Earth Shift

It is generally thought that continental drift is a slow process.  However, Alfred Wegener (d. 1930), the Father of Continental Drift, concluded that North America and Europe were moving apart from each other at 2.5 m per year! [1]  Could Rapid Plate Movements (RPM’s) fit into a more concentrated earth history and support Young Earth Science (YES)?

Consider the recent earthquake in Nepal (April 26, 2015).  The earth shifted vertically by 3 feet!  A region 75 miles by 30 miles was lifted upward according to geophysicist Tim Wright (Univ. of Leeds, UK).

It is estimated that Kathmandu moved 10 ft to the South!  Even more astonishing was Japan's Tohoku earthquake (EQ) which had plate movements of 50 meters‼  The largest earthquake in the Himalayas hit Assam in 1950 and displaced the land by 30 m.

A disaster film actually depicts the catastrophic shifting of tectonic plates which dooms Japan - Japan Sinks (2006, Nihon Chinbotsu).  This is scifi, but it is based on real science.  You can see clips from the movie here (w/ English subtitles).  According to Atsushi Utsunomiya et al, “A collapsed megalith accelerates a single-layered convection at a whole mantle scale.” [2]  Delamination was another process suggested for RPM.

To learn more about this topic, get YES – Young Earth Science where there is a whole chapter on Rapid Plate Movements (RPM’s).

Notes:

1) YES – Young Earth Science by Jay Hall (IDEAS, Big Spring, TX, 2014), p. 148.

2) Superplumes: Beyond Plate Tectonics ed. by David Yuen, Shigenori Maruyama, Shun-ichiro Karato and Brian Windley (Springer, 2007 ed., 2014), p. 396, emphasis added.