Catastrophic Plate Tectonics would have ended life on earth.

Baumgardner’s admits that CPT releases about 10²⁸ Joules of heat as gravitational potential energy. Further the entire ocean lithosphere is replaced with molten material. Just cooling the crust will release a lot of heat. The following calculations use numbers that are found easily on the web or in many text books or the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Heat to cool the crust
The ocean crust is about 7,000 meters thick. This is 7 x 10⁵ cm.

The surface area of the ocean is about 360,000,000 or 3.6 x 10⁸ sq km.

There are 10¹⁰ sq cm in a square km so the oceans cover 3.6 x 10¹⁸ cm² of the earth's surface.

This makes the volume of the ocean crust 2.6 x 10²⁴ cc.

The density of crust rocks is about 3.3 so there is about 8 x 10²⁴ g of crust. When the crust cools to the point that it solidifies it will release heat that is called the latent heat of fusion.

This amounts to approximately 400 J per gram so solidification of the crust will release about 3.3 x 10²⁷ J of heat.

The rock also has to cool by about 1000 degrees Kelvin to get to its current temperature. The heat capacity of basalt is about 1 J per gram per degree K so each gram of Basalt will release about 1000 J as it cools and since there are 8 x 10²⁴ grams of rock 8 x 10²⁷ Joules of heat would be released.

The total heat released is more than 10²⁸ J. Now far more than this will be released cooling the lithosphere but even 10²⁸ J is enough to cook the earth to death many times over. This is just for the crust, my guess is that about 10 time more heat will be released cooling the lithosphere but I haven't calculated it yet.

Boiling the Oceans

How much heat is 10²⁸ J? It is a lot. Consider this. There are about 1.4 x 10²⁴ grams of water in the oceans of the world. It takes about 420 J to heat a gram of water to 100 C and another 2260 to boil it at one atmosphere pressure. Thus it would take about 5.9 x 10²⁶ J to heat the oceans to 100 C and another 3.2 x 10²⁷ to boil them away at standard pressure. This still leaves nearly 2 thirds of the heat unaccounted for from even 10²⁸ J and far more heat than this is released. As the water boils the steam will cause the air pressure to increase, because air pressure is hydrostatic, and more heat will be needed to get to the boiling point but the heat of vaporization decreases until it reaches zero at the critical point and the total heat required does not increase all that much. The final result of releasing 10²⁸ grams of heat into the oceans will be an atmosphere of saturated steam at a pressure about 280 atmospheres and a temperature well above 374 C, the critical point of water. Of course, if you don’t release the heat into the oceans you will get temperatures far higher than this. As we see below, it takes only 5.1x10²³ J to heat the whole atmosphere form 0 to 100 C and 10²⁸ J is about 20,000 times more heat than that.

Attempts to Solve the Problem

http://www.icr.org/research/as/platetectonics.html
What does Baumgardner say about the problem? His web page on Runaway Subduction

http://www.icr.org/research/jb/largescaletectonics.htm

contains one of my favorite pieces of creationist illogical thinking and you don’t need a Ph.D. to see the obvious flaws. Here is a direct quote about his model from his web page.

“It plausibly leads to intense global rain as hot magma erupted in zones of plate divergence, in direct contact with ocean water, creates bubbles of high pressure steam that emerge from the ocean, rise rapidly through the atmosphere, radiate their heat to space, and precipitate their water as rain.”
I think this could only be plausible to someone who avoids thinking about it. As water meeting a hot surface boils the steam generated will expand against the pressure of the atmosphere at approximately the speed of sound, radiating its heat in every direction not rise up in neat bubbles, especially since high-pressure steam is heavier than air. When the pressure is equalized it will rise but by then it will have heated up a lot of air. For the steam to only radiate its heat into space it would have to be a long way from the earth since the earth's cross section is about 13,000 km and the heat radiation will be spherically symetric. That is heat will be radiate in all directions including back toward earth. Since it only takes a tiny fraction of the total heat to cook the earth to death this mechanism doesn't help.

Recently we have the claim that superheated steam jets will reach escape velocity and carry the heat away. I think this is pretty silly too. I have never seen any calculation on this, just the claim that high pressure steam jets would somehow rise into space.

http://www.answersingenesis.org/home...aumgardner.asp

Does this make sense? How does the steam organize into boyant supersonic jets? Why doesn't the steam spread rapdily to equalize pressure as it comes out of the ocean radiating heat in every direction? What does it mean to effectively cool the new ocean floor keeping temperatures in the bulk of the ocean at modest values when the entire ocean floor has to be newly formed? How is all this heat radiated into space.

Baumgardner's Admission and steaming the atmosphere

However, Baumgardner has admitted that a signficant fraction of the oceans
Jonathan Sarfati quotes an email from Baumgardner in his True,Origins ark defense http:// www.trueorigin.org/arkdefen.htm

Baumgardner: “Indeed I do believe a significant fraction of the volume of the oceans was boiled away during the catastrophe. But since the atmosphere can hold so little moisture, the water quickly returned as cool fresh water to the ocean surface. “
Sarfati then goes on as if this simple statement solves the problem but the problem is that the atmosphere also has very little capacity to hold heat.

Lets consider the consequences of boiling a ‘significant fraction’ of the ocean. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, there are about 3.9x10²¹ g of Nitrogen and 1.2 x 10 ²¹ g of oxygen in the air, with the other gases being very minor. The heat capacity at constant pressure of either N₂ or O₂ is about 30 J/degree-C-mole or about 1 J/C-g (A mole of O₂ weighs 32 g, N₂, 28g). That is, it takes about 1 J to heat a gram of air by 1 degree Celsius at constant pressure(it takes even less at constant volume). For the steam from the boiling oceans to condense to form rain it must release its latent heat of vaporization, 2260 J/g. This means that the condensation of 1 gram of steam to water releases enough heat to raise the temperature of 22.6 grams of air by 100 C. To fall as ‘cool’ rain it must release about another 4.2 J/degree C for each degree it cools. It takes only 5.1x10²³ J to heat the whole atmosphere to 100 C. Again according to Britannica, there are about 1.4 billion cubic kilometers (1.4 x 10²⁴ g) of water in the ocean. It is easy to calculate that boiling less than one quarter of one percent of the ocean (hardly a significant fraction) will release enough heat into the air as the steam condenses to raise the average temperature of the entire atmosphere to 100 degrees Celsius, which would be a little hard on Noah and his passengers, don’t you think?

Baumgardner's BFM (boiling flood model) cooks the earth to death thousands of times over. It is admited to release 10²⁸ Joules of energy when it starts and in addition entire ocean lithosphere dives into the earth and is replaced by molten mantle material. In fact it is super hot molten mantle material because Baumgardner uses an ad hoc heating of the mantle to reduce mantle viscosity about 100,000,000 times to get the process started.

It takes less that 1 one hundredth of 1% of the heat released from CPT to be absorbed the the lower atmosphere to raise temperatures far beyond those required to kill of all air breathing life. It takes about 5% of the heat from the cooling ocean crust to heat the oceans to the sterilzation point.

The Frumious Bandersnatch

While research the post above I found this as Baumgardner debates Oard about CPT.

http://www.answersingenesis.org/home...aumgardner.asp
First Baumgardner says this
Now the entire ocean floor is being replaced so these massive steam jets must have swept over all of the forming oceans.

Then he says this.

So all over the galloping continents we have giant cyclonic eddies rearranging all the worlds geology with cavitating currents. I would think there would also be massive winds generated by these steam vents and hyper hurricanes with enormous winds and at least some YECs agree with me. Of course I don't think it ever really happened.

http://www.icr.org/research/icc03/pdf/HYPERCANES.pdf

So massive steam jets are shooting from all around the ocean, cyclonic eddies with cavitating currents are sweeping the continents and hypercanes are forming because of the super warm ocean water. Meanwile we have a 600 year old man in the largest wooden boat ever built sailing serenly around with several thousand animals on board. How can this make sense to anyone?

Looks like the ark would have sunk before they all got steam cooked or vaporized.

One also wonders how these massive cavitating currents that were sweeping along moving great masses of sediments over the continents sorted the fossil record so neatly in the process and especially how trace fossil such as nests and animal tracks got laid down while all this was going on. I guess there were some really tough animals in those days.
The Frumious Bandersnatch

Here's another factor to consider:

At sufficient pressure, water does not boil, it seperates into a brine phase and a vapor phase, both being liquid. The densities of the two are different, but nothing like the difference between steam and water.

Even if the contact with the magma was below the critical point pressure (shallow enough depth), the steam would not be nearly as bouyant as steam at atmospheric pressure, so the bouyancy need to force this steam to the surface and into space would not be there.

Steam rising through several kilometers of ocean would lose heat to the cool water very fast. I wonder if we could model it somehow to show that the steam would lose so much heat that it would re-condense before reaching the surface. The only way to avoid re-condensing, that I can see, is to have the entire ocean at the boiling point (which would happen pretty quickly, anyway).

does he ever give a mechanism which can cool all the rock by 1000 degrees in the suggested timeframes?

__________________
MSci MSc ARCS DIC PhD..... yes, I am bragging.

Sort of. He claims in can be done it by shooting water into outer space and carrying the heat away. See

http://www.answersingenesis.org/home...aumgardner.asp

I suppose phase separting brine from supercritical steam might be a way to get massive salt deposits.

http://christianforums.com/t50900

The problem is that these deposits are not in the ocean basins as one would expect if the salt were precipitated during CPT. Does it make sense that those cyclonic current Baumgardner talks about carried the brine undiluted to places like the Michigan basin where the brine then evaporated to produce the thick salt layers there.
http://www.geo.msu.edu/geo333/evaporite.html
That doesn't make the least bit of sense to me.

Glenn Morton talks about 300 foot thick Permian salt layers in North Dakota.

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/geocolumn/

Was a massive amount of brine transported in on top of the lower sediments, evaporated and then covered with the overlying sediments by these cyclonic currents. How would that work. Boiling the flood does give YECs an opportunity to create salt deposits but they are in the wrong places and boiling the flood also cooks the earth to death.

The Frumious Bandersnatch

it still seems a bit problematic because of the heat gradient that would be set up. I don't see how he gets all the heat out of the lower hot regions of the rock, as all they are ever exposed to is other hot rock.

__________________
MSci MSc ARCS DIC PhD..... yes, I am bragging.

Wow, what an unusual explaination. I'd have thought that he'd simply have argued that the value of the heat radiation constant was different back then, or something. After all, you can change any "constant" you want in the YEC model.

Unless, of course, you wanted to argue that the universe is perfectedly fine-tuned for its existence and the existence of life.

__________________
Creationism has not made a single contribution to agriculture, medicine, conservation, forestry, pathology, or any other applied area of biology. Creationism has yielded no classifications, no biogeographies, no underlying mechanisms, no unifying concepts with which to study organisms or life. - Botanical Society of America's Statement on Evolution

CPT will either sink, vaporize or steam cook the ark and kill off all life on earth as the calculations above show. However that is not the only falsification of CPT. Consider the fossil record which I alluded to above and trace fossil in particular.
Baumgardner says that CPT will cause giant cyclonic eddies to sweep over the continents.
http://www.answersingenesis.org/home...ardner.asp#r29

So the sedimentary layers of the continents are being deposited by giant cyclonic eddies and the fossil record is somehow being sorted by these giant cyclonic eddies at the same time.

What about trace fossils? The link shows animal and insects tracks in the Permian Coconino sandstones

http://www.psiaz.com/Schur/azpaleo/cocotr.html

The Coconino Sandstones sit on top of the

Tapeats Sandstone, Bright Angel Shale, Muav Limestone, Grand Wash Dolomites, Temple Butte Limestone, Redwall Limestone, Surprise Canyon Formation, Supai Group of four formations (Esplanade, Wescogame, Manakacha, and Watahomigie), and the Hermit Shale Formation

Now if these sediments were deposited by giant cyclonic eddies with velocities of tens of meters per second how were there any animals left to make tracks. Of course I have no idea how giant cyclonic eddies could deposit dolomites and I don't think YECs do either but let's focus on the Coconinos.

Snelling and Austin on AiG say the Coconinos were deposited as sand waves moving at 1 to 1.65 meters per second with a sustained velocity in one direction for days.

http://www.answersingenesis.org/home...randcanyon.asp

This sure doesn't sound like giant cyclonic eddies to me.

Of course what Snelling and Austin propose for the source of the tracks is totally absurd.
http://www.christianforums.com/t50735

and the Coconinos were not flood deposits.

http://www.geocities.com/earthhistory/grandb.htm
Still it looks like YECs explanations for various features of flood geology are still contradicted by one another as well as reality.

Now consider dinosaur trace fossils. Dinosaur fossils, nests, eggs and tracks are all found in the Jurassic Morrison formation. At the link you will also see a large fossilized termite nest. How did these features survive "giant cyclonic eddies" with velocites of tens of meters per second?

http://rainbow.ldgo.columbia.edu/courses/v1001/14.html

Such giant cyclonic eddies sweeping over the continenst should have turned the entire fossil record into a jumble of broken skeletons and mixed fossils of all land animals, since all the land animals that ever lived were supposedly living on the continents at the time and even mixed marine and terrestrial fossils together as the oceans raised in hight and swept over the land. Delicate trace fossils such as animal tracks and nest should not have been preserved.

Were dinosaurs stopping to build nests and lay eggs as giant cyclonic eddies deposited trillions of tons of sediment all the over continents they lived on?

The fossil record and trace fossils falsify all flood models and are easily seen to falsify CPT (as if it needed another falsification)

http://www.geocities.com/earthhistory/eggs.htm

The Frumious Bandersnatch