Earth.)

So everything on the Pacific side "slumped:" mantle, crust, and hydroplate? (Not a criticism, I'm just trying to be clear).

I confess it still seems to me that this temporal sequencing, which appears to be required to cause the Pacific trenches, would prevent the formation of the Pacific ridges and the Atlantic trenches, and wouldn't give the hydroplates anywhere to slide away from the ridges.

Although I'm not worrying about the mechanisms at this point, it would be keen for a physicist to weigh in on the idea that the rising of a ridge on one side of the planet would most likely be compensated for by a drop on the opposite side of the planet (i.e., through the gravitational center of the planet), rather than, say, from lateral crustal/mantle movement immediately adjacent to the rise.

 

[Stripe]

it happened on the moon...
the near side
the far side

 

[aharvey]

it happened on the moon...
the near side
the far side

Not sure what you're trying to show here: is there a narrow ridge on one side of the Moon with a correspondingly narrow trench on the opposite side or something?

 

[Stripe]

The moon didn't have a subterrainean chamber. But when one side of the moon was pulverised the mass lost to disintergration was replaced by mass through the center and from the other side of the moon. This generated heat, molten rock, basaltic flows and a huge slump on the opposite side from where all the impacts centered.

 

[Jukia]

The moon didn't have a subterrainean chamber. But when one side of the moon was pulverised the mass lost to disintergration was replaced by mass through the center and from the other side of the moon. This generated heat, molten rock, basaltic flows and a huge slump on the opposite side from where all the impacts centered.

The mass that is pulverized and disintegrated on the side of the moon facing us was replaced by material from the center of the moon causing the other side to cave in? Is that what you are saying?

 

[Stripe]

Yes. You can't miss it. The depression is the large dark area covering the southern hemisphere of the far side. The near side was pulverised by a series of very large and closely timed collisions that are now largely flooded with maria.