Were the ocean basins not already full during "the flood"?
Yes, exactly.
Subtitle: Empty the oceans and pile the water on land, then drain back into oceans
Actually, yes, exactly that. But we must keep in mind that not all water is created equal. Water does cycle through all three states of matter, after all, so the water that piled up so deeply on land was water
in its solid state.
The main problem for YECs is that the actual world-wide flood is (because it is still happening and is becoming worse) nothing like how they imagine it, so they have to come up with all kinds of impossible nonsense to try to explain everything away.
Here is basically how it works. There's the basic
water cycle:
- Water in the liquid state fills the seas (of all descriptions; eg oceans, seas, lakes, marshland, etc). Please note that this step essentially empties your "ocean basins", though not completely.
- That liquid water evaporates into the gaseous state, water vapor.
- That water vapor condenses back into either the liquid or the solid state and falls as either virga (ie, rain that re-evaporates before it reaches the ground) or rain (liquid water that reaches the ground) or snow or ice (solid water which may either melt on the way down to become rain or else reach the ground still in its solid state). And I'm sure that you can come up with other variations if you put your mind to it.
- Liquid water that reaches the ground either soaks into the ground to add to the ground water, or it flows downhill to eventually reach the seas again (usually). Solid water will usually melt come the thaw and behave as liquid water would. Solid water that doesn't experience a thaw remains in the solid state and becomes the crux of the matter in the next section.
- That last step completes the basic water cycle which then repeats with evaporation.
There are situations in which more and more solid water fails to melt, fails to experience a thaw. Those situations are called
ice ages.
In an ice age, snow just keeps piling up on the land as the water cycle keeps emptying the seas
causing the sea level to drop -- there's your "Empty the oceans and pile the water on the land". And as the snow keeps piling up, it compresses and forms glaciers and large ice caps and so on.
Then at the end of an ice age, that ice starts to thaw and melt and flow back into the seas -- there's your "then drain back into oceans". As a result, the sea level starts to rise again, which is exactly what we are experiencing now.
It's really that simple and that obvious. The last ice age, the Wisconsian, ended about 13,000 years ago. When that happened, sea level was about 200 feet lower, from one source I read. That was when there were a number of land bridges such as across the Bering Strait and in the western and eastern parts of the islands of Indonesia and Papua/New Guinea. The latter explains
Wallace's Line, in which separate islands on either side of the line have very similar land animals, yet the land animals on the west side of the line are quite different from the ones on the east side -- there's an ocean trench along the line that kept those two land bridges separate and prevented land animals from crossing that water barrier.
It should also be noted that the Persian Gulf is about 150 feet deep at its deepest, so during the ice age it was dry land. And since humans have a strong tendency to concentrate large populations on coast lines, it makes complete sense that they would have noticed it when the sea level rose and flooded out where they used to live. And that an oral tradition about that devastating situation would have developed and be passed down.
There were also some more sudden flooding events such as the
Channeled Scablands in the American Northwest which were created by episodes of the sudden release of a large lake of glacial meltwater when its ice dam broke. There's also evidence that something similar happened at the Black Sea.
So then the actual world-wide flood is the rising of the sea level after the last ice age. And it is still happening as climate change is causing the ice caps to melt at an alarming rate.
That actual world-wide flood is actually happening. The one imagined by YECs didn't.
Edited by dwise1, : Added Wikipedia link for the water cycle
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