Last month where I live we had 75 mm of rain.
Wed, 30. June 2010
The Great Flood
40 mm of that amount fell in one day and that is the heaviest daily rainfall recorded here in the last fourteen months. I was pondering this when I made the trip over to www.distroman.com where I found Distro Man still busily demolishing the myth of Noah's Ark. Apparently the bible book - which of course is irrefutable - tells us that it rained for forty days. I guess that's not totally impossible, we used to get weeks of rain here sometimes until Australia moved into years of drought. The book also tells us that by the end of those forty days the water level had astonishingly risen to cover all the mountains.
(your baloney alarm should activate here).
How much water is that? Let's say the water went to 8,000 metres, that's a nice round figure close enough to cover the height of most of the world's tallest mountains. 8000 metres of rain in forty days? That's an amazing 200,000 millimetres of rain on average each day - or 5,000 times the paltry 40 mm we got on our wettest single day! For the sea level to rise eight kilometres, it must have risen at over 55 mm per minute, continuously for 960 hours, not just in one place but all over the planet. It must have rained non-stop literally everywhere!
(your baloney alarm should now have risen to critical).
I decided to calculate how much water that rainfall constitutes:
- The mean radius of the planet is about 6371 km.
- The raised water level of 8,000 metres would have increased the radius to 6379 km.
- The calculated volume of the world without the rainfall is about 1,083,206,916,845.75 cubic kilometres
- The calculated volume of the world with the increased radius would be about 1,087,292,558,627.91 cubic kilometres.
- The difference between these two is the calculated volume of the forty days rainfall: 4,085,641,782.91 cubic kilometres of water! That's a hell of a lot of water dropping out of the sky. Where did it all go?
Wait a minute. (your baloney alarm is screaming at high pitch). The big question is not where the water went to but where it came from in the first place. How does moisture actually get into the sky? It doesn't come from outer space, it evaporates from the oceans as moisture. Relocate any large amount of water from the oceans into the sky and what would happen to the sea level? It wouldn't rise, it would fall by a corresponding amount! After the water falls back as rain, the net difference in sea level would be zero! There could be no flood!
The basic facts ignored by this stupendously primitive bible story (still believed my many Christians) are that the ocean levels would first drop (not rise) following any abnormal water evaporation and then slowly return to normal as the rain falls! Of course, the Earth's atmosphere could never hold four billion cubic kilometres of moisture. The entire content of the Earth's oceans (1.3 billion cubic kilometres) is only one third of the amount required to produce this unbelievable rain fall.
Additionally, (a) there was no mention of fish taken on board the 'ark'. So if the entire oceanic water content was evaporated into the sky, the world's fish population would have become extinct; and (b) The bible book does not mention any occurrence of the unimaginable high temperatures and strong winds required to cause a massive evaporation event.
Noah's Ark and the Great Flood. It's science fiction at it's very worst. Poor science and poor fiction. The only truth that emerges from this inconceivable legend is that people will believe whatever they were indoctrinated to believe - in defiance of credible evidence to the contrary; and despite the absence of any reliable evidence to support it.