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.
