Colphax wrote:
One of the most interesting arguments against a biblical flood is simply that there isn't enough water on the earth to completely submerge all of the Earth's continental landmasses. The amount of water on the earth is essentially a constant value, so if there ain't enough to do it now, there wasn't enough to do it back then. I think it was some History Channel program about the Noah story that I saw it on.
Well... yes and no. The History Channel should be taken with a grain of salt. They aired
this crap as if it were a credible theory.
The statement isn't entirely accurate for a few reasons. (Perhaps I should say it's misleading, rather than that it isn't accurate). DE pointed out one of them already. The whole world doesn't have to actually flood when your concept of "the whole world" is limited to a region the size of Arizona or Nevada. Furthermore, at various times in Earth's history there has been more or less "land" to work with. This brings us back to the "yes" part. In order to show that, we have to do away with the notion that the Earth is only 6,000 years old. The idea that there has been enough water to flood the planet rules out Noah's Ark as described
in the Bible by the Cult of the Carpenter. (Since we're now trying to decide what a real religion is, apparently).
Volcanic activity produces two chief types of rock depending on how quickly it cools: basalt and granite. Granite "floats" and basalt "sinks." Bear in mind, we're talking about rocks, so basalt doesn't plummet to the bottom over the span of a minute or two. It has to work its way down through all of the granite. What is produced depends on (among other things) how quickly the lava cools, although I forget what conditions causes each to form. It's important to remember that volcanic activity is not limited to eruptions like Mt. St. Helens. There's a lot of volcanic activity occurring underground, which is the mark of a healthy planet. (Mars is considered a dead planet because its volcanic activity has stopped).
This gives our planet the structure we all know and love. When you get basalt piled up from volcanic activity, with granite stacked on top of it, you get an island. If you were to have a huge pile of basalt with granite stacked on top, say from a rift in the Earth's surface spewing magma into the ocean, you get continents. Now, we know that if we pile a bunch of dirt and rock up, we had to get it from somewhere - we're left with a big hole. Water tends to fill up holes, not cover hills.
Well, what if more of our volcanic activity was producing a different type of rock? The one that sank instead of floated. Plate movements regularly carry both granite and basalt down to the core, only now more basalt is forming compared to granite. Remember that basalt "sinks" while granite "floats." So what you have is the ground getting lower, while the ocean floor is getting higher. Where does all that water go? Your oceans aren't as deep anymore, but they cover more of the planet's surface. You've still got rocks sticking up out of the water, and there may even be more of them, but they aren't as big.
Now we need to think about the drifting of tectonic plates. Remember the notion of Pangaea? Well, plate tectonics suggests that Pangaea wasn't the first time all of the Earth's "land" was clumped together in one spot. In fact, it suggests that there is a regular cycle where supercontinents form and break up. This is even thought to have been essential to the emergence of life on the planet. During a supercontinent phase, more of the Earth's surface is covered with water because the land mass is pushing together and forming mountains. The increased surface area also increases water evaporation, and leads to increased cloud cover and rainfall which cooled down the planet. A complete cycle is supposed to take 300 million to 500 million years.
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