Catastrophism, such as would have prevailed as a consequence of the Biblical flood, can provide alternative models for many of these anomalies. As noted in chapter 1, the Biblical description of the flood provides information which suggests that not only rain, but also sub- terranean water and water from the pre-flood oceans was involved in that event. This would suggest a major geological upheaval and could explain many of the features which are apparent in the earth’s topography today. If oceanic waters were also involved as implied in the book of Amos and a number of passages in the Psalms, then one would expect to find marine sediments on the continents in large quantities. Standard geological interpretations would require these deposits to have been formed in cycles of marine submersion of the continents over time. Considering the vastness of these deposits, this is a difficult scenario to envisage particularly since such deposits are often associated with other fossils as well.
It is significant that we find only young sediments in the sea and the ocean floor reveals no evidence of great age; the older layers such as the Paleozoic, for example, are missing. However, vast land deposits of marine material are found on our continents. These could therefore have been formed by water and sediments from the sea, being poured over the land as the Scriptures suggest, and this could have been achieved by the raising (upwarping) of the sea bed.
Since great quantities of marine material are to be found on all the continents, it is as if the contents of the oceans were simply dumped on the land and the accompanying turbidites (underwater mud flows)
buried the animals to form the fossils, which we find in the strata today. This event would have been followed by a series of major upheavals as the topography of the surface was reformed, and the net result would have been that surface material was washed back into the sea as young sediments. Today we find a massive geologi- cal column on the land areas, but very little sediment beneath the sea. Considering that at least three quarters of this planet is covered by water, this is indeed remarkable.
The Earth’s continents are comprised of granitic-type rocks that, being lighter, float on the heavier basalt and schists beneath. Cov- ering the continents, there is an abundance of sediments containing marine fossils, such as marine fish and numerous invertebrates, such as corals, crinoids, and clams .The geologist J.S. Shelton described this conundrum as follows:
Marine sedimentary rocks are far more common and widespread on land today than all other kinds of sedimentary rocks combined. This is one of those simple facts that fairly cry out for explanation and that lie at the heart of man’s continuing effort to understand more fully the changing geography of the geologic past.34
What if the words of divine inspiration were true and God did at some stage intervene in the affairs of men and de- stroy the antediluvian world with a flood, but man refused to acknowledge it? Well then, even if the facts ‘cry out for expla- nation’, there would be no answer forthcoming.
The vastness and nature of the deposits suggest geological events in the past, which must have been radically different from any present day analogous events. It is, however, not incompatible with a flood model to expect marine deposits on land if the ocean floor was raised and the pre-flood continents depressed to allow for this type of deposition. The paucity of marine sediments in
the ocean would then simply be the result of insufficient time since the flood to produce such deposits. Seismic methods that were used to determine the thickness of ocean sediments, which were once considered to be up to 22 km thick, have revealed that the major portion of the ocean floor has sedimentary layers less than 0.1 km thick while a smaller fraction largely near the continental margins has a thickness greater than 1 km. This gives an average depth of only 0.4 km, of which half would be red clay and the other half carbonate oozes consisting of coccolith and foraminiferal skeletons. Given the rate at which erosional sediment flows into the oceans today and the rate of production of the algal and unicellular organ- isms, which would produce the oozes, the Biblical time frame is more than adequate to account for all the ocean sediments, particu- larly if one allows for greater sedimentation due to the catastrophic displacement of sediments during the flood.35
In order to provide an explanation for the missing sediment, there is a suggestion that the sediments are being absorbed under the Tectonic plates, as the continents are moving apart. However, the rates of subduction are several orders lower than the rates of erosion thus not accounting for the missing sediments. Estimates of sediments flowing into the oceans range from 8 – 64 billion tons per year and subduction rates are only estimated to be 2.5 billion tons per year.36 The immensely long time periods envisaged by the scientific fraternity do not fit the observed rates of change even under current circumstances, let alone catastrophic ones. In order to account for the present position of the continents, very slow rates of continental drift are postulated. Rates in the order of 2 cm per year are generally accepted, however, at the rate at which sediment is being washed from the continents into the sea, that crack between continents could not have opened up, as the crack would have been filled two-and-one-half times faster than it formed. Also, the rate at which erosion is changing the continental coastal features makes it unlikely that the continental fit could have been maintained as well as it has. Even in historic times, coastal features have changed so
rapidly that, if extrapolated, they would remove or add thousands of kilometers of coastal material in the supposed geological time since the separation of the continents. The coastal features of the white cliffs of Dover are a prime example, where limpets are whit- tling away the coastline at an extremely rapid rate of up to 2 m per year in the case of the Suffolk coastal cliffs. In fact, over the last 800 years, the sea has claimed 1.6 km of land including the entire medieval city of Dunwich of which the last of its twelve churches toppled over the cliffs in 1919. It is conceivable, therefore, that the continents separated very rapidly after the flood.