Yeesh! At last I've got some more blasted posts available to me... HATE being on a short leash!!!
"Continental Drift" - yes, as Villalobo and Leolia said, it's now (more correctly) referred to as "Plate Tectonics". I used the term "Continental Drift" in my previous post on BadBoy's "Venus" thread because when I was a JW about 25 years ago, it was at that time predominantly still being referred to as "Continental Drift"
VM44, that textbook is basically correct, but there is so much more to the story than that simplistic statement... The planet Earth has never, never been totally 'flat', unless you want to consider its fully magmatic original form, before ANY rocks cooled enough out of the planet's fiery beginnings - that's AFTER the planetary matter began to congeal and heat from friction, nuclear reactions (NOT in the firecracker style of man-made explosions...) and other forces that may have generated heat, melted the 'star matter' sufficiently for it to become liquid initially. That would have been the stage, by the way, when the materials that made up the core, mantle (several layers of mantle which I won't go into right now) and crust began to separate. Then, in the initial cooling, continental masses formed as the lighter materials (granitic-type materials) rose to the top of the basaltic materials.
After that initial cooling, the activity of the Earth's crust must have frequently generated mountain ranges [and oceanic depths] - I'm speaking generally, here - and then erosion wore them down, whereupon the entire mountain-range building process started anew...
For example, the Rocky Mountain Range(s) currently in existence in the state of Colorado is the THIRD such mountain range(s) to exist in that general location in geologic time... Here is a good site that discusses the three major uplifts in the general area that the present Rocky Mountain ranges exist: http://vulcan.wr.usgs.gov/LivingWith/VolcanicPast/Places/volcanic_past_rocky_mountains.html
The fact that there are oceanic fossils at the top of Mt. Everest (roughly; the Himalayan peaks have sedimentary deposits comprising part of their rock masses) shows that those rocks were once underwater. If, as BadBoy indicates, one wishes to pretend that there was a global flood and those deposits are supposedly part of "Flood" debris, then the Himalayas were uplifted at a rate of 4,838 feet per year, and that's using a figure of 6,000 years ago for the supposed 'occurence of "Noah's" flood'...
Just to give you a little perspective, the great earthquake that hit San Francisco in 1906 moved the earth in one 296-mile-long section of earth a range of 8-30 feet. WOW! A whole 30 feet of ground-slippage, yet look at all the damage THAT caused!! Its magnitude was later estimated to be approx. 7.7 to 8.3 on seismic wave estimates, moment-magnitude, and Richter scale.
Going back to the illustration of Mt. Everest, if one divides the 4,838 feet per year by days, you get an average rate-of-earth-movement of 13 feet approx. per day - that would mean that the earth would have been experiencing at least a 7.7 earthquake DAILY just to 'build' the Himalayas - not to mention the Alps, the Rockies, the Andes, etc, etc.
Let's talk about the Atlantic Ocean!! The Atlantic is over 4,000 miles wide at its widest point(s). That's equivalent to 21,120,000 feet. Now, let's pretend that the Atlantic ocean began opening at the supposed 'beginning' of the supposed 'Creation' of the earth by a regional Middle Eastern god of a bunch of backward, superstitious, ignorant Middle Eastern nomads... Let's use the WTBTS' figure of 49,000 years. 49,000 years x 365 = 17,885,000 days. Divide the 21,120,000 by 17,885,000 = movement of OVER ONE FOOT PER DAY to open up the Atlantic Ocean - and that's assuming it actually began opening at the beginning of the Middle Eastern mythology...
Remember, too, that geologic processes aren't SMOOTH - generally speaking - so the Atlantic would have opened in jumps and starts - that is, if you believe that a Middle Eastern god of a buncha desert-dwelling nomads would actually have a CLUE about the makeup of the ocean - talking to Phoenicians would make more sense if you want to find out about oceans - at least THEY were master sailors...
Anyhoo, if the mid-Atlantic ridges were moving in jumps and starts, AGAIN you would have had massive earthquakes once every - oh, say, about two weeks. Add to that the massive earthquakes that 'must have been happening' to raise the Himalayas in 6,000 years -
NO HUMAN CIVILIZATION WOULD HAVE BEEN ABLE TO DEVELOP. There would have been massive, structure-destroying earthquakes every few days and every few weeks...
Hamsterbait, the volcanoes active around the perimeters of tectonic plates do not result from 'hot spots' or deep-mantle magma upwelling 'currents'. They generally result from 'subduction' zones where the oceanic plate is being pushed/plunging beneath either other oceanic plates or, more commonly, beneath lighter-weight granitic continental areas. Here is further information on continental shelf/boundary subduction zones and the volcanic activity that results from the oceanic floor plunging beneath the continental body/plates: http://vulcan.wr.usgs.gov/Glossary/PlateTectonics/framework.html
All of the above explains, to some extent, why I made the comment about "Continental Drift" disproving the bible and the WTBTS' "creation" time schedule on BadBoy's "Venus" thread...
On a sad side note - the first scientist within recent times to postulate the "Plate Tectonics/Continental Drift" theory was an Icelandic meteorologist who died - froze to death - while trying to obtain further evidence for his theory... : http://academic.emporia.edu/aberjame/histgeol/wegener/wegener.htm
Zid