On the Third Day, Part 1: A Plate That Can Move Mountains

Then God said / “Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together into one place / and let the dry land appear” / and it was so / and God called the dry land Earth / and the gathering together of the waters He called Seas / and God saw that it was good.

One of the perks of scientific study is the chance to go to conventions in far-flung places. I just got back from one near Munich, and yes, Sam, as you kept reminding me before I left without you: "Daddy, I've never been to Germany." (Substitute: Austria, Switzerland, etc.) You've never been on a plane for 14 hours in one day and disembarked at 11am, either, Sam. You'll get your chance soon enough.

So your mom and I rented a car and drove south from Munich, toward the Alps, to the small town near a lake where the convention took place. The airport is on very flat land, and by the time we got south of the city, the land began rippling in green waves a little like a bedsheet, but in a easy farmland-pasture cowbell kind of way. But that was nothing compared to the green wall ahead of us; even the smaller, eastern half of the Alps looms over the mountainscape like a sudden escarpment. It's the reason the border between Germany and Austria is where it is: there's just this big, sudden wall that's hard to get over. Good fences make good neighbors, for countries too. Here's the best picture I could find, although even this doesn't do full justice to the sudden, looming nature of the Alps:







This border is geographical and political, and it's sudden. On the southern side of the Alps (all the way into Italy), it's not nearly so sudden. I like to have an idea for why the land looks like that. The best current idea is that we were looking at the back side of a "continent crash." To imagine what this might be like, take a look at Google Earth and click on a "hybrid" view that will superimpose roads and city names onto the satellite view of the mountains and lakes. On the highest zoom level, look at the Alps. and imagine that a very large hand is pressing Italy into the rest of Europe. Imagine that the Alps are the ripples from that continental attack. Click back and forth on the view, zoom in and out. With Google Earth, you can look at it from any angle you like. Also, look at India pressing up into Asia: the Himalayas are a larger version of the same phenomenon. I'm not sure if this is geologically sound, but I like to think that because Italy is pressing northward, the ripples on the north side of the Alps are more sudden, and it's more like a wall on that side, but for now that's just a hunch.

Now, I realize this may seem like a lot to swallow. After all, something moving too slowly to observe is something that must be taken on faith. This idea, that Italy and India are scooting around on the earth like cards on a playing table, is just about 100 years old to science, and it was understandably controversial at first. I'll save you the debates, and just show you the ideas that are the current, uncontested results: the Alps for one, the Himalayas for another, and for another provocative idea, look at the east side of South America and the west side of Africa. Not only do they look like puzzle pieces that have been torn apart, there are also mountain ranges/types of rock and even fossils that match on each side, separated now by an ocean but hinting that the two were once together. I know how much you like puzzles, and it's kind of satisfying to think of the Earth as a giant, moveable puzzle. I mention this now because the third day of creation describes the land separating oceans, the definition of borders, and land and sea becoming defined. These things are geology, and we see that geology has been very active and dynamic, much like God's hand is described on the third day.

I think that to accept such an outlandish idea as dancing continents, it helps to have a reasonable scientific mechanism, preferably chemical. It might be just because I'm a chemist, but there actually is a chemical -- well, at least atomic -- reason to adhere to this theory. The hand of God shuffling land is an interesting idea: what if he left fingerprints? He did, but in his typical, low-key, intricate and natural way, a way that we can retrace by being chemists and looking at the atoms.

It all has to do with why Lord Kelvin was wrong. If you recall from Day 2, Lord Kelvin was the venerable old scientist who calculated the age of the earth by assuming it had cooled down from a molten state and asking, how long would it take to cool off to the current temperature? His answer was it would take millions of years to cool off. Yet the Earth's age from the pitchblende experiments is in the range of BILLIONS of years old. How could Lord Kelvin be so wrong when his basic ideas were right? The problem is he didn't know his chemistry. (Take this as a lesson, young sons!)

To be specific, he didn't know his nuclear chemistry. In Day 2, the message that "atoms fall apart" is actually a statement of "nuclear" chemistry, because the part of the atom that falls apart is the hard core in the middle: the nucleus. Lord Kelvin didn't know about the nucleus because he was a 19th-century scientist and the nucleus wasn't known at all until the early 20th century. Once it was found, scientists studied how it falls apart, with the result being one of the most ambiguous yet defining discoveries of all time: the atomic bomb. Clearly when an atom falls apart, it releases energy. When lots are made to fall apart at once, you get an extraordinary, even demonic?, amount of energy. When you have a big ball of tons of atoms, which is what the earth is, there's a few falling apart deep inside, releasing little bits of energy. They act like tiny spaceheaters, because the energy warms its surroundings just a bit (much more gentle and spread out than a bomb). This means the decay of atoms deep within the earth keeps it warmer than it would be without that decay. This warmer earth means it took longer to cool down and is therefore older than the most prominent 19th-century chemist could calculate. It also means the earth, deep down, is still pretty warm. In fact, it's still liquid underneath its crusty shell.

Although we can't yet drill down and scoop this liquid up for examination, we can see it (from a healthy distance) when it shoots out of a volcano and we can observe its effects by just rubbing a magnet on a floating needle: the magnetic field that keeps a compass pointing north is caused by the liquid inside the earth. The crust is actually very thin compared to the rest of the earth, like the skin of an apple. If you think of it that way, it's possible to see how the continents are floating on a sea of magma and, very slowly, can move about. The chunks of dry land are wide and flat and eventually came to be called "plates." The movement of the plates is "plate techtonics."

And so, there's the theory that as the surface of the earth cooled, and as rains fell and seas formed on the lowest parts of that surface, that continents became defined and moved about on the million-year scale. One theory is that a huge land mass formed first and then broke apart along the line of the African-South American coast. I can read the third day of creation in the Bible and see that happening in my head, with God commanding it (perhaps from the very beginning of time) and the radioactive nature of atoms causing it. Or, if you prefer, of God causing the atomic cause. It's all chain-of-command detail once you identify the source.

The clincher for me is that we have GPS systems and laser measurements where we can actually measure movements as short as the wavelength of light, and using these fine tools we can actually observe Greenland moving west at about an inch a year, for example. We can work on the details of what moves where and when -- but it looks pretty clear that the continents are moving and have moved. (By the way, did you know that GPS does not work unless you account for "relativity" in the math? As strange as physicists may seem when they talk about relativity, you need to account for it to get the resolution that a GPS system provides, or GPS simply does not work.)

So the seas formed around the land, and continents separated waters from waters. "Seas" and "dry ground" were defined. Then something really remarkable began to happen, too small to see at first, but an event so amazing we're still having a hard time trying to see just how it happened. That event is the subject of Day 3, part 2, coming next. Let me give you a hint: it has something to do with chemistry.

To be continued ...