As I recall, "the society" at one time taught the flood waters of Noah's day came from an immense canopy of water, which formed sometime during creation and hovered above the earth until it all broke loose in the flood. O.K., cool. But does anyone know of an explanation of where it all went afterwards? For water to cover the highest peaks, allowing for the possibility those peaks weren't quite a high as they are today and even allowing for some water displacement by those peaks, a little quick math will reveal it would have taken at least a few hundred million cubic miles of water to cover them. Does anyone know if a plausible explanation has ever been given for what happened to all that water? (Plausible, meaning something beyond "Jehovah can do anything!")
WHERE DID ALL THAT WATER GO?
by MYOHNSEPH 70 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
-
-
Fe2O3Girl
Polar ice.
The water canopy created a global temperate climate, when it fell the polar regions formed.
I don't know if that is an official WT teaching, but it is what I understood as a dub growing up.
I don't know if the volume of water in the icecaps would account for enough water to cover all mountains on the entire surface of the earth.......
-
AlanF
They still officially teach all that nonsense, but these days say almost nothing about it. Critics have clobbered their silly ideas so badly that not even the Writing Dept. boobs can fail to understand the problems. But they can't directly abandon the old notions because their only alternative is to admit that their teachings about Genesis "science" have been 99% nonsense for their entire history. Hard thing for "divinely directed", anointed, faithful and discreet slaves to admit, eh?
The official explanation of where it all went afterward is that it's now in the ocean. The idea is that pre-flood, the earth's surface, including seabeds, was much flatter than it is now. If the earth were a perfect sphere, seawater would cover it to about 8,000 feet, so in this they feel justified in making their claim. Unfortunately, this idea means that ALL of the earth's high mountainous regions had to form after the Flood, within the last 4,300 years. This is rank nonsense. The big island of Hawaii reaches about 30,000 feet (9,100 meters) about the sea floor. There is no way this big a mountain formed in such a short time. And think of the Himalayas, Andes, Rockies and other ranges. Just popped up and eroded to their present state in four millennia? No way!
For an in-depth look at these issues, see my essay "The Flood" here: http://www.geocities.com/osarsif/index2.htm
AlanF
-
Truth2Me
I remember reading and or hearing from a mainstream Christian source that a possible contributing factor to the vast amounts of water during the flood of Noah's day could have been from oceanic plate movements in addition to the water canopy concept. There are huge oceanic pits that go down for over a mile deep where the techtonic plates meet in some places....one theory was that if the plates moved closer together, causing the ocean pits to close, the water contained therein would have been forced upward, causing the sea to rise......in stands to reason that the opposite would also be true, that if the plates moved apart, and a ocean pit was created, the water level would fall if the pit was over a mile deep.
Unfortunately I came across that info a long time ago, I don't recall the source, but I've found sites online about creation and the flood etc, so more info is out there.
-
AlanF
Truth2Me, it is evident from your description that you have no knowledge of plate tectonics or of the actual seafloor profile. It is difficult to try convey to you all of the information necessary to help you understand such things, in one post, but I'll give a summary.
The earth's surface is comprised of a dozen or more rigid "plates" that are somewhat like a cracked eggshell. Because of convection currents in the earth's mantle deep below, the plates are dragged in various directions. Some plates, such as the Pacific Plate, are nearly all under ocean water. Some, such as the North American Plate, have a continent as part of their structure. The continents are dragged along as the plates move. Plates move at roughly the rate your fingernails grow, from about 1 to 10 centimeters a year. Thus it has taken about 150 million years for the North American Plate to reach its present separation from the European Plate.
How is it that rigid plates comprised of rock can move? They can slide laterally past each other. Where two plates are moving towards one another, one dives under the other and is subducted back into the mantle. At mid-ocean ridges, plates are continuously created by upwelling magma that solidifies as the two plates move apart.
A particularly interesting example of a plate collision is where the Indian Plate is colliding with the Asian Plate. The former is sliding underneath the latter and pushing up the Himalayas. A good topographical map of this areas shows how the Indian Plate has also pushed aside vast areas of land to the west in Persia, and to the east in China and southeast Asia. Severe earthquakes occur regularly in these mountains, but not in the rigid plate interior of India.
Earthquakes occur at plate margins, such as all along the "ring of fire" that rings the entire Pacific Ocean. They also occur with less intensity at mid-ocean ridges and where plates are slipping past one another. Subducting plates create deep valleys called trenches where they dive under other plates, and volcanoes appear a few hundred miles on the lee side of one of these valleys.
A good example of a deep ocean valley is the Marianas Trench in the Pacific near the Phillipine Islands. It's some 37,000 feet deep. A good example of the "ring of fire" is the series of volcanoes that begins near the southern tip of South America and comprises the Andes Mountains, continues north through Central America, then along the west coast of North America to Alaska, then bends southward through the volcanoes of the Aleutian Islands, then to the Kamchatka Peninsula, Japan, the Phillipines and Indonesia. All along this route are deep trenches a few hundred miles seaward of the coast.
Most of the deep ocean floor is between 10,000 and 15,000 feet deep. It's shallower along mid-ocean ridges, and of course it's a lot deeper in the trenches. Note that the trenches are deep, long and narrow, so they contain very little extra water compared to the amount in the rest of the ocean.
Given the above, I can comment on your statements:
: I remember reading and or hearing from a mainstream Christian source that a possible contributing factor to the vast amounts of water during the flood of Noah's day could have been from oceanic plate movements in addition to the water canopy concept.
This could occur only if the Watchtower concept of much shallower oceans before the Flood were true. But there is no evidence in favor of this, and great against it. It would mean that the science of Plate Tectonics is nonsense, but there is simply too much evidence in favor of it. Do you honestly think that ALL of the earth's high mountains, including Hawaii, formed in the last few millennia?
: There are huge oceanic pits that go down for over a mile deep where the techtonic plates meet in some places....
Obviously you're referring to the trenches, but given your description below it is clear that you don't understand their physical structure.
: one theory was that if the plates moved closer together, causing the ocean pits to close, the water contained therein would have been forced upward, causing the sea to rise......in stands to reason that the opposite would also be true, that if the plates moved apart, and a ocean pit was created, the water level would fall if the pit was over a mile deep.
The trenches contain tiny volumes of water compared to the volume of the rest of the oceans. Trenches do not open and close. They gradually form, and they gradually disappear, over time scales of tens of millions of years. Obviously this has no relation to a "Noah's Flood" scenario.
: Unfortunately I came across that info a long time ago, I don't recall the source, but I've found sites online about creation and the flood etc, so more info is out there.
Various young-earth creationists all have their ideas on these things. I have yet to see any that were not at least as nonsensical as JW notions. All of them contradict observational data, and often basic physics. All are based, not on science, but on a straw-grasping desire to hang on to faith in the Bible story of Noah and the Flood.
AlanF
-
OUTLAW
Hey AlanF,in many cultures there are stories of a great flood.Up here in the Great White North our first nations people(native indians) even have a story about a great flood.With so many stories like that I tend to think there was a great flood.Not a noahs ark flood that covered the whole earth,but a flood that did affect this planet.What Are your thoughts on this?...OUTLAW
-
Mulan
Alan, thanks for that link. I bookmarked it. You are quite a prolific writer, aren't you? I read several and they are great.
-
freedom96
What about the relics of ocean creatures found in places that are no where near the ocean? Also, there have been reports by mountain climbers of wood on or near Mt. Ararat (however it is spelled) that seems consistent with the ark.
As far as the earths surface, who really knows what would have happened if you had that much water come suddenly. Who really knows?
-
AlanF
Hi Outlaw,
It's true that there are many flood legends. However, many cultures have none. I think that there was some sort of catastrophic flooding in the Middle East a few thousand years ago that wiped out, or at least, drastically affected, the civilizations there. Their descendants told stories which became the Epic of Gilgamesh, or something similar, by the time the Sumerians controlled Mesopotamia. The story was so compelling that it migrated throughout the world.
The fact that a story has spread widely does not necessarily mean that it came along with the original inhabitants of a region. In any number of ways a good story can be picked up and spread, and within decades its origins become lost. In the link I posted I give several examples of this which posed a puzzle for anthropologists until they figured out where the story came from. Amazingly, withing a few decades of acquiring a story, people had incorporated it into their creation myths.
The jury is still out on just what event, or events, resulted in the Noah story. Mesopotamia is subject to severe floods from time to time, and it's possible that a number of these floods occurring over several thousand years were conflated into one primordial story. Or one especially bad flood might have done it. There's pretty good evidence that the Black Sea was a freshwater lake until about 7,500 years ago, and then the Mediterranean Sea broke through the narrow channel now called the Bosporus, on which Istanbul now sits. Within a year or so the lake level rose 500 feet and flooded thousands of square miles of prime lakefront habitat, forcing people to go elsewhere. It's possible that this catastrophe and resulting migration gradually became the Noah story. Other possibilities exist.
Hi Mulan,
I wrote a lot of those essays between about 1992 and 1996, so there was plenty of time. [:-)]
Hi freedom96,
: What about the relics of ocean creatures found in places that are no where near the ocean?
You mean like fossils of sea creatures found in sedimentary rock? Over the past few hundred million years many areas that are now mountainous were shallow sea beds near continental margins. They accumulated sediments washed out by rivers and many creatures were buried. Sometimes the seafloor sunk down a lot further and accumulated many miles of sediments. Later these areas were uplifted by tectonic forces and became mountainous regions. Today, geologists have found that the first part of this process is occurring in the Mississippi Valley. Basement rocks are covered by up to twelve miles of sediments near the mouth of the river. The same goes for parts of the Gulf of Mexico in that area. The earth's crust is dynamic on geologic times scales. But surely you knew some of these things.
: Also, there have been reports by mountain climbers of wood on or near Mt. Ararat (however it is spelled) that seems consistent with the ark.
You really don't want to go there with me; I've researched this stuff thoroughly. The wood that was not a hoax (there have been several) was brought back in the 1950s by a man named Navarra. It turned out to be about 1,200-1,400 years old. Around 1000 A.D. (historical records confirm this) a monastery was built high on the flank of Mt. Ararat. It was destroyed in a huge eruption/earthquake in the 1850s or so. There has been plenty of time, opportunity and motive for people to bring wood up there, so finding 1,200-year-old wood means nothing as far as Noah's Flood goes. Do keep in mind that many expeditions by ark seekers have been mounted since the mid-19th century. All have failed to find anything that can be proved to have anything to do with "Noah's Ark". Read the link I posted and you'll find an extensive discussion of this.
: As far as the earths surface, who really knows what would have happened if you had that much water come suddenly. Who really knows?
Geologists can tell. If you have no science background, you can't understand this. All this means is that you need some education, and then you can understand it.
Let me give you an example. Suppose I claim that I was badly burned in a fire and that 90% of my body received 3rd-degree burns. You look at my skin and see that it's in pretty good shape -- no scarring, and it's smooth. You tell me you don't believe I was burned and that I'm fibbing. I tell you, "Hey! You weren't there! I was burned!" How can you tell that I'm lying?
AlanF
-
MYOHNSEPH
Good stuff, AlanF. Thanks for the input!