Creationists develop models like these . . . by studying the facts of God’s Word and God’s world.

When the first humans rebelled against the Creator, they brought death and decay into the universe. Over the next 1,500 years, violence increased to the point that the holy God announced that He was destroying the earth by a global Flood.

God first told Noah to build an Ark to protect his family and to house representatives of every kind of land animal and bird. God then brought hand-picked animals onto the Ark and shut the door.

Far away, in the depths of the world’s ocean, catastrophe struck. The earth had been a time-bomb waiting to go off. Cold, dense material at the seafloor was floating on top of hot, lighter material deeper in the mantle. The seafloor suddenly broke open in the middle, while the edges began diving into the mantle below. The crack in the seafloor spread around the globe.

As hot magma rose into these cracks, seawater flashed instantly into steam. Supersonic jets of steam roared into the upper atmosphere, carrying seawater with them. Clouds of this ejected material spread out across the planet, cooled, and fell in torrents on land and sea.

As cold ocean crust was replaced with hot, expanded magma, the seafloor rose, and with it, the sea level rose worldwide. Step by step, the rising waters wiped out the environments that God had carefully created, beginning with hot-water reefs at the edges of the continental shelves, then the shallow sea environments near the shore, where trilobites and other strange creatures thrived. Next to perish was a bizarre forest that floated atop the pre-Flood oceans, hosting a range of semi-aquatic creatures like Tiktaalik.

Moving inexorably forward, the Flood’s tidal waves washed away the continent’s beaches, depositing vast layers of sand that later became the Permo-Triassic sandstones of the world. Moving inland, the waves destroyed forests, swamps, and grasslands filled with different, well-designed ecosystems. The waters kept rising until the highest mountains were covered.

As environments were systematically inundated, the plummeting seafloor dragged continents along at five to ten miles per hour. In the course of the year-long Flood, the original continent was ripped apart, the pieces were reassembled into a supercontinent known as Pangaea, and Pangaea was pulled apart into the present configuration of continents.

Meanwhile, ocean currents, laden with sand and mud, circled the earth, dumping layer after layer of dead animals and plants across the moving continents. The earth became a tomb, a time capsule that preserved a record of the world judged by God.

Eventually, the process ran out of steam. Once all the cold material from the seafloor sank into the mantle, everything ground to a halt. The fountains of the deep were shut off, and the torrential rain ceased. As the new, hot seafloor cooled and shrank, the sea level once again dropped. The waters drained off the continents, carrying piles of sediment with them back into the ocean.

The old world perished, but Noah’s Ark survived.