Re: hypothetical question about Noah's flood

Sheila Wilson wrote:

"...If we had a global flood today on our 4.5 billion year old earth, how much different would the topography look?"

The effects of a huge quantity of water suddenly dumped on Earth would depend a great deal on just how the water was dumped. If it was in the form of rain, it would be hard to distinguish the results from normal erosion and redeposition (although the distributions of fossils would be different). Large quantities of water dumped in bulk on small portions of Earth could generate significant surface features. I'm thinking of the deep channels carved out of basalt in eastern Washington, especially Grand Coulee. These channels are believed to have formed when large glacial lakes drained suddenly when channel-blocking ice melted.

Sheila: "Or would the waters rise so quickly that very little erosion would occur?"

Clearly there would be far less erosion on surfaces already covered by water than on exposed surfaces. There are exceptions--such as turbidite flows. But the exceptions would be trivial on a whole-Earth scale.

Sheila: "...Given the geologically instantaneous event and the depth of the water, would enough sediment be created to fill the basins of Wyoming? The depth of sediment there can be measured in miles, not feet. I think the speed at which the proposed global flood occurred would not generate the sediment volume required."

It is obvious to geologists with oil company experience that no single flood could possibly account for the observed volumes of sedimentary rock. Wyoming is hardly the only place with mile-deep sediments. They exist all over the place, and in most of those places the depths have been plumbed with oil wells, so the evidence is rock-hard. Where there are few wells there are reflection seismic data that allow geophysicists to image the rock layers and establish continuity between widely spaced wells.

Almost the whole state of Texas consists of sedimentary basins that go to depths well in excess of two miles in places, and there's no reasonable source (e.g., erodible mountain range) for the material within many hundreds of miles. Much of the material is of marine origin anyway. I think it would be easy to show that there are at least a million cubic miles of sedimentary rock underlying the area that extends from west Texas to the east coast. The total area of the USA is only about 3.5 million square miles, so to scrape off a million cubic miles from that small an area in a short time would require processes vastly more energetic than running water. Even if you were comfortable with some highly energetic process (millions of buried H-bombs?), you still wouldn't be able to explain the rocks: Energetic processes do not yield the fine-grained sediments we observe (including marine shales, limestones, chalks, halites and evaporites) but instead give coarse conglomerates. And how, pray tell, does one get massive halite and evaporite deposits from a global flood? To one who knows even a little about world geology, few endeavors are as absurd as trying to explain the bulk of the geology with a single, world-wide flood. Who can muster the patience to listen?

As you know, a worldwide flood would soon defeat its own erosion processes: Once the waters rose significantly, they would act like oceans, which don't flow fast enough to cause serious erosion. Instead they'd become sinks for the sediments from erosion at higher elevations. The higher the waters rose, the less land there'd be to erode and the less rapidly flowing water there'd be to carry the sediments--hence fewer observable effects.

Don

  ----- Original Message -----
  From: Sheila Wilson<mailto:sheila-wilson@sbcglobal.net>
  To: D. F. Siemens, Jr.<mailto:dfsiemensjr@juno.com>
  Cc: asa@calvin.edu<mailto:asa@calvin.edu>
  Sent: Friday, July 22, 2005 2:06 PM
  Subject: Re: hypothetical question about Noah's flood

  I agree with all the implications and ramifications that you have given. Focusing on the hypothetical question, however, how much of the primordial land (using your term) would have been torn up given an old earth scenario. In other words, if we had a global flood today on our 4.5 billion year old earth, how much different would the topography look? In Genesis, the waters flooded for forty days. Would that have been enough time and power to significantly erode existing rock? Or would the waters rise so quickly that very little erosion would occur?

  I believe these questions are important in understanding what a geologically instantaneous global flood would do. Many of us agree that a global flood never happened. Others believe that it did. If it did, how much different would the earth's surface look before vs. after. Could we have a global flood without cataclysmic plate shifting, as suggested by Humphreys, Ham, and others? How could cataclysmic plate shifting possibly cause a global flood. I don't believe that it can. I don't think the laws of physics would allow that type of plate shifting, nor do I think the earth has the potential energy to cause it. Even if it could, I don't think the atmosphere, much less a boat of any size, could possibly survive the turbulence created by plate shifting of that magnitude.

  Venus appears to undergo periodic resurfacing caused by global, cataclysmic volcanic events. The resurfacing is probably a function of cooling and the lack of plate tectonics. Even with that level of deformation, the planet itself appears to remain stable in orbit, rotation, and tilt. How could a flood possibly cause the earth's axis to tilt? I don't think it can.

  Also, given the geologically instantaneous event and the depth of the water, would enough sediment be created to fill the basins of Wyoming? The depth of sediment there can be measured in miles, not feet. I think the speed at which the proposed global flood occurred would not generate the sediment volume required. A global flood would probably just resort existing sediment more than erode existing rock and a lot of the sediment would end up in the ocean as the water receded.

  Sheila

  "D. F. Siemens, Jr." <dfsiemensjr@juno.com> wrote:
    Sheila,
    I think you are not taking into account the broader requirements of a global flood less than 6000 years ago. It has to be something that tore up the primordial land and redeposited it in the strata now encountered. That the Flood only lasted a year is, from the standpoint of geological time, virtually nothing. But geological time is absolutely excluded from consideration by all who hold to a global flood. The deluge was, according to flood geology, catastrophic and cataclysmic. One thing possibly suggested as a model is the length of time it took for the atomic bombs to explode over Nagasaki and Hiroshima relative to the extended existence of the cities. But it seems inadequate. Even destruction times duration of the recent tsunami off the Indonesian coast seems relatively close to zero compared to the destruction required and yearlong duration of the Flood.

    A major problem which we have in analysis is focusing on a single aspect of a greater problem as if it were the crucial and major factor--tunnel vision. There are always ramifications galore.
    Dave

    On Fri, 22 Jul 2005 10:47:57 -0700 (PDT) Sheila Wilson <sheila-wilson@sbcglobal.net<mailto:sheila-wilson@sbcglobal.net>> writes:
      I understand your position but that wasn't my question. My question was, if it did occur, what would we see. Purely hypothetical, no debate on whether or not it happened.

      These questions came after reading Chris Sharpe's essay on the age of the universe and astromony. One significant point that he made was, if the universe was only 6000 years old, we would not see most the stars because they are too far away. The light didn't have time to get here. So what would the earth look like if a global flood did occur? I don't think we would see any geologic evidence of a global flood as described in Genesis. In geologic time, it was instantaneous. Of course, volcanoes are instantaneous and we can see lots of evidence of them. How deep of sediment layer would we expect?

      Any ideas?

      Sheila

  Sheila McGinty Wilson
  sheila-wilson@sbcglobal.net
Received on Sat Jul 23 05:39:13 2005