Where did the flood waters come from and where did they go?

This has come up several times on theads on the Geology and Flood forum recently and couldn't find an old thread on it.The question is, what was the source of sufficient water to cover the earth 15 cubits above the mountains and where did these water go after the flood?The vapor canopy claims have been rejected even by "maintream" creationist organizations based on considerations of atmosphere physics. The only way there could be enough water in the atmosphere to create any significant depth of global rain is for temperatures and pressures to far exceed those that could sustain human life and of course there is no explanation for where that water went after it fell from the sky."Fountains of the deep" models also run into some severe heat problems and other problems. Catastrophic Plate Tectonics ala Baumgardner cooks the earth death as I show on post 96 of the Geomagnetism and Seafloor Spreading thread and Bill Birkland's post 97 on that thread shows that sedimentation patterns on the ocean floor and not consistent with CPT. The giant cyclonic currents that Baumgardner predicts would not produce the ordered fossil record or preserve trace fossils and would also be a little tough on a big wooden boat.Walt Brown's hydroplate model brings water from 10 miles below the earth where it would be supercritical steam and not water. It would not have been possible to confine it before the flood and it would have cooked the earth to death after.I have seen some YECs talk of a comet bringing the water. The problem with this is kinetic energy. Comets typically hit at about 50 km/sec and any large object striking earth from space will hit with a mininum velocity of 11 km/sec. A comet carrying enough water for a significant global flood would hit with an impact far exceeding anything that has hit the earth at least since the heavy lunar bombardment 3.8 billion years ago. It takes about 1.5x10^20 kg of water to cover the earth to a depth of 1000 feet. A comet moving at 50 km/sec with this much water would have a kinetic energy about 2 x 10^29 J. Such an impact would vaporize the oceans and heat the air to thousands of degrees. An air blast with a velocity of more than 3000 mph would circle the earth blowing a wooden boat apart with an overpressure of around 500 psi even if were on the other side of the earth from the impact site. Distributing the impact through a group of comets won't help much because the total energy still must be dissipated on the earth.So if the flood really were global as YECs claim where did the water come from and where did it go?Randy {Added two message specific links (without any page number references), and made the topic link to the beginning of the topic rather than to page 7 of the topic. The problem is, since individual members can choose to set their "messages per page" to different values, page 7 for one member may very well be substatually different than page 7 for another member. IMO, the "messages per page" needs to be fixed at the same value for all members, to avoid this problem. - Adminnemooseus}This message has been edited by Adminnemooseus, 06-07-2005 02:17 PM

Thread moved here from the Proposed New Topics forum.

The TTO topic is Wadsleyite: Global flood water repository?.Message 1 of the above cites http://www.sciencedaily.com/...ases/1997/12/971217071316.htmI made one reply at the TTO topic: Essentially, there is thought to be a LOT of water in the Earth's mantle. It can be released to the surface environment via volcanism and returned to the mantle via subduction. Doing either at a rate that would produce "The Flood" and then disipate "The Flood" is the trick.The "Wadsleyite model" would seem to share the same problems that "Runaway Plate Tectonics" has.Moose

1.5x10^20 kg of water translates to 1.5x10^17 cubic meters. For a comet to carry that much water, its nucleus would have had to have been about 650 km in diameter! (The Earth's "diameter" - the Earth isn't quite spherical - is roughly 12750 km).

There was a massive comet that broke apart into a "string of Pearls." Each pearl got trapped sequentially in a stationary geosynchronous orbit between the Earth and the Sun. There were 40 pearls in all and as they sublimed (in about 24 hours each) from the solar heat their water content was driven by the solar wind down onto the earth where it turned into rain and snow.During this period the Earth was in a partial eclipse state (none of the pearls were large enough to create a total eclipse) that was sufficient to lower the surface temperature enough to keep all the water from evaporating as fast as it fell. As soon as the last peral sublimed though, solar radiation at the earths surface returned to normal and over the next 150 days all the water gained evaporated and was lost to space.Simple.

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

Jar, sometimes I wonder where your heart lies. If you're really a person of faith, you should have known that God created the water for the flood and took a sufficient amount away afterward. To have come up with any other explanation is an insult to God awesome and unlimited power.

Nah, he didn't have to create it. It was just lying around in the dustbin from the scraps left over during Gen 1. He just moved it around a mite.

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

i've been over it before, and i'll go over it again: the sky.actually, ABOVE the sky.when god creates the earth in genesis 1, first he creates heaven. a firmament which separates the waters below from the waters above, dividing the great deep in which everything exists. the waters below collect to form the seas.when god floods the earth, he is literally and figuratively and sybolically un-making creation. so god punctures this firmament opening "the windows of heaven." and out pours water. and he opens the fountains of the deep (the water below, possibly).you'll hear a lot of christians reply to this and debate it. but it's what the bible says, and is consistent with the worldview of the time of every single culture in the area. it is consistent with the thought that water was the element from which all was made, also common to every culture in the area (as well as many others).

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אָרַח

so the bible is an insult to god?the bible does indicate pretty clearly where the water comes from. you just have to actually read it carefully.

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אָרַח

Why could not the water come out as supercritical steam in parts of the world jettison high into the atmosphere, and fall as a massive rain, frozen precipitation, hail, etc,....as Brown suggests?I am not saying I buy it, but the claim it would cook all of the earth, I am skeptical of.

Basic thermodynamics and basic fluid dynamics. I am an MIT ME (as is Brown, but he has a PhD and I only have a Masters). There is no excuse for him; he learned this stuff as an undergraduate.The supercritical steam would quickly expand, heating the atmosphere for many miles around, maybe for thousands of miles, far beyond a point that would cook everything living in that area. The high jet velocity required would entrain massive amounts of air and move it high into the atmosphere, requiring air to rush in from other parts of the world to replace it, causing winds that would make hurricanes look like kitten hiccups, stripping the Earth bare and killing everyting in the path of the winds.When this hypothesized massive amount of water, in whatever form it was, broke through the surface of the Earth it would have kinetic energy mv²/2. When it wound up on the surface of the Earth as a flood, it no longer would have that kinetic energy and it would have the same potential energy as it had when it broke through the surface of the Earth. By conservation of energy the kinetic energy of the water gets converted to heat,and since the only way that the Earth+water system can lose energy to space is inefficient (i.e. slow) radiation, that kinetic energy got converted into heat and raised the temeprature of the Earth high enough to kill everything.Waltie has some temperature calculations at Some Temperature Changes Resulting from the Flood. He considers the fairly small energy release due to decompression of nearly-incompressible water, then gets rid of that by hnad-waving. He considers the change in potential energy due to moving the water from 10 miles down to the surface, but he ignores the kinetic energy of the water as it jets out of the surface which is by far the largest energy involved. {Added by edit: He also ignores the fact that the depressurized hot water would immediately flash into steam.} An F for Waltie in undergraduate thermodynamics.Thre are three scenarios:

• If the steam doesn't come out of the Earth fast, it heats the atmosphere and kills everything.
• If it comes out of the Earth somewhat fast, it heats the atmosphere some, kills everything with wind, maybe leaves the atmosphere, cools, but then heats everything up when it falls back to Earth and kills everything again with heat.
• If it comes out of the Earth real fast, it leaves the Earth and never returns.

See A Few Silly Flaws In Walter Brown's Hydroplate Theory for some fascinating calculations.This message has been edited by JonF, 06-15-2005 10:37 AM

JonF has answered the question "Could it happen?" (no), but there's also the question, "Did it happen?" Frail, soft-bodied Ediacara fauna from a quiet sea a half a billion years ago somehow managed to leave behind evidence of their existence, but hundreds of fissures in the earth spouting cubic kilometers of water in the form of white-hot steam at high velocity a mere 5000 years ago somehow managed to leave no evidence behind at all? Think about this.This question of evidence is ignored over and over and over again by Creationists. Events leave evidence. Events cause change. Whatever was before the event is now different. Seek these differences.A site where a fissure opened, spouted steam, and then somehow closed, would be very different from a site where no fissure ever existed. If these fissures were real then they can still be found today.This isn't the only line of evidence, only the most obvious. For example, perhaps water from within the mantle has a different isotopic profile than water on the surface. A sudden change in the isotopic profile of water 5000 years ago should be detectable in some way, probably in sediments and ice layers and so forth.Another possibility: the mineral content of this much water from the mantle would make a major and sudden contribution to the sediments deposited during the flood. It should be readily obvious from sedimentary layers laid down by the flood.Of course, nothing about Walt Brown's idea does anything to address radiometric dating or sedimentary layers or fossil distribution, all of which are incompatible with his proposals.--Percy

Walt says the the fissures are now the midoceanic ridges.

It's pretty easy to tell an inie from an outie, isn't it?

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

I've been waiting for someone to explain the individual strata and correlations found in the ice cores USGS labs seen here

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion