Is Noah's flood possible?

Question

The Bible claims that the the whole world flooded and that the sea level went above the tip of the highest mountain ie. Mount Everest.

The Bible claims that this occurred due to heavy rainfall that lasted for 40 days. However, if you consider how rain is created, this makes no sense. Rain is formed when sea water evaporates and forms water vapour in the sky which then condenses back into water due to low temperature and falls onto the land.

How could rain result in the sea level rising above the tip of Mount Everest if every drop of rain that falls is taken from the sea?

The only way to raise the sea level would be to add water to it. The only way this could happen is if the polar ice caps melted. However, it has been estimated that even if all the ice on the Earth melted, the sea level would only rise around 80 meters. Mount Everest is around 9 km above sea level. The average mountain range is around 2-3 km above sea level. Thus, people living on mountains would survive the flood.

If the "Fountains of the great deep" ie. water reservoirs opened, the water would just flow back in.

There is no evidence that a water canopy ever existed. What was stopping the water falling before the flood occurred?

I understand that water could come from underground reservoirs but to do that a hole would have to be opened in the Earth and the water would quickly flow back in.

The canopy hypothesis has been made up by Creationists to justify the flood story. It is not based on empirical evidence.

Answer 1

No.

Someone, who shall properly remain anonymous, suggested that all the water needed to flood the Earth existed as liquid water surrounding the globe (i.e., a "vapour canopy"). This, of course, it staggeringly stupid. What is keeping that much water from falling to the Earth? There is a little property called gravity that would cause it to fall.

Let's look into that from a physical standpoint. To flood the Earth, it would require 4.252 x 109 km3 of water with a mass of 4.525 x 1021 kg. When this amount of water is floating about the Earth's surface, it stored an enormous amount of potential energy, which is converted to kinetic energy when it falls, which, in turn, is converted to heat upon impact with the Earth. The amount of heat released is immense:

Potential energy: E=M*g*H, where
M = mass of water,
g = gravitational constant and,
H = height of water above surface.

Now, going with the Genesis version of the Noachian Deluge as lasting 40 days and nights, the amount of mass falling to Earth each day is 4.525 x 1021 kg/40 24 hr. periods. This equals 1.10675 x 1020 kilograms daily. Using H as 10 miles (16,000 meters), the energy released each day is 1.73584 x 1025 joules. The amount of energy the Earth would have to radiate per m2/sec is energy divided by surface area of the Earth times number of seconds in one day. That is: e = 1.735384 x 1025/(4*3.14159* ((6386)2*86,400)) = 391,935.0958 j/m2/s.

Currently, the Earth radiates energy at the rate of approximately 215 joules/m2/sec and the average temperature is 280 K. Using the Stefan- Boltzman 4'th power law to calculate the increase in temperature:

E (increase)/E (normal) = T (increase)/T4 (normal)

E (normal) = 215 E (increase) = 391,935.0958 T (normal) = 280.

Turn the crank, and T (increase) equals 1800 K.

The temperature would thusly rise 1800 K, or 1,526.84 C (that's 2,780.33 F...lead melts at 880 F.). It would be highly unlikely that anything short of fused quartz would survive such an onslaught. Also, the water level would have to rise at an average rate of 5.5 inches/min; and in 13 minutes would be in excess of 6' deep.

Finally, at 1800 K water would not exist as liquid.

It is quite clear that a Biblical Flood is and was quite impossible. Only fools and those shackled by dogma would insist otherwise.

Answer 2

Two things.
1. Genesis 1:6-7 explains there were two divisions of water. On land and a water canopy above the earth. This was insulation for the planet. It was this water which rained down on the earth.

2. Geologic shift occurs even today. The earth folds with rises and depths that accommodated the water. Current ideas are the continents were once together and drifted apart. Mountains change altitude and trenches of the ocean get deeper.

Answer 3

No, it makes no sense at all.

You can play with the data in the Chemical Rubber Company's Handbook of Chemistry and Physics. We know the bounds of the Earth, the volume of the Earth. There are figures in there for the total tonnage of the oceans but also total atmospheric water on average, total mass of water in the ice-caps, total subterranean water. Add up atmospheric water, ice-caps, and subterranean water, and even if you managed to make the whole Earth's atmosphere bone-dry and dig up all the subterranean water you can find and somehow LIFT it to sea-level, you only get a certain total tonnage of extra water.

Equate 1 ton of water to 1 cubic meter. Add that extra water volume to the total volume of the Earth and you get a new radius of 10 additional meters. It means the sea-level rose 33 feet. Very bad for the coast-lines, but NOT a global flood.

QuietBuck was wrong in claiming this extra water "goes over the top of Everest" because he doesn't know how to run the numbers for his own self. Can't invent and theorize extra sources of "underground" water, even allowing for the mechanism that carries it into the oceans and assuming NO CRACKS in the Earth's crust to let the subterranean water go back down again. We KNOW how much underground water there REALLY IS, and it's not enough to do much. Science has actually DISproven what QuietBuck thinks...

I heard somewhere that possibly the "global flood" story was a vague cave-man memory of the formation of the Black Sea, which was NOT always there but was a plain flooded by inundations from the Mediterranean. Just like we will be hard-pressed to remember the Aral Sea in Central Asia (formerly in the Soviet Union and victim to their water aquifer projects), which has shrunk.

A "water canopy"? Give me a break you religious drones! There is no water in the solar-system space. And even if you could introduce water onto Earth from some mysterious invented source, how does this water then lift off the Earth again by fighting Earth's gravity so the sea-level can go back down again? Any ice meteors that rain down on Earth, the Earth keeps! It's called gravity. Plus, many thanks to the other guy who has been even busier than me on a scientific calculator and considered the effect of heating of the Earth from all that space-dropped water.

Think a bit. You must admit, staying in a religion makes you hard of thinking...

Answer 4

read Genesis... " for there was a firmament ", that is more or less an ice shield that surrounded earth. this would explain the 40 days of rain (as it melted), would explain how plants, and all items we find from back then are right in high levels of oxygen (amber, bones), and it explains how man (like Noah) lived so long and why dinosaurs got so big, as the firmament created one large o2 chamber on earth. read up on o2 chambers and their results.

science has proven if you take all the water we see in the oceans, lakes, rivers, and take into account all the water that is under the ground (remember, many millions get their drinking water from wells) and you put all that water on the surface. The water will be around 20-100 ft over top of Mt. Everest. Plus again, read the story of Noah, for it rained and water came up from the deep, its telling you exactly where all the water comes from, one just has to read.


edit: bible clearly says firmament , all one has to do is define that word. next one can look at science and what happens to ice in a cold state such as space, it becomes magnetic, in turn this magnetic force is what would hold it up. put two magnets together and watch the one hover.

If the fountains of the deep opened up, the water would not just drain back in. This fountains of the deep can easily explain how Atlantis was lost in 1 day, an entire continent. Same principle of science.

the canopy is not a hypothesis nor made up, its fact based and seated in scientific facts we hold today from bones, amber, ice cap records, etc. Please research it all more before you put down what you do not understand. Do you sit in a classroom and tell a teacher she is wrong when she is the one teaching you something new?

You asked a question, you see multiple answers all saying the same thing yet you still won't accept the answer. Then there is no hope in showing you anything as you have already choosen not to want to know the truth. For one must cast down all thought at times to accept what is true, then build a new foundation off of that truth.

Remember, science books are changed yearly due to errors, new findings, new research. Bible is not changed yearly or ever, yet still holds true. Which do you think is written more properly from the git go? Common logic tells us which one. Bible even told us the earth was round when for a thousand years man thought it was flat. If man had just taken the time to read, they would of realized it was round, for it says " G_D sat on the circle of the earth ". (sphere is a modern word)

Answer 5

The missing mass is about 0.1% of the Earth's or 10% of the Moon's mass. The flood waters would have to rise at a rate of 12 inches a minute or one inch every 5 seconds. The forces involved would destroy the ark.

Answer 6

With god anything is possible, if he wanted to kill all living creatures on the earth and only keep 1-2 of each kind he is able to. he made the flood happen to rid the earth of all the evil that was happening at the time and to stop people living as long as they did before ('...In the future, they will live no more than 120 years' Genesis 6:3)

Answer 7

It is interesting that there are flood legends in many cultures around the world.
How a world-wide flood could have happened is a mystery.
Once a saw a program in which a theory was presented that there was a polar shift and that what is now Antarctica had been Atlantis. If such a thing had happened, the oceans would have flooded many places. But what would have caused the pole to shift?

Answer 8

if taken literally, i don't think so.

if you assume the position that it was a regional flood, and the "highest mountain" really wasn't that high, but it still flooded so much that they thought it was the whole world (if you look at pictures of New Orleans after Katrina, it would certainly seem that the whole world was flooded)

then yes


lost(dot)eu/21618
replace (dot) with .

Answer 9

This is a well documented subject and has been proved, perhaps not to all readers of this medium, but true, non the less.
During the creation of this planet, as has also happened to other planets (ask NASA) a canopy of water as such did encircle the earth for a great many years prior to the flood.
Comets carry water and many other planets; even Mercury has water.
So it is not so far fetched to think that God would know the future, and prepare fit?
Yes! there is evidence world wide of the biblical catastrophe.
Doubters abound, but are proved wrong.................

Answer 10

Read it again....
Gen 7:11 In the six hundredth year of Noah's life, in the second month, the seventeenth day of the month, the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened.

'Fountains of the great deep'....means water also broke forth from the ground.
If you are questioning whether it happened or not, there is geological evidence of it, and many 'customs' of other peoples have a flood story in it.(There is even a japanese symbol in their language to represent the flood, if I remember correctly).