Originally Posted by vikingrob

There are several problems with that. You would have to consider the amount of energy necessary to put all the water up there in the first place, the fact that ice and snow reflects sunlight back into space, and the question of how to create a bubble of ice above the surface.

In addition, the release of water from beneath the crust of the earth in the quantities necessary for what you are saying would result in many large earthquakes in a short succession; please correct me if I am wrong, but I find no mention of these quakes in chapters 6 through 9 of Genesis.

As for the superheated ice canopy, you also have to consider the fact that the sun is pretty consistent in the amount of energy it produces and consequently the amount of energy that reaches the earth. Now if it melted away the ice on one side of earth, the other side would not have any structural support and would simply crash to the earth in the form of ice. You would have a considerable amount of air displaced by this that would simply be blown out to space.