Wednesday, December 11, 2013
So how might we explain biogeography within the framework of biblical Earth history?
by Dominic Statham
One process by which plants and animals could have spread around the world after the Genesis Flood is rafting—that is, on log mats driven by ocean currents. Actually, a growing number of evolutionists are proposing rafting as an explanation for how some plants and animals dispersed from one island to another, and even from one continent to another.14
When Mt St Helens erupted in 1980, a tsunami was generated in the nearby Spirit Lake, and this caused around a million trees to be uprooted from the surrounding hillside. These eventually settled on the lake as an enormous log mat. Following the great earthquake off the coast of Japan in 2011 and the resulting tsunami, a trail of debris formed in the Pacific ocean, around 70 miles (100 km) long and covering an area of over 2 million square feet (186,000 square metres).
Now the effects of the Mt St Helens and Japanese tsunamis were nothing as compared with the destruction that would have been wrought by a global flood. The flood we read of in the book of Genesis would have resulted in billions of trees floating on the surface of the oceans. These log mats would have been like enormous floating islands and, regularly watered by rainfall, they could have easily transported plants and small animals great distances. Some creationists believe that the pre-Flood world included great floating forests, a bit like the quaking bogs we know today.15 Perhaps these were broken up during the Flood and became rafts too.
The ability of ocean currents to distribute floating objects around the world was seen recently, when thousands of bathtub rubber ducks were lost off a container ship in the North Pacific. Within just a few months, these had floated to Indonesia, Australia and South America, and subsequently into the Arctic and Atlantic oceans.16,17,18 (See here.) Often we find plants distributed along coastlines and islands. The distribution of the Sago palm can be seen here. It’s found in East Africa, Madagascar, the tip of Indian and parts of Indonesia and Australasia.
