Glad you banged the gavel on that one, your honor!
You still haven't answered the question.
So then if freezing water was brought in from space to cover the world, over 40 days, then this is going to heat things up so much as to destroy life?
Yes. You are presuming to discuss this stuff without even a knowledge of junior-high science?
Really, how does that work? What is potential energy difference?
Potential energy is energy that is due to being at a certain position in a gravitational field. It can be measured relative to any position. Let's say we decide to measure relative to the Earth's surface (pretty common). Hold a 2 pound ball 6 feet off the ground; its potential energy is the weight times the height (2 lbf) * (6 ft) = 12 ft-lbf = 16.3 joules. Drop the ball onto the ground. Its potential energy is now (2 lbf) * (0 ft) = 0 ft-lbf = 0 joules. Whenever anything moves vertically in a gravitational field, there is a change in potential energy.
Energy is not created or destroyed. The potential enrgy lost by dropping the ball didn't disappear; it "turned into" heat and warmed up the ball. In most day-to-day cases like this, it's pretty hard to measure the change in temperature, but it can and has been done.
The calculation is a little more complex when the object (such as your hypothesized water) starts so far away that the gravitational force changes during the movement, but that calculation also has been done. We know how much energy it takes to warm up and/or melt water, so we can calculate the change in temperature of the water. That also has been done, and the answer is in the many hundreds of degrees Fahrenheit.
And we haven't even considered the kinetic energy due to difference in velocity between the water is space and the Earth's surface, which makes it even worse!
I notice you reference Brown below. He discusses other problems and shows a sample calculation or two at
In the Beginning: Compelling Evidence for Creation and the Flood - Arguments for a Canopy—and Brief Responses.
What if there were a lot more water under the continent than imagined?
"Then it would be terrifically hot and would heat things up even more when brought to the surface."
Only if the theories about the earth's center etc were accurate.
Measurements, not theories. The theories have to do with
why it's as hot as it is down there.
Now Walt Brown's theory of this has it that the continents were lifted up, and slid away from each other near the mid atlantic ridge, and glided to their present position, where mountain ranges were pushed up in the process, and great heat was released, such as in the coastal mountains, where much of the sediment was mixed with magma that bubbled and spewed through volcanoes etc. The continents were said to have sat on some of the subteranean water remaining to reduce the friction, and I believe that the current settling in process is what he says are responsible for earthquakes, especially around the pacific.
{emphasis added}
Yup, Brown's a pip. He does the calculations for the ice canopy and then doesn't do them for his "model"; because, as I said, the calculations show that the heat released would have cooked everything to a fare-the-well. Yup, that's what he
says is responsible for earthjquakes ... but his ideas, including that one, are contradicted by the evidence.
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