The Earth Moved

The History of How the Earth Moved Under Our Feet
(The Geological History of the Land under Old Donation Church, Virginia Beach, VA)

Like the history of Old Donation Episcopal Church which relies on written records, the history of the earth under our feet here this morning must rely on records which are written in rocks and radioactive decay of materials. While not accepted as absolute proof but classified as scientific theory, the following are popular theories from geologists, geochemists, and quantum physicists about the movement of the earth under our feet and surrounding areas. In the ensuing story of jaw-dropping gargantuan proportions you will learn that indeed this Holy earth under our feet did move - considerably!

But before I begin, I want to clarify something. This discussion is based on scientific theory from logical hypotheses or repetitive observations and findings; that is except for the last paragraph which combines the written record. Scientific theories are presented in the academic classroom and are updated, changed, or discarded as new or different evidence is discovered. On the other hand, religious belief is the established belief held by a religion and is taught in the religious classroom and is typically not updated or changed but rather is held as true to the particular belief for all times. Creationism is religious belief and should not be put in the same category with evolution which is a scientific theory. Some religious people are comfortable with this explanation and feel that one does not conflict with the other but rather allows evolution to explain in a scientific way God’s work in creating all that is. For those of you who feel creationism and evolution stand in contradiction, please be ready at the end of this discussion to voice your concerns.

13.7 Billion Years Ago. In the beginning the earth under our feet was created as part of our vast universe by a collision between our three-dimensional world and another three-dimensional world. In other words the theory says the universe had a beginning, and that both time and space leaped out of nothingness which seemed to confirm the first few sentences of Genesis. Our particular collision (called the Big Bang) happened 13.7 billion years ago, and the matter under our feet was contained along with the other matter of our known universe in a space smaller than a single electron, i.e., close to nothingness. An outburst of enormous proportions decompressed matter as it hurled in all directions to form our entire observable universe, 100 billion galaxies, each stuffed with 100 billion stars, with the matter under our feet to be part of the debris swilling around one of these 10 sextillion (10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) stars that eventually formed after the Big Bang. Scientists are now more certain that our universe will go on expanding forever with not enough gravity to pull things back together as was once proposed in the pulsating universe theory.
http://discovermagazine.com/2004/feb/cover
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/2748653.stm

On 4 Oct 2006, two Americans, George Smoot and John Mather, won the Nobel Prize in physics for measuring the oldest light in the heavens that helped to convince skeptics of the Big Bang theory of the universe’s origin. These two quantum physicists were the chief architects of a NASA satellite named COBE, for cosmic background explorer. Launched in 1989, the spacecraft measured feeble remnants of light from that originated early in the history of the universe. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/04/science/04nobel.html

4.6 Billion Years Ago. 9.1 billion years passed (two thirds of the entire time that our universe has existed) while galaxies formed into star clusters, and solar systems developed into planets and moons. 4.6 billion years ago the matter under our feet became a piece of planet Earth as debris orbiting our young Sun collided together.
http://campus.udayton.edu/~INSS/ThemeEvol/evoltimelineMED/secondchunk.htm

4.1 Billion Years Ago. Another 500 million years passed while the Earth’s surface cooled and clouds formed producing enormous volumes of rain water that formed the oceans. Beginning with almost no dry land volcanoes began spewing forth from the ocean’s depths with liquid rock to form a hard crusted land. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth

850 - 630 Million Years Ago. The first of a long string of ice ages began. Called the “Snowball Earth,” permanent glacial ice covered the entire globe and was finally ended millions of years later by the accumulation of volcanic greenhouse gases. Huge sheets of ice or glaciers slid toward lower ground crumbling the earth’s crust into boulders and stones. Therefore, ice ages were an important process in creating the soil that is under our feet here this morning. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_age

570 – 400 Million Years Ago. The matter under our feet formed as a volcanic micro-continent, called Avalonia, south of the equator. Then the land masses comprising the earth’s crust began to move like floating plates. Under the outer crust of the earth is a layer, called the lithosphere. It is solid but has relatively low viscosity which allows the upper surface crust to slide over it. This theory is called “Plate Tectonics” and encompasses the older concepts of “Continental Drift.” Avalonia drifted northward and away from Africa over the next 100 million years. Then Avalonia collided with North America about 400 million years ago to form the land that is now under our feet. This collision and others to follow pushed plate over plate creating the Appalachian Mountains.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_drift
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plate_tectonics

400 – 200 Million Years Ago. Land plants appeared and began to break down the rocks and sands into the soil under our feet. Carbon fossil remains of tropical plants and animals piled up for the next 300 million years on land and in the waters. Then layers of sediment covered these remains crushing and compressing the carbon fossil remains into coal, oil, and gas.

For about 45 million years North America and North Africa and other land masses continued colliding together forming a super continent called Pangaea [pan-jee-uh]. The earth under our feet was located thousands of miles from the ocean, deep within that huge super continent of Pangaea. After a 100 million years Pangaea began to break up drifting apart to form the Atlantic Ocean. As the Appalachian Mountains eroded, land on both sides of the mountain chain became covered with sediment. In what is now the earth under our feet and along the east coast, layers of sediment formed to become the coastal plain and the (now underwater) continental shelf.
http://www.jamestown-ri.info/geological_history.htm
http://www.teachcoal.org/lessonplans/coal_formation.html
http://www.energyquest.ca.gov/story/chapter08.html

200 – 36 Million Years Ago. The atmosphere surrounding us this morning was much warmer and the earth under our feet basked in tropical or subtropical conditions as continents drifted further apart and the Atlantic Ocean became wider. During this extended warm period sea levels were high, and the Atlantic Ocean extended to about where Richmond, Virginia is today. The part of Virginia not underwater was covered with a dense tropical rainforest, and the lands under our feet along with the other tidewater areas of Virginia were underwater, where rich marine life left dense layers of lime from shell deposits. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/04/science/04prim.html?_r=1&ref=science&oref=slogin
http://meteor.pwnet.org/impact_event/past.htm

35 Million Years Ago. A huge meteoroid, called the Chesapeake Bay Impact Crater, smashed into this area. The meteoroid hit near present day Cape Charles on the Eastern Shore of Virginia and punched a deep hole through sediments and into the granite continental basement rock creating a 53 mile diameter crater. Immediately after impact, the surrounding region suffered massive devastation with millions of tons of water, ice, sediment, and shattered rock being hurled high into the atmosphere for hundreds of miles as an enormous seismic tsunami overtopped the Blue Ridge Mountains.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chesapeake_Bay_impact_crater

36 Million – 21 Thousand Years Ago. During this period a series of ice ages occurred with significant ones 36, 15 and 3 million years ago. The worst, the ice age 36 million years ago resulted from India colliding with Asia, throwing up the Himalayas and the vast Tibetan plateau, plus the breakup in the far south of the super continent Gondwanaland [Gond-wana-land]. When Australia and South America separated from Antarctica, an ocean formed completely around Antarctica contributing to this deep freeze, a freeze so severe that no mammals survived upon the earth under our feet, and almost everywhere else, except for Africa. During the interim warming phases of these ice ages huge ice dams burst and massive walls of rushing water scoured out canyons and opened up mountain passes. North America continued to experience fluctuations of cold and arid climate conditions followed by periods of warm and moist subtopic conditions to yet again be followed by another ice age.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/ice/chill.html

21 - 5 Thousand Years Ago. The ice age of 3 million years ago continues to this day which over the last 3 million years has advanced and retreated over 20 times into North America with warm intervals lasting thousands of years. Our climate today is actually a warm interval between these many periods of glaciations. While ice sheets covered many parts of present day continental US, none ever advanced as far as the earth under our feet. At the full extent of a sever world-wide cold 21,000 years ago, sea level was approximately 330 feet lower than at present in our area. In Virginia lands again became exposed from the old location of the Atlantic Ocean shoreline near present day Richmond to the continental shelf, some 50 miles east of the present shoreline. When the climate began to warm again 15,000 years ago, the Atlantic Ocean rose in three major steps, one 14,000 years ago, one 11,500 years ago, and the last 8,200 years ago. Between these periods there was a pause in melting and sea level rise as the climate went back into almost fully glacial conditions. The last pause in warming 8,200 years ago was caused by a catastrophic freshwater release when glacial lakes burst through huge ice dams in what is present day Canada with a great wall of water hundreds of feet high rushing into the North Atlantic disrupting the great ocean global conveyor belt which had relied on heavy laden salt waters to keep it moving and bringing warm Gulf Stream waters north. This theory may also explain earlier reversals in warming periods.

10,000 years ago, when the shoreline had receded to 32 miles east of its current location, the Chesapeake Bay began to form as waters flooded into the main channel of the Susquehanna River valley to form a narrow estuary. After the last cold snap 8,200 years ago the Atlantic Ocean proceeded to rise rapidly and by 7,000 years ago the shoreline of the Atlantic was about 3 miles from its present shoreline. The Chesapeake Bay was now taking on its characteristic as a "drowned river valley." From 7,000 years ago to the present ocean levels rose more slowly.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermohaline_circulation
http://news.mongabay.com/2006/0629-flood.html
http://earthguide.ucsd.edu/virtualmuseum/climatechange2/01_1.shtml
http://science.howstuffworks.com/ocean-current.htm/printable

370 - 270 Years Ago. Adam Thoroughgood (1604 – 1640) was a colonist and community leader in the Virginia Colony who helped settle the area of Lynnhaven. The first Lynnhaven Church (Old Donation Church No. 1) was constructed on Mr. Thoroughgood’s land in 1639 on a location later to be called “Church Point” on the shores of the Lynnhaven River. At that time the only entrance into the Lynnhaven River from the Chesapeake Bay was by way of Little Creek and was a tedious east-west journey of three miles. Adam Keeling, whose plantation was situated east of Thoroughgood’s property and just east of the mouth of the present day Lynnhaven River, organized a group of people in the summer 1667 to dig a small pilot channel from the Lynnhaven River through a huge sandbar about a half-mile long to the Chesapeake Bay. Then almost immediately thereafter on August 27, 1667 a hurricane struck the area and enlarged the ditch to the size of an inlet. Perhaps this was the first change in geography in North America caused by man. This information comes from “Virginia Beach, History of Virginia Beach’s Golden Shore,” by Amy Waters Yarsinske, page 39, but is disputed by Deni Norred-Williams who is currently writing a history of Thalia. She writes to me, “The fishermen digging the channel: that is debated by historians, and features on some old maps lead some to believe it is myth rather than fact.” http://www.virginiabeachhistory.org/thaliaprogram.html. So the true story may be solely Mother Nature. This is an example of the written record conflicting and in need of eventual updating and correction, just as “theory” is changed and corrected. Nevertheless, the Lynnhaven River caused significant erosion at Church Point which submerged the Lynnhaven Parish Church cemetery and finally the little church itself. the congregation decided to build further up the Lynnhaven River primarily for safety. The Dutch had been at war with the English and attacked English shipping at the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay. A convoy of English ships was attacked in Lynnhaven Bay in July 1673 by a fleet of nine Dutch warships. With little protection by the British Navy and a combination of Native American raids and storms convinced the congregation they had to move further up the Lynnhaven River. So the vestry approved the building of a new church (Lynnhaven Parish Church No. 2) which was competed in 1692 on two acres of land purchased from Ebenezer Taylor further up the West Branch of Lynnhaven River. As the congregation grew, a third and larger church was needed and was constructed in 1736 just 70 feet northeast of the second building.

And that is the story of how the earth moved under our feet here at the third Old Donation Church.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Thoroughgood
http://members.cox.net/lynnhavenparish/
http://www.olddonation.org/history.htm
"Virginia Beach, History of Virginia Beach’s Golden Shore " by Amy Waters Yarsinske @
http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&id=MXq4SWS-s6QC&dq=%22Virginia+Beach%22+by+Amy+Waters+Yarsinske&printsec=frontcover&source=web&ots=G9wHGrJZcu&sig=VDLo5Cm33_2iSDzSnNDD_apAcjw&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=1&ct=result#PPA52,M1