The Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Creationism (2023)

extreme conditions they entail, or both, to explore experimentally in a repeatable manner in the laboratory. The Genesis Flood certainly falls into this category. This paper describes a beginning attempt to apply known physical laws, physical processes that can be investigated in the laboratory, and processes on larger scales that can be studied and characterized by measurements in the present, to model important aspects of this unique cataclysmic event. The numerical model exploits the shallow water approximation to represent water flow in a thin layer on the surface of a rotating sphere corresponding to the earth. It utilizes the theory of open-channel flow to treat the suspension and transport of sediment by turbulent flowing water. As its mechanism for erosion, it utilizes cavitation. To drive the water flow it draws upon a currently observable consequence of plate tectonics, namely, the locking and sudden release of the overriding lithospheric plate along its fault contact with a subducting plate in a subduction zone. Today, when the overriding plate unlocks and rebounds, its upward motion can, and often does, generate a water wave known as a tsunami. During the Flood, when plate speeds were orders of magnitude higher than they are today, the amplitudes of the tsunamis were almost certainly vastly larger. In our numerical model we utilize such large-amplitude tsunamis to drive the global water flow. Along the continental margins water speeds consistently exceed the cavitation threshold, leading to intense erosion of the continental bedrock. As the tsunamis surge onto the continental surface, the turbulent water transports the eroded sediment inland and deposits it in patterns characterized by large spatial scales. In the case highlighted in this paper, erosion and deposition rates approach those needed to account for the average sediment thickness on today’s continental surface. This numerical model sheds important light on major issues related to the Flood. It plausibly points to the source of a large fraction of sediment in the continental sediment record within the Biblical time span of the Flood. It plausibly explains how this sediment came to be deposited on top of the normally high-standing continental surface. It readily accounts for the vast lateral scales and the horizontal continuity of these sedimentary sequences. Astonishingly, it yields a large-scale pattern of sediment distribution that matches the observed pattern remarkably well. Moreover, it suggests a plausible cause for the global erosional unconformities bounding the megasequences above and below, including the Great Unconformity. 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