Where Did The (Great Flood) Water Come From And Where Did It Go?

dad writes: The schools are closed in many places now, for example. Coincidence?

Undoubtedly.

But standards remain the same. You still won't get into medical school or law school or engineering school with a diploma from Joe's Creationist Skool.

Not when Joe's creation school was closed down because they refused to teach your religion as science, or were closed down for teaching Adam and Eve rather than Adam and Steve etc.

Numerous posts are drifting off-topic. This is a science forum and the methodology will be respected.

Any subsequent off topic rants regarding science as religion, or religion being scientific, without reasoned evidence and argumentation supporting them and being on topic will elicit one day suspensions. We simply must nip this lack of discipline in the bud.

Topic Starter writes: In the thread "Evidence for a recent flood", claims have been made as to the sources of the water of the flood, the "fountains of the deep" amongst other sources. Arguments have been made that the flood was not catastrophic or violent, that water flows uphill, that the opening of the fountains of the deep doesn't mean water reaching high in the atmosphere, that water wasn't in the mantle pre-flood, but got there afterwards when the "single land mass" divided in the days of Peleg. So many different arguments have been made, some inconsistent with others, that it's difficult to visualise the floodist's model and the various statements are scattered over numerous posts and threads. In the distant past we've discussed this topic, touching on Walt Brown's hydroplate theory and vapour canopies etc, but it would be worthwhile to discuss this subject in light of the ongoing thread "Evidence for a recent flood". In that thread many claims are made regarding the source of the flood water. Discussion of that would be off topic in that thread (I think) and it would be useful to have all the claims together in one thread.

ADMIN writes: Assuming you would like evidence for where the water came from and where it went, I don't think this would be off-topic for the Evidence for a recent flood thread.

Topic Starter writes: It's not so much asking for evidence as asking for the "models" proposed to be examined for plausibility with regard to current science. In the thread "Evidence for a recent flood", the source of the water is claimed to be the fountains of the deep. As far as I can tell, these fountains resulted from the release of water from the mantle (so the argument goes). A rough calculation puts the amount of water required to flood the entire earth at 2046 million cubic km. To help get an idea of what that means, the Earth's crust is estimated to be 1332 million cubic km (I googled that). The temperature of the mantle ranges from 1400C to 3000C with densities ranging from 3.4 - 4.3 g/cm2. What effect would 2000 million cubic km of superheated pressurised water have on the atmosphere, crust and life if it was released to the surface over a period of 40 days? What sort of atmospheric temperatures are we talking about here? When water becomes steam it increases in volume by 1600 times, giving us a total of 3.2 million million cubic km. In contrast, the earth's atmosphere is estimated to be 51,000 million cubic km so the volume of steam is 62.7 times the volume of the earth's atmosphere

WARNING TO Dad: The topic started to diverge from the science with your post here: Message 307. Any further efforts to drag this topic away from the science forum format will be aggressively met with suspensions. --AdminPhat

Edited by AdminPhat, : highlighting warning to dad

dad writes: Not when Joe's creation school was closed down because they refused to teach your religion as science, or were closed down for teaching Adam and Eve rather than Adam and Steve etc.

If you can back that up, start a different topic.

OK. So when we ask for proof of the nature you claim existed and that you claim is science, that is off topic.

Edited by dad, : No reason given.

OK. So when we ask for proof of the nature you claim existed and that you claim is science, that is off topic.

Edited by dad, : No reason given.

What is off topic is your unevidenced insistence that some "other nature" exists.

Produceing some real scientific evidence of your position would be on topic.

You got any?

Yes. The onus is on you to provide proof for your counter-assertion.

Where did the water go is a very simple question: It went to the ocean. There is no other place to go. The current vast amount of ocean water IS An IRREFUTABLE evidence.

Where did the water come from: This is a more complicate question. One important source is from the moisture in the atmosphere. Another one is from the earth's interior. Both sources are not likely to provide enough water for the global flood in today's environment of the earth. The ancient earth must be very different and this is a common understanding in the field of earth's sciences.

One thing for us to consider: Where did the dominant amount of CO2 go in the early atmosphere of the earth? When did it disappear into ppm scale? Suddenly or gradually?

Edited by Juvenissun, : No reason given.

The early CO2 on earth partly got converted to carbohydrates in all the plant like on earth. A bunch more was captured to form limestone and dolomite, which make up a great deal of all the sedimentary rock in the crust.
Gradually by either method. Millions to billions of years.

Edited by Coragyps, : No reason given.

The early CO2 on earth partly got converted to carbohydrates in all the plant like on earth. A bunch more was captured to form limestone and dolomite, which make up a great deal of all the sedimentary rock in the crust. Gradually by either method. Millions to billions of years.

If so, why doesn't similar process happen on Mars and Venus?
And I guess you would suggest the Cambrian Exploration did not really happen, because it should be a gradual process too.

CO2 has varied a lot through Earth's history. It was 1800ppm in the Cretaceous causing high sea levels and warm polar regions.
India colliding with Asia built mountains which eroded, absorbing CO2 and gradually dropping the level over millions of years, cooling the Earth. This incidentally changed the vegetation of east Africa to grassland and facilitated the evolution of a bipedal naked ape that we all know and love.

Very low levels hundreds of millions of years ago led to a snowball Earth effect.

Where did the water go is a very simple question: It went to the ocean. There is no other place to go. The current vast amount of ocean water IS An IRREFUTABLE evidence.

Were the ocean basins not already full during "the flood"?

Moose

Were the ocean basins not already full during "the flood"?

Yes, exactly.

Subtitle: Empty the oceans and pile the water on land, then drain back into oceans

Actually, yes, exactly that. But we must keep in mind that not all water is created equal. Water does cycle through all three states of matter, after all, so the water that piled up so deeply on land was water in its solid state.

 
The main problem for YECs is that the actual world-wide flood is (because it is still happening and is becoming worse) nothing like how they imagine it, so they have to come up with all kinds of impossible nonsense to try to explain everything away.

Here is basically how it works. There's the basic water cycle:

1. Water in the liquid state fills the seas (of all descriptions; eg oceans, seas, lakes, marshland, etc). Please note that this step essentially empties your "ocean basins", though not completely.
   
2. That liquid water evaporates into the gaseous state, water vapor.
   
3. That water vapor condenses back into either the liquid or the solid state and falls as either virga (ie, rain that re-evaporates before it reaches the ground) or rain (liquid water that reaches the ground) or snow or ice (solid water which may either melt on the way down to become rain or else reach the ground still in its solid state). And I'm sure that you can come up with other variations if you put your mind to it.
   
4. Liquid water that reaches the ground either soaks into the ground to add to the ground water, or it flows downhill to eventually reach the seas again (usually). Solid water will usually melt come the thaw and behave as liquid water would. Solid water that doesn't experience a thaw remains in the solid state and becomes the crux of the matter in the next section.
   
5. That last step completes the basic water cycle which then repeats with evaporation.
   

There are situations in which more and more solid water fails to melt, fails to experience a thaw. Those situations are called ice ages.

In an ice age, snow just keeps piling up on the land as the water cycle keeps emptying the seas causing the sea level to drop -- there's your "Empty the oceans and pile the water on the land". And as the snow keeps piling up, it compresses and forms glaciers and large ice caps and so on.

Then at the end of an ice age, that ice starts to thaw and melt and flow back into the seas -- there's your "then drain back into oceans". As a result, the sea level starts to rise again, which is exactly what we are experiencing now.

It's really that simple and that obvious. The last ice age, the Wisconsian, ended about 13,000 years ago. When that happened, sea level was about 200 feet lower, from one source I read. That was when there were a number of land bridges such as across the Bering Strait and in the western and eastern parts of the islands of Indonesia and Papua/New Guinea. The latter explains Wallace's Line, in which separate islands on either side of the line have very similar land animals, yet the land animals on the west side of the line are quite different from the ones on the east side -- there's an ocean trench along the line that kept those two land bridges separate and prevented land animals from crossing that water barrier.

It should also be noted that the Persian Gulf is about 150 feet deep at its deepest, so during the ice age it was dry land. And since humans have a strong tendency to concentrate large populations on coast lines, it makes complete sense that they would have noticed it when the sea level rose and flooded out where they used to live. And that an oral tradition about that devastating situation would have developed and be passed down.

There were also some more sudden flooding events such as the Channeled Scablands in the American Northwest which were created by episodes of the sudden release of a large lake of glacial meltwater when its ice dam broke. There's also evidence that something similar happened at the Black Sea.

So then the actual world-wide flood is the rising of the sea level after the last ice age. And it is still happening as climate change is causing the ice caps to melt at an alarming rate.

That actual world-wide flood is actually happening. The one imagined by YECs didn't.

Edited by dwise1, : Added Wikipedia link for the water cycle