Catastrophic Plate Tectonics
- sharpdb
- 7 days ago
- 2 min read
Guest: Dr. John Baumgardner Hosts: Doug Sharp and Rich Geer
Dr. John Baumgardner explains his Catastrophic Plate Tectonics model of the Flood of Noah to Doug Sharp and Rich Geer at Bandelier National Monument. The catastrophic plate tectonics (CPT) model is a young-Earth creationist attempt to explain much of Earth’s geology, especially the continents, ocean basins, mountains, and fossils, within the framework of Noah’s Flood.
The model proposes that before the Flood, Earth’s crust was arranged differently than it is today.
During the Flood year, the tectonic plates moved extremely rapidly, not at the slow rates measured today.
This rapid movement caused the breakup and sinking of pre-Flood oceanic crust, the opening of new ocean basins, massive volcanism, uplift of mountains, and widespread flooding and burial of organisms.
In this view, most major geologic features formed quickly and catastrophically, rather than over hundreds of millions of years.
Baumgardner argues that the key driver was runaway subduction:
Cold, dense oceanic lithosphere began to sink into the mantle.
As it sank, it pulled more plate material down with it. This triggered a kind of positive feedback, so plate motion accelerated dramatically.
The process became catastrophic, meaning plate movement happened on timescales of days to months, not millions of years.
He used computer mantle-convection models to argue that under certain assumptions, this sort of instability could occur.
In the CPT model, rapid plate tectonics during the Flood would have produced ocean-floor upheaval and displacement of vast amounts of water,
tsunami-like flooding across continents, rapid sediment transport and deposition, burial of organisms in sedimentary layers, and changes in the seafloor that affected sea level globally.
Creationists who accept CPT use it to explain the fossil record and sedimentary rock layers as products of the Flood rather than long geologic ages.
The model is commonly paired with the idea that newly formed ocean crust was hotter and more buoyant, making sea levels higher; later cooling caused ocean basins to deepen; mountain building and continental reshaping continued after the Flood; an ice age followed due to altered ocean temperatures and atmospheric conditions.
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