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

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

Walt says the the fissures are now the midoceanic ridges.

Yes, provided that ludicrous parameters (e.g. mantle viscosity 10⁹ lower than our best values) are provided as input, the model's predictions that are incompatible with observations (e.g. seafloor spreading) are ignored, and release of enough heat to sterilize the Earth many times over is regarded as a minor issue. See, of course, Creationist Baumgardner: one of the top mainstream mantle/plate tectonics simulators!. He's made significant contributions in numerical simulations of mantle dynamics. "Major" is arguable.