Connecting a Global Flood with the Mystery of Mankind's Ancient Past (cont.)
By David Warner Mathisen

Dr. Brown’s hydroplate theory begins with one assumption – that there was once a large amount of water trapped under the earth’s surface. This water was under tremendous pressure (due to the weight of the crust above it) and when a rupture took place which enabled it to burst out, the results were catastrophic. The high-pressure water rushed out with tremendous violence, and the crack of the initial rupture spread rapidly in both directions until it encircled the globe and intersected itself again. The force of the escaping water eroded the crust above it and widened the crack on either side as it blasted away earth from the sides of the rupture, mixing massive amounts of sediments into the water that would eventually blanket the earth, and also removing the weight of the crust along the line of the rupture (which now encircled the earth “like the seam of a baseball,” in Dr. Brown’s words). The removal of so much sediment allowed the basement rock that had been below the line of the rupture to spring upwards, and this caused the massive plates that would become our continents (the now-separated pieces of the crust on either side of the rupture) to begin sliding away from the upward-springing seam in either direction, still lubricated by the escaping water beneath.

This upward-springing action on one end of the globe, however, would not just cause an “air bubble” to open up in the center of the earth, of course: instead, it would cause an equal and opposite “downward-sucking” action on the opposite side of the earth. This process created the Pacific basin, which contains geological features consistent with what you will see if you suck the air out of a metal gasoline can, for instance (creating a suction and a collapse), or if you stick your thumb into the side of a ping-pong ball (there wasn’t a thumb pressed into the Pacific because it wasn’t pressed from above, it was pulled from beneath, but the arc-and-cusp shape of the Pacific trenches, and the fact that they lack the mass that they should have if they were indeed formed by one enormous plate subducting below another, indicates that the Pacific was formed by forces with similar vectors). The continents slid towards the Pacific basin and away from the upward-bulging mid-Atlantic ridge, their steep-sided continental shelves still matching the line of the mid-Atlantic ridge, because that was the line of the original rupture, whose upward-jetting water created the vertical sides of those shelves when the water that had been below the continents escaped.

Eventually, friction (as the subterranean water all escaped) or collision caused these sliding “hydroplates” to grind to a violent stop, creating violent buckling and long parallel mountain ridges roughly perpendicular to the direction of travel, just as you would create “mountains” in the front of your car if you drove it at high speed into a concrete wall. Also, along their forward edges especially, friction melted rock and created magma, which is why the “ring of fire” generally outlines the Pacific basin towards which all these plates were sliding. The thickening of the continents due to this buckling caused the waters to begin to rush off into the ocean basins, although in many places it was trapped and lifted to great elevations as the hydroplates came to a stop. Later, when precipitation continued to fill these trapped bodies of water, some of them breached violently, carving features such as the Grand Canyon (the Vale of Kashmir may have been another example, and the Jhelum River may mark its breach). In other parts of the world, where trapped bodies of water received less precipitation, the inland seas sometimes dried up or receded over the centuries (the Great Salt Lake in Utah may be one such example, and Lake Titicaca in the Andes may be another, although it has not dried up completely but only receded significantly).