Baumgardner's model has too many problems to be saved. One problem is the tremendous amount of heat that would be released. His own estimate is 10^28 joules, an amount greater than that required to boil all of the water from all of the oceans. Here is a link where is asked about this directly and does not challenge the number. [
http://www.trueorigin.org/arkdefen.asp ] I think the number can be found in his paper
Baumgardner, John R., 1990a. Changes accompanying Noah's Flood. Proceedings of the second international conference on creationism, vol. II. Pittsburgh, PA: Creation Science Fellowship, pp. 35-45.
Now, in his response on the linked page he says "Indeed I do believe a significant fraction of the volume of the oceans was boiled away during the catastrophe. But since the atmosphere can hold so little moisture, the water quickly returned as cool fresh water to the ocean surface." However, this is not possible from a thermodynamic sense. When the water condensed, it would release the same amount of heat as what had been required to evaporate the water in the first place. A pound of condensing water vapor releases 1000 Btus of energy. And that water is still at the boiling point! 1000 Btus is enough energy to raise the temperature of a pound of air by 4000 degrees F. There is no way to get rid of the heat. What would happen is that as the oceans boiled, the atmosphere would be quickly heated until it was also at the boiling temperature for water. Without the water condensing, the atmosphere would have quickly become almost entirely water vapor. Anything on the surface, Noah for instance, would have been roasted by temperatures of at least 212 F while being suffocated by an atmosphere that was essentially all water vapor. There just is not a reasonable method for ridding the planet of that kind of heat flux.
There is another, unrealted heat problem. To get the model to work, he needs for the viscosity of the mantle to be lower which means it would have been much hotter. This heat, too, must be removed from the earth.
Here is another problem for his model. To quote him again. "But most are unaware that the Precambrian-Cambrian boundary also represents a nearly global stratigraphic unconformity marked by intense catastrophism. In the Grand Canyon, as one example, the Tapeats Sandstone immediately above this boundary contains hydraulically transported boulders tens of feet in diameter."
Paleomagnetic data shows that the continents were not in the Pangean configuration at the time of this boundary between the precambrian and the Cambrian. Since his model is dependenant upon this, his model is at odds with a fairly simple observation from geology. Pangea came much, much later. Now if you go around and take samples from each continent of rocks from this layer, you can check the way the magnetic field lines are arranged and find out what direction is north. From this, you can reconstruct how the continents were arranged with respect to one another. Simply, they were not in the position at this time that his model demands. He claims that the landmasses of the earth were in a particular position at a particular place in time. The data from geology does not agree with his assertion. There is still not anything to show that the earth's landmasses were in fact in the configuration that has been asserted. Since his model depends on this and since I have yet to see data offered to support the assertion, he has a major problem.
One more problem. In this paper
Baumgardner, John R. and D. W. Barnette, 1994. Patterns of ocean circulation over the continents during Noah's Flood. Proceedings of the third international conference on creationism. Pittsburgh, PA: Creation Science Fellowship, pp. 77-86.
he asserts that the velocity of the water currents during the flood would have been as much as 180 ft/sec. I will assert that this rules out the possibility of most fossils that we see having been formed by the flood. There would be little other than tiny pieces to fossilize! But that is not my main point.
The water would have been flowing. We know, from Stoke's Law, how things settle out that have been suspended in water. It mainly has to do with the size, shape and density of the objects. The rate is actually proportional to the square of the diameter, so size dominates. What this means is that in the case of the flood, that the order that things settled out should follow a pattern based on Stokes Law. So what does this mean for us?
In the case of dirt and rocks, it means that the geologic column should be sorted by size and by density to a lesser extent. Boulders on the bottom. Rocks and pebbles next. Each succeeding layer should be increasingly fine until the top layers are the finest of the silts. But this is not what we see. By the same token, the fossil record is not sorted by such features either. Animals of similar size and shape and even habitat are sorted through many differening layers. Even mmore curious is that a given layer generally only has a very narrow slice of all the known life in them. This is how we get the use of index fossils, by repeatedly seeing that the same narrow groups of organisms are always found together and at the same date when the layers can be directly dated. And there is no correlation between size or shape or body type that would account for the sorting.
