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Too much heat in Noah’s Flood?
Published: 25 July 2020 (GMT+10)
Did the physical mechanisms that operated during the Flood generate too much heat for Noah and the Ark to survive? Joseph R. from the United States writes:
I was debating someone about the Noah’s Ark and was asked a question that I could not find an answer for it on your website. An argument they had against the Flood was that marine animals could not have survived the Flood waters because they say that the energy created during such event would generate 3.65 octillion calories which would increase the water temperature to 2700 C. They received this information from the National Center of Science Education. I am just wondering if you have a good answer for that or what they are getting wrong.
CMI’s Shaun Doyle responds:
Whether that particular figure is right or not, there is most likely a severe heat budget issue for any purely natural explanation of what happened during the Flood.1 As such, there is no simple scientific answer to this issue. Indeed, there may not be one. However, this need not be problematic. Why? First, the biblical evidence casts considerable doubt on any notion that Noah’s Flood was a purely natural event.
Think, for instance, of the Exodus. Deuteronomy 4:32–36 says this concerning it:
For ask now of the days that are past, which were before you, since the day that God created man on the earth, and ask from one end of heaven to the other, whether such a great thing as this has ever happened or was ever heard of. Did any people ever hear the voice of a god speaking out of the midst of the fire, as you have heard, and still live? Or has any god ever attempted to go and take a nation for himself from the midst of another nation, by trials, by signs, by wonders, and by war, by a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, and by great deeds of terror, all of which the Lord your God did for you in Egypt before your eyes? To you it was shown, that you might know that the Lord is God; there is no other besides him.
Clearly the plagues and the parting of the Red Sea were not ordinary events, but involved supernatural activity on God’s part to some extent. Can we model this solely with science? Unlikely (The Red Sea Crossing: can secular science model miracles?). Now, consider also what God said to Noah after the Flood in Genesis 8:21–22:
Neither will I ever again strike down every living creature as I have done. While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease.
That suggests that some of these things, e.g. the seasons, may have been disrupted during the Flood. This sounds very similar to the sort of events surrounding the Exodus. The uniqueness of the Flood event, and the fact that God was behind it, shows that there is likely some supernatural activity embedded in the cause-effect narrative of the Flood (The Flood—a designed catastrophe?). But again, how do we model such an event solely with science? It seems unlikely.
Second, we seem to have some positive empirical evidence in the rock record that is difficult to explain naturalistically. On accelerated nuclear decay, consider this summary presentation of the primary evidence from Snelling:
So do we have physical evidence that radioactive decay has actually occurred? Yes, there are several evidences of this:
- The presence of daughter isotopes such as lead and helium present with the parent isotopes of uranium in the right proportions to have been derived by radioactive decay;
- The observable physical scars left by the alpha (α)-particles during radioactive decay as radiohalos; and
- The observable physical scars left by the nuclear decay of uranium atoms as they split or fission, which are known as fission tracks.2
However, Snelling also lists four features of radioisotopic systems that show a telling discontinuity between the radiometric ‘ages’ and the real age of the rocks:
- Young (6,000 years) helium diffusion ages of zircons in a granite that yield zircon uranium-lead “ages” of 1,500 million years;
- The concurrent formation of ubiquitous uranium and polonium radiohalos found together in biotite mica flakes in many granites around the world;
- The resetting of the uranium-lead radioisotope system by the intense heat generated by radioactive decay only within zircons within volcanic ash that were otherwise relatively unheated; and
- The consistent presence of measurable radiocarbon yielding young (<60,000 years) “ages” in coal and diamonds, that are supposed to be millions and billions of years old, respectively, based on radioisotope “dating”.3
The fact of millions of years’ worth of nuclear decay measured by today’s rates and the massive, systematic age discrepancies with other measurements of the same systems means that the discrepancy is best explained by one or more accelerated nuclear decay events. (For more information, please see Is there any evidence that the radioactive decay rate might not have been constant? and What is the current creationist thinking on radiohalos (formerly called ‘pleochroic halos’)?, and our resources Thousands … not Billions and RATE Vol. II.) Nonetheless, since the earth hasn’t been sterilized by the heat that would inevitably be produced by such accelerated nuclear decay, it appears we have a systematic pattern of ‘anomalous’ empirical traces in the rocks that are near impossible to explain except by intelligent agency controlling these processes for some high-energy ends. Creation Week and the Flood are the only candidate events into which this sort of data can legitimately fit. This would imply that if an accelerated nuclear decay event was associated with the Flood mechanism, then it was likely intelligently controlled by God to produce the intended effects. Creation researcher Dr Russell Humphreys has even suggested a means by which this sort of heat budget issue may have been managed by God.4
Notice the foundational role the Bible plays in such a response (Biblical history and the role of science). This is crucial. The heat budget issue is a scientific issue, but science can’t be the final determinant of what we consider a plausible account of the cause-effect narrative of the Flood. The Bible has to be. And when it speaks of miracles, we have to take that into account. Scientific considerations matter, of course. There are many facets of the Flood that likely are the result of natural cause and effect. But that means we have a complex question to answer: how do we explain the causal history of these confluence of physical traces from the Flood in a consistent, compelling, and biblically faithful way? See Historical science and miracles for more on the philosophical approach undergirding this analysis (as well as Modern science in creationist thinking and Flood models and biblical realism).
Kind regards,
Shaun Doyle
Creation Ministries International
Related Articles
Further Reading
References and notes
- Worraker, W.J., Heat problems associated with Genesis Flood models—Part 1: Introduction and thermal boundary conditions, Answers Research Journal 11:171–191, 2018; Heat problems associated with Genesis Flood models—Part 2. Secondary temperature indicators, Answers Research Journal 12:211–254, 2019. Return to text.
- Snelling, A.A., The Earth’s Catastrophic Past, Vol II, ICR, Dallas, TX, pp. 836–837, 2009. Return to text.
- Snelling, ref. 2, p. 846. Return to text.
- Humphreys, D.R., New mechanism for accelerated removal of excess radiogenic heat; in: Whitmore, J.H. (ed.), Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Creationism, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: Creation Science Fellowship, pp. 731–739, 2018; creationicc.org. Return to text.
Readers’ comments
The 1st thing a creationist should do is question the data from the NCSE (National Center for Spamming Evolution) and search the real numbers. They are known for pushing anything they can think up to discredit creation - not for honesty.
I'm no expert in geology or floods but it seems to me that there are better ways to answer the question than "God did it" -even if he did intervene supernaturally. We don't KNOW that he did.
The water temp would have reached 2700 C? That's strange as water boils at 100 C and would have totally evaporated long before it was anywhere near that.
- Is there not reason to think the waters from fountains within the earth would have been extremely cold - as they are at great depths? Water in the aphotic, zone (>1,000m) would have no light at all. And the sun, hidden by heavy cloud coverage for at least 40 days would have raised the aphotic zone significantly - more cooling.
- Would not the gradual water coverage -not instantaneous- hinder such temp increases, given the constant input of lower near or below 0 C waters?
- Salinity, density, pressure and Ph also affect water temperature.
- ...
In other words, there are multiple factors to consider and the NCSE is not likely to have taken all variables into consideration.
I think CMI scientists should reevaluate this question and research more scientific answers, w/o removing the possibility of divine intervention.
Skeptics will instantly point out all "God did it" answers.
Just trying to help the creationist cause
And is the point of all this to provide an answer that will convince hardened skeptics like those at NCSE? No. The point is to get people to think biblically about these issues. Indeed, that's the main point of creation research into the Flood. Ultimately, it's not about showing that our model can compete on the 'scientific' turf of the dedicated naturalist. Rather, we're trying to find out what really happened in the Flood. To do that, we try to characterize the cause-effect mechanics of the Flood in a way that assumes the Bible is true and explain the physical traces as we find them. And this is the case whether the bast explanation is natural, supernatural, or a mix of the two.
But yes, creation researchers still have a lot of work to do, and there are many uniformitarian assumptions left to question. Still, the sheer magnitude of some of these issues (especially accelerated nuclear decay, but even the cooling of the oceanic lithosphere) makes it clear that these issues will not be easily resolved naturalistically, if at all.
However, when we're looking at the main heat issue; i.e. accelerated nuclear decay during the Flood; the problem isn't likely to be solved by appealing to the Earth's interior as a heat sink. Why? Much granitic continental crust is most likely creation rock. See these exchanges between Dr John Baumgardner and Don Stenberg: Could most of the earth’s U, Th, and K have been in the mantle prior to the Flood? and Do radioisotope methods yield trustworthy relative ages for the earth’s rocks? I think Baumgardner points out some good reasons to think that the continental crust is Creation Week rock, and did not form during the Flood. But if that is the case, then the mantle can't serve as a sink for the heat of accelerated decay, since the decay relevant to the heating issue would be confined to the crust.
1. Talk of accelerated nuclear decay has not resolved any conclusive nor likely mechanism yet so it is not possible to speculate on heat produced or even if that happened.
2. Catastrophic plate tectonics (Baumgardner's theory) places mantle rock in contact with seawater which at casual assessment seems like it will create a lot of heat in the ocean however the specific heat of water is 4200 J/kg while that of mantle rock is around 1300 J/kg which means that it takes 4 times the heat in the mantle to bring the same volume of seawater to the same temperature (its not quite like that as the water does not start at absolute zero but this should prompt some thought).
3. Further, thermal conductivity of the mantle, and cooling crust, will greatly limit diffusion of heat into the seawater above such that a heat gradient in the oceanic crust rapidly stabilizes, reduces and spreads deeper after initial rapid plate tectonics. This heat gradient still exists today and it would be foolish to assume it is now constant. Indeed investigation into decay of the heat gradient over time would be a great 'creationist' research project. Thermal conductivity of rock is 2-7 w/(m.K) so 5000 to 20000 watts is needed to cool the first metre of mantle (2500 deg) to ocean temperature for each square metre of ocean - ie. equivalent of a typical 2400Watt electric jug operating for 2 to 7 seconds. Think of how much effect and electric jug has in just 7 seconds, then how effective is 1m of rock as insulation.
4. At the same time as heat transfer is high after the flood, atmospheric reflectance of solar radiation is increased by more cloud cover and, in time, ice cap caused by increased precipitation around poles.
Is it logical to assume that there just wasn't that much water changing hands in a fashion what would have heated things up to above boiling?
This is clearly not the last word on the question, but creation research still has a ways to go in explaining these sorts of heat issues. And this is true whether we adopt CPT or some other Flood model, since CPT is the most elucidated model there is at present.
do you think that the Heat Problem of the Flood Models could be solved naturally if we hypothesize that the rain in the first 40 days as mentioned in Genesis 7:17 was not just liquid water but snow, hail or ice?
This should decrease the temperature of the energy release from the water.
Is such a consideration helpful?
God bless you!
Has the RATE team found that their evidence for accelerated nuclear decay is global, not merely localized?
Moreover, the radiohalo evidence for hundreds of millions of years worth of radioisotope decay at today's rates is found in Flood rocks from all over the world; from as disparate locations as Norway, the U.S., and Australia. See DeYoung, D., Thousands ... Not Billions, Master Books, Green Forest, AR, p. 90, 2005.
10 km), with thick sediment layers on the continental shelves. After all, in ceramics, we use furnaces that are heated to over 1000 C to quickly transform wet, soft clay into hard objects. And this energy is absorbed by the clays. I do not imagine that the heat has been 1000 C or more everywhere, but has propagated through the layers of sediments, at about 200-350 C, and thus been absorbed / spent on solidification of huge amounts of sediments on a global scale.
—
So do we have a calculation - even if approximate - as to how much energy the total volume of wet/muddy sediments produced by the Flood would be able to absorb?
As should be clear from this quote, we're talking about heating solid granite, not merely sediments, well beyond ceramic limits. In fact, we're talking about sufficient heat to melt it all several times over, or even enough to vaporize it all. Natural mechanisms of heat transfer do not seem capable of handling this level of heating confined to to the crust.
I guess I just don't agree that the continents have moved appreciably since our very recent creation, nor do I see the possibility of great heat generation in an event which was mostly about masses of cold water, not so much about tectonics.
For me it boils down to (pardon the pun) whether God's knowledge of science is on man's level, which of course it isn't, it is way above and beyond, like Isaiah says, "My thoughts are higher than your thoughts" (paraphrase). In another place it is written; "Trust in the Lord, and lean not on your own understanding."
For me that is where the answer lies; so many places in the bible imply human understanding is just not good enough compared to God's, and we can find it easy to forget that in a scientific age. The real germane question is a logical one which is this; "Is the God that created all things, including the laws of thermodynamics and all physical forces, NOT going to be capable of dissipating heat so that the animals HE CREATED don't get cooked?"
The question is loaded but rightly so, for it would be an ABSURD contradiction to suppose the one with the wisdom to create the finely balanced science of earth's atmosphere would be foxed by His own flood.
Given the progress of creation cosmologies over the last two decades, I am loathe to surrender any event to the bin on insollubility.
1) ~95%+ of the heat was absorbed by raising the temperature of the core and mantle to its present temperature from an initial cool state and
2) The rest was removed from the surface of the earth by the intense global rainfall - steam condensing at very high altitudes would fall as rain at ~30 C cooling off the ocean surface where Noah’s ark was. Just because some parts of the earth’s crust, mantle, and deep ocean were very hot doesn’t mean everywhere was - especially the ocean surface.
The Ancients called the Antediluvian Age both (a) the Golden Age and (b) the Age of Kronos (Saturn), and they associated its end with the dismemberment of Saturn, which they considered the preeminent god (planet) at the time. A well-known catastrophist has suggested that Saturn might have become a nova and exploded, thereby (a) ejecting pieces throughout the Solar System and (b) causing “the light of seven days” to which Isaiah referred (Isaiah 30:26).
If Saturn broke into pieces, and God used one of them in the form of a body of ice or a cloud of ice-chunks to precipitate the moisture in Earth’s vapor canopy, would heat have been a major factor in the resulting flood unless God suppressed it supernaturally?
This is logically absurd as a blanket starting point.
However one imagines uranium, for example, was first formed, why would anyone think that a portion of daughter element wasn’t also formed at the same time from essentially the same process?
And if the daughter element was also formed at the same time, then how could anyone pretend that a dating model could possibly be built from the ratio of parent / daughter pairs?
(YEC) Creationists have the same issue.
Meaning we have no obligation to explain radio active decay that yields aledged long ages - or high energies, because it is impossible to know the initial conditions, let alone possible decay accelerations as mentioned in the article.
And besides all that, is it not reasonable to imagine that the atmosphere could have “decompressed” somewhat during the Flood?
Possible mechanisms for this being asteroid bombardment, volcanic spewing, or an axial wobble of the planet?
And if so, then such decompression (i.e. sudden loss of atmospheric mass) would also have a quick cooling effect.
I’m certainly not against the idea that energy levels could have been directly managed by the Lord for the preservation of His creation, but I do think that reconstructing the physics is much more complicated than theoretical models can accommodate.
To the skeptic: you can’t even explain the existence of radioactive elements, so you sure can’t get hung up on a problem you have no idea even really exists or not.
On the negative side - is the possible temperatures of the falling water for 40 days.
The upper atmosphere is filled with super-cooled water that needs a particle to form droplets on - the height of that moisture's origin and the temperature at the top of the atmosphere (-50 degrees F?) is another possible way to cool things down . . . I think ?
I seems to me this could be a Hailstorm/Thunderstorm on steroids - and be perfectly in keeping with GOD's control of nature . . .
Lots of questions. I’m merely thinking out loud here. Pondering possibilities. Its actually quite an interesting question the questioner posted. Whether the answer lies in the supernatural or in a better understanding of subatomic forces, may be an important research-area for YECs.
God bless you.
Can genetic variability be explained by the Toba eruption instead of Noah's flood? I think it is an objection that is around.
Moreover, the heat issues of hydroplate theory arise not merely in terms of generating too much heat, but also in terms of the mechanisms that are posited for the origin of radioactive elements in the earth's crust not being sufficient to generate them.
But here's the difficulty at present: their objections to hydroplate theory have gone unanswered in forums designed to deal with these disagreements (e.g. The Flood Science Review: injesusnameproductions.org/flood-science-review) and the peer-reviewed creationist literature (of which there are several venues run by different groups: Journal of Creation, Creation Research Society Quarterly, Answers Research Journal, as well as the International Conference on Creationism). I'm not saying definitively that there are no answers to these objections; I clearly can't say that, given the current state of play. But we really need substantive responses to these issues easily accessible to the broader creation research community for the debate to move forward, as Oard pointed out in his Analysis of Walt Brown’s Flood model.
Perhaps the survival of the fish is strictly miraculous, perhaps not. Just off the top of my head perhaps some explanations could be:
1) better genes,perhaps meaning better heat resistance
2) cooler spots in the ocean(s) , there is a lot of water after all
3) the lack of knowledge as to all the processes in play during a global flood
4) nature's knack for being resilient
5) science’s tendency to have to readjust
There is a lot of marine life in the fossil record, perhaps the cause of some of their death was heat, but I have a hard time believing we could scientifically, and positively kill All of them via mathematical pondering of a one off event thousands of years ago.
Regarding CPT, I think many lay creationists like it because of the impressive computer modelling Dr Baumgardner has done over the last few decades to show how the crust can under certain circumstances undergo rapid subduction. However, this is not why he or most creation geologists believe some form of CPT must form at least part of a cogent Flood model. It has to do with things like the fit of the continents, heat and magnetic patterns in the oceanic crust as one moves away from esp. the mid-Atlantic ridge, geochemical and fossil matches across the Atlantic, as well as GPS data that seems to confirm the idea that there are coherent lithospheric plates that move. Combine this with the seismographic evidence that there are 'cold slabs' of lithosphere that extend through the mantle right down to the mantle-core boundary, and we have evidence that suggests coherent lithospheric plates have moved thousands of kilometres rapidly in the recent past. Even if CPT is only a part of a full-orbed Flood model, that doesn't undercut this evidence for coherent lithospheric plates having moved thousands of kilometres rapidly in the recent past. See Empirical data support seafloor spreading and catastrophic plate tectonics for more information.
Now, there are some creation geologists who think that much of what I've cited as 'data' for CPT is actually 'uniformitarian interpretation'. This is a disagreement that has been in the creationist literature for a couple of decades, now (see Forum on catastrophic plate tectonics). However, I personally think this card gets overplayed, since some cases I've put forward (such as magnetic patterns, fossil and geochemical signatures, heat profiles, the physical fit of continents, and a huge 'baseball seam' along the ocean floor) are simply observational realities, and even where interpretation is involved (e.g. the seismographic data) the interpretation offered is based on meaningful data, and it doesn't conflict with Scripture. This data needs to be explained, and CPT seems to offer a coherent and compelling explanation for it. At the very least, it looks like any Flood model that excludes any notion of CPT (which is different from a Flood model that makes CPT only a part of the model) needs to explain all these features better than CPT does. To my understanding, none at present do. That doesn't make CPT true, but it makes it the most actionable framework for explaining the data within biblical constraints at present. I think that's a good thing, since if we have such a framework, we have something to work with, tweak, and maybe even overhaul as needed. It we just go back to pre-theoretical data collection 'within biblical observational assumptions', I think that ignores too much of what has been achieved in the last couple of centuries in terms of descriptive geology.
Otherwise I think there must be some mistakes in the NCSE calculations. I'd investigate that before assuming it has to be entirely miraculous/supernatural intervention. Usually these organizations misrepresent the figures; why accept them on face value? Can someone from CMI figure out what the actual heat generated from the Flood would be (as it's described in Scripture, not some Atheistic scientist's imagination)?
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