Where all the rest of the water had gone?

[mr.spaceman]

Recently I discussed with one person about global flood, which occurred (according his claim) in the ancient world

I refuse this event, I think it's nonsense and my general argument is that there's no even necessary amount of water to cover the entire surface of the earth.

You need 3 times more water to cover entire land.

Let's speculate that we don't know ancient environment and maybe once there was more water, then where all the rest of the water had gone?

Is it possible that huge amount of water can disappear from the atmosphere? Or is it possible that the rest of the water could disappear beneath the earth?

I'm curious if really exist any scientific hypothesis about global flood and how huge amount water can disappear somewhere else.

 

thank you

[StringJunky]

Leonardo Da Vinci came to the same conclusion.

[mr.spaceman]

Leonardo Da Vinci came to the same conclusion.

 

That global flood was impossible to happen?

[StringJunky]

That global flood was impossible to happen?

 

Yes, like you, he asked where did all the water go?

 

What about the Great Flood mentioned in the Bible? Leonardo doubted the existence of a single worldwide flood, noting that there would have been no place for the water to go when it receded. He also noted that "if the shells had been carried by the muddy deluge they would have been mixed up, and separated from each other amidst the mud, and not in regular steps and layers -- as we see them now in our time." He noted that rain falling on mountains rushed downhill, not uphill, and suggested that any Great Flood would have carried fossils away from the land, not towards it. He described sessile fossils such as oysters and corals, and considered it impossible that one flood could have carried them 300 miles inland, or that they could have crawled 300 miles in the forty days and nights of the Biblical flood. http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/history/vinci.html

 

Pat yourself on the back for thinking like Leonardo.

Edited September 8, 2012 by StringJunky

[ewmon]

Hydrothermal vents [including deep-sea vents along with hot springs, fumaroles and geysers] exist because the earth is both geologically active and has large amounts of water [...] within its crust.

source

[mr.spaceman]

source

 

Is it possible that these waters once were on the surface?

 

I mean not very distant past when the earth was very young and lifeless.

[Enthalpy]

"Large amounts of water in its crust" doesn't meant three global Oceans!

[StringJunky]

"Large amounts of water in its crust" doesn't meant three global Oceans!

 

...and I doubt would only take a year or so which it apparently took to recede in the bible.

Edited September 8, 2012 by StringJunky

[ewmon]

So far, they've found a huge "ocean" under Asia the size of the Arctic Ocean.

[StringJunky]

So far, they've found a huge "ocean" under Asia the size of the Arctic Ocean.

 

I came across that link myself and looked around a bit more and it was about 2.5 billion years ago when 97+% of the Earth was possibly underwater. When the Earth was hotter the lighter molecules, including water, would have been in the atmosphere and on the surface I think...the bible is only out by about 2 499 996 000 years.

[Gaylord]

I think that part of the confusion regarding global floods arises from semantics. Ancient people typically defined "the world" as that part of the planet that they knew. Alexander the Great was said to have conquered the world, which would have come as a great surprise to the Chinese.

So when an ancient people's world suffered a flood, it meant that the world they knew was flooded. Anyone lived in eastern Washington 10,000 or so years ago would have had the world they knew flooded when lake Missoula emptied. The same would go for any one living on the Snake River plain when Lake Bonneville emptied.

[ewmon]

when an ancient people's world suffered a flood, it meant that the world they knew was flooded.

Especially if the rising waters forced them to retreat up a mountain and transformed it into an island. Yet, where did all that water go?

 

Then there's the "outburst floods" involving the Caspian and Black Seas and also the Zanclean Flood of the Mediterranean basin.

 

The Zanclean Flood has got me thinking. The Earth rotates toward the east. The water bursting through the Gibraltar Strait would accelerate toward the east, which would decelerate the Earth's spin, lengthening its day, right? Probably not by much. Wikipedia says the flooding/drying cycle has happened several times.

[John Cuthber]

I think that part of the confusion regarding global floods arises from semantics. Ancient people typically defined "the world" as that part of the planet that they knew. Alexander the Great was said to have conquered the world, which would have come as a great surprise to the Chinese.

So when an ancient people's world suffered a flood, it meant that the world they knew was flooded. Anyone lived in eastern Washington 10,000 or so years ago would have had the world they knew flooded when lake Missoula emptied. The same would go for any one living on the Snake River plain when Lake Bonneville emptied.

The point about the biblical flood is that it drowned anyone who might have kept independent records.

Also, it covered all the land- including the mountain tops.

Even ancient people knew to head for the high ground so the flood must have been deep enough to cover the tops of the mountains. You can't do that on a purely local basis- the water would drain away. It only happens if the whole world is flooded to the top of the highest mountain they knew about.

They clearly knew about Mt Ararat which is over 5000 m high. More than half the height of Everest. Because the oceans are shallow compared to the radius of the earth, the volume of water needed is roughly proportional to the depth of the flood. A flood that covers Ararat takes about 58% as much water as would be needed to flood Everest.

 

That's a lot of water.

 

It is, of course impossible.

Only the bible says it happened and that can't be thought of as a reputable source since it's not even internally consistent.

From this we can conclude that the flood didn't happen.

[mr.spaceman]

I am interested if some hypothesis exist about global flood.

 

even most immposibles

 

Not in pseudoscience or among creationists, but in science.

[Phi for All]

I am interested if some hypothesis exist about global flood.

 

even most immposibles

 

Not in pseudoscience or among creationists, but in science.

There's no evidence to support an hypothesis like that. There isn't enough hollow internal space inside the Earth to hold waters from a global flood that could cover the highest mountains. I think, like others here, that if there is any historical accuracy to the biblical account, there could have been a local flood that encompassed the world within the view of the chronicler. But even that would have been an exaggeration for the reasons John Cuthber mentioned last.

 

So, no valid scientific hypothesis about a global flood that covers the mountaintops. None.

[iDevonian]

From more of a geological standpoint...

 

The earth, has a very detailed history written within the rocks. If a global flood occurred, we would be able to read it within the rocks. For example, I can look at X rocks and I can see paleo flood basins. These being very small events are able to be recognized with the naked eye and are common.

 

A global flood, undoubtably would have such a massive environmental and geologic impact, that you would have to be blind not to see the massive amount of evidence it would leave behind.

 

Of course, no such evidence exists.

 

If there were truly a global flood, then God or Satan or whomever, would have to have transformed the earth to make it look "as if" it never happened.

 

And of course, there are a million and one questions about where the water came from and where it went, and where is the evidence for that too? Water trapped within the earth is not nearly enough to flood over the highest mountains.

 

Also, if this happened just 6000 years ago during the time of modern scripture writing people, there is no way we would have over 6 billion people (along with our varying genetics) on earth today unless we bred like rabbits on steroids.

Edited October 9, 2012 by iDevonian

[Ophiolite]

Also, if this happened just 6000 years ago during the time of modern scripture writing people, there is no way we would have over 6 billion people (along with our varying genetics) on earth today unless we bred like rabbits on steroids.

It turns out that this is incorrect. Assuming a generation time of 30 years and a growth rate of 10% per generation, both conservative numbers, we arrive at a population of 7.6 billion after 6000 years.

 

I am always disappointed when someone seeking to refute fundamentalist nonsense screws up with a basic argument. It does a gross disservice to science. Wouln't you agree?

[Moontanman]

It should be noted that water welling out of thermal vents in the mid atlantic and other mid ocean ridges is not from within the earth but is water than has been recycled by geothermal processes. In other words it just circulates around and around....

[iDevonian]

It turns out that this is incorrect. Assuming a generation time of 30 years and a growth rate of 10% per generation, both conservative numbers, we arrive at a population of 7.6 billion after 6000 years.

 

I am always disappointed when someone seeking to refute fundamentalist nonsense screws up with a basic argument. It does a gross disservice to science. Wouln't you agree?

 

 

 

Ill accept your rebuke in regards to sheer numbers (assuming mankind wasn't decimated in recent history by a flood or plagued by wars and disease, nor trumped by genetic corruption).

 

If you know that this story isnt literally true, then you would also most likely know that people would indeed have to breed like rabbits on steroids to meet the current population of today. If mathematics couldnt show this argument to be true in a simple calculation, surely our ability to recognize the trumps and hardships in life (variables left out of the calculation), would allow you to see truth in this.

 

You would have a very hard time finding any biologist who disagrees with this. And on top of this, the inbreeding would destroy what few people remained. The genetic variation couldn't possibly be gathered in such a brief period of time.

 

Do not say that my statement is a disservice to science, just because some creationist is able to wiggle around it with a half truth. In reality, you and I, and most likely all of the scientists reading this, know that this is true.

 

On a side note, some creationists claim that people like Noah and others of the time lived for hundreds of years.

 

None of it really makes any sense at all. I cant be too bothered looking into it.

Edited October 11, 2012 by iDevonian

[Ophiolite]

Ill accept your rebuke in regards to sheer numbers.........If you know that this story isnt literally true, then you would also most likely know that people would indeed have to breed like rabbits on steroids to meet the current population of today.

I am now at a complete loss. You have agreed that the figures demonstrate you to be wrong, yet in the next sentence you deny the figures. Do you understand that an increase in 10% per generation is low compared with current rates and that it represents a very different pattern from "breeding like rabbits"?

 

If mathematics couldnt show this argument to be true in a simple calculation, surely our ability to recognize the trumps and hardships in life (variables left out of the calculation), would allow you to see truth in this.

The trumps and hardships are incorporated through the use of the very conservative growth rate. China's population grew by 17% in the twenty years since 1990. India's grew by over 40%. They experienced plenty of "trumps and hardships", yet the growth rate exceeded the number I have used. What fault do you find with this?

 

You would have a very hard time finding any biologist who disagrees with this.

So you are claiming that biologists would deny the possibility of a 10% growth rate per generation, even though much higher rates have been and are demonstrably in place for humans.

 

Anyway, I believe I may have found a biologist who disagrees with this. He considers elephants rather than humans, but elephants are slower breeders than humans. And he considers only five hundred years, not six thousand.

 

The elephant is reckoned to be the slowest breeder of all known animals, and I have taken some pains to estimate its probable minimum rate of natural increase: it will be under the mark to assume that it breeds when thirty years old, and goes on breeding till ninety years old, bringing forth three pairs of young in this interval; if this be so, at the end of the fifth century there would be alive fifteen million elephants, descended from the first pair.

 

Actually, the same writer does have a comment on human population growth:

Even slow-breeding man has doubled in twenty-five years, and at this rate, in a few thousand years, there would literally not be standing room for his progeny.

 

But perhaps you consider Darwin to be too outdated to give serious attention.

 

Do not say that my statement is a disservice to science, just because some creationist is able to wiggle around it with a half truth.

That is not why it is a disservice. It is a disservice because it is factually incorrect. I am sorry you cannot see this.

[JohnB]

I have to agree with Gaylord here. The old legends have to be read in their context.

 

There is no point arguing over the Biblical version because it is simply a copy of an earlier work. Tablet XI of the Epic of Gilgamesh has the complete story. Building the boat, the animals, grounding on a mountain and the sending out of the doves.

 

The essential point that most people who deny the possibility of a disaster of this magnitude ignore is the direction from which the water comes. It does not rain and then flood, it floods and then rains. In every account I've read (and I've read more than a few) the seas always rise to flood the land, it is never a river flooding. There is little reason to think that our ancestors were not as smart as we are, but they didn't have certain concepts or vocabulary. But what do the words actually say?

 

Just as dawn began to glow

there arose from the horizon a black cloud.

Adad rumbled inside of it,

before him went Shullat and Hanish,

heralds going over mountain and land.

Erragal pulled out the mooring poles,

forth went Ninurta and made the dikes overflow.

The Anunnaki lifted up the torches,

setting the land ablaze with their flare.

Stunned shock over Adad's deeds overtook the heavens,

and turned to blackness all that had been light.

The... land shattered like a... pot.

All day long the South Wind blew ...,

blowing fast, submerging the mountain in water,

overwhelming the people like an attack.

No one could see his fellow,

they could not recognize each other in the torrent.

The gods were frightened by the Flood,

and retreated, ascending to the heaven of Anu.

The gods were cowering like dogs, crouching by the outer wall.

Ishtar shrieked like a woman in childbirth,

 

A large black cloud with terrifying noise. Bright lights in the sky and the wind and water coming from the south, the sea. Hands up all those who think the Indian Ocean just got hit by a meteor or comet?

 

The accounts are not consistent with a global flood caused by rain but they are consistent with varied accounts of an impact and the following tsunamis. In each case we are reading local accounts of a single event. To be slightly more precise it only requires two impact objects to create all the creation/flood myths, one in the Indian and one in the Pacific Ocean.

 

Another point to consider is that the Biblical account is an outlier in its timeframe. The other legends have the flood lasting only a couple of days at best with the rain continuing for a while, a couple of weeks. 40 days and 40 nights is far longer than the other accounts. (Except the Japanese legends of the month without a Sun during the war of the Gods, which was around the same time)

 

Something that has occured to me that I haven't really seen discussed in the literature is "How long does it take the land to drain after a megatsunami?" We've all read the estimates or seen movies like Deep Impact so we can visualise the wave coming in, 1,000 feet high at 1,000 mph and that is a lot of water that is going to travel a long way inland. Roman accounts of a tsunami in the Med had it travelling inland some 20 miles. So with that much water, that far inland and being refresh a bit by rain, how long does it take to drain?

 

Reading the old legends with a 20th Century mindset is to do a great dis service to our ancestors. So sorry John, but you are reading the flood myth as a literal biblical creationist reads it and as you say it simply can't have happened. The thing is it can't have happened as interpreted, but it certainly could have happened as described. Disproving an event like a world flood as described by Christianity does not disprove the existence of an event that gave rise to local legends, each describing it as a world flood. They only knew what was within 20 miles of their home, destroy that and you have destroyed their world. In short, while there is no evidence of a flood as the Christians imagine it, there are plenty of reasons to believe that mankind has had some serious disasters in its history.

 

In a similar line there was a town in the Balkans (I think) that disappeared in the 1600s, destroyed by God, or Satan, take your pick. It is tempting to discount the story based on our belief as to the existence of God and/or Satan but this is misleading. The town did exist and after a very loud noise and many bright lights in the sky it disappeared. When nearby towns noticed that nobody had come from the missing town for a while they went to investigate and found a still smouldering hole in the ground. And so we got stories of Divine retribution etc, whereas today we would call it "Meteorite Strike, Ground Zero". Earlier societies tended to place a religious interpretation on any and all events, just because their religious interpretation was wrong doesn't mean that the event didn't happen. And so it is with floods.

Edited October 11, 2012 by JohnB

[John Cuthber]

Pointing out that another older reference gives a plausible story isn't really relevant to the bible's version unless you can show that the bible is really a bad copy of it.

Of course, if it is, then the bible isn't much use, it's certainly not anything like "the word of God".

If, on the other hand, the bible version is original and it's plainly impossible (and hence wrong) then the biblical account is still not very useful.

 

The Gilgamesh story may be of some use as a historical record of some sort of flood- A tsunami seems as good a bet as any- but it's difficult to interpret after all this time.

 

I still think that a physical record from the geology is a lot more likely to tell us the details of any ancient flood.

[JohnB]

Fair comment John.

 

What we can say is that Gilgamesh is the earlier version and the entire Biblical flood story is there, but with the names changed. Given that the job of "Scribe" was not really a common one then it is quite reasonable to assume that the early writers of the Bible were aware of the earlier account.

 

To a great degree I agree about the importance of Geology but I do wonder if it can show the information required. For example a flood from a tsunami would be a very transitory flood and may not leave much evidence. I was curious ealier and so I phoned the Gov Dept that deals with tsunamis in Aust to see if they had further information. What is interesting is that the modelling only goes so far. It will tell us how high the wave will be and hoe fast and how far inland it will probably travel, but they stop at that point. There has been very little done apparently on how long it takes the water to drain away, which was the specific information I was looking for. The Seismologist I was talking to had not seen any models about drain rates and it didn't really apply to his line of work, so he hadn't been looking.

 

As I understand it a tsunami is essentially a surface effect and doesn't bring a lot of debris with it to the shore, it picks the debris up after striking the land. So unlike a riverine flood it will not deposit a nice thick layer of dirt to mark its passing. Given that a meteorite strike will probably cause rainfall extremes as well I do wonder how much evidence will be left behind in the geological record to find. The only places for there to be geological evidence are the valleys behind the coasts and these would be in very specific areas, may not have had a lot of debris placed there and what was may have been washed away as the waters subsided and torrential rains lashed the region. While the water places the evidence, it is also very efficient at removing it as well, so there might not be much left to find.

 

But at all times we have to keep in mind the limitations of the vocabulary of these ancient peoples. "Flood" can mean riverine floods as we know them, tsunamis, or simply the actions of the tides and erosion. Many societies only had one word to describe all conditions where the water rises to cover the land (Flood) and so that one word can have multiple meanings. And of course for some things they didn't even have a word. Latin for example has no word for "Volcano", which made Pliny the Youngers effort at describing the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD even more remarkable. His very accurate description of the pyroclastic flow was ignored by science for many years on the grounds that "Volcanoes don't erupt like that", but when we finally saw a pyroclastic flow we saw that they do indeed "erupt like that" and Pliny was very accurate in his account.

[iDevonian]

I am now at a complete loss. You have agreed that the figures demonstrate you to be wrong, yet in the next sentence you deny the figures. Do you understand that an increase in 10% per generation is low compared with current rates and that it represents a very different pattern from "breeding like rabbits"?

 

 

The trumps and hardships are incorporated through the use of the very conservative growth rate. China's population grew by 17% in the twenty years since 1990. India's grew by over 40%. They experienced plenty of "trumps and hardships", yet the growth rate exceeded the number I have used. What fault do you find with this?

 

 

So you are claiming that biologists would deny the possibility of a 10% growth rate per generation, even though much higher rates have been and are demonstrably in place for humans.

 

Anyway, I believe I may have found a biologist who disagrees with this. He considers elephants rather than humans, but elephants are slower breeders than humans. And he considers only five hundred years, not six thousand.

 

The elephant is reckoned to be the slowest breeder of all known animals, and I have taken some pains to estimate its probable minimum rate of natural increase: it will be under the mark to assume that it breeds when thirty years old, and goes on breeding till ninety years old, bringing forth three pairs of young in this interval; if this be so, at the end of the fifth century there would be alive fifteen million elephants, descended from the first pair.

 

Actually, the same writer does have a comment on human population growth:

Even slow-breeding man has doubled in twenty-five years, and at this rate, in a few thousand years, there would literally not be standing room for his progeny.

 

But perhaps you consider Darwin to be too outdated to give serious attention.

 

That is not why it is a disservice. It is a disservice because it is factually incorrect. I am sorry you cannot see this.

 

We know that millions lived during the time of Adam and Eve (with respect to evangelical views). Clearly, mankind of a 2 person 6000 year old origin, would have had to outbreed mankind of reality (tens of millions), by a significant rate to match the population of today.

 

You cant really argue against this. Not only that, but you still continue to ignore the genetic deficits that a 2 person origin would bring.

 

Adam and Eve would have to produce a kin that would breed ad obscene rates to counteract the issues that would come with their lineage. They would have to breed at obscene rates to catch up to the more realistic number of people during that time, that is millions.

 

Anyone can make up a number and say X rate of growth would produce Y amount of people, and anyone can sit around and compare growth rates of modern societies (that prosper with trade and nearly indefinite resources at our current disposal, and modern medicine and agriculture etc)...

 

In that sense, creationists may be able to argue with what you are saying now.

 

But no person with a brain, who knows of the actual origins of mankind, and the actual population of mankind, could make such an argument. We know that such an argument, lacks variables of reality. Thus, your rebuttal is truly more unscientific than my original claim.

 

You seem to believe that a simple calculation that could be designed by a 5 year old, would adequately depict the reality of population growth over the past 6000 years.

 

Yet, reality shows that such a calculation is flawed. It is flawed for countless reasons that involve countless variables that we all use to disprove Adam and Eve today.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

Its like driving a car. We can say yesterday that I drove my car a half hour to the store. Then the following day, Id say that it generally takes me a half hour to get to the store if I were to drive there again.

 

Then a creationist comes along and says...oh no, you can do it in 15 minutes, I know you can because your car is capable of moving twice as fast as you did yesterday.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

Well sure the creationists may be correct about the capability of the car, but the calculation would negate many environmental factors. How long would my car last at that speed? Would that speed put my life in danger? Would that speed lead to changed reactions of others around me?

 

In reality, we know that it took me a half hour at optimal speed, so for a creationist to come along, and to say that its possible it happened in half the time, factually is ignoring a number of variables. We know they are ignoring variables, simply because my optimal speed of the time was double that which they believe.

 

And now you are coming along and saying...10% is a liberal growth rate considering modern chinas growth rate of todays time.

 

Well, that doesnt really matter either...both of us are speaking of hypothetical impossibilities to begin with (given the biological necessities of mankind and our limitations in breeding capability).

 

The argument you are playing the devils advocate in favor of, in its own right doesnt make any sense, and even you yourself couldnt use it to justify the belief in Adam and Eve.

 

In order to do so, you would have to ignore the countless variables that limit population growth. To do so would be the true detriment to science.

 

So, while I appreciate your critique, and its good to be a skeptic, at the end of the day, you still couldnt justify your own position given that you actually use science.

Edited October 12, 2012 by iDevonian

[Ophiolite]

You claimed that in order to produce a population of six or seven billion that Adam and Eve would have to "breed like rabbits". That is the claim that I have clearly refuted. It is the only claim I am dealing with. Your continual refusal to acknowledge this simple fact calls into question your grasp of scientific principles and basic arithmetic.

 

You keep harping on about the genetic consequences of inbreeding. I have made absolutely no comment, implicit or explicit, upon that matter. My sole point is that your claim that humanity would need to breed like rabbits is wrong. Please stop this childish refusal to acknowledge that simple fact and let this rest.