Where did all the water go?
by Tas Walker
Photo stock.xchng
According to the Bible, water covered the whole world during Noah’s Flood.
Have you ever wondered where it has all gone?
Even if the glaciers and ice caps melted, the oceans would only rise some 70 m (230
ft), yet Mt Everest rises 8,848m (29,029 ft) above sea level.
It may surprise you to learn that we don’t need any more water to cover the
earth. There is already enough.
Photo Mountain High Maps® <www.digiwis.com.>
The reason water doesn’t envelop the globe now is that the earth’s surface
is uneven. The ocean basins sit low and the continents sit high. Some mountains
are especially high and some ocean trenches are very deep, but these extremes do
not account for a large percentage of the earth’s surface (see graph).
If the earth’s surface were even, then there is enough water in the oceans
to cover the globe to a depth of about 3 km.
This suggests that, during the Flood, the ocean floor moved vertically relative
to the continents, something mentioned in the Bible (Psalm 104:8 NASB).
In the first half, the pre-Flood ocean basins rose and the pre-Flood continents
eroded down until water covered everything.
That does not mean the earth’s surface would have to be completely even. The
ocean basins would have only had to rise enough for the water to cover
everything.
Then, in the second half of the Flood, other parts of the earth’s crust sank.
The water flowed off our continents into new ocean basins. Movement of the earth’s
crust at this time also pushed up new mountain ranges, including the one that is
home to Mt Everest.1
So where did all the water go? It is in the ocean.
The hypsographic (Gk. hypsos=height) chart shows the amount of the earth’s
surface at (or higher than) various elevations.1 It illustrates that if the ocean
basins were pushed up 5 km and the mountains shaved off, water would cover the entire
earth. Such tectonic movements seem huge to us, but compared with the radius of
the earth, (6,378 km), the movement is tiny, less than 0.1%.
- Ocean floor bathymetry, <www.waterencyclopedia.com/Oc-
Po/Ocean-Floor-Bathymetry.html>,
24 May 2006.
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Reference
- Oard, M.J.,
The mountains rose, Journal of Creation 16(3):40–43,
2002.
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