Where did all the water go?

by Tas Walker

If the whole world was once covered with water during Noah’s Flood, where has it all gone?

Even if the glaciers and ice caps melted the oceans would only rise some 70 meters, yet Mt Everest rises 8848 meters above sea level.

But we don’t need any more water to cover the earth. There is already enough.

This hypsographic chart illustrates that if the ocean basins were pushed up 5 km and the mountains shaved off, water from the oceans would cover all the earth. Such tectonic movements seem huge to us, but compared with the radius of the earth, (6378 km), the movement is tiny, only 0.1%.

Water doesn’t cover the globe at present because the earth’s surface is uneven. The ocean basins sit low and the continents sit high. Some mountains are especially high and some ocean trenches are very deep.

However, if the earth’s surface was even there is enough water in the oceans to cover the globe to a depth of 2.7 km.

This suggests that, during the Flood, the ocean floor moved vertically relative to the continents.

In the first half, the pre-Flood ocean basins rose and the pre-Flood continents eroded down until water covered everything.

Then, in the second half of the Flood, other parts of the earth’s crust sank. The water flowed off our continents into new ocean basins. Movement of the earth’s crust at this time also pushed up new mountain ranges, including the one that is home to Mt Everest.

So where did all the water go? It is in the ocean.

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