salt water fish

1. Even evolutionarily the delicacy of any particular species is a result of over-speciation into a particular environment. It has nothing to do with original populations or kinds.

2. Anytime 40 days and 40 nights of rain can mix the waters of the ocean, let me know.

 

1. In evolution the delicateness of any particular species is a result of a number of factors. Evolution has no concept of original kinds.

2. Anytime 40 days and 40 nights of rain can cover the continents, let me know.

-Neil

 

1. Should have put 'parent population' -- and the point still stands.

2. It wasn't the rain. Look at Genesis 7:11 and see what happened first...

 

(Helen: I admit I was nit-picking on point #1, I just wanted my reply to be symmetric WRT the original! )

On the second point my concern wasn't directly with whether 40 day ands nights could cover the continents. Obviously it could if one assumes enough rain. My point was: it's almost impossible to imagine a process which could flood the continents -- even much lower continents than we see today -- without seriously mixing the oceans and impairing their ability to support life. This is true regardless of whether it's fountains, rain, or any other natural process we can postulate.

-Neil

 

Hi Neil,

If the fountains of the deep were along the incipient continental plate lines and not just scattered higgledy piggledy, then we have areas where there would be massive catastrophic mixing (and death) and some rather large areas where things would be relatively calm.

 

How deep, on average were the oceans then and how tall were the highest mountains?

I know you think the earth was even flatter then than now, but here is where I am going. Let's say, for example, that the average depth of the oceans was one mile and the tallest mountain was one mile tall. You have the "fountains of the deep" opening up in specific locations and yet raising the level of the whole ocean by one mile. There would have been a tremendous flow of water from where it was being released to where it was not being released to keep the worldwide levels equal. There is the mixing and turbulence.

Some related questions. Water is incompressible, so what drove the release of the water? I see steam and compressed gasses (other than steam) as the obvious choice. (Similar to geysers today.) What was the temperature and pressure of the water? If the temperature of the water was equal to or greater than the boiling point at that pressure, what fraction of the water was converted to steam before release?

 

An analogy.

Fill your bathtub about 1/3 full. Let it sit a few days to let all of the currents die down. Add some dyd to the end away from the water faucet. Now fill the tub to about the 2/3 level and see how well the dye is mixed into the rest of the water. I would not expect it to be even but I would expect it to be MUCH different than before you started adding water again.

 

I can't do it all, and Barry is in Australia for a few weeks, but I think I can do a little here:

I doubt VERY seriously if there was anything NEAR mile-high mountains before the Flood. Slightly rolling terrain possibly -- but ALL the earth was watered by steam/mist/streams (see Genesis 2:5) and since Eden was the source of water for four rivers (Genesis 2:10), it was on a rise of ground at the least -- since rivers flow downhill. However if Eden were very high, only one river would have resulted, I think...

So, first of all, think small hills, not mountains.


I suggest you read Barry's essay here on the history of the earth, which answers your questions for the most part, I believe:
http://www.setterfield.org/earlyhist.html

About half the ocean water was outgassed at the time of the Flood.

What is now the Pacific would have been MUCH wider then, and the central aread of its plates would have had very little turbulence.

As far as the temperature of the water is concerned -- heating and compression would have led to the scalding, steaming massive explosions spoken about by the ancient Jews and other ancient cultures around the world -- all of whom, having been descended from Noah, would have had some memory of the Flood in their cultures.

 

Why? We have nearly SIX mile tall mountains today. Genesis speak of both "high hills" and "mountains." Genesis was written, presumably, by Moses and I would suppose that he new what a "mountain" was. Mt. Sinai is about 1.5 miles tall, I think. Mt Ararat, if we have the right one, is about three miles tall. So on what basis do you say that there were only rolling hills?

Yellowstone averages over 1.5 miles in elevation and the springs and geysers there have no trouble flowing.

I guess it would depend on the local topography. I really do not know. Any one who knows, if you look around today at flatter areas and hillier areas, which one is more likely to be broken into many streams?

Read it. Looking for specific information.

Not "high hills" and "mountains" as found in Genesis?

You still have a lot of water flowing from one area to another. I still think there would be significant mixing.

Ah, now you get to another point.

Let's say the oceans were as cold as possible, 32 F. Now let's say that the water from the fountains was under no pressure and was just at the boiling point, 212 F. You say the volumes are about equal so I can simply say (32 + 212)/2 = 122 F. So the average temperature of the oceans is now 122 F and all the fish are dead. (Not to mention the animals on the ark, but that is a different discussion.)

It gets much worse when you want to consider that the water may have actually been under some pressure and that steam is the most likely compressible gas to expand to drive the release of water. For example, take the very moderate pressure off 200 psig. ( a half mile of water is around 1000 psig pressure ) Water at the boiling point at 200 psig is now at a temperature of about 390 F. (Let's see (390 + 32) / 2 = 211 F. Water at 1000 psig boils at about 550 F!) Once you add in some amount of steam (I'm guessing 5-10% of the weight of the water would do it without going through the rigorous calculations and assuming that the expansion goes to atmospheric pressure, that is that the fountains of the deep were at the same elevation as the peak of the flood.) you have additional heat from the condensation and cooling of the steam. And without the water being at least at the boiling point, no steam to drive the water out. Water is not compressible, it CANNOT drive itself! Things sure were hot for those fishies. Literally boiling.

 

The water BURST out of the earth. That means into the air.

Where it cooled, condensed, and fell as torrents of what was probably warm rain.

Please take that cooling into account, OK?

Nor do I think Moses wrote Genesis. I think he was the editor and compiler. By Genesis 5:1, we are already reading that this is a written record. There is evidence that I am willing to consider seriously regarding the possibility that Genesis is a series of eyewitness accounts, starting with Adam's.

Thus the idea of 'high hills' and 'mountains' would be relative to the beholder. The first time my husband showed me Mt. Lofty near Adelaide, Australia, I started giggling: "THAT's a MOUNTAIN?" Now that he has seen the Sierras and the Rockies, he knows why I was giggling. Nevertheless, in Australia, it's a mountain...

 

How long was the water in the air?

 

oh help...

How high does Old Faithful have to go so that those watching don't get burned by the condensation (not just there but all over the park!)

In New Zealand there is a place called Rotorua. Bubbling mud pots -- that sort of thing. Natives live there. They dry their clothes on the rocks. But I don't think they tell their kids to go outside and play...

In other words, the atmosphere seems to cool the erupting waters and steams rather quickly.

 

I cannot take that into account. Not enough mass in the atmosphere to absorb the heat.

The mass of the atmosphere is about 5.3*10^18 kg and the mass of the oceans is about 1.4*10^21 kg. So even given that only half of the water was outgassed at the time, the mass of the water still would have been about 130 times the mass of the atmosphere. The heat capacity of water is also about 4 times that of air. This means that after the first tiny fraction of the water was released into the air that the air would have been heated to temperature of the water.

Yippee! Now we have both the oceans and the atmosphere at the boiling point of water. There just is not anywhere near enough mass in the atmosphere to absorb the heat. Unless of course you want to speculate that the pre-flood atmosphere was at a pressure of about, say, 40000 psi.

 

Helen; the incidents you mention require a lot less water then what you are speculating (even if I take your claims at face value). It's a lot easier to cool a little water then the amount you are suggesting.

 

When hot or superheated water goes into the air it primarily cools by giving off latent heat in the vapor that boils away. That is, the vapor gains most of the heat the water loses by changing state from a solid to a gas (a smaller amount of heat is lost to the air directly). This is a fast process when the air is dry, since it takes a lot of energy to change liquid water to water vapor.

Changing from a gas into a solid requires the same amount of heat be released to change state. When the water vapor condenses back into liquid water, it releases that heat back into the air. This heat may do further "work" within the atmosphere, but the final sink of the heat is longwave energy radiated into space.

(This has been a public service announcement from your local climatologist ).

-Neil

p.s. Sorry UTEOTW, I didn't mean to stomp on your explanation; our posts crossed in the aether.

 

Neil brings up a good point.

There will be some cooling due to latent heat effects in addition to the sensible heat.

It does not help the situation any because once the humidity hits 100%, there is no more cooling due to evaporation. At, say 100 F, the atmosphere can hold about 6% of its mass as water vapor*. Insignificant when you are talking about such large differences in mass.

Interestingly enough, at 212 F, the atmosphere can be 100% water vapor (If you get rid of all the other gasses. Just saying that at 212 F it can be 100% water vapor at 14.7 psia). Makes it hard to breathe. And you are still so different in mass that sensible heat effects still dominate.

But this may pose another interesting issue. As the atmosphere heats up a larger fraction of the atmosphere becomes water vapor making it difficult if not impossible to get adequate oxygen. Now you have atmospheric pressure changes complicating things, too.

Of course, the hot water, besides being bad all by itself for the fish, lowers the solubility of oxygen in the water causing even more fish problems.

*Partial pressure of water @ 100F = 0.95 psi. .95 psi / 14.7 psi = 6.5%

 

Barry's in Australia for a few weeks. You are into his territory now, with the math etc. I'll ask him to take a look at this thread when I talk to him in the morning.

 

One more thing about Neil's comments. Radiating the energy into space.

Just making a quick pass, I would estimate that if the atmosphere were heated to the boiling point of water that the energy radiated into space would roughly double.

(370 K / 300 K)^4 = 2.3

Taking the mass of water released, multiplying by the enthalpy change in water from 212 F to 100 F, and dividing back out by the estimated radiant heat transfer at 212 F (actually the amount more than normal since the typical amount is needed to radiate the daily energy from the sun back into space), you get about 36 years to radiate enough heat to space to get the earth's temperature back down to 100 F from 212 F. It is a bad calculation because once you consider the unsteady state heat transfer, the amount of heat radiating from the earth at a given time goes down as the temperature goes down so it really takes quite a bit longer.

Of course this also ignores changes such as the insulating effect of clouds and the tendency of clouds to reflect solar radiation back into space. (The former hurts and the latter helps in cooling.)