Flood Math

[danalwyn]

Was sitting around in the office today, browsing the web because I managed to make the host command SegFault on Linux, when I happened upon some of the coverage of the creation/evolution debate (possibly prompted subconsciously by mergle. Having gone over that in some depth earlier, I passed by most of it, but paused at some coverage of the now-fallen discipline of Flood Geology.

Basically Flood Geology is a bunch of people who got together and said: "Hey, maybe there was a big flood a couple of thousand years ago" and attempted to fit the theory into a whole bunch of physical models. It didn't pan out, as the geologists will tell you, for a number of reasons but mostly because they got too ambitious and tried to use it to explain Earth's fossil record.

But they all approached the question like geologists and paleontologists. So I decided to take a brief look at the literal flood from the perspective of a physicist.



Consider a flood so large and powerful that it was capable of covering the entire Earth. That's a lot of water. Since I'm a physicist I can assume that the Earth is approximately a sphere (even though it's not) and point out that the water would have to cover the highest mountain. Since the Earth wasn't that different that long ago, let's assume that the highest mountain was still Mount Everest, at a height of 8850 meters. So if we have water at depth of 8850 meters over sea level, we've covered everything in the world (although it you're going to sail over it you better be damn careful to keep from ripping your bottom out over the Himalayas).

So let's assume that the water got there via rain, more or less uniformly, over a period of, say, forty days and forty nights. So that means that over a 24 hour period you get 221.25 meters of water dumped on you. That's a lot of water. This rules out a natural event of course, because if there was a weather phenomenon capable of that we'd probably know about it by now. You think this argument would derail the group who claims that this was all natural and perfectly believable, but it didn't. They seem to be the ones that can't accept a miracle when they get one.

How much water is that? Well, over an area about a square meter (that's about the size of a square card table for me, although your size may vary) that turns out to average to 2.56 kg of water every second. That's a lot of water. If you did have a boat out on this you better make sure it's watertight on deck, or it's going to be full of water faster than you can blink. Can wood even survive that level of continuous pounding? Hard to tell, the calculations for water velocity and the resistivity of wood are hard to do and I don't have the information. But the sheer volume of water being dropped out of the sky is incredible, it makes all those huge floods of years past look like nothing. Think of that, Everest submerged.

Which leads me to my question to the Flood Geologists. If this was a natural event of sorts, where did the water go? Sure, the flood waters receded, but where did they end up? That aren't that many places where you can hide enough water to flood the entire Earth. Maybe it's in the center of the Earth? It recedes into the ground is the easiest explanation. But if this is the truth, you should be seeing small pockets of water all over the place.

I can just see some oil sheiks in the middle of the desert digging a new well, when all of a sudden there's the stereotypical rumbling and a huge geyser explodes up out of the desert floor and high into the sky.

Sheik 1: You idiots! That's not oil, that's water!
Sheik 2: Well, at least we can bottle it up and sell it to American tourists.

If it did go underground then we would be hitting water so often that mineral water would probably be cheaper than dirt, you would have mineral water coming out of your backyard like water out of a waterbed being used as a playground by a squadron of porcupines. One wrong mistake while you're digging a new firepit in your backyard, and suddenly you and everyone else in your neighborhood would be up to their neck in the leftover wrath of the Lord. And I don't think you'd be able to get a very good rate on flood insurance anymore.

Which leads to the moral of this little exercise. If you're going to belive in supernatural miracles, fine. But don't try to pass them off as normal, rational events. You'll just piss people off.

Comments

[tripathy.livejournal.com]

One wrong mistake while you're digging a new firepit in your backyard, and suddenly you and everyone else in your neighborhood would be up to their neck in the leftover wrath of the Lord.
<--Hee! That is such an awesome line. I should sig it or something. XD "Leftover wrath", he he. ^_^

[danalwyn.livejournal.com]

Feel free to take that line and use it however you want.

The Wrath of the Lord. There's plenty left for everyone.

[lacontessamala.livejournal.com]

That's a cool look at things, Dan. As a Christian, I'm highly lefty; I don't believe that the water from the Biblical flood actually covered the entire earth, if it happened at all. But I accept that the writers of the Bible were human, and wrote things from their perspective. So if the Black Sea broke through a mud wall and deluged part of Eurasia, well, that could be the source of the story. I also accept that some of the Old Testament is highly allegorical, not literal. Did the flood happen? I don't know. But there's more to base my faith on than that.

[nightdog-barks.livejournal.com]

I find it interesting that some folks think that an age-old flooding by the Black Sea was the true origin of the story of the Genesis flood ...

http://www.nationalgeographic.com/blacksea/ax/frame.html

And I'm afraid that the wrath of the Lord seems to be ... uh ... overflowing these days.

:-D

[loneseabreakers.livejournal.com]

Curious - wasn't there a geological study (recently?) that mentioned that there were signs of a big flood around the general time of the biblical flood, in places where there couldn't have been that sort of flood? I remember hearing something like that, but what I recall is too vague to prove much help at all. Just wondering if you'd heard anything about it?

[danalwyn.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't know anything about it, since I'm not really sure what you mean by places "where there couldn't have been that sort of flood". The only place I really know like that is the moon. Almost everywhere on Earth can, and probably has, received large flood events, but nothing on the scale indicated by the Biblical literalists.

There are quite a number of areas that get unexpected flooding due to sudden appearance of strange weather patterns, geographical changes or natural disasters. Although it's rare on a human time scale it is fairly common on a geological time scale. What I do object to are the groups who sometimes like to posit the existence of a huge flood that will solve all the problems presented by the fossil record and various other problems-and who bend the evidence to make it look like the Biblical account. If God did it, he hid the evidence rather well.

You could be thinking of the Black Sea stuff that Nightdog and Squirrely mentioned. Or you might have something else in mind. If you give me a general area I might be able to find something.

[(Anonymous)]

My teacher made much of the "and the fountains of the earth were broken open," quote, meaning that water came from the ground as well as the sky. Attack of the groundwater!

Which could be used to support a "flood from outside the lake into the lake" theory. And it doesn't answer where the water went.