Continental Sprint, as opposed to Continental Drift, refers to sudden plate movements or rifting and could explain the possible young age of the Dead Sea and the Biblical accounts of mountains sinking, sea rising, valleys changing and lots of new land being created by volcanoes or the release of magma from the mantle beneath.
'As the lower plate continues its descent, it drags the locked area down with it, bending and deforming the upper plate, and thus causing the surface above it to deform. As depicted in Figure 3b, land in the region close to the trench slowly sinks (subsides), while land further away from the boundary slowly rises (uplifts). This process builds up stress. After centuries or even thousands of years, the upper plate will suddenly break free and rebound, slipping by tens of feet (several meters) in a matter of seconds, and generating a giant earthquake. As shown in Figure 3c, this sudden displacement of the land causes islands closest to the trench to uplift in a matter of seconds, and the land further from the boundary to suddenly subside. The large, sudden upward movement of the sea floor when the locking between two plates is ruptured displaces water. If the displacement is large enough, it can cause great tsunami waves, as happened after the December 2004 Sumatran quake.' http://www.tectonics.caltech.edu/outreach/highlights/sumatra/why.html
Now those plates were moving together but if two plates were moving apart, as in the Dead Sea area, one plate would lift up gradually and then suddenly sink. The things described in the Bible, the rising of the mountains and the sinking of the sea, could be the final ripping apart of the top of the plates. The Dead Sea was not created gradually. The difference between the Dead Sea and maybe the Read Sea (and along the rest of the Great Rift...maybe also the Sea of Galilee) is that long built up stress from distorted crust can cause much greater earthquakes than where two plates move against each other with no edge.
'Extension occurs where the seafloor is being pulled apart or split along rift zones, such as along the axes of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and the East Pacific Rise. This is often called "seafloor spreading," which occurs where two oceanic plates move away from each other horizontally, with new molten material from the mantle beneath rising between them to form new oceanic crust. Similar extensional splitting of a continental crustal plate can also occur, such as along the East African Rift Zone.
On the other hand, many other observations are incompatible with slow-and-gradual plate tectonics. While the seafloor surface is relatively smooth, zebra-stripe magnetic patterns are obtained when the ship-towed instrument (magnetometer) observations average over mile-sized patches. Drilling into the oceanic crust of the mid-ocean ridges has also revealed that those smooth patterns are not present at depth in the actual rocks.7 Instead, the magnetic polarity changes rapidly and erratically down the drill-holes. This is contrary to what would be expected with slow-and-gradual formation of the new oceanic crust accompanied by slow magnetic reversals. But it is just what is expected with extremely rapid formation of new oceanic crust and rapid magnetic reversal during the Flood, when rapid cooling of the new crust occurred in a highly nonuniform manner because of the chaotic interaction with ocean water.
Furthermore, slow-and-gradual subduction should have resulted in the sediments on the floors of the trenches being compressed, deformed, and thrust-faulted, yet the floors of the Peru-Chile and East Aleutian Trenches are covered with soft, flat-lying sediments devoid of compressional structures.8 These observations are consistent, however, with extremely rapid subduction during the Flood, followed by extremely slow plate velocities as the floodwaters retreated from the continents and filled the trenches with sediment.'
http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/nab/catastrophic-plate-tectonics
Creationists believe the Bible talks about the break up of the continents but I believe it talks about the break up at the Great Rift, mainly the Red Sea Rift and the Great Rift Valley. 'The world' in the Bible, I believe, is not the world but their world...the world they knew. Their world was, according to the, flat.....it had four corners...so they didn't know it was a globe. Their world was small.....the Holy Land....what they knew. What occured in the Red Sea Rift and above probably reflects what occured when the world's continents moved apart, something that could have occured suddenly. Because of the similarities, Christians (and others) are now assuming the the Biblical authors knew about things that occured millions of years ago when in all likelihood they knew about what had happened in their vicinity thousands of years before.
More on sudden 'continental sprint' here...http://www.creationinthecrossfire.org/Articles/CatastrophicPlates1.htm
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