Baumgardner is a technical staff member at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
He took his Ph.D. in geophysics from UCLA. As part of his Ph.D. research he
developed a three-dimensional model for the Earth's interior called Terra.
It is recognized at the most capable code computer model of its type in the
world, and NASA is currently using it. I pick up the interview:
Q. What is NASA's interest in this project.
A. Well, they see it as an important means for solving yet unanswered
questions about the Earth. They have a number of satellite observation
programs for monitoring the Earth and measuring tectonic motions of the
Earth's surface. They see my computer model as complementing some of these
observational programs. They see it as cutting edge science. And the model
can be applied to the other terrestrial planets of the solar system--Venus,
Mars, and Mercury in particular.
Q. How has your work in geophysics confirmed your faith?
A. I believe that there is strong evidence in favor of the proposition that
the Earth has suffered a major cataclysm in the past that is responsible
for most of the fossil-bearing portions of the sedimentary record.
Q. The great flood of Noah's day?
A. Yes. There's an abrupt beginning to the portion of the geological record
than contains fossils. There's a worldwide discontinuity in the record,
above which we find fossils, below which we do not. Above that boundary
there is abundant evidence that the sedimentary layers were deposited
rapidly by processes that were global in lateral extent--a regime
dramatically different from anything we can observe on the Earth today. The
majority of the sedimentary record since that point is the product of
global catastrophism. My work in particular has focused on what conceivable
mechanism could result in such an event. I believe I have identified it, or
at least a likely candidate for a mechanism.
Q. And what is that?
A. The name other people have applied to this process is thermal runaway.
Tectonic plates of the Earth's surface can slide down into the hot mantle
that comprises about the outer 2,000 miles of the Earth. What I'm finding
is that this runaway process involving the tectonic plates can indeed occur
and cause a massive catastrophe at the Earth's surface. One exciting
discovery from the Magellan mission to Venus in the early 1990s was that
Venus had been entirely resurfaced in the relatively recent past. The high
resolution images showed the surface of Venus had been catastrophically
flooded with lava, presumably as a result of some process interior to the
planet. All the ancient craters had been obliterated by this lava. The
images show hardly any change of a geological nature has occurred on Venus
since this catastrophe. So within our own solar system we now have at least
one indisputable example of global tectonic catastrophe. This was exciting
to me because for years I had been investigating a similar possibility for
the Earth. I firmly believe the idea of a global tectonic catastrophe on
the Earth is not a far-fetched idea, but close to being established as
scientific fact. And, of course, this supports what the Scripture has said
all along about the past history of the Earth.
Q. How do you deal with the creation/evolution controversy?
A. If ever there was in the history of mankind clear evidence for creation,
evidence for a Super-Intelligence behind what we see today, it's the
genetic code. Incredibly complex information structures, coded in DNA, form
the genetic blueprints for every living organism. Evolutionists have
absolutely no clue as to how such structures could arise by natural
processes, much less how the code itself could come into existence.
Actually, evolutionists do not have a viable mechanism for macroevolution
at any stage, whether we're talking about the origin of a first living cell
or the origin of new structures in existing organisms. Natural selection
and mutation alone are pitifully inadequate to account for what we see,
especially with our current understanding of molecular biology. And in the
arena of Earth science, uniformitarianism-the idea that the present is the
key to the past, that the present can explain the past-is essentially
obsolete. It won't be long, in my opinion, before that idea completely
collapses.
Q. Because there's so much evidence for catastrophism?
A. That's right. The evidence for catastrophism supports an entirely
different understanding of the fossil record-that it's a product of a
single catastrophe rather than hundreds of millions of years of gradual
change.