Mesozoic Era
Calendar Years – 159 years long
Atomic Years – 185.5 million years long
Atomic, or Geologic Years ago Geological period Calendar, or orbital, years before Christ Calendar, or orbital years after creation Biblical events
Gen. 10:22-32; 11:14-19
251 – 200 million Triassic 3182 - 3139 2628 - 2671 200 – 146 million Jurassic 3139 - 3092 2671 – 2718 146 – 65.5 million Cretaceous 3092 - 3023 2718 - 2787 Noah and Shem die, Eber and Peleg born 3023 2787 Continental land mass divisions begin
Catastrophe Three: Days of Peleg/ Continental Division/ Cretaceous-Tertiary Extinction/ higher axis tilt
Light speed at the close of this era: about 1.13 million times its current speed
After the Babel volcanism there was a high carbon dioxide content in the atmosphere. This resulted in a very warm, greenhouse effect on earth. The average temperatures were five to ten degrees above what we experience today. The existing axis tilt from the Flood maintained the earlier winds. The high temperatures evaporated the shallow water bodies, depriving amphibians of many habitats. This new state of affairs favored the egg-laying reptiles, as the eggs themselves maintained the moisture content needed for the developing embryos. Semi-desert conditions were formed over large parts of the earth. Large sand dunes were typical of this era, but there were also broad river valleys where the warmth along with the large bodies of water would provide the habitat needed for the large dinosaurs and similar creatures.
The windy conditions favored wind-blown pollination by the naked seed plants, the gymnosperms such as palms and pines. They were predominant in the river valleys, along with the animals living there. The geological activity during this time was normally confined to a band around the edges of the super-continent which sometimes widened to 400 miles or more. It was there, and where the river valleys met the sea, that the burial and fossilization of these organisms occurred. The conditions at the mouth of these river valleys, much like what we might see in the Florida Everglades today, was not amenable to mammals and hard-seeded plants, and thus we would not expect to find them fossilized along with the gymnosperms and animals that thrived in this environment.
It is sometimes admitted by evolutionists that it appears dinosaurs lived on for a million years after the Cretaceous/Tertiary Extinction. But these are atomic years, and when corrected to actual, or orbital, years, they indicate some dinosaurs lived on after the events of Peleg for about two or three years after the vast majority of them finished dying out.
Between the time of the Permian Extinction, or Babel, and this catastrophe at the time of Peleg, about 160 years had passed, allowing a great deal of migration. Thus, when the continental division began, populations of various species were in different places around the super-continent and their isolation would not be complete until the tectonic plates had finished their major movements.
These movements – this catastrophe at the time of Peleg, and for which he was named – were caused by the further heating in the earth’s interior which, by this time, has not only produced a layer of molten rock under the crust, but had driven more water out of the hydrated minerals. This water, combining with the magma layer, produced what is known as the asthenosphere. Today this is not quite as hot and slippery as it was in Peleg’s time, but at that time it was quite molten and liquid, with a lower viscosity.
What is interesting is that when rock heats and then melts, its volume is increased by about 10%. This translates into about an 18.8% expansion for the circumference of a sphere. For the earth, 18.8% translates into about 4,700 miles, the width of the Atlantic Ocean.
This lower viscosity combined with the pressure of the expanding molten rock was evidently put into play by a series of asteroid hits whose craters can still be seen today across Europe and North America and down into the Yucatan.
The lines, or fracture zones, where the fountains of the deep had released the scalding interior waters in Noah’s time became the boundaries of plates that started slipping at a very fast rate over the expanding asthenosphere. The evidence which is so clear today is the Atlantic Rift Zone underneath the Atlantic Ocean.
This division of continents was fast, but not simply completed in a year or two! Mentions in the book of Job, written after this time, indicate the process may still have been going on, and thus we are looking at a time of at least a couple of hundred years of massive earth movements and associated tsunamis, volcanism, mountain-building, etc. The earth was mostly settled by the time of Abraham, although we still see the aftermath of some of the movement today in our earthquakes and measured rate of continental movement.
The Pacific Ring of Fire was formed at this time, as the supercontinent split apart and separated at what is now the mid-Atlantic ridge. The eastern and western parts of the super-continent moved in opposite directions, causing the far, or leading edges of both segments to become buckled or ‘wrinkled’. This buckling formed the young mountain ranges we see around the Pacific Rim (as well as forming the Himalayas and Alps from continental movements ‘crunching’ these areas). Around the Pacific Rim the buckling and wrinkling resulted in lines of weakness in the earth’s crust, giving rise to the thousands of volcanoes which still ring the Pacific. The earthquakes we experience today around the Pacific Rim as well as through the Middle East are ‘leftover’ bits of movement from the catastrophic movements that started in the time of Peleg.