The Confessing Seventh-day Adventist

I'm excited about the theory of planet resurfacing as explained in the transcript to the Nova program called, Venus Unveiled. The theory was devised to explain a mystery about the planet Venus but I believe that it applies to the planet Earth as well.

In short, the theory of planet resurfacing says that a planet like Venus has a crust (a lithosphere) that is trapping the heat of the planet's molten core. As the interior of the planet continues to heat up due to radioactive decay at the core—and an insufficient loss of heat through the lithosphere—eventually the surface will become disrupted and it will catastrophically sink into the interior. This begins a period of totally catastrophic surface volcanism with a time of flame resulting in a virtually complete magma ocean on the entire surface of the planet. This extracts so much heat from the interior of the planet that the interior cools off until the point that it is sufficiently cool that again the planet dies and starts to form a solid surface, very quiet and peaceful for 500 million years.

"It will look like the planet is totally dead with no volcanism, earthquakes or other activity of that sort. But it then heats up in the interior until you're ready for another catastrophe. As the interior heats up, eventually this process repeats. The whole surface founders and sinks into the interior and this episodicidity repeats again."

Please compare what the scientists have said about planet resurfacing with what the prophet Ellen G. White has written in the 1911 edition of The Great Controversy:

"In the midst of the angry heavens is one clear space of indescribable glory, whence comes the voice of God like the sound of many waters, saying: 'It is done.' Revelation 16:17.

"That voice shakes the heavens and the earth. There is a mighty earthquake, 'such as was not since men were upon the earth, so mighty an earthquake, and so great. Verses 17, 18. The firmament appears to open and shut. The glory from the throne of God seems flashing through. The mountains shake like a reed in the wind, and ragged rocks are scattered on every side. There is a roar as of a coming tempest. The sea is lashed into fury. There is heard the shriek of a hurricane like the voice of demons upon a mission of destruction. The whole earth heaves and swells like the waves of the sea. Its surface is breaking up. Its very foundations seem to be giving way. Mountain chains are sinking. Inhabited islands disappear." Ellen G. White, The Great Controversy, pp. 636-637.

"The earth is broken up. The weapons concealed in its depths are drawn forth. Devouring flames burst from every yawning chasm. The very rocks are on fire. The day has come that shall burn as an oven. The elements melt with fervent heat, the earth also, and the works that are therein are burned up. Malachi 4:1; 2 Peter 3:10. The earth's surface seems one molten mass—a vast, seething lake of fire." Ellen G. White, The Great Controversy, pp. 672-673.

From an earlier vision, Ellen White reported this:

"But there was one clear place of settled glory, from whence came the voice of God like many waters, which shook the heavens, and the earth. The sky opened and shut, and was in commotion. The mountains shook like a reed in the wind, and cast out rugged rocks all around. The sea boiled like a pot, and cast out stones upon the land." — Ellen G. White, A Vision, April 7, 1847.

The Geophysical End of the World has started

Geologist Dereje Ayalew and his colleagues from Addis Ababa University were amazed -- and frightened. They had only just stepped out of their helicopter onto the desert plains of central Ethiopia when the ground began to shake under their feet. The pilot shouted for the scientists to get back to the helicopter. And then it happened: the Earth split open. Crevices began racing toward the researchers like a zipper opening up. After a few seconds, the ground stopped moving, and after they had recovered from their shock, Ayalew and his colleagues realized they had just witnessed history.

In north-eastern Africa's Afar Triangle, recent months have seen hundreds of crevices splitting the desert floor and the ground has slumped by as much as 100 meters (328 feet). At the same time, scientists have observed magma rising from deep below.

The dramatic event that Ayalew and his colleagues witnessed in the Afar Desert on Sept. 26, 2005 was followed by a week-long series of earthquakes. During the ensuing months, hundreds of further crevices opened up in the ground, spreading across an area of 345 square miles. "The earth has not stopped moving since," geophysicist Tim Wright of the University of Oxford says. The ground is still splitting open and sinking, he says; small earthquakes are constantly shaking the region.

Scientists have made repeated trips to the area since the drama of last September. Locals have reported a number of new cracks opening in the ground, says geologist Cynthia Ebinger from the University of London, and during each visit, new crevices are discovered. Fumes as hot as 400 degrees Celsius (752 degrees Fahrenheit) shoot up from some of them; the sound of bubbling magma and the smell of sulfur rise from others. The larger crevices are dozens of meters deep and several hundred meters long. Traces of recent volcanic eruptions are also visible.

In a number of places, cracks have opened up beneath the thin layer of volcanic ash that covers the region. As there is no ash in the fissures, it's clear that they opened up after the volcanic eruptions, most of which took place at the end of September or in October, 2005. A number of locals who fled the eruptions have reported that a black cloud of ash -- spewed out of the Dabbahu volcano -- darkened the sky for three days.

Basalt magma has risen into some of the crevices. For the moment, Ayalew explains, the lava seems not to be rising further. A number of recent eruptions, though, have left layers of new basalt lava on the Earth's surface. And it's the exact same kind of lava that spews out of volcanic ridges deep under the ocean -- a process which slowly pushes older lava sediments away on either side. The process has only just begun in the Afar Triangle.

The source of the African magma looks to be a gigantic stream of molten rock rising from beneath the Earth's crust and slicing through the African continental plate like a blow torch.

Now, it's the Afar Triangle's turn and it's sinking rapidly. Large areas are already more than 100 meters (328 feet) below sea level. For now, the highlands surrounding the Denakil Depression prevent the Red Sea from flooding these areas, but erosion and tectonic plate movement are continually reducing the height of this natural barrier. The Denakil Depression, which lies to the east of Afar, is already prey to regular floods -- each flood leaving behind a crust of salt.

The chain of volcanoes that runs along the roughly 6,000 kilometer (3,730 mile) long East African Rift System offers further testimony to the breaking apart of the continent. In some areas around the outer edges of the Rift System, the Earth's crust has already cracked open, making room for the magma below. From the Red Sea to Mozambique in the south, dozens of volcanoes have formed, the best known being Mt. Kilimanjaro and Mt. Nyiragongo.

A team of scientists working with Christophe Vigny of the Paris Laboratory of Geology reported on the phenomenon in a 2006 issue of the Journal of Geophysical Research.

Source: SPIEGEL Magazine Online - March 15, 2006, A Continent Splits Apart by Axel Bojanowski.

Report: Volcanism in the Afar triangle region of NW Ethiopia.

Japanese Waters Warming Faster Than World Average
Tokyo (AFP) May 16, 2007

The temperature of waters around Japan has risen at a much faster rate than the rest of the world's oceans in the past century, partly because of global warming, according to an official report. Average sea temperatures in areas around Japan rose by 0.7-1.6 degress Celsius between 1900 and 2006, a higher rate than the world average of 0.5 degrees Celsius, the Japan Meteorological Agency said.

This compared with an average rise of 1.1 degrees Celsius in the temperature on the ground in Japan in the past century, the governmental agency said in its report this week.

The warmer ocean was expected to impact fish resources and the ecosystem including colonies of corals, said Yasushi Takatsuki, a marine meteorology specialist at the agency.

"It cannot be totally attributed to global warming. There are factors such as natural changes in the ocean environment. We want to check how much global warming accounts for the sea temperature rise," he said.

For completeness, perhaps I should mention another theory that might help to explain the eventual collapse of the Earth's mantle and the future sinking of mountains. This is crazy but there seems to be evidence that the Earth has expanded dramatically during the Creation Week. I doubt if this connects to the time of the Universal Flood.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjgidAICoQI
http://www.gotquestions.org/pangea-theory.html

The sudden thinning in 1997 of Jakobshavn Isbrae, one of Greenland's largest glaciers, was caused by subsurface ocean warming, according to research published in the journal Nature Geoscience.

Jakobshavn Isbrae, a large outlet glacier feeding a deep-ocean fjord on Greenland's west coast, went from slow thickening to rapid thinning beginning in 1997. Several explanations have been put forward to explain this development. The scientists in the Nature Geoscience study sought to address the matter comprehensively by tracing changes in ocean temperatures and the factors driving these changes.

In doing this, they relied on previous results published by others that used NASA's Airborne Topographic Mapper, which has made airborne surveys along a 120-kilometer stretch in the Jakobshavn ice-drainage basin nearly every year since 1991.

While many other glaciers were thinning around Greenland, these surveys revealed that Jakobshavn Isbrae thickened substantially from 1991 to 1997. But, after 1997, Jakobshavn Isbrae began thinning rapidly. Between 1997 and 2001, Airborne Topographic Mapper surveys showed an approximately 35-meter reduction in surface elevations on the glacier's 15-kilomater floating ice tongue.

This is far higher than thinning rates of grounded ice immediately upstream.

The researchers reported that these changes coincided with jumps in subsurface ocean temperatures. These temperatures were recorded by the Greenland Institute of Natural Resources from 1991 to 2006 over nearly the entire western Greenland continental shelf.

These data indicate a striking, substantial jump in bottom temperature in all parts in the survey area during the second half of the 1990s. In particular, they show that a warm water pulse arrived suddenly on the continental shelf on Disko Bay, which is in close proximity Jakobshavn Isbrae, in 1997.

The arrival coincided precisely with the rapid thinning and subsequent retreat of Jakobshavn Isbrae. The warm water mass remains today, and Jakobshavn Isbrae is still in a state of rapid retreat.

The remaining question, then, is what caused the rise in water temperatures during this period.

Source: Atmosphere And Ocean Warming Thinning Out Greenland Icecap by Staff Writers New York NY (SPX) Oct 03, 2008

EARTH'S HEAT ADDS TO CLIMATE CHANGE TO MELT GREENLAND ICE

COLUMBUS , Ohio -- Scientists have discovered what they think may be another reason why Greenland 's ice is melting: a thin spot in Earth's crust is enabling underground magma to heat the ice.

They have found at least one “hotspot” in the northeast corner of Greenland -- just below a site where an ice stream was recently discovered.

The researchers don't yet know how warm the hotspot is. But if it is warm enough to melt the ice above it even a little, it could be lubricating the base of the ice sheet and enabling the ice to slide more rapidly out to sea.

“The behavior of the great ice sheets is an important barometer of global climate change,” said Ralph von Frese, leader of the project and a professor of earth sciences at Ohio State University. “However, to effectively separate and quantify human impacts on climate change, we must understand the natural impacts, too.

“Crustal heat flow is still one of the unknowns -- and it's a fairly significant one, according to our preliminary results.”

Timothy Leftwich, von Frese's former student and now a postdoctoral engineer at the Center for Remote Sensing of Ice Sheets at the University of Kansas, presented the study's early results on Thursday, December 13, 2007, at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco.

von Frese's team combined gravity measurements of the area taken by a Naval Research Laboratory aircraft with airborne radar measurements taken by research partners at the University of Kansas. The combined map revealed changes in mass beneath the Earth's crust, and the topography of the crust where it meets the ice sheet.

Below the crust is the mantle, the partially molten rocky layer that surrounds the Earth's core. The crust varies in thickness, but is usually tens of miles thick. Even so, the mantle is so hot that temperatures just a few miles deep in the crust reach hundreds of degrees Fahrenheit, von Frese explained.

“Where the crust is thicker, things are cooler, and where it's thinner, things are warmer. And under a big place like Greenland or Antarctica , natural variations in the crust will make some parts of the ice sheet warmer than others,” he said.

The ice thickness, the temperature at the base of the ice, and ground topography all contribute to the forming of an ice stream -- a river of ice that flows within a larger ice sheet. In recent years, Greenland ice streams have been carrying ice out to sea faster, and ice cover on the island has been diminishing.

Once the ice reaches the sea, it melts, and global sea levels rise.

“The complete melting of these continental ice sheets would put much of Florida, as well as New Orleans, New York City and other important coastal population centers, under water,” von Frese said.

The ice sheet in northeast Greenland is especially worrisome to scientists. It had no known ice streams until 1991, when satellites spied one for the first time. Dubbed the Northeastern Greenland Ice Stream, it carries ice nearly 400 miles, from the deepest interior of the island out to the Greenland Sea.

“Ice streams have to have some reason for being there. And it's pretty surprising to suddenly see one in the middle of an ice sheet,” von Frese said.

The newly discovered hotspot is just below the ice stream, and could have caused it to form, the researchers concluded. But what caused the hotspot to form?

“It could be that there's a volcano down there,” he said. “But we think it's probably just the way the heat is being distributed by the rock topography at the base of the ice.”

Collaborator Kees van der Veen began working on the project when he was a visiting associate professor of geological sciences and research scientist at Byrd Polar Research Center at Ohio State. He is now at the University of Kansas.

“Recent observations indicate that the Greenland Ice Sheet is much more active than we ever believed,” van der Veen said. “There have been rapid changes in outlet glaciers, for example. Such behavior is critically linked to conditions at the ice bed. Geothermal heat is an important factor, but until now, our models have not included spatial variations in heat, such as this hotspot.

“Our map is the first attempt at quantifying spatial variations in geo-heat under Greenland -- and it explains why the Northeast Greenland Ice Stream is where it is,” van der Veen added.

To measure actual temperatures beneath the ice, scientists must drill boreholes down to the base of the ice sheet-- a mile or more below the ice surface. The effort and expense make such measurements few and far between, especially in remote areas of northeast Greenland.

For now, the researchers are combining theories of how heat flows through the mantle and crust with the gravity and radar data, to understand how the hotspot is influencing the ice.

Once they finish searching the rest of Greenland for other hotspots, they hope to turn their attention to Antarctica.

This research was funded by the National Science Foundation.

West Greenland Glaciers Melting 100 Times Faster at Their End Points Beneath Ocean Than at Their Surfaces

February 16, 2010
Glaciers in west Greenland are melting 100 times faster at their end points beneath the ocean than they are at their surfaces, according to a new NASA/university study published online Feb. 14 in Nature Geoscience. The results suggest this undersea melting caused by warmer ocean waters is playing an important, if not dominant, role in the current evolution of Greenland's glaciers, a factor that had previously been overlooked.

West Antarctica, shown in red, has warmed far more than the east over the last 50 years Photograph: EJ Steig/Nasa

New research shows that while some parts of the frozen continent have been getting slightly colder over the last few decades, the average temperature across the continent has been rising for at least the last 50 years.

In the remote and inaccessible West Antarctic region the new research, based on ground measurements and satellite data, show that the region has warmed rapidly, by 0.17C each decade since 1957. "We had no idea what was happening there," said Professor Eric Steig, at the University of Washington, Seattle, and who led the research published in Nature.

This outweighs the cooling seen in East Antarctica, so that, overall, the continent has warmed by 0.12C each decade over the same period. This matches the warming of the southern hemisphere as a whole and removes the apparent contradiction.

"The 2007 report from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said that the impact of greenhouse gas emissions could be seen on every continent bar Antarctica. The new work, along with another recent study, now clearly shows that the rising temperature of the continent cannot be explained by natural climate variation alone. ibid.

Scientists have discovered a fast-moving deep ocean current with the volume of 40 Amazon Rivers near Antarctica

A team of Australian and Japanese scientists, in a study published in Sunday's issue of the journal Nature Geoscience, found that the current is a key part of a global ocean circulation pattern that helps control the planet's climate.

Scientists had previously detected evidence of the current but had no data on it.

"We didn't know if it was a significant part of the circulation or not and this shows clearly that it is," one of the authors, Steve Rintoul, told Reuters.

Rintoul, of the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Cooperative Research Center in Hobart, said it proved to be the fastest deep ocean current yet found, with an average speed of 20 cm (7.9 inches) a second. It was also found to carry more than 12 million cubic meters a second of very cold, salty water from Antarctica.

"At these depths, below three kilometers (two miles) from the surface, these are the strongest recorded speeds we've seen so far, which was really a surprise to us."

The current forms part of a much larger network that spans the world's oceans, acting like a giant conveyor belt to distribute heat around the globe.

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
- Robert Frost

Piers Corbyn said: