The Global Flood in the Christian Religion occurred.

Plate Tectonics in a NutshellMost of my opponent's arguments from Round 2 are based on plate tectonics so we'll have to delve into that topic briefly. Plate tectonics is the theory that the Earth's crust is made of plates that slowly drift atop the mantle [12]. Crustal plates are less dense, more buoyant, and float higher atop the comparatively dense mantle. Oceanic plates are less buoyant, float less well, and thus form deep ocean basins. Oceanic plates cool as they age, becoming even less buoyant and eventually sink back into the mantle in a process known as subduction [13]. Subduction of oceanic plates is the driving force behind plate tectonics and pulls the other plates around at roughly the speed that your fingernails grow [14].Truly Catastrophic Plate TectonicsAiG attempts to run plate tectonics at extreme speeds in what they refer to as "Catastrophic Plate Tectonics" [15]. It tries to do in about one year what regular plate tectonics does in a few hundred million years. The results are unarguably catastrophic.First they use a computer simulation to show that runaway subduction occurring "at rates of feet-per-second" to close an old ocean basin, pull apart a supercontinent and form new, warm, shallow oceanic crust. The shallower oceans can't accommodate all the water which either vaporizes and falls as rain or floods the land as a series of tsunamis. The new ocean floor then cools and sinks, allowing the water to return.A few minor problems:- Oceanic plates only subduct when they are old and cold. AiG's model would require that God created the Earth with old, cold oceanic plates ready to initiate the flood.- Oceanic plates are about 100 km thick and a few thousand km on a side [16]. Pushing them through water at feet per second is implausible. Pushing them through solid rock at those speeds is utterly ridiculous.- The stresses produced would not only pull the supercontinent apart but would pull the continents into tiny bits of gravel. Friction at plate boundaries produced by continental drift moving at the speed your fingernails grow causes melting [17]. At feet per second we'd expect a blazing wall of plasma along every plate boundary.- Sea-floor spreading governs the rate at which the underlying mantle ascends and the degree to which it melts. Under modern conditions that's limited to about 25% partial melting of the mantle source, producing ordinary ocean floor basalt [18]. During Earth's earlier, hotter geological history as much as 50% partial melting occurred, giving rise to komatiites. Komatiites are lavas we haven't seen on Earth in 2.5 billion years. AiG's catastrophic rates would cause 100% melting, producing volcanic equivalents of mantle peridotites and dunnites, rocks for which geologists have no names because they don't exist.- All the super-heated steam that's going to fall as rain has to shed a whole lot of energy and since water vapor is such an excellent greenhouse gas [19] precious little will be lost to space. The only place for it to go is into the atmosphere, leading to rapid and catastrophic temperature rise and the inevitable steaming alive of all aboard the ark.- Producing an ocean roughly the size of the Atlantic requires a whole lot of lava. About 4000 km wide by 15,000 km long and at least 10 km deep. To put that another way, about 600,000 times as much lava as would be released by a VEI-8 eruption of Yellowstone [20]. The gas released by that much lava would render the atmosphere unbreathable. The heat will boil the ocean entirely. The hydrothermal action would release massive amounts of metals into the waters. Given the weird composition of the lava, most of the metal would be iron and nickel. This fluid would more closely resemble the run-off from mine tailings ponds than ocean water. The end result would be turning the world's oceans and all its sea-life into the nastiest mine-waste gumbo imaginable before finally evaporating it completely.Put simply, running plate tectonics at these speeds simply doesn't work.Point 1: The Olive LeafThe salinity of seawater is regulated largely by hydrothermal interaction at mid-Oceanic ridges [21]. Thus, my opponent's hypothetical olive seed is trying to grow in post-flood sediment that has been thoroughly immersed in either salt water (my version) or mine-waste effluent (AiG's version). Neither is suitable for germinating plants in.Point 2: Jumbled FossilsJumbled fossils have been found. My opponent provides no source for his information on this point and all of the sources that I have found on the Cumberland Bone Cave indicate Pleistocene fauna and flora [22]. To defeat my point my opponent needs to find an example of fossils from different ages in the same location. A dinosaur and a horse for example.The remainder is an argument from what is not known, and thus an argument from ignorance. My opponent's problem is that what we have found, again and again, is a clear fossil succession. This is entirely contrary to what the flood should produce.Point 3: Fossils in the AndesAs the Andes are well above 8000 ft, both my opponent and I agree that they must have been uplifted by tectonic forces. Where we differ is the speed at which these forces can operate. As I've noted above, running plate tectonics at the speed that AiG desires is ridiculous.Point 4: Global Sedimentary LayersAiG entirely condemns radiometric dates in excess of a few thousand years. The youngest dates cited by the authors of the papers that AiG quotes is 250 million years. AiG is being incredibly dishonest by claiming that the Earth cannot be more than a few thousand years old and then relying on multi-million year U-Pb zircon ages to make their case.My opponent appears to have dropped my points regarding (1) The lack of global distribution of sediments and (2) The lack of chaotic sediments we would expect from a global flood (3) Well-ordered and stratified sedimentary rocks that could not be formed by a flood.My opponent then goes on to make an argument from folded strata. This argument does not demonstrate a flood, it demonstrates deformation. My opponent asserts that this could only happen if the sediments were deformed while still soft. This is patently false but would not demonstrate a global flood even if it were true. Contrary to my opponent's claims, folding requires neither the temperatures nor the pressures necessary for metamorphism [23]. Neither do sedimentary rocks deform without fracture. Sadly, my opponent's images did not turn out, but here's a similar one from AiG. http://cdn-assets.answersingenesis.org...; />Note the abundant fracturing of the rock, especially in the upper left of the photo. This is the axis of the fold where strain is highest and fracture most common. These fractures would not occur in soft sediments.Soft sedimentary deformation is well-understood and differs wildly from folding of sedimentary rock. In large scale it leads to chaotic jumbles of rock known as olistostromes [24]. In smaller scale it leads to a variety of soft sediment deformation structures such as convoluted bedding, sand volcanoes and flame structures [25]. I should thank my opponent for bringing this topic up as soft sediment deformation is relatively rare when it should be produced in abundance by a global flood.Point 5: Source and Sink of the WatersMy opponent attempts to appeal to the "fountains of the deep" as a source for the waters. The Earth's mantle may contain as much as tent times the amount of water as the oceans but the only way to release it s to melt the rock that contains it. This produces more lava than it does water, so while you will have a flood it will be a entirely molten rock. All of the water will be released as vapor at several hundred degrees in what is known as pyroclastic flows. A gopher wood ark will not fare well under these conditions.My opponent seeks to sink the waters in the existing ocean basins but this runs afoul of the catastrophic plate tectonics noted above.A few new points of contentionGreenland and Antarctica both have extensive ice caps. Ice floats and these glacial caps should have floated free by any global flood. The GRIP ice cores date back over 100,000 years [26] and the Vostok ice cores over 800,000 years [27]. Clearly these ice caps didn't float free during the flood.Rain Falls. Everything Dies.While the land animals may be cozy in the ark, the rest of the world's creatures are doomed. All aquatic life will be faced with either too much or too little salt as ocean and flood waters mix. Anything on the bottom will also be buried in hundreds of feet of sediment. This will lead to the extinction of most life that can't survive living beneath 2400 m of saline water for a year or so. A few seeds and spores might survive but all they'll find are the inhospitable salt wastes left when the flood waters recede.Sources[12]http://www.moorlandschool.co.uk...[13]http://www.earthobservatory.sg...[14]http://pubs.usgs.gov...[15]http://answersingenesis.org...[16] http://www.trinity.edu...[17] http://www.sciencedirect.com...[18] http://link.springer.com...[19] http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov...[20]http://www.unc.edu...[21] http://www.geochemsoc.org...[22] http://dnr.maryland.gov...[23] http://sp.lyellcollection.org...[24] http://faculty.umf.maine.edu...[25] http://www.ualberta.ca...[26] http://www.iceandclimate.nbi.ku.dk...[27] http://www.antarcticglaciers.org...