Subterranean Collapse Theory
But what if it wasn’t always this way? What if the earth looked radically different in the pre-flood (antediluvian) world? Well, I have a theory that I’d like to share. As far as I know, this theory is unique, and I’m also not a trained scientist, so take everything I posit with a healthy grain of salt. Very little is known about the geology and geography of the pre-flood planet, and the best evidence I can produce is circumstantial at best.
With that out of the way, (drumroll please) I present:
THE SUBTERRANEAN COLLAPSE THEORY.
Before I can lay out the theory in all its glory, first I need to set up all the points and ideas and then weave them into my conclusion.
Point 1 - The Biomass problem.
Both Creationist and secular scientists alike have observed the dramatic evidence of a once thriving biosphere that supported far more vegetation and biomass than what the earth can support today. Everything from frozen forests in Antarctica1 and Greenland2. Petrified forests found in places where no forests exist today(such as Arizona3 and Egypt4). Massive peat deposits (peat is compressed, decayed vegetation) found in Russia, Canada, and even Indonesia. Coal seams contain so much biomass that:
“Even if forests of present-day structure were to cover the entire surfaces of today’s continents, they would yield only approximately 40% of the estimated coal portion of the fossil fuels.” 5
The Weizmann Institute of Science notes:
"Today, all the living plants on Earth weigh roughly 1 teratonne, half of what they did…12,000 years ago." 6
So, it is evident that, in the past, the amount of vegetation was significantly greater than what is supported today. Now, this of course can be blamed on climate change and a host of other reasons. However, as I’ll explain later, I think a different explanation can be made.
Pont 2 - Population
Another interesting point I’d like to link in the formation of this theory, is the proposed antediluvian population. While (let me be clear) it’s impossible for us to really know what the population was at the time of Noah, there have been some suggestions as to what it might have been.
Due to the long lifespans (up to 900 years) and longer fertility windows of pre-flood people, and given the overlap of generations, population numbers could have easily been higher than 5 billion, and more likely between 10 and 20 billion people! That is significantly higher than the current global estimate of 8.2 billion. As one article points out, there would be a struggle in feeding this staggering population7, which is a valid point! We struggle to feed the 8 billion people we already have…imagine trying to feed a population of 17-20 billion! Not only would this require sophisticated infrastructure, but it would also require HUGE areas of available land for growing crops and raising livestock. Again, we’ll come back to this.
Point 3 - Pangea
Something that is a common suggestion regarding the pre-flood world by creationists, and a prehistoric world by evolutionists, is a sort of “supercontinent” where all the current land masses are joined together. This is commonly referred to as ‘Pangea’, and I’m sure most of us have seen this sort of image in nearly every geology textbook:
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Where the difference lies between the typical Biblical view and the secular view of the existence of a supercontinent lies in the formation and process that led our earth to look like what it does today. The evolutionist says that Pangea slowly drifted apart over millions of years, gradually shifting pieces of continent across the globe by largely imperceptible tectonic shifting.
The creationist says the continents drifted apart rapidly and violently because of a catastrophic global flood9. Some creationists have suggested that a supercontinent existed by means of lower ocean levels, especially during the ice age when much of the water was locked in polar ice caps. By dropping water levels 100 feet, nearly everywhere on earth could be reached by land. This theory doesn’t require continental drift, nor would the “supercontinent” look much like what is pictured above.
Regardless, most scientists, whether Creationist10 or secular, will entertain the possibilities of a Pangea type supercontinent.
Point 4 - The Continental Slope
Around the entire world, surrounding every continent, is something called the continental shelf. This is the area that gradually slopes away from the land and out to sea. The shelf eventually connects to the continental slope which is the steep drop off down into the abyss. This marks the actual edge of any continent.
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Sometimes, the continental slope is quite near the shoreline. In other places, it can be incredibly far from shore. If you are in Puerto Rico for example, you are just 12 miles away from the 26 thousand foot drop into the depths of the sea. On the other hand, Alaska and Russia share a continental shelf that is 500 miles wide before it encounters the drop into the Arctic Ocean in the north, and Pacific in the south.
Point 5 - Supercritical subterranean water
Thankfully, supercritical water isn’t something we deal with on a regular basis. What does it mean if something is supercritical? It's got nothing to do with that supervisor at your nightmare job who trashes every email you send and complains about your choice of deodorant.
Instead, a supercritical fluid is a substance at a temperature and pressure above its critical point, where distinct liquid and gas phases do not exist, but below the pressure required to compress it into a solid. In the case of water, it reaches its supercritical point when heated to above 650 degrees, and experiences pressure above 218 atmospheres. Basically, pretty intense conditions.
In this state, it behaves like both a gas and a liquid—highly energetic, with extreme solubility and corrosive properties. It can carry dissolved minerals, organic compounds, and heat more efficiently than regular water or steam. This is exactly the kind of fluid found in hydrothermal systems and deep-earth geological activity.
Much evidence12 exists to show that there are large reservoirs of supercritical water still contained inside the earth today. While research is now diving into the possibility of harnessing supercritical water as a highly efficient source of energy13, that is a subject for another time.
What we are most concerned with here, is that even today, there are substantial amounts of water held within the earth's crust, only escaping in rare occasions, or in deep sea hydrothermal vents.
Point 6 - Subterranean Water Chambers
So far, not much of what I’ve said is particularly controversial, I’m merely submitting generally accepted facts in order to build my case. Here, however, I must delve a little into speculation. I am going to rely on some scripture to help support the idea. Let's start with a well-known verse when it comes to Noah and the flood:
Gen 7:11 In the six hundredth year of Noah's life, in the second month, the seventeenth day of the month, the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened.
Here we have an explicit description of where much of the water came from during the catastrophic flooding of the earth. Yes, it rained…for 40 days it rained, but I believe the majority of the water actually came from within the earth, not from above it.
Matthew Henry helpfully connects this passage with Psalm 33:
“There needed no new creation of waters; God has laid up the deep in storehouses, Psalm 33:7; and now he broke up those stores.”
John Gill agrees:
“By both these the flood of waters was brought upon the earth, which drowned it, and all the creatures in it: by the former are meant the vast quantities of subterraneous waters, which are more or greater than we know; and might be greater still at the time of the deluge.”
John Calvin also comments:
“God raised for men a theater in the habitable region of the earth; and caused, by his secret power, that the subterraneous waters should not break forth to overwhelm us…Now, however, Moses states, that when God resolved to destroy the earth by a deluge, those barriers were torn up.”
Dr. John Morris of the Institute for Creation Research writes that: “the ‘great deep’…evidently speaks of great subterranean reservoirs or chambers deep inside the earth, all of which spewed forth their contents” when “broken up” by God. He notes that the Hebrew word for “broken up” implies a rending or splitting – the same term used in Numbers 16:30 when the earth split open to swallow Korah
Even today, large subterranean aquifers are known to exist. There is really no great controversy in postulating that immense underground water supplies existed pre-flood, and scripture seems to indicate this very thing.
However, what was the nature of this underground system? I think two more verses can shed some light upon this subject:
1Sa 2:8 He raises up the poor from the dust; he lifts the needy from the ash heap to make them sit with princes and inherit a seat of honor. For the pillars of the earth are the LORD's, and on them he has set the world.
Job 9:6 who shakes the earth out of its place, and its pillars tremble;
While verses like 1 Samuel 2:8 and Job 9:6 are undeniably poetic, they may also reflect real structural features of the earth, described in language familiar to the ancient reader. In 1 Samuel, God is said to set the world “on pillars,” and Job speaks of the earth’s foundations trembling and being shaken “out of its place.” These vivid images imply that the land we stand on is not self-sustaining…it is upheld by something deeper. Within the framework of the Subterranean Collapse Theory, it’s not difficult to envision these “pillars” or “foundations” as actual geologic support structures - perhaps vast columns of rock or pressure-regulating formations - that upheld the earth’s crust above immense subterranean water chambers.
Putting the Pieces Together
At long last, let us assemble these pieces into a cohesive unit. Perhaps you have already started to see something of what I’m building to. Let's begin!
I submit that the pre-flood landmass was indeed a supercontinent, but one that is much larger than the Pangea model, or the reduced water level theory. The reason I reject the Pangea model is really quite simple. It is built upon the phenomena that it appears that many of the earth's continents could fit together if rotated and moved into the right positions. Like this:
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Sorry you had to see that. Continents shouldn’t act like that in public.
Anyway, while this may seem like an obvious theory at first glance, it actually has a few major problems. To begin with, (in the case of Africa and South America) the continents need to be rotated in opposite directions in order to make them fit. Also, the scaling is off in order to make it work right. However, the biggest issue of all, is that the continental slopes rarely (if ever) match up. Sure, you can imagine the exposed shoreline being an easy match, but the continental slope tells a different story. Thus, I submit that the Pangea style of supercontinental theory begins to break down.
And then we add the biomass and population problems. Our current landmass isn’t capable of easily producing the amount of vegetation that once was growing on our planet. Nor would it be very easy to farm enough food for a potentially double global population to what we have today. This doesn’t even take into account the apparent size and variety of animal life that existed pre-flood. Wooly mammoths, giant sloths, 200 pound beavers, Paraceratherium (a 16 foot tall relative of the rhino), 1 ton armadillos, and much more…to say nothing of the variety of herbaceous dinosaurs.
How did the earth support such a vast amount of life?
I believe that the earth didn’t have oceans as we know them today. Certainly there were large bodies of water, as whales and large sea creatures obviously existed and thrived. However, what if the current ratio were flipped? Instead of 70% water, and 30% land that we have today, what if we had 70% land, and 30% surface water? What if the earth had an abundance of large seas and connecting waterways, but no large oceans at all? It might have looked something like this:
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Now, THAT looks like a place that can support massive populations, grow food for everyone, and support a mind boggling variety of gigantic flora and fauna. Plenty of water for crops and a likely more stable seasonal cycle.
So where did our modern oceans come from then?
In the ancient antediluvian world, miles beneath the surface, hidden away in rock chambers under titanic pressure, supercritical water churns…no longer liquid, not quite vapor, but a blazing, hyper-energized fluid hotter than 700°F and pressurized to hundreds of atmospheres. It's seething, corrosive, and volatile, its molecules in a barely stable frenzy, like a bomb sealed behind layers of rock.
Now imagine that containment fails.
In a split second, the crust ruptures. Supercritical water, no longer confined, explodes upward. As it rises, the pressure plummets—and with it, the water instantly flashes into steam, expanding in volume by a factor of over 1,600 times. The result is not a gentle geyser. It's a supersonic jet of skin-blistering vapor and rock, erupting through the ground with the force of a thousand bombs.
Massive columns of steam blast into the sky, carrying molten rock and pulverized crustal debris miles into the atmosphere. Where water escapes, it carves gargantuan gorges and fissures in the land. What had been dry land becomes a seething trench.
The sky darkens with storm clouds fed by vapor. Torrential rain begins to fall—fuelled by the superheated moisture now saturating the upper atmosphere. The “windows of heaven” open, not just metaphorically, but climatically. Rain falls in sheets, unstoppable and suffocating. The heavens roar while the earth spews.
The Flood has begun—not as a tranquil rising of water, but as a cataclysm of thermodynamic rage. Supercritical water, once buried quietly, becomes the hammer that fractures the world.
Jewish tradition teaches that the generation of the Flood “was judged with boiling water.”16 In this rabbinic view, the springs from the deep erupted not with lukewarm groundwater but with searing, steaming water to ensure the wicked perished. A Jewish Midrash comments that even the hardest objects melted in those hot floodwaters.
Noah and his family are safely on the ark, protected by wood and pitch.
Underneath the earth's crust, the once pressurized chambers are beginning to empty. No longer is the pressure from super compressed water doing its job to support the crust above it. In fact, the same water that once helped support the crust above, is now weighing down on top of it.
As the floodwaters rise, as the rain falls nonstop for 40 days, the incalculable weight of literal oceans of water begins to take its toll on the internal structure of columns and pillars. Little by little, they begin to weaken. Some shatter from the stress, leaving their neighbors to support the extra weight. Eventually…who knows how long…it is too much to bear. Suddenly, the dark, empty voids that once held so much destruction within the bowels of the earth…collapse.
As yawning chasms open where land once stood, billions of gallons of water surge downhill with singular purpose. The newly formed ocean basins—deep, jagged, raw—gape open like wounds in the earth, and the waters answer.
Water doesn’t trickle in—it hurls itself into the void, eroding rock with the force of a thousand Niagaras. Entire canyons are carved in hours. Boulders the size of houses are tossed like driftwood. As the seas roar into place, they tear through the world like a beast uncaged—violent, grinding, unstoppable. The ground shakes under the weight of continents being rebalanced. The crust of the earth fractures and splinters like shattered glass, heaving upward into jagged new mountain ranges.
And when the rushing ceases and the waters settle… Nothing looks the same. Vast oceans now stretch between shattered continents. Deep abyssal plains lie hidden beneath newly carved ocean basins, bordered by steep, plunging continental slopes.
It is only by God’s grace that He stopped the destruction when He did. He didn’t wipe the planet clean—He left enough land for humanity to live, grow, and flourish again. When Noah and his family stepped out of the ark, they emerged into a world forever changed—scarred, reshaped, and no doubt unfamiliar. Perhaps echoes of that lost world still linger in ancient myths—like the tale of Atlantis, a civilization swallowed by the sea.
As I’ve said, this is a personal theory. The Subterranean Collapse Theory is not dogma, but a framework—an attempt to make sense of how devastating the judgment of God truly was. The Flood wasn’t just a heavy rain. If pre-Flood populations were truly in the billions, as some suggest, then this was the single deadliest event in human history—more catastrophic than every war, plague, and disaster… combined.
Whether future discoveries confirm or challenge this model, one thing remains clear: the earth bears the mark of catastrophe, and Scripture offers a compelling lens through which to interpret it. If the Flood was truly as global and violent as both the Bible and physical evidence suggest, then we are not merely living on the remnants of shifting plates. We are walking on a world reshaped by judgment—tempered by mercy, and echoing with the warning it still speaks.
Footnotes:
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/03/210315165639.htm
https://geologyscience.com/gallery/geological-wonders/the-petrified-forest-arizona-usa/
https://bibleask.org/is-there-biblical-support-for-the-concept-of-pangea/
https://geoenviron.wordpress.com/2015/11/05/morfologi-dasar-laut/
https://pangea.stanford.edu/ERE/pdf/IGAstandard/SGW/2012/Suarezarriaga.pdf
https://phys.org/news/2024-10-scientists-explore-geothermal-energy-potential.html
https://www.open.edu/openlearn/mod/oucontent/view.php?id=65871§ion=10
Image generated by Sora
Zevachim 113b:12
The Hydroplate Theory (HPT), proposed by Dr. Walt Brown, envisions a global layer of subterranean water that erupted when the earth’s crust fractured, triggering the Flood and reshaping the surface through massive geological upheaval. While my theory differs in mechanism—focusing on crustal collapse rather than floating plates or lateral rupture—it shares the core idea of catastrophic subterranean water release. Many of HPT’s concepts could be compatible with this model, particularly regarding the role of deep water pressure and sudden destabilization of the earth’s surface.
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