Atheist scientists are really bothered by the structure of the Earth’s crust. The mystery of the crust is so great that it is called “the holy grail of geology”.
Here’s the gist of the riddle: The outer layer of the crust is composed of tectonic plates which are hard, brittle and relatively low temperatures. The inner crust which we get to see in a volcanic eruption is fiery hot molten magma. No other planet in our solar system has a crust with the same structure as Earth.
It gets more confusing. The aforementioned tectonic plates have two types of crusts, oceanic crusts and continental crusts. Scientists have a good estimate of how the oceanic crust was made, from molten magma that cooled off in the sea. In other words, material from the hot inner crust that came up and hardened made the oceanic crust. There are whole giant undersea mountain ranges that have a layer of basalt that seems to have been poured on them from the ocean floor. Basalt is volcanic rock that once was magma.
The continental crust is quite different. Its creation remains a mystery for it is full of silicate minerals that make the Earth’s continental crust much denser and heavier than the oceanic crust.
Scientists theorize that the continental crust was formed first and is older than the oceanic crust. That can explain the density but how it was formed remains unexplained.
There are two recent studies on this subject, one is from the “New scientist” and the other is from the Nature Geoscience magazine. They both talk of explanations for a narrow layer of crust till a depth of 250 miles at most no further than that. More baffling is that in Nature Geoscience their study found that the the places they could describe how the crust was formed were relatively “new” portions of the crust which have a different composition than the classical denser crusts we are familiar with.
So that brings us back to the question, how did the continental crust form under our continents? And how did it happen so quickly.
Scientists have no answer but the Torah does. (Genesis 1, 9-10)
And God said, “Let the water that is beneath the heavens gather into one place, and let the dry land appear,” and it was so. And God called the dry land earth, and the gathering of the waters He called seas, and God saw that it was good.