The Ark, the Flooding, and, Earth's Mass ?...

[tmaromine]

Besides my belief that a 600 year old man creating a football-field sized vessel from scratch from trees of which he himself cut and than gathered two animals of every species seems ridiculous,

 

if God flooded the planet – and assume he went over Mt Everest's peak (which I guess would've been a little closer to the sea ?), God would have added enough water to Earth to raise the sea level by 8,848 metres (Mt Everest).

 

So, assuming this happens, and the sea reached Everest, would this not have added a fair amount of weight to Earth, rising its mass ?

 

Would this mass change be shown in Earth's revolution ?

 

Could this be shown in any civilisation's astronomical studies or something ?, were the any as advanced civilisations at that time ?

 

Water absorbs energy slower than land (but in such a large mass, it could be rather warm ?), so when it receded, wouldn't the land be a little cooler, with all that 80 day warmed water gone ? Assuming a near 9km raise, land would've been freezing that far underwater...

 

Wouldn't the heightened sea level thin out/screw up the troposphere ?

 

 

 

Does this have any sence ?/Could any of this hold up ?

[InfiniteNow]

if God flooded the planet – and assume he went over Mt Everest's peak (which I guess would've been a little closer to the sea ?), God would have added enough water to Earth to raise the sea level by 8,848 metres (Mt Everest).

 

So, assuming this happens, and the sea reached Everest, would this not have added a fair amount of weight to Earth, rising its mass ?

 

Let's assume for a moment that the story is valid (and that's a big and somewhat irrational assumption IMO, but no worries...).

 

Where do you think the water which made those sea levels rise came from? Since the water did not come from outside the earth's atmosphere, but within it, all of the water would have already been part of the overall mass of the planet, hence no new weight from the flood, just redistribution of it.

[tmaromine]

Let's assume for a moment that the story is valid (and that's a big and somewhat irrational assumption IMO, but no worries...).

 

Where do you think the water which made those sea levels rise came from? Since the water did not come from outside the earth's atmosphere, but within it, all of the water would have already been part of the overall mass of the planet, hence no new weight from the flood, just redistribution of it.

 

Well, the point you make I understand. But, does Earth have enough water to flood itself to over Mt Everest ? If all water precipitated and melted, how much would our oceans raise ?

 

And getting at about 8km high, even more water would be needed toward the 'top', since the height is going out from Earth, and thus 1km high of extra water at current sea level would have a lesser volume than measuring a kilometre deep from an 8km higher-than-current sea level. (I probably got quite confusing, but I don't know if I can explain the idea easier.... The higher you go water-level wise, the bigger the volume for a kilometre-height of water that encircles the Earth.)

 

 

With this storey, I just figured God imported a lot of (non Earth's) water and flooded it. :):shrug:

[Turtle]

Well, the point you make I understand. But, does Earth have enough water to flood itself to over Mt Everest ? If all water precipitated and melted, how much would our oceans raise ?

;):D

 

According to calculations by our member Janus, the answer is no. Melting all the water on Earth raises sea levels only 80 meters. Here is his thread and his custom maps of what Earth would look like were all the ice to melt. >> http://hypography.com/forums/earth-science/9304-waterworld.html

 

:cup:

[tmaromine]

So then, that would not nearly kill every human (Save Noah and two animals of all species). That means if the flood occured, an insanely large amount of water was added to cover every bit of land. If this surely occurred, could any evidence remain ?

 

With layers in the ice at the poles, and in rocks, would there not even be there evidence of an 80 day water-covered land ?, surely it'd have drowned a lot of life, and the new sea floors would've been a mess... Unless this event is supposed to have happen so long ago (I have no clue when it 'happened'). Saying this actually occurrs as I see life is also very irrational, but, surely there wouldn't be signs if it didn't, and were it to happen, signs would exist ?...

 

 

Either God didn't put enough water on Earth at its creation, and miscalculated (but clearly impossible for such a being), or he "added" water, and then took it away, and if all that extra water were added, some signs, somewhere, there'd be...?

[Turtle]

So then, that would not nearly kill every human (Save Noah and two animals of all species). That means if the flood occured, an insanely large amount of water was added to cover every bit of land. If this surely occurred, could any evidence remain ?

 

The biblical flood story is taken from an earlier written Sumerian story, the Epic of Gilgamesh, which is taken from an earlier oral tradition. What's more, many cultures have flood myths and this only points to the fact that enormous & memorable floods can and do occur.

 

The unexplained things have historically, and yet remain today all too frequently, been attributed to the gods. Scientifically we know better, for example there is every reason to believe humans may have witnessed some of the Missoula floods, which scoured out the entire scab-lands of Eastern Washington and deposited hundreds of feet of rock downstream. I live on top of one of those deposits.

[tmaromine]

So, I have two stories on my count that are pretty much mocks to fit the religion,

 

Adam and Eve, could be an older storey,

 

and now this flood.

 

But yes, scientifically, we do know better, and that is exactly it: we. For the mere fact that religion is a mind-comfortor, I wouldn't want to deter peoples' beliefs in one and "hurt" them, but, when it comes to debating validity over falicity, it's all the more enjoyable to prooffully refute some religions stories.

 

Floods do occur, and when in the right area, it does seem like everywhere – but this wasn't "just a flood": Noah was 'told by God' to 'plan' for it, and thus Noah 'made a football field of a vessel' which fit his family and two animals of 'every species on Earth'. So, there is no way without theism that such a 'Great Flood' could have occured, and we have no evidence to say that such a flood did occur, technically. . .yes ?

 

So for the fun of stretching one's mind with mad ideas, approximately how much water would be needed to heighten Earth's sea leve by 8.5 kilometres ?, taking into account Earth's shape and that 1km would be like a 'blanket' that'd be palced on top of another 'blanket', and that the blankets would eventually become more massfull when nearing the 8th extra km. (I hope you understand me better than I think I understand it...)

 

And scientifically, all of these more or less hold up, right ? (At least the not-so-dreastic ones, ie: a change in revolution...)

 

(And, one must 'pretend' that this biblistoric flood occurred for results...)

::

if God flooded the planet – and assume he went over Mt Everest's peak (which I guess would've been a little closer to the sea ?), God would have added enough water to Earth to raise the sea level by 8,848 metres (Mt Everest).

 

So, assuming this happens, and the sea reached Everest, would this not have added a fair amount of weight to Earth, rising its mass ?

 

Would this mass change be shown in Earth's revolution ?

 

Could this be shown in any civilisation's astronomical studies or something ?, were the any as advanced civilisations at that time ? ((Assuming that the revolution would alter....))

 

Water absorbs energy slower than land (but in such a large mass, it could be rather warm ?), so when it receded, wouldn't the land be a little cooler, with all that 80 day warmed water gone ? Assuming a near 9km raise, land would've been freezing that far underwater... ((Taking the actual 8+ kilometre sea-level rise, could the Earth have been in an 'ice'/cold age if the water simply receded in minutes ?))

 

Wouldn't the heightened sea level thin out/screw up the troposphere ?

[Freddy]

There are several plate tectonic explanations by creationists concerning Noah's Flood. These pseudo scientific explanations are out there, but then again are all the other explanations.

Catastrophic plate tectonics - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[tmaromine]

Hm... Yes ; and, of course to that Wiki link.

 

Thanks for the tip.

[tmaromine]

I've given the "theories" a closer look,

 

the Vapour Canopy one, well. . .let's keep it put at that the Earth never became a high presurised boiler (besides, if that happen, then God didn't need a flood to kill us, right ?, simply bowl Earth into the Sun – hell, near it, and there'd be hell),

 

hydroplates ?, 'mm... Simply sounds too non real...,

 

the subduction one, at least it still occurs. For subduction on such a scale to 'completely' flood the Earth with its own water (which otherwise isn't supplement enough), wouldn't there be some giant ridge somewhere ?, and some rather great trench ?... It seems that for it to 'flood' Earth (I don't know how it's meant to work really ; the Wiki doesn't give much info for this one), this would cause some huge events, that happen on a 'planet-whole' level, so then some effect of this would have, or not have, evidence, right ?

 

And from Pangea to seven continents: if it happened so quickly, wouldn't that scew with some ecosystems, that would have just been split ?

[CraigD]

The biblical flood story is taken from an earlier written Sumerian story, the Epic of Gilgamesh, which is taken from an earlier oral tradition.

Thanks, Turtle, for noting this important coincidence. Much to all of the Old Testament creation story appears to be based on stories both written and oral from ancient Sumer.

 

To understand how a story of the entire world being flooded could have been believable to the ancient Sumerian and later Hebrew people, which is nowadays believable only to a minority of people, predominantly religious fundamentalists, I think we need to consider the beliefs of these ancient people concerning the world’s structure and origin.

 

As I outline is a bit more detail in ”The ancient Sumerian universe model”, the Sumerians believed that solid land, air, the sun, the moon, the stars and the planets were created from an endless, timeless sea. A similar, somewhat more ambiguous account is in the Bible’s, Genesis 1:

…

2 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters

…

7 And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so.

Important differences exist between this creation story and the predominant Sumerian one, in that in the Sumerian story, Nammu, the timeless, endless, bottomless sea goddess from which everything was formed, is also the creator of everything, while in the Hebrew story, the creator, God, is not the same as this sea, predates and created the sea, and the sea is not bottomless. However, in both world models, the world began in a state of being either completely water of completely covered in water. Under these models, that a deity could temporarily return it to this state is sensible.

 

As the inconsistencies, impossibilities, and lack of evidence tmaromine and others point out reveals, our modern, scientific world models are not well suited to providing sensible explanations of the great flood story. Most modern attempts to reconcile the story of Noah and the Ark as factual history with modern world models tend to do so by proposing that the Flood was not world-wide, but local to a relatively small region where all human beings (or at least the descendents of the ones described in the Bible) lived at the time. Some of these explanations are very elaborate and compelling. Examples include Walt Brown’s “hydroplate theory” (which is considered scientifically unsound, and is discussed at length in the thread 9972), and local flood theories suggesting that sudden, massive flood of present day Iraq around 2900 BC by a huge but brief-lasting inland lake formed by the damming of the Kraun River by a huge sand dune.

[InfiniteNow]

Perhaps the flood stories are the attempts of pre-technological societies to describe the primoridial soup? Perhaps there was no boat, but a floating piece of "something bigger" onto which molecules held like a star sucking in galactic dust...

 

 

...perhaps. :beer:

 

 

tmaromine,

Please read original response. This is why religion frustrates so many scientists so very frequently.

 

Step 1: Ask question.

Step 2: Receive answer.

Step 3: Ignore answer, ask question again until preconceived notions are acquiesed.

Rince, lather, repeat...

[CerebralEcstasy]

I thought you might be interested in the following.

 

 

Where did the water come from? Where did it go?

 

 

It rained and it rained, for 40 days and 40 nights – the opening of the windows of heaven. This was something quite new because Genesis 2:5 explains that it did not rain during former time. The implications are that there was no rainfall until the time of the flood, when these windows of heaven opened and the rain fell. If this was so, it explains why Noah preached for so long that it was going to rain and why so few believed him. The people had not experienced rain, and they scoffed at Noah's warnings.

 

Yet, the major source of the waters was not the rain, but, according to religious accounts, the fountains of the great deep (Genesis 7:11). These fountains lasted 150 days, whereas it rained just 40 days and nights. Either or both, we are talking about some huge quantities of water!

 

Some have suggested that when God made the dry land appear from underneath the waters on the third day of creation, some of the water that covered the earth became trapped underneath and within the dry land. In any case, we are told in relation to the eruption of these fountains on the day the flood began, that there was a "breaking up", which implies large fissures in the ground. The waters that had been held under pressure inside the earth burst forth with catastrophic consequences.

 

It is interesting to note that up to 90 percent of what comes out of volcanoes even today is water, often in the form of steam. Because there are many volcanic rocks interspersed between the fossil layers in the rock record, then it is quite appropriate to suggest that these fountains of the great deep may well have involved a series of volcanic eruptions with prodigious amounts of water bursting up through the ground.

 

The world may have been deluged in 40 days of rain, but this was not the major source of the flood waters. So there was no rain in pre-flood times – there would have been no rainbow, either. We are told in Genesis 9:8 that God made a promise to Noah that He would never again send a flood like the one He had just sent, and that He put the rainbow in the sky as a sign of this covenant or promise. Specifically, God said (verse 13), "I do set my bow in the cloud" a reference to the fact that one needs clouds to produce rainbows.

 

The clouds are made up of water droplets. As the sun shines through those water droplets, they act as glass prisms, so that the light is split up into its component colors and we see a rainbow. The whole thrust of this covenant is that this was a new thing that God was doing, so this was the first time the rainbow was seen.

So what were these waters above the atmosphere before the flood? Many Christian scholars regard these as water in vapor form that was held up by the atmosphere. The term normally used is water vapor canopy, implying a blanket of water vapor all the way around the earth. It is hard to imagine how liquid water could be suspended above the atmosphere, but water vapor would be much lighter than liquid water.

 

An ancient vapor canopy around the Earth could have shielded pre-flood inhabitants from harmful radiation, and some pre-flood people are reputed to have lived over 900 years.

 

“Windows of Heaven”

What were the windows of heaven? Genesis, chapter 1, says that on the second day of creation God divided the waters that were on the earth from the waters that He placed above the earth when he put a firmament, or atmosphere, in between those waters. It was into that firmament that He later placed the birds, so we know this refers to the air we breathe.

This describes waters above the atmosphere that are obviously not there today. This cannot refer to clouds, because they are in the atmosphere and produce rain. “Fountains of the Deep”

These fountains were evidently created in the beginning to water the earth. We are told in Genesis 2:5,6 that there was no rain at first, but instead a mist went up from the earth to water the whole face of the ground. The Hebrew word for mist not only suggests a mist or fog and its associated dew as we would understand this process today, but literal fountains, as geysers or springs.

Four rivers flowed from the Garden of Eden, and if there was no rain, then such a spring would be the source of the water that then went in four directions as rivers through the garden. The importance of these fountains in the original created order is again emphasized in Revelation 14:7, where it says that an angel will preach the everlasting Gospel with the words... "worship Him that made heaven, and earth, and the sea, and the fountains of waters."

If you accept the vapor canopy idea, it seems clear that the reference in Genesis 7:11 to the "windows of heaven being opened" is a reference to the collapse of this water vapor canopy, which somehow became unstable and fell as rain. Some have suggested that when the fountains of the great deep broke open – as volcanic eruptions, perhaps – the dust generated by these eruptions could have spread up into the water vapor canopy, causing the water vapor to nucleate with dust particles and form water droplets which then fell as rain.

 

Such a canopy would have meant a very pleasant climate all around the globe at that time, since the earth, being encased in such a canopy, would be akin to a glasshouse, where, much more than today, the heat of the sun's energy would be trapped inside the cocooning effect of the vapor canopy. Thus, scholars talk of a greenhouse effect before the flood with a pleasant sub tropical-to-temperate climate all around the globe, even at the poles where today there is ice.

 

This would have meant the growth of lush vegetation everywhere. Evidence that this did happen in the past is the discovery of coal seams in Antarctica containing vegetation which is not now found growing at the poles, but which obviously grew under warmer conditions. Still, it does not support the geological record of ice ages and glacial erosion.

 

A Water Vapor Canopy

Dr.Joseph Dillow has calculated how much water vapor it would be physically possible to suspend above the atmosphere as a blanket around the earth. His calculations give the equivalent of 12 meters (40 feet) thickness of liquid water. Such a quantity of water would be sufficient, he thought, to generate 40 days and 40 nights of torrential rainfall; whereas if these waters above had been clouds, then the moisture, if precipitated to earth as rainfall, would be the equivalent of less than five centimeters (two inches) of liquid water - hardly enough to sustain 40 days and 40 nights of heavy rainfall.

 

Where did the water go?

Allowing that the whole earth was covered with water, the world that then existed was destroyed by the very waters out of which the earth had originally emerged at God's command (Genesis 1:9; II Peter 3:5,6). But where did the water go afterwards? There's nowhere for it to go. It must still be here!

 

There are a number of Scripture passages that identify the flood waters with the present-day seas (Amos 9:6 and Job 38:8-11). If the waters are still here, how is it that the highest mountains are not still covered with water, as they were in Noah's day? Psalm 104 offers an answer. After the waters covered the mountains (verse 6), God rebuked them and they fled (verse 7); the mountains rose, the valleys sank down (verse 8) and God set a boundary so that they will never again cover the earth (verse 9). Isaiah 54:9 gives a similar account.

 

Clearly, the Bible states that the earth's topography was altered after or during the flood. New continental land-masses bearing new mountain chains of folded rock strata were uplifted from below the globe-encircling waters that had eroded and leveled the pre-flood topography, while large deep ocean basins formed to receive and accommodate the flood waters that then drained off the emerging continents.

 

Could the water have covered Mt.Everest?

It has been calculated that the maximum height of the flood waters over a theoretically level earth would have been about three kilometres (two miles). But Mt. Everest, for instance, is more than eight kilometres (five miles) high. How, then, could a flood cover all the hills under heaven? The argument is that the mountains were formed after the flood by an upthrusting. In support of this, one can observe that the layers which form the uppermost parts of Mt.Everest are composed of fossil- bearing, water- deposited layers.

 

This process of uplift of the new continental land-masses from underneath the flood waters would mean that, as the mountains rose and the valleys sank, the waters would rapidly drain off the newly emerging land surfaces. Such rapid movement of large volumes of water would cause erosion, and thus it is not hard to envisage the rapid carving out of many of the landscape features that we see on the earth today.

 

Could it be that is why we also see, in many cases, rivers in valleys today that seem to be far larger than could have been produced by the river? In other words, the water flow responsible for carving out such large river valleys would seem to have been greater than the volume of water flowing in the rivers today. This is consistent with the concept of voluminous flood waters draining off the emerging land surfaces at the close of Noah's Flood, and ending up in the rapidly sinking, deep ocean basins.

 

At their deepest, the Pacific Ocean is over 11 kilometres (7 miles) deep and the Atlantic is 8 kilometres (5 miles) deep, with the Indian Ocean much the same. There is ample room to hold quite a few Mt.Everests and all the water of a catastrophic global flood. We need to remember, too, that nearly 70 percent of the earth's surface is still covered by water.

[Boerseun]

I don't think there's a big mystery here.

 

Flood myths are global, occurring all over the world from the ancient Sumerians to the Bushmen in Africa. And I think the reason for this common theme is simply an attempt at explaining why you find seashells on mountaintops.

 

An insufficient understanding of Geology gives rise to flood myths. I think Alfred Wegener basically killed off Noah and his cruise liner.

[CerebralEcstasy]

I don't think there's a big mystery here.

 

Flood myths are global, occurring all over the world from the ancient Sumerians to the Bushmen in Africa. And I think the reason for this common theme is simply an attempt at explaining why you find seashells on mountaintops.

 

An insufficient understanding of Geology gives rise to flood myths. I think Alfred Wegener basically killed off Noah and his cruise liner.

 

 

Further to the statement that flood myths are global...I pilfered the following information.

 

A Whole World Destroyed! - Jehovah's Witnesses Official Web Site

(I tried to copy the table, but it didn't post well)

 

If you notice....while all of them differ in 1-10......all of them state there was a destruction by a flood, and that only a small amount of mankind survived.

 

Interesting coincidence that all of these peoples, from different areas of the world have this parallel in each of their legends.

[Buffy]

If you notice....while all of them differ in 1-10......all of them state there was a destruction by a flood, and that only a small amount of mankind survived.

 

Interesting coincidence that all of these peoples, from different areas of the world have this parallel in each of their legends.

But coincidence is not supportive of the Biblical story. There are many examples of catastrophic floods in history, and easy explanations that do not require supernatural intervention to find their causes. There is increasing evidence supporting the notion that the Black Sea Flood did indeed occur around 5000-7000 years ago, right when modern man was exanding throughout the world. Given the fact that living next to this large sea would have been very advantageous to beings that were becoming sophisticated social groups with advanced methods of hunting and fishing, this catastrophe alone would have seemingly "killed virtually all of humanity" and would naturally find its way into historical lore that was just beginning then on the edge of recorded history.

 

There are numerous examples that have been found of glacial warming floods that defy imagination like the Hudson River Valley, and Missoula, Montana, showing these to be unimaginable, but actually quite easy to produce, leading one to more likely conclude that there may have been even earlier events that could have become part of human oral history long before any written historical evidence would have been produced.

 

Its also notable that these geological events provide a solid model for predicting what would have happened in a "global flood" showing that the "reforming" of entire mountain ranges as described above would have required supernatural intervention to occur.

 

Less awe inspiring, but just as interesting,

Buffy

[CraigD]

A Whole World Destroyed! - Jehovah's Witnesses Official Web Site

(I tried to copy the table, but it didn't post well)

 

If you notice....while all of them differ in 1-10......all of them state there was a destruction by a flood, and that only a small amount of mankind survived.

 

Interesting coincidence that all of these peoples, from different areas of the world have this parallel in each of their legends.

What I found most interesting in presentation of flood stories from many traditions is not that items 2 and 5 (“Destruction by a flood” and “Few of mankind survive”) were common to the 14 selected traditions – these traits are common to verified modern catastrophic floods (assuming “mankind” to refer to a local population) – but that all but the “South America – Quechua” stories include item 6 (“Saved in a vessel”).

 

In my experience, a vessel resting on soon-to-be-flooded ground is not a good place to be in a flood. Massive floods usually involve strong currents and large amounts of floating debris. Photos of the aftermaths of modern floods typically include spectacular examples of the fate of boats swept up in them, which usually involves some sort of being dashed to bits and washed into a debris pile. Though I’ve known some people who have survived floods clinging to small boats, their experiences were more along the line of surviving a boat wreck than a comfortable, planned boat ride.

 

If these stories are reasonable accurate retelling of actual events, you’d expect the survivors to be those who fled to high ground, not those who boarded a huge boat in the flood’s path. As none of the flood stories I’ve read describe Noah or his equivalent having cleared the surrounding country of debris, built barriers to lessen floodwater speed, etc., I wonder how realistic their narative could be. In short, using ancient ship building materials and techniques, is it even possible to build a large vessel that could survive a flood like the Missoula flood or the Black Sea deluge?

 

Sounds like a great MythBusters episode idea, except for the possible show-canceled-due-to-angry-religionists consequences. :hihi: