Re: [asa] yec claim (flood and oil)

> The solid-solid bond of ice to rock is very strong at low temperatures. This is probably something that can't be calculated from first principles, but it could be measured. The only way (apart from mechanical) to loosen that bond would be to raise the temperature above freezing at the interface. The only way to do that with water would be to somehow inject it at the interface in a way that wouldn't freeze the injected water. Ordinary flooding would affect only the outer edges and surfaces of the ice mass and thus leave most of the ice cap intact. Buoyancy forces would take effect only after water could seep in under the ice. Hence it would take a long time to melt the ice cap and break it free of the underlying rock. How long would depend on the temperature and total mass of the ice. Without conducting experiments I can only guess; but my gut says a lot longer than one year. We're not talking car windshields here.
>
> An excerpt from the Web version of Encyclopedia Britannica on icebergs states:
>
> "...Arctic ice islands and giant Antarctic bergs last as long as 10 years at high latitude. Most icebergs from western Greenland melt within two years of calving from the parent glacier.
> "Once an Arctic Ocean iceberg has been calved and moves out to the open sea, it usually transits Baffin Bay in from three months to two years, during which time it undergoes some disintegration through melting and calving of smaller chunks of ice from its perimeter. This results in a decrease in mass of about 90 percent by the time it reaches the coast of Newfoundland and the Grand Banks in the North Atlantic. When the iceberg enters the region of the Grand Banks, where the warm waters of the Gulf Stream meet the colder waters of the Labrador Current, it has only a few days of life remaining."
>
> So if icebergs can last several years floating in cool seawater, it would likely take many times several years for a worldwide flood to melt the entire icecap. That, of course, is assuming God is not up there (or down there) with a blowtorch to free up more water for his flood.
>
> Don
>

If a global flood didn't float the ice caps, I would think that it would
have left some sort of detectible discontinuity in the annual layers that
would enable the flood date to be calculated.

Gordon Brown (ASA member)

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Received on Wed Dec 5 13:00:18 2007