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

That's what some people claim, without any evidence for that claim. The stories about coninents reeling around the globe like drunken sailors in order to create the topography we see today are amusing but nothing to take seriously. The heat that would be released in the process is incomprehensible.

It's a pretty simple story. heat is important to industry and has been studied extensively. There are three mechanisms by which heat can be transferred from one place to another. In order of decreasing average efficiency:

• Convection -- moving the hot solid/liquid/gas from one place to another and carrying the heat along with it
• Conduction -- heat transferred through a physical medium between the two places. Conduction through solids is generally more efficient than conduction through liquids, which is generally more efficient than conduction through gasses.
• Radiation -- photons given off by one body carry the heat to someplace else. When you feel heat as you stand in sunshine, that's radiation from the Sun.

There's no noticeable amount of stuff leaving the Earth, so there's no noticeable heat transferred away from the Earth by convection. There's no physical medium between the Earth and outer space to conduct heat, so there's no heat transferred away from the Earth by conduction. All physical bodies emit photons, so some heat is transferred away form the Earth by radiation (and some is also transferred to the Earth by radiation). The only heat loss process for the Earth as a whole is radiation.