Seafloor Spreading Observed

Hosts: Doug Sharp and Rich Geer

In April 2024, scientists observed the sea floor split wide open. Earlier that year, in February, marine geophysicist Jean-Yves Royer of the French National Center of Scientific Research deployed the Observatory with Hydro-Acoustics and Geodesy near Amsterdam Island on the Southeast Indian Ridge between Australia and Antarctica. This is part of the French Southern and Antarctic Lands and includes the Kerguelen Islands, MacDonald and Heard Islands. Seafloor spreading is not a slow, gradual creep. Instead, tectonic tension builds over decades before being unleashed in rare, violent bursts — discrete episodes the researchers call "quantum" events. The team built an observatory consisting of five autonomous hydrophones positioned to monitor the entire Saint Paul-Amsterdam volcanic plateau, hoping to catch one of these cataclysmic episodes.

The event in April observed that the ridge axis failed and let the accumulated magma underneath propagate into the oceanic crust. Vast sheet-like intrusions of magma, known as dikes, tore through the crust in less than two hours, injecting an estimated 150 million cubic meters of magma into the crust. As the dikes spread, they triggered earthquakes, reawakened long-dormant faults — fractures where blocks of Earth's crust can suddenly slip past one another — and drained the magma reservoir beneath the ridge. As a result, the seafloor above it collapsed very rapidly.

At its peak, the ridge was pulling apart at 5 cm every minute — nearly half a million times faster than its long-term average.

The findings were published in Nature.

If we go to the Biblical account of Noah's flood, in Genesis 7:11, it says that in the six hundredth year of Noah's life, in the second month, the seventeenth day of the month, the same day were all the fountains of the great deep were broken up and the windows of heaven were opened. Perhaps this April event is a microcosm of what happened on a macro scale during the flood of Noah. Creationists have two models of how that happened: Catastrophic Plate Tectonics and the Hydroplate Theory.