Jayhawker Soule

Well, shucks, maybe most emergent peoples lived close to fresh water sources, and maybe most folks back then had a parochial sense of the world, and maybe local floods occurred, ...

Sorry, but you haven't a clue ... <img src="graemlins/banghead.gif" border="0" alt="[Bang Head]" />

Kosh

Oh, that evidence...

Coragyps

Walt Brown's <a href="http://www.creationscience.com/onlinebook/index.html" target="_blank">online book </a>, which, unfortunately, has no page numbers, is the source of this assertion. Walt actually said: His footnote 40 refers to a paper by Wei, et al., Science, 292, 716-718, (2001), which does talk about the possibility of brine 15 to 20 km deep beneath Tibet. Wei says, in fact, "Thus, the preferred explanation for the high [electrical] conductance beneath Tibet is interconnected fluid, either partial melt [of rock] or aqueous fluids present along the grain boundaries of the rock." The paper goes on to calculate some "what ifs" - a layer of rock with 10% molten rock would need to be 16 km thick, or, "For example, a layer only 1.6 km thick containing 10% of a 100 S/m [a measure of conductivity] brine would be needed to yield the observed 10,000-S conductance."
The authors go on to say that the shallower areas likely do have brine, grading into molten rock as you go deeper (and further north, where the conductive zone is deeper.)
Now, a PhD mechanical engineer from MIT, as Brown apparently is, should know just a little about fluid flow and the mechanical properties of rocks, as well as how to read articles before he cites them. This paper clearly implies, and explicitly footnotes, that the temperature in the area where this brine is postulated to be is above 500 degrees Celsius or so. The paper specifically says, and I quoted above, that any water (or molten rock) that's down there is present as a film on rock grains, not in bulk. Brown does have the honesty to qoute the sentence beginning "For example", above, verbatim, but he misses or ignores the obvious implications of the Wei paper for his "Hydroplate Theory:"
1) His "waters beneath the Earth" would have burst forth at far above boiling, heating the atmosphere and hydrosphere to Noah-poaching temperatures. And it would have some molten rock mixed in.
2) The water couldn't have "burst forth" at all - the water that might, even today, be trapped at such depths would, of necessity from the mechanical properties of any rock under 50,000 psi confining pressure, be in thin films between rock grains, and not in bulk in a "layer." There is a property of rock called permeability, very well understood by the geologists and petroleum engineers who bring you oil, gas, and well water, which limits how fast fluids can flow through those rocks. A good oil reservoir, like you Brits have in the North Sea, might have a permeability of 100 millidarcies or more. The better reservoirs I work with might have 5 millidarcies; a concrete sidewalk about 1 to 0.1, a "tight" gas reservoir perhaps 0.01. A basalt with 10% porosity, before you damaged it by dropping its confining pressure to half, might, just maybe, have a microdarcy. There is no conceivable way, to a person with even my limited knowledge of flow in porous media, that Browns "theory" could provide more than a tremendous fart of steam followed by a multi-century boiling of the oceans.
His whole thesis is absurd and unsupported by any evidence, is utterly falsified by , for one example, the geology of the Midocean Ridges, and I scarcely believe that I just spent this time and these precious electrons bothering to refute it.


(edited because I type even worse when I'm irritated!)

[ March 18, 2002: Message edited by: Coragyps ]</p>

Coragyps

And David, when I said I was irritated in the post above, please don't take it as meaning that I'm irritated at you. I am irritated at mountebacks/ con artists/ scammers/ shitheads like Brown (though I don't know yet into which category he falls) who put out propaganda which they must know to be untrue with the aim of sucking in people who are honestly looking for information. And I'm still willing to think that you are one of that latter group.

Happy Wonderer

Er, not to take us on a completely unrelated tangent but I think quite a few historians would deny that there was ever a Roman conquest of the world. To begin with, there is this little country that we call China...

I bring this up because there is an interesting parallel here -- the Romans may have believed that they had conquered all the world, but they didn't know it all. Kind of like the local/global flood thing. (Actually they knew of China, the first offical contact was in 166.)

So stories of the Romans conquering the world would, in fact, be myths. To understand the true extent of Roman domination, one needs to look at physical evidence as well as the written traditions.

Here is a URL for ya: <a href="http://www.acs.ucalgary.ca/~vandersp/Courses/maps/basicmap.html" target="_blank">Extent of Roman empire</a>

HW

Oolon Colluphid

David, I worked this out merely with help of a calculator and maths even Douglas should understand ( )). I'd appreciate your comments.

According to Genesis, the flood waters came from two sources. The one mentioned most is rain (7:4, 7:11, 7:12, 8:2). There was also the "fountains of the deep" (7:11, 8:2). It rained, apparently, for "forty days and forty nights" (7:4, 7:12). By the end, "all the high hills, that were under the whole heaven, were covered" (7:19). 7:20 even claims that it went fifteen cubits higher than that, but let's not quibble.

Now, in order to cover just the 16,854 ft of Mount Ararat (Büyük Agri Dagi) in that time (960 hours), the waters had to rise at a rate of seventeen and a half feet per hour (three and a half inches a minute). If you take 7:19 literally, as seems reasonable from 7:19's "all the high hills", and from your claim the flood was global, then for Everest (29,035 ft) a rate of over thirty feet an hour (six inches a minute) is required. Come to think of it, Everest must have been covered. The very top is composed of <a href="http://www.bartleby.com/65/li/limeston.html" target="_blank">limestone</a>. Limestone is usually formed from the skeletons of marine invertebrates; some comes from chemical precipitation from solution. Either way, for limestone to be there, your model insists it was under water.
<a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/exploration/everest/features/everest/geology.shtml" target="_blank">The Geology of Everest</a>.

Which means that, even if you allow these mysterious "fountains of the deep" to account for as much as, say, 70% of the water (and the emphasis on rain makes that pretty generous), that's still rainfall of nine feet per hour for Everest, or 5.3 feet per hour for Ararat. Average.

For comparison, the <a href="http://home.nycap.rr.com/teachertown/weathfac.html#Precipitation" target="_blank">world record</a> for precipitation is six feet in a day (three inches an hour), or 86.75 feet -- in a year.

For Everest, that's 36 times heavier than the heaviest rainfall ever recorded. For Ararat, it's still 21 times faster.

Whether Everest or Ararat (and if not Everest, how did those fossils get there?), surely enough to sink an aircraft carrier, let alone a laden wooden ark.

Thoughts?

Oolon

Oolon Colluphid

It also occurs to me, David: what happened to every species of land plant (most of which wouldn't survive overwatering, let alone submerging under thousands of feet for a year)? 7:4 and 7:23 say that "every living substance" died. So did Noah take every 'kind' of plant too? How did he get them?

And... olives don't grow at such high altitudes, so how did the dove manage to "pluck off" (8:11) an olive leaf while the waters were still high enough that no land was visible?

Any ideas?

Oolon

John Solum

I just thought I'd point out that there's a good discussion of some of the problems with Brown's claims in this thread:

<a href="http://iidb.org/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=58&t=00031" target="_blank">http://iidb.org/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=58&t=00031</a>

Kosh

True, but the statement David made is further
evidence of how uninformed he is. David,
the physical evidence of Romes influence on the
part of the world they did conquer is incredible.
Architecture all the way to Britain shows it's
influence. THere are still ancient Roman structures standing. Hardly a fitting analogy
to the problem of the exodus or flood [non-existant] evidence.

davidH

Ok, it seems to me that people here have taken me far too literally whenever I mentioned in passing the Roman conquests.

I in no way meant that they conqueored the whole world - just that they conquoered an awful lot of it for a nation at that time. ie. They where basically the power that ruled the most important part of the world at that time.

The fact that there are still Roman structures standing makes no difference - they could well have been built by nations only copying the design or even building for Romans that lived in that country etc.
But that is besides the point.

Yes Oolon, but you are taken Mount Everest to have already been formed before the Flood.
What if mount Everest was formed during the flood?
Would that no then explain why the very top is composed of limestone? - Not that the flood had to rise up that high - but that that land was already under water before the rupting of the earth caused it to rise so high up.
- It's maybe a thought to consider.

maybe the reason I gave above is why.

Yeah, that's a good question.
Firstly some seed and plants could well have been brought onto the ark to feed the animals - no proof of this but I am only speculating here. So that could well have been a source of some plant life.

I might also add that these plants and seeds could have brought many more species of plant - mircoevolution - were information is changed but the essential aspects of the plant retained. - Not sure on this though but a couple of plants can bring about a large diversity of them.

The other possibilty is that some plants and seeds survived the flood.
I know that plants and seeds generally get destroyed by salt water - maybe except the very toughest seeds. But I want to raise the possiblity that maybe the water that flooded the area wasn't completely or at all salt water. I may be way off track here, but I want you to consider it as a possiblity. I'll explain why.

You yourself mentioned above that the rain is mentioned most as compared to the fountains of the deep. Now where rain is concerned there is no salt water - correct? Well, I haven't tasted any rain that is salty.
So if most of the water came by rain, it would therefore not have to be salty and so giving many seeds a far better chance of surviving.
Then the question of how there could have ever been that much rain arises. (I just make clear at this point that this is all my own reasoning and so I could be at fault somewhere).

Maybe you have touched on the answer here - I'll explain why.
Why is it necessary that cool water is present?
If the water was heated and was released mostly as steam in the force - wouldn't water being released on that scale cause immense showers of rain? And wouldn't the water be free of salt? Cause any evaporation of salt water leaves the salt behind.

Maybe I am totally wrong, but is that not possible? If that much water was released as steam into the atmosphere wouldn't it cause massive rains?
Anyway that's just my thoughts on that, maybe it is totally wrong but at the minute it makes sense to me.

So if this was the case, would it not have made the perservation of seeds more likely?

Also Oolon, you are assuming that the flood had in no way altered the climate and the ground composition of that mountain when you said that Olive trees don't grow that high up in the altitude. - The flood would have been most likely to have left mud and sediment on the mountain - if a seed was carried there, there's no reason why it should not grow, as long as the heat, sun and enough water was there.

Anyway those are just my ideas to your questions.

Yeah, but as far as I know he didn't state that that was the exact replica of what caused the "fountains of the deep" to rupture. Or did he?

Yeah some rocks are porous but aren't others waterproof (to a far greater extent)? If this where so would it be intirely unreasonable to assume that the water could have been surround by this rock?
May this could have been the case.

But I wouldn't take the example he gave as the correct condition for another Noah's flood as it is clearly only an example.

Also what do you think about his theory on the asteriods and metorites? Doesn't that information seem to support his theory on the flood? It sort of ties in well too. - Maybe worth thinking about too.