Evidence of a worldwide flood

The Bible describes the creation of heaven this way: “And God said, ‘Let there be a vault between the waters to separate the water from the water.’ So God made the vault and separated the water below the vault from the water above it. And it was so. God called the vault “heaven.” And the evening and the morning were the second day.

According to the Bible, there was once a canopy of water vapor over the ‘dome’ or sky that enveloped the globe creating a global greenhouse effect. This would have produced a subtropical climate from pole to pole. A rich vegetation would have covered the land on all sides. This canopy of water vapor would have filtered out harmful ultraviolet radiation, allowing men and animals to live much longer. This primitive environment was destroyed by the flood described in Genesis,

“In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, in the second month, on the seventeenth day of the second month, on that day all the fountains of the great deep burst open, and the floodgates of heaven were opened. And rain fell on the earth for forty days and forty nights…And the waters prevailed and increased greatly on the earth…so that all the high mountains everywhere under the heavens were covered…And the waters prevailed on the earth one hundred and fifty days… and the waters gradually decreased over the land… And in the second month, on the twenty-seventh day of the month, the land dried up.”

What caused the flood?

What could have caused the flood? For Christians, the obvious answer is God’s judgment against wicked humanity. But how did it happen? Given what we know about geology, geography and climatology, we could build the following scenario:

We must begin by acknowledging that no current phenomenon can explain the massive forces of nature that accompanied the flood. The world that exists today is drastically different from the one God created. On the one hand, we have four seasons. The first time the seasons are mentioned in the Bible is after the flood. After Noah and his family disembarked from the Ark, God said:

“While the earth lasts,

sowing and reaping,

Cold and heat,

summer and winter,

day and night

will never cease.”

The four seasons were a new feature of the post-flood world. What could have caused the seasons? The seasons exist because the earth is tilted at an angle of 22.5 degrees on its axis. It is possible that the earth rotated on a straight axis before the flood. Some cataclysmic event may have shifted the axis to cause the breaking of the waters above the ‘dome’ or sky and the resulting deluge of rain. One of those possible events was the monstrous asteroid that cratered the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico. Such a collision may have been powerful enough to tip the earth on its axis causing the heavenly waters to rupture and beginning the cycle of seasons first mentioned in Genesis 8:22.

The force of an asteroid would have triggered tremendous earthquakes for the first time in earth’s history, causing the waters of the deep to well up as described in Genesis 7:11, “In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, on the seventeenth day In the second month, on that day all the fountains of the great deep burst open, and the floodgates of heaven were opened, and there was rain on the earth forty days and forty nights.

Start of the ice age

Volcanoes would have started spewing ash into the atmosphere, obscuring the sun, cooling the earth, and bringing torrential rain. Michael Oard, author of “Frozen in Time” says: “Amongst the sedimentary rocks there is evidence of incredible volcanic activity that is unparalleled today… It appears that at the end of the Flood the world was covered by enormous volumes of volcanic rocks. “. ash and gases that had been thrown into the atmosphere. Instead of warming the Earth, it would have reflected sunlight back into space and cooled it.”

At the same time that the terrestrial masses were cooling down with the drop in ambient temperature, the warm waters that had been released from the subsoil would have caused an increase in the temperature of the seas. The result would have been decades of extraordinary snowfall as warm air masses from the sea met cold air over land at higher latitudes. This started the formation of huge ice sheets that covered North America, Europe, and northern Asia. Mr Oard says the amount of volcanic ash released was so great that even summer temperatures cooled enough to sustain glaciation over a period of many years.

Where did all the water go?

The reason the water covered all the dry land during the forty days of rain and subsequent runoff was that the drainage could not keep up with the huge volumes of water produced by the collapse of the water vapor canopy and the release of groundwater. As the book of Genesis says regarding what happened after the flood, “the waters steadily receded from the earth.” So even though the water reached as high as the tops of the highest mountains, it’s not like the entire earth is a lake. There were still adequate ocean basins to accommodate the runoff from the flood.

So where did all the water that covered the earth go? Given the mean depth of the ocean at 15,000 feet and the mean height of dry land at 2,250 feet, only a moderate rise in ocean levels would have created enough overflow to cover the entire land mass of the earth. These waters would have been easily absorbed by the oceans once the deluge stopped, raising sea levels and covering large portions of what had been dry land before the flood.

Much of the water was trapped in huge glaciers that covered the Northern Hemisphere as a result of the sudden onslaught of prolonged cold weather that followed the flood. Geologists tell us that the oceans were 120 meters (more than 500 feet) lower during the ice age, exposing large portions of the continental shelves. Anthropologists agree, assuming that the North American continent was connected by a 1,000-mile-wide land bridge to Siberia over which early populations migrated. Today this landmass is buried under 100 to 165 feet of the Bering Strait. Since this land bridge was higher than sea level to begin with, the rise in sea level after the Ice Age would have been enough to accommodate all of the glacial runoff produced by rising temperatures. Many generations must have elapsed between the flood and the creation of the Bering Strait for ancient peoples to have had enough time to migrate from Mount Ararat in Turkey to Siberia and then to the North American continent.

Fossil fuels are found in many parts of the world in the high seas along continental shelves. Since fossils are the ancient remains of plant and animal life, it is clear that the continental shelves were once exposed.

Non-repetitive natural phenomenon

Scientists seek to explain all natural phenomena in terms of familiar forces. They say that the present is the key to the past. But the natural forces that caused the ice age are not in evidence today. Such cooling could only be caused by natural forces on a scale we have never seen in historical times. And that makes sense because the flood was a one-time outpouring of God’s wrath that He promised not to repeat.

The apostle Peter describes those who say no this way: “Above all, you must understand that in the last days scoffers will come, mocking and following their own evil desires. They will say, ‘Where is this ‘coming’ that he promised? Since our ancestors died, everything continues as from the beginning of creation. But they deliberately forget that long ago, by the word of God, the heavens were created and the earth was formed of water and by water. Also by these waters the world of that time was flooded and destroyed. By the same word, the present heavens and earth are reserved for fire, reserved for the day of judgment and destruction of the wicked.

From “Frozen in Time” by Michael Oard