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In a pleasantly wide-ranging discussion entitled Canopy Theory, Bert posted a link on hydroplate theory:
 

http://www.creationscience.com/onlinebook/HydroplateOverview3.html

 
That could probably do with a thread all of its own.

The site linked to is the online edition of In the Beginning: Compelling Evidence for Creation and the Flood by Dr. Walt Brown, who is, I gather, a well-known young earth creationist. Should be good, then! The book covers a range of topics besides hydroplates — evolution, the solar system, and so on — but I guess we ought to try to keep geology as central to this thread as we can...

Basically, the book sets out to criticise plate tectonics — the idea that parts of the earth's crust ('plates') move around rather slowly due to convection currents in the solid mantle beneath, and that mountain ranges etc. are due to their long drawn-out collisions or the subduction of one plate beneath another. It argues for replacing it with his hydroplate theory, in which all geological features of note were formed in the space of a year or so around the time of the biblical flood, which is presumed to have been global.

I'm starting reading, then, at the beginning of the earth science section. First off, Brown claims (without giving reasons) that the Colorado River Delta is, mysteriously, far too small to account for the amount of rock eroded in forming the Grand Canyon. This seems to me to be a problematic claim. Since the damming at Glen Canyon in 1963 effectively stopped sediment from flowing down the river and replenishing the delta, it has shrunk considerably. That implies constant removal of sediment from the seaward end. So there's no reason to suppose that all the rock eroded from the Grand Canyon ought still to be in the delta: the evidence of the last 50 years clearly tells us to expect most of it to have moved down the Gulf of California and out into the Pacific, instead.

Next he mentions the Hualapai Limestone through which the river cuts as it leaves the canyon. The deposition of this rather muddy (not "relatively pure") limestone is radiologically dated using volcanic ash layers to 13-6Ma ago (Ma = millions of years), which means the carving of the canyon must have begun after the end of this time. He suggests, again without any real supporting argument, that this is hugely problematic for the conventional old-earth geological model. But is it?

The volume of the canyon is given by the National Park Service here as 4.17 trillion m³. Supposing the Colorado River to be 6 million years old, that means that on average 4,170,000,000,000÷6,000,000=695,000m³ of rock has to have been removed per year during that time. Is this credible? In experiments done on the Colorado River during dam overflows in the 1990s, average water flow rates of 1290m³/s containing 0.16% sediment were measured. That's a shade over 2m³ of sediment per second (0.16%×1290=2.064), or about 178,000m³ of sediment per day (2.064×60×60×24=178,329.6). Each of the past 6 million years would need on average about 4 days of such peak flows to shift the required amount of sediment (695,000÷178,000=3.9), which is surely not an unreasonable figure.

That's rather a simple-minded set of calculations, but it shows rather clearly that the conventional model isn't about to collapse under the weight of its supposed internal contradictions — at least, not at this point! So, I'm not impressed by Walt Brown's case so far.

Correct me if I am wrong.

The major problem I have with approaches of this sort is that they are not seeking to find better explanations or better science, but are just trying to discount current scientific knowledge.

It does not seem that they are aware of scientific methods or the philosophy of science.

Now if they could argue about the relative merits of induction and deduction, theories of falsification, Kuhn's paradigms of scientific revolutions, science as sociology or Feyerabend's view that scientific knowledge is no different from other forms of knowledge then I might get interested.

If an unassailable axiom of your work is that the earth is young then all your arguments are directed in support of that.

_________________
John

My soul looks back in wonder at how I got over

We who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes

I rather agree with you, John. I haven't yet come across a naturalistic YEC account of the world that does what it says on the tin, so to speak.
 
They seem to arise like this:
 

1. Process a traditional reading of early Genesis through a modernist mindset, and arrive at an uncritical realist interpretation of it.
 
2. Set this interpretation as one's paradigm for understanding nature, and confuse and confound adherence to this interpretation of these texts with faithfulness to scripture as a whole.
 
3. Notice the lack of overlap between this paradigm and the ones current in the scientific community, and fail to reconcile the conflict.
 
4. Conclude that the scientific consensus(es) must be driven by an ideological commitment which is the mirror image of one's own, and that their claims to be based on evidence must therefore be spurious, as all evidence is being viewed through an unholy and distorting mindset.
 
5. Attempt a naturalistic account of earth history that buttresses one's scriptural interpretation, justifying a partial approach to the evidence by referring to the project as a work in progress, or to the "opposition's" supposedly proceeding likewise.

 
Some people are carried along with these projects for a while, and then find the evidence convinces them that the earth is in fact old, or that there's no sign of a global flood anytime recently, or whatever. They may then fall foul of 2., and suffer a crisis of faith in Jesus. Others never let themselves look at the evidence, and this blunts their witness to a world which, whatever its many faults, can often spot when people aren't facing up to something.
 
Somewhat controversially for round here (!), I conclude that YECcery is not one approach to the truth, but an out and out deception.

Walt Brown (1989)—Hydroplate Theory... Sediments, produced during the flood phase, settled through the flood waters, grain by grain. Liquefaction sorted those sediments into layers totaling, on average, a mile in thickness. About 20% of the flood water was trapped between those grains at the end of the flood. As that subsurface water escaped during the following years, much of today’s terrain was sculpted.

So, according to Brown, the sediment that's all churned up in the waters of the global flood settles out... and then "liquefaction" sorts it all into layers. As a thousand photos of the Grand Canyon show, this layering is perfect over hundreds of square miles; and close examination shows no trace of mixing at the contacts between layers. No matter; Brown tells us also (here) that he has done an experiment to show how this works in practice. His apparatus sways gently to and fro, sending water from one bottle up and down through sediment in the other, and gradually sorting it into layers. Impressed? I wasn't.
 

Oh, and Brown starts by invoking liquefaction of the entire sediment column to explain its layering, but then explains the persistence of animal footprints about ¾ the way up by claiming that they were made after the sediment they formed in experienced its last liquefaction episode. Leaving aside the question of floating dinosaurs surviving a global flood long enough to go for a walk, and also the question of how there may have been any exposed sediment there for them to walk over (see here), it is a fact that well-layered sediments lie above these footprints. Brown makes no suggestion as to how these higher layers can have been liquefied and sorted separately from the layers beneath. The boundary between liquefied and non-liquefied sediments must have been precisely at the level of the footprints, too, as there is no unsorted sediment just above that level.

I really don't think it's the usual geological model that's suffering from internal contradictions... It seems to me, so far, that someone would really have to want very very much to believe in this stuff to give it any credence.

The more I browse through Brown's book, the more I am in awe of his audacity. He certainly thinks big; I'm just embarking on his section about the origins of the earth's radioactive elements, for which a hydroplate explanation will no doubt be forthcoming. He doesn't like to miss a chance to paint conventional science in an unflattering light either. Here's his footnote on atomic structure:

5. “No complete theory exists which fully describes the structure and behavior of complex nuclei based solely on a knowledge of the force acting between nucleons [protons and neutrons].” J. S. Lilley, Nuclear Physics (New York: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, 2001), p. 35.
 
Various models of the atom are debated. Each explains some things, but each has problems. For example, the popular planetary model visualizes electrons orbiting a nucleus, much as planets orbit the Sun. However, a consequence of Ampere’s Law and Faraday’s Law is that a charged particle, such as an electron, moving in an orbit should radiate energy as electromagnetic waves. Electrons should lose energy and quickly fall into the nucleus. Stated another way:
 
The “planetary” model assumed that light, negatively charged electrons orbit a heavy, positively charged nucleus. The problem with this model was that the electrons would be constantly accelerating and should radiate energy as electromagnetic waves, causing the atom to collapse. Ibid., p. 4.
 
Because this does not happen, either electrons do not orbit nuclei, or the above laws must be modified.
 
Contrary to popular belief, atoms and their components (protons, neutrons, electrons, etc.) are not spheres or mathematical points. This is another example of how we sometimes unknowingly distort reality in order to simplify.

You'd get the impression from this that the idea of electrons orbiting atomic nuclei like miniature planets was still current, wouldn't you? Current, though suffering from serious and embarrassing flaws that no-one is too certain how to address.
 
The fact is, though, that the radiative collapse of atoms predicted by this model was sorted out 80 to 90 years ago (it's part of the story of the birth of quantum mechanics, a theory which has collected absolutely spectacular experimental support in the intervening decades). The planetary model of the atom is a museum piece, in other words, and has absolutely nothing whatever to do with the quote with which the footnote begins. What Brown is doing here is quote-mining, which isn't nice. He may also be betraying a fundamental ignorance of the science he's criticising.
 
I suspect he's also trying to set up a narrative in which all theories are as good as each other, really — "each explains some things, but each has problems" — and it's pretty much a matter of personal taste which one you plump for. That's probably his best hope, from what I've read so far!

Hmm. I gotta agree with you, Andy (not that I don't want to ). Even I know the planetary model of atoms has been relegated to the dustbins of scientific thought.

_________________
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..and also to the logos on the letterheads of atomic energy organisations, of course.

Just got side-tracked on to the origin of comets: blasted into space by the fountains of the deep at the beginning of the flood, we are told. (See here & ff.) Furthermore:
 

Textbooks and the media confidently explain, in vague terms, how comets began. Although comet experts worldwide know those explanations lack details and are riddled with scientific problems, most experts view the problems, which few others appreciate, as “future research projects.”

 
It has been known for some time that comets have about twice the amount of heavy water in them that Earth's water supplies have. Brown notes this, too:
 

Surprisingly, in comets, one out of 3,200 hydrogen atoms is heavy—twice that in water on Earth. Therefore, comets did not deliver most of Earth’s water, as many writers have speculated. In comets, the ratio of heavy hydrogen to normal hydrogen is 20–100 times greater than in interstellar space and the solar system as a whole. Evidently, comets came from an isolated reservoir rich in heavy hydrogen. Many efforts by comet experts to deal with this problem are simply unscientific guesswork. No known process will greatly increase or decrease the heavy hydrogen concentration in comets. ... The high concentration of heavy hydrogen in comets means comets did not come from today’s known hydrogen sources—in or beyond the solar system.

 
Well, after that build-up, there should be something pretty incisive in store for us by way of explanation. This is what Brown serves up:
 

Comets are literally out of this world. As the flood began, the extreme pressure in the interconnected subterranean chambers and the power of supercritical water exploding into the vacuum of space launched material that later merged to become about 50,000 comets, totaling less than 1% of the water in the chambers. ... This water was rich in heavy hydrogen.

 
...an assertion that comets have a lot of heavy water because they came from the fountains of the deep, and the fountains of the deep had a lot of heavy water. Ah, of course.
 
A little later, we read:
 

Comets are rich in heavy hydrogen, because the water in the subterranean chambers was isolated from other water in the solar system.

 
Why should that assumed isolation of the subterranean water have meant that it was enriched in heavy water? Brown doesn't try to explain. He then follows up with:
 

PREDICTION 28: Excess heavy hydrogen will be found in salty water pockets five or more miles below the Earth’s surface.

 
This is bold, but it's baseless. He's taking a piece of evidence that counts strongly against his theory, and bolting unexplained assertions on to that theory in an attempt to stop it falling over. I don't think it works. In anyone else, I think he might say it "lacked detail", call it "vague", and label it "unscientific guesswork"... which is where we came in, isn't it?

LOL

_________________
"The person who has my commandments and obeys them is the one who loves me. The one who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and will reveal myself to him." (John 14:21)

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People like Walt Brown do immense harm to the Christian faith by making absurd claims that anybody with a knowledge of freshman physics will know is wrong. This has serious consequences to Christian witness on university and college campuses, and in general amongst people with at least some grasp of science. Many Christians complain that their children leave Christianity after attending college. If such children are fed on a diet like that published by Walt Brown before leaving for college, they will certainly have a serious problem if they attend classes in astronomy or geology.

 
Quoted from one Christopher M. Sharp at http://www.csharp.com/hydroplate.html, where he discusses the energy that would be needed to eject the largest asteroid (Ceres) from Earth (Brown's vision of the genesis of the asteroids is here), and points out that asteroids' orbits can be back-calculated for much longer than the past few thousand years, and don't bring them anywhere near Earth.

And (briefly) back to Brown's take on where the earth's radioactive elements come from. He pictures a pre-flood granite crust as supported on pillars, with the space underneath filled with water. (Supercritical water, indeed, but that doesn't really come into this bit.) Huge tidal effects in this water layer cause the granite to "flutter" up and down, and the piezoelectric effect in the granite's quartz crystals sets up massive voltage differences between the top of the crust and the bottom. These in turn cause something akin to lightning to flow through the rock — massive plasma currents — and gamma photons released when the electrons in this plasma decelerate knock neutrons out of nearby nuclei. These neutrons are in turn picked up by other nuclei, forming the heavy radioactive isotopes the crust contains now. It's all here in Brown's book.
 
There are several objections to all this. One is that, while the piezoelectric effect is real enough (bending certain types of crystal makes a voltage difference develop across them), the piezoelectric effect in rocks is largely self-cancelling because it is sensitive to the orientation of the crystals, and the crystals are arranged at random. And even if he were to suppose that his quartz crystals were lined up nicely, then to develop the enormous voltages his mechanism demands he depends upon them being connected up like batteries in series. This would require conductive connections, though, like metal wires, in order to fix the electrical potential of the + side of one quartz crystal at the same level as the – side of the next one; and the other crystals in granite don't conduct. He relies on massive voltage differences to make the rock conduct; but without the rock conducting, he has no mechanism for creating the massive voltage differences.
 
Approaching the question from the other end, his neutron capture idea would predict the presence of isotopes in the crust and in seawater which aren't, in fact, there. The neutrons would have to have come from somewhere, and that somewhere would have to have been existing atomic nuclei. This would lead to unstable light isotopes, most of which are so unstable that we wouldn't expect to detect them any more. Aluminium-26, though, has a half-life of 720,000 years, and there's an awful lot of aluminium in granite. Some of that stable aluminium-27 should have donated neutrons to Brown's "neutron soup", and the resulting aluminium-26 ought still to be there, making aluminium in general appreciably radioactive. That's not the case, though, as is well known.
 
Moreover, one of the stable isotopes of chlorine, chlorine-35, is unusually good at capturing neutrons. Brown's model predicts, therefore, that chlorine-36 would have been formed in relatively large amounts and ought still to be quite prevalent on earth, as it has a half-life of around 300,000 years. Salt (sodium chloride) ought to be noticeably radioactive because of it... but it isn't, of course.

I conclude overall that biblical exegesis needs the support of ideas like Brown's like it needs a hole in the head. This is pseudoscience, and would be an embarrassment to anything it attached itself to. It deserves our contempt, and nothing else.