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

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.And we are not even getting into the havoc that would result from the shape of the earth changing from a perfect sphere to a flattened sphere in a time span of less than a year. Maybe the ark was flung into orbit after all.

Alright, alright. I know how ridiculous we can make this sound. But mockery - as fun as it is - is not going to help us understand one another. And I'm not trying to admonish anyone in particular or anything like that.What I'm interested in finding out is just what the creationists believe. Like how high was the highest mountain of the time of Noah? I'd still like another number to comapre to our 31ft/hour. Are there any sources on this?Is there a source (and it does not have to be the most scientific - even a link to a creationist website will help me understand) that can explain the fountains of the deep to me?Creationists, here's your chance to explain how we get around the alleged superheated water problem! Is it even a problem? Why or why not?Also, I would be interested in finding out how many shower heads I would need in my 3X3' shower to simulate rain of 31ft/hour. I understand that 10 gallons per minute is very heavy and the average shower head is 3.5 gpm. Again, this is assuming that all water is from rain.How many standard 3.5 gpm shower heads would it take in my 3x3 shower to simulate the flood rising at 31ft/hour?If any of the issues that I have raised have already been beaten to death in other threads please show me and I'll read up there!Edited by Chief Infidel, : No reason given.

Do the experiment: plug the drain and measure.

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Just a suggestion.There is a widely accepted unit of measure used by farmers everywhere. That is either the acrefoot or hectarefoot. You might do better thinking in those terms.

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A 3 x 3 foot shower stall seems smallish - but each inch of depth is 1296 cubic inches or 5.61 gallons. 31 feet/hr is 6.2 inches/minute so it's 34.7 gal/min or about ten shower heads.But you better have better water pressure than my house has. And don't let anybody flush while you're in there.

Sounds pretty intense.What if I had a wooden umbrella? How long would a finished piece of wood last under a steady stream of water like this? What if instead of a finished piece of wood, we used the finished wooden roof of a shed or an ark?

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

Oh dang. And just when I had it all calculated out, too.

Wow. Thanks Randy. So it would be very hot and very windy. This also sounds pretty intense.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?Can we also work backwards? Let's say that the earth was at the same temperature today as it was after the flood...If all that water evaporated and the earth cooled after the flood, how hot was it before teh evaporation?

Good question. I was starting to think along those lines recently.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?http://www.berkeley.edu/...eases/2005/07/25_hurricanes.shtmlEdited by Faith, : No reason given.

It seems that the flood conditions (both the rain and later the evaporation) would be perfect for hurricanes - massive ones beyond the scale of anything that we have ever seen since the flood, according to the link that you posted.

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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

But all based on sheer guesswork about how it happened. So the rains of the flood started with the removal of latent heat? And what would have removed the latent heat?It's the claims that the planet would have been so hot that nobody at all could have survived that creationists now have to answer though. 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.A whole planet covered with hurricanes isn't going to behave the way a few hurricanes here and there behave anyway. 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.