Tsunami
Curse or blessing?
I remember it as if it was yesterday. January 25, 2005, my wife, Susie, daughter Shannon, and I were standing on the eastern beach of the Ko Kho Khao peninsula in Thailand, raking the beach while searching for artifacts of a once thriving village. Tears flowed as the pile of dolls, children’s shoes and brushes, water-blurred photos of families who were no more, and the like, grew. To the east across the bay lay Baan Nam Kem, just six weeks prior, a sleepy Thai fishing village of 4000 residents; now reduced to less than a thousand homeless, orphaned, battered refugees. What happened to cause such devastation and loss of life? Where was God in all of this?
Christmas Day, 2004, hundreds of miles to the west in the Indian Ocean, an undersea megathrust earthquake 9.3 on the Richter Scale occurred, right where the great Indian plate was being forced beneath (subducted) the massive Burma plate, an awesome display of the mega-force of “plate tectonics”. Over a ten-minute period, an 800-mile-long block of Indian plate was displaced downward 125 feet, creating a gigantic tsunami that raced across the Indian Ocean, in all directions, at nearly 500 miles per hour. As the first wave approached Ko Kho Khao, those relaxing on the beach would have observed a strange phenomenon, all the water in the bay would have suddenly been sucked out into the ocean. Moments later a wall of water, in some areas over 100 feet high, washed over the peninsula and crashed into the mainland, depositing large ships onto the hills nearly two miles inland . Some believe the great “Christmas Day” 2004 Sumatra-Andaman tsunami took over 300,000 lives.
When natural tragedies of such a magnitude occur, there are those who are quick to point out that this is surely an example of the “Curse” following the “Fall” of Adam in the Garden of Eden. But was this catastrophic event a manifestation of evil, or might it have been an unfortunate outcome of the Creator’s “good” plan to prepare a planet perfectly suited to support mankind? I think the latter.
Without Plate Tectonics (PT), or ‘Continental Drift’ as some call it, the earth could not support life at all; it’s that critical. If scientists could identify an exoplanet with the potential to develop and support life somewhere in another solar system, one of the first criteria would have to be a crust-moving model like plate tectonics. Why so important? Here are a few reasons:
• Earth’s great heat conveyor system in the mantle is the driving force behind PT. The mechanism of PT brought forth the first land above sea level nearly 3.8 billion years ago. No land - no plants, animals, or humans.
• PT is earth’s thermostat, keeping it not too hot or not too cold by regulating various cycles, e.g. the carbon cycle and the carbonate-silicate cycle.
• PT determines where ores and minerals form, and where we can find oil and gas.
• Early earth had atmospheric levels of the ‘greenhouse gas’, carbon dioxide, over ten times greater than today. The PT process trapped this CO2 into rocks and stabilized our climate, making earth habitable.
So, if you happen to live next to a volcano or on an earthquake-prone fault zone, be thankful for these plate tectonic signs of life around you – part of God’s good creation plan.
