How Hard Was it Raining During the Flood? Could the Ark Survive?

It may be a bit off topic here but it always amuses me when YECs say there were no significant mountains before the flood. When you ask these same YECs about fossil sorting you get nonsense about animals that could run faster being higher in the fossil record, or animals living in different ecological zones. How would that work to sort several thousand feet of sedimnents with no mountains? (Of course it doesn't work anyway but that's another topic). So I say you need at least 10-15 thousand foot mountains for the fossil sorting claims. Or maybe it doesn't really bother YECs when their "explanations" for two different phenonmona directly contradict one another.Randy

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Ok, an alternative view then is that enough water came from the fountains of the deep to cover the land with three miles of water. That still leaves approximately 2.5 miles of water to fall as rain. So:
2.5 miles = 13200 feet; divide by 960 = 13.8 feet per hour for 40 days. So we are down to 2.76 inches per minute for 40 days. I still think that baby is going to sink. Furthermore, where did the 2.5 miles of water go after the flood? Three miles of water goes back into the oceans in this scenario. You still have 2.5 miles of water to account for.

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This also just a bit off-topic but there is another huge problem with this much rain or even any significant amount of global rain. As pointed out the surface area of the earth is about 510,000,000 sq km. This is 5x10^14 square meters. So a meter of global rain would amount to 5x10^14 cubic meters of water. A cubic meter of water weighs 1,000 kg or 1,000,000 grams so we have 5x10^20 g of water in just a meter of global rain. Water will not condense from vapor to fall from the atmosphere as rain without releasing its latent heat of vaporization, which amounts to 2258 J/g. The total latent heat released by this much water falling as rain would be 1.15x10^24 J. The problem is that this heat has to go somewhere. The energy is partially released as wind, which is what drives hurricanes so there should be mega-hurricanes all over the earth, but eventually nearly all of the heat will be absorbed by the air. The mass of the atmosphere is about 5x10^21 g and the heat capacity of atmosphere gases is only about 1 j/g so just one meter of global rain releases enough heat to heat the atmosphere by about 200 C. Of course that won't happen. As the air temperature rises the vapor pressure of water will increase and the rain will stop falling.The long and the short is that a simple consideration of atmospheric physics shows that any significant amount of global rain is impossible.Of course if it did manage to magically rain several feet or even several inches an hour for 40 days and forty nights, consider that the ark supposedly has a big window in it and no steering. With all the wind that the would be result from the energy released by the water condensing to fall as rain there is no way the ark could survive. So the ark couldn't survive.Randy

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What do we know about water evaporation? Is it a cooling process? If all that water evaporated over 10 months, how much would this cool the earth?

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It wouldn't. Water evaporation from a surface cools the surface because the water absorbs the latent heat of vaporization from the surface. Once the air is saturated (100% RH) evaporation is balance by condensation, which releases latent heat, so cooling of the surface stops. The amount of water we are talking about would very quickly make the humidity 100% unless the temperature were far above what life could stand.I read somewhere that if all the water currently in the atmosphere were to somehow fall as rain it would make about 2-3 inches of global rain but I don't have the link handy.In order for air to "hold" enough water for significant global rain emperatures life couldn't stand would be required. For even 2 meters of global rain you need a moisture fraction in the air of about 0.2 kg water/kg air which takes a temperature of about 160 F. For 10 meters of global rain you need a temperature in excess of 200 F for the air to contain enough water to start with.The only way to cool the planet as a whole is through black body radiation into space but that's another story.Randy

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Good question. I was starting to think along those lines recently.

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I just addressed this.

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Everybody here talks so dogmatically about how this or that would happen, of course absolutely precluding the possibility of a worldwide flood, but in reality simply figuring out the dynamics of one hurricane is not easy, so where does all this certainty come from about how there woulda been such and such a temperature and so on?

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The calculations are straight forward to good approximation. It is not that the temperature would reach a certain point. It is that you have to take away the latent heat for rain to fall. That is why we get rain when a warm air mass rides up over a cold air mass. The cold air absorbs the latent heat allowing the water vapor to condense. The heat energy released warms the cold air and may power winds as well.Water that is blown into the air from the ocean and falls back down as described in your link won't increase the overall depth of water on the earth will it? It can cause some local flooding but I don't see how you get a global flood from it. I also don't expect that the ark could stand the 140 mph winds discussed in the link and the hurricanes during a global rainstorm would probably make that seem a gentle breeze.RandyEdited by Randy, : Punctuation

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But all based on sheer guesswork about how it happened.

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The calculations not guesswork. They are based on what actually happens when it actually rains.

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So the rains of the flood started with the removal of latent heat? And what would have removed the latent heat?

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I can't think of anything that would remove that amount of latent heat from water in the air all over the globe. This is not a real problem because there never was a global flood.Of course enough water vapor in the atmosphere to yield significant global rain would require temperatures and pressures that air breathing life could not survive. There is good reason that most YEC organizations gave up on the "vapor canopy" long ago.

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I didn't put the link up as an argument. I just ran across it trying to get some information about what causes cooling and heating in ocean weather patterns, and thought it mostly showed how hard it is to know much for sure about weather patterns, even when a lot is known. It wasn't meant to prove anything at all.

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The main factor here is a simple concept called the conservation of energy. In a local event there are places for the heat to go. In a global event there is no way to shed the latent heat.

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A whole planet covered with hurricanes isn't going to behave the way a few hurricanes here and there behave anyway.

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So how is the ark going to survive that?

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Things would probably have been so different I don't see the point in extrapolating anything that is known back to that event any more. The problem with all this is that nobody knows what would have happened. It's all guesswork based on the barest of hints in the Bible. I've had fun with the guessing at times but really it's futile. If I've learned one thing at EvC it's not to take anything anybody says about the supposed physics of the flood seriously any more.

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I suppose you have to believe that since it is so easy to use physics to show that a global flood is impossible.Randy

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The calculations are not guesswork but the actual conditions of the time are guesswork. Things were certainly different in many ways than they are now. Even if something basically true about the conditions can be guessed, there are too many ways the scenario could have played out that probably escape our imaginations.

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So what was different?Was the latent heat of vaporization of water greatly reduced 5,000 years ago?Was the heat capacity of atmospheric gases much higher 5,000 years ago?Was the saturation vapor pressure of water in air greatly different 5,000 years ago?Was the mass of water greatly different 5,000 years ago?Was the mass of the atmosphere greatly different 5,000 years ago?If these things weren't different my calculations are valid. (Unless you can show where I made a mistake)So what was so different 5,000 years ago that even 10 feet of global rain could fall, let alone thousands of feet?

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I was thinking about all those hurricanes that they might actually cancel each other out.

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Hurricanes wouldn't cancel each other out. Did you ever hear of the conservation of energy?

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Your physics showing the flood is impossible is based on wild guesses about what happened.

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The calculations are based on published numbers and well known principles of physics. Hurricanes canceling each other out is a wild guess. My calculations are not.

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None of it tells me there was no flood. That is based on God's inerrant revelation, and that revelation also happens to be couched in details and facts, genealogies and so on, that ground it in reality.

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There may have been a real flood but every aspect of science that can be applied to the problem shows that it was not global.

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I don't know how it played out, of course, but the creationists have some very interesting ideas about it.

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I think I am pretty up to date on all the YEC global flood models and they all have fatal flaws. I don't think either ICR or AiG actually accepts the idea of much of the water coming from rain from a vapor canopy. They tend to go for something like catastrophic plate tectonics which has its own falsifications, though for somewhat similar reasons having to do with heat.

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And I do know that people who don't believe in God's revelation are not going to be looking for ways it could have happened but only for ways it couldn't. Makes the whole discussion futile finally.

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The people who originally falsified the flood originally believed in it. There are people who believe so strongly in their interpretation of the Bible that they are willing to reject or greatly distort science to try to justify it. YECs keep looking for workable flood models but they have all totally failed so far.Randy