EARTH & MOON IMPACTS

occurred mostly during and after the Great Flood

Did Meteors Trigger Noah’s Flood? https://answersingenesis.org/the-flood/did-meteors-trigger-noahs-flood

https://www.newscientist.com

CONTENTS

OVER 50,000 IMPACTS TO EARTH

IMPACTS, TORRENTIAL RAIN, TSUNAMIS

IRIDIUM LAYERS

There were likely several periods of major impacts on the Earth and the Moon. There was possibly an impact event that formed the supercontinent, Pangaea. There were certainly major impacts during the Great Flood event, as revealed in the sedimentary rock record. And there were surely major impacts during the Younger Dryas event which occurred during the end of the Ice Age, the latter having occurred after the Great Flood, not before.

Mainstream science assumes that the Late Heavy Bombardment of the Moon occurred billions of years ago, but I've shown that conventional dating methods are proven unfounded in my previous post, at https://cataclysmicearthhistory.substack.com/p/226-dating-methods . Below I quote some articles that indicate that the Moon and Earth were bombarded with impacts more recently, at the time of the Great Flood.

In a forum post at https://www.thunderbolts.info/forum3/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=13&start=720#p8078 I quoted evidence that the features on Mars are also young and Mars was likely involved in the same bombardment. Venus, Mars and Earth were before and for some time after the Great Flood probably satellites of the planet Saturn and possibly Jupiter as well. That's one of the findings of the Saturn Theory, which I discussed briefly at https://cataclysmicearthhistory.substack.com/p/myths-about-cataclysms . The Saturn Theory suggests that the asteroids, comets and meteors may have formed during a nova flareup of Saturn.

This recent article declares that "30,000 near-Earth asteroids discovered, and numbers are rising" at https://phys.org/news/2022-10-near-earth-asteroids.html . Not only are there those thousands of asteroids orbiting near Earth, the Earth also crosses many meteor streams, each of which has apparently millions of meteors, though most are very small. But each stream includes one or more comets that can be rather large, large enough to form a large crater. There is a "List of meteor showers" at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_meteor_showers .

In this post, https://cataclysmicearthhistory.substack.com/p/1 , I showed that sedimentary rock strata on Earth date mostly to the time of the Great Flood. In this forum post, https://www.thunderbolts.info/forum3/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=13&start=735#p8102 , I quoted Velikovsky on many features on Earth that came into existence during and after the Great Flood. Earth was much different before the Flood. There were no mountains. There was only one continent which was all lowland with warm climate, lush vegetation and wildlife, no cold.

Following are some details about the impacts from the time of the Flood, quoting two articles.

OVER 50,000 IMPACTS TO EARTH

Impacts and Noah’s Flood https://creation.com/impacts-and-noahs-flood

_New data from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter from 2010 provides high-resolution topographic data on the lunar surface. This new data leads to an estimate of 58,000 impacts on Earth, even larger than Michael Oard’s estimate of 36,000 Earth impacts. The significance of secondary craters is considered in these estimates. Such estimates have inherent limitations that should be kept in mind. The number of known Earth impact sites is considered as well as how Catastrophic Plate Tectonics could destroy many craters on Earth.

_Objects scattered near Earth’s orbit could have occasionally fallen on Earth for some time after the Flood year. The post-Flood Ice Age would also erode or possibly bury craters from effects around ice sheets or from volcanism or other sedimentation burying the craters. All these effects together would explain how we might only find today a small number of the craters that once existed.

_I agree with Oard that some source of objects outside the solar system that could somehow set off many impacts within the solar system may be reasonable.2 The discussion of impacts at the Flood brings up the obvious question of where the impactor objects came from. I once suggested that a cloud of debris from outside the solar system could have passed through the system and set off collisions.13

_2. Oard, M.J., An impact Flood submodel—dealing with issues, J. Creation 26(2):73–81, 2012. Return to text.

_13. Spencer, W.R., The Origin and History of the Solar System; in: Walsh, R.E. (Ed.), Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Creationism (technical symposium sessions), Creation Science Fellowship, Pittsburgh, PA, pp. 513–523, 1994.

IMPACTS, TORRENTIAL RAIN, TSUNAMIS

What do impacts accomplish in the first hour? https://creation.com/flood-impact-submodel

__[CRATERS WITH THIN CRUST BELOW THEM OCCURRED AFTER PANGAEA BREAKUP]

_Larger impact craters on Earth, although almost destroyed, might however have thinned the crust and raised the Moho. The amount of crustal thinning and the height of the Moho above the average are the main factors that determine the type and size of the gravity anomaly. During an impact, both the asteroid and some of the target rock melt, but the process and amount of melt production is not well understood.15

[Since large craters cause the Moho to raise up under them, wherever the Moho is raised up under a crater, the crater must have formed after the Pangaea Breakup {Shock Dynamics} event.]

__[LARGE CRATERS ON PLANETS ARE SHALLOW]

_Very large impact basins observed in the inner solar system include South Pole-Aitken Basin on the moon at 2,500 km in diameter, the Hellas Basin on Mars at 2,300 km in diameter (several on the northern hemisphere of Mars are possibly around 3,000 km or larger, but the evidence is uncertain), and the largest on Mercury, the Caloris Basin, at about 1,500 km. These craters are believed to have been formed by asteroids 100 to 800 km in diameter19 — assuming they originated from the asteroid belt and were travelling at typical velocities. It is believed that the earth and Venus should have also produced large impact basins.19

_Mantle rocks exposed from impacts on the moon’s surface are extremely rare.22 The conundrum of the missing mantle rocks implies that the transient crater depth was much shallower than expected. Basins on Mars between 275 and 1,000 km in diameter are also shallower with less crustal thinning 58expected.23 The puzzle is especially evident in an analysis of possibly the largest impact basin in the solar system, the South Pole-Aitken Basin on the moon. The diameter is 2,500 km, but there are no mantle rocks. None of the mantle was tapped during such a huge impact,17 and very little basalt flowed into this crater.

_[Maybe this is why Hudson Bay basin is shallow. Deep rock is more plastic and partially fills back in from below.]

__Impacts in water. Impacts in water of course are different from those that strike land. If the impact is small compared to the depth of water, there will be little cratering on the bottom.29

[WATER IMPACTS LED TO HEAVY RAIN & TSUNAMIS]

_For asteroids with diameters about the depth of the water or greater, the water will have little or no effect on the cratering process. The rebound of the centre of the crater immediately after impact would mostly be a pulse of water shooting high into the air.

_The most significant effect of impacts striking water is that a fair amount of water will be blasted up into the air30 and large tsunamis will result. In the excavation of an oceanic crater, a thin layer of water is ejected from the rim almost straight up, which soon collapses and plunges onto the water surface (figure 8).

_So impacts cause water to shoot high into the atmosphere at both the rim and the centre of the impact. Could this be what is described in the Bible as “on the same day all the fountains of the great deep burst open” (Genesis 7:11b)?

_Much water is also vaporized during transport to the upper atmosphere:

_“Another important difference between continental and oceanic impacts is the vaporization of water expanding as a vapor cloud in the upper atmosphere. Earth’s climate and atmospheric circulation may be severely perturbed by the injection of a large amount of vapor … .”29

_The above statement was made assuming one impact. However, with multiple impacts occurring simultaneously during the very early Flood, a huge amount of water vapor, and probably also liquid water, would be injected into the atmosphere and above.31

_The liquid and vapor would be spread all around the earth by the upper winds and general circulation of the earth, whatever that was before the Flood, and fall as torrential worldwide rain early in the Flood. Such a rainfall would tend to slow up as the number of impacts decreased early in the Flood. But, it would still take many days before all the water fell out of the atmosphere by gravity. Such an impact mechanism can easily explain the 40 days and night of heavy rain over the earth.

_Impacts in water cause tsunamis. The size of the tsunami wave is related to the projectile diameter, but it will be different than a tsunami resulting from a large earthquake. Tsunamis would move at hundreds of m/sec away from the impact, and as they move through deep water they are large swells that may not even be detected on board a ship. It is only in shallow water that a tsunami builds up to a giant wave. Impacts cause two groups of tsunamis: one from the pushing outward of water at the rim and the other from the collapse of the central uplift, which will follow the rim wave (figure 8).

_Impact tsunamis decay much faster than earthquake-induced waves. There are two reasons for this weaker tsunami for the same amount of energy. First, a resurge flow returning water back into the crater would diminish the strength of the tsunami waves and also help fill up the crater with debris.32

_Second, since impact tsunamis are much larger, the breaking of the wave in shallow water starts on the edge of the continental shelf and not near the beach.33 Breaking so far from shore dissipates much of its energy, and the roll up on land would be much less than expected.

IRIDIUM LAYERS

EVIDENCES OF A WORLD-WIDE FLOOD FROM A STUDY OF THE DINOSAURS https://digitalcommons.cedarville.edu/icc_proceedings/vol2/iss1/7/

... Most recently, the asteroid theory has become a popular explanation for the dinosaur extinction problem. It has been argued that the asteroids slammed into the earth, raising dust clouds of such magnitude as to darken the earth for a long period of time. ... {The} iridium-rich ... K/T boundary layer {is unusual}. Ordinarily, we do not find iridium in any significant amounts on the earth's surface. Since it does occur in space debris, asteroids were considered to be its main source. We do know, however, that it is resident within ... the earth's crust. Creationists, therefore, have contended that the iridium layer was due to volcanic activity. ... A scientist from MIT's Nuclear Reactor laboratory, Dr. Ilhan Olmez, has provided excellent information which undermines the asteroid {impact} theory. First, Dr. Ilhan Olmez clarifies the fact that many of the elements found in the K/T boundary are not found in asteroids. Secondly, he shows us that an asteroid collision would require that more debris should be found in the vicinity of the impact. On the contrary, the K/T boundary has been found at many different parts of the earth. Further, the elements in question (arsenic, selenium, and antimony) are found at every one of these locations. According to Officer and Drake, "the concentrations of arsenic and antimony and the clay mineralogy suggests a mantle source rather than a meteoritic one." Science, 8 March, 1985, vol. 227, pp. 1161-1167. Since it has been observed that when a volcano such as Kilauea produces almost as much iridium as that found in the K/T layer, Olmez concludes that a few volcanoes of that size could have been responsible for our present quantity of iridium. This suggestion, then, becomes a support for the idea of a world-wide Flood.

{Actually, there were many impacts, as well as volcanism. The Younger Dryas impacts c. 700 years after the Great Flood were also accompanied by volcanism, I believe, and an iridium spike layer.}