For follow-up discussion and general commentary on the topic. Comments are sorted chronologically.
Glenn Oldham
The Creation of our earth has many mysteries because even though God has given us how HE created it, there are many things HE did not reveal. Tectonic Plates, for example are not mentioned at all in any format. We can guess and theorize all we want but God has chosen not to reveal how the “land masses” separated. God has blessed us with a fantastic book (manuscripts that were compiled by Jewish scribes & priests over 1500 years) with a huge amount of information. As Christians, we walk by Faith not by sight, so let us put away these questions that cannot possibly be answered.
Helmut Fischl
Although all the above theories are possible they seem to forget the fact that after the flood there were only 8 people alive. They had to reprocriate to a number big enough to be able to migrate which possibly only happened after the the Tower of Babel. So the tectonic plate separation only would make sense if it happened then. That doesn’t leave much time for it to have happened unless God spoke it into being.
Troy Davidson
PSALM 104
New American Standard Bible
6 You covered it with the deep as with a garment;
The waters were standing above the mountains.
7 At Your rebuke they fled,
At the sound of Your thunder they hurried away.
8 The mountains rose; the valleys sank down
To the place which You established for them.
9 You set a boundary that they may not pass over,
So that they will not return to cover the earth.
These verses seem to support the theory that, during the flood, God speed-up the tectonic process resulting in the formation of the high mountains (non-existant before the flood) and the creation of deep valleys. If this is true, it also provides an explanation for where the waters of the flood came from, seeing as the highest mountains did not exist before the flood.
Jennifer Rothnie
It's worth mentioning that most geologists believe there were *two* super-continents at different times - first Rodinia, and later Pangaea. While some geologists read long time periods into this and others see rapid cataclysm, most agree Rodinia was the initial super-continent but was broken up. Then a second supercontinent, Pangaea, was formed from the fragments of Rodinia and a lot of sediments that collected to connect those fragments. Then later, Pangaea broke up again.
This fits very well with the idea of God separating the land from the waters (the implication there, though not definitive, being that it was one land mass), that super-continent being broken up in the flood, then there being a short period of time as the sediment settled where a new super-continent was formed and people could travel between the main pieces before it broke up again. And if Babel happened before Pangaea broke up, it would explain how different people groups ended up in very different parts of the world.