*This ended up being much longer than I had originally planned and sort of went off on a tangent at the end. I was going to add a part about radiative heat loss; I still might, but it will be later. If you find any errors in the calculations or assumptions, please let me know. Except for the assumptions about Halo, I'm pretty sure that those are correct*
Why a world-wide flood would have melted the Earth
I know that this argument has been made before by others, but I just personally want to run through the reasoning and calculations for my own amusement.
Given the present-day sea level and the highest point on Earth, we can estimate the approximate volume of additional liquid water required to flood the entire Earth, covering the highest peak.
We will first assume that the Earth is perfectly spherical, which it isn’t, but it’s close enough. It actually more closely approximates something known as an oblate spheroid that bulges at the equator and is flattened at the poles; an exaggerated version of which would resemble a beach-ball being compressed by your hands on opposite sides. But, back to the sphere approximation; the distance from the center of the Earth to sea level, which we will call the “mean radius,” is 6,371.0 km. Using this number, we can calculate the approximate volume of the Earth, if all features on Earth averaged out to sea level:
The highest point on Earth is the summit of Mt. Everest, at 8.848 km above sea level. Using a similar approach from before, we can calculate the volume of water required to cover the entire Earth. First, we must calculate the volume contained in the sphere with a radius of the Earth plus the added distance of Mt. Everest’s height. The radius in this case will be the “mean radius” from before plus the 8.848 km:
Next, subtracting the Earth’s volume from sea level and the Earth’s volume at the top of Everest will give us an estimate of the total volume of water required to cover the entire Earth:
This is 4.5 billion cubic kilometers of additional water needed to flood the entire Earth. A single cubic kilometer is equivalent to 264.17 billion gallons. Keep in mind that the total amount of water on Earth, as estimated by the US Geological Survey, is approximately 1.3 billion cubic kilometers.
As an aside, if we added up all the water from the hypothetical flood and the water presently in the oceans, put it in space, it would create a giant sphere of water with a radius of 1,115.9 km. For comparison, the Moon has a radius of 1,738 km. That’s a lot of water.
For water to transition from a liquid phase to a gaseous phase, it must absorb a certain amount of energy to heat up, and then vaporize. The amount of energy needed to raise 1 gram of water by 1 degree Celsius is 4.184 Joules. This is called the Heat Capacity of Water, or Specific Heat. Once the water is at its maximum temperature before evaporation, it must absorb a specific amount of energy to make the transition to a gaseous phase. This is called the Heat of Vaporization and requires 2,260 Joules of energy per gram of water. Its corollary is the Heat of Condensation, which is the same magnitude but opposite sign. In other words, when water makes the transition from a gaseous phase to liquid, it releases energy. The important point here is that rain, which is water condensing in the atmosphere, releases energy when it forms. This is of interest to us since the Biblical Deluge was initiated by 40 days and 40 nights of constant downpour.
Armed with this information, we can now calculate the total amount of energy released from the massive amounts of water condensation. I suspect that the number is going to be extraordinarily high, and that we will have to represent the total energy release in terms of thermonuclear weapon detonations.
Let’s first figure out how much all this flood water weighs, in grams:
Next, we can calculate the energy release from condensation using the value for the Heat of Vaporization/Condensation:
I have no idea how to even say that number. To get a better idea of what it means, we need to talk about nuclear bombs. Modern nuclear bombs, also referred to as thermonuclear weapons or hydrogen bombs, measure their explosive power in an energy unit called a “megaton”. This unit is equivalent to the amount of energy that would be released by setting off 1,000,000 tons of dynamite. For comparison, the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of the Second World War released an amount of energy equivalent to 15,000 and 21,000 tons of dynamite, respectively. The largest nuclear weapon ever detonated, the Former Soviet Union’s Tsar Bomba, yielded an energy release equivalent to 50,000,000 tons of dynamite.
1 Megaton is equivalent to 4.184 quadrillion joules. Using this conversion, we can calculate the energy release, in Megatons, of the flood water condensation:
The most powerful bomb in the US arsenal as of 2012 is the B83 nuclear weapon with a maximum yield of 1.2 megatons. The total stockpile of all nuclear-capable nations in the world only amounts to approximately 20,000 weapons. The condensation of an amount of water to cover the entire surface of the Earth would release an amount of energy equivalent to 2,032,926,743,170 B83 thermonuclear weapons! That is right at 50 billion nuclear bombs exploding per day for 40 days straight!
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| or 588,000 nuclear explosions per second! I think it might get a little balmy. |
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| Whoops. |
I hope that Noah’s Ark was a spaceship, otherwise it would have been melted along with the rest of the planet. Maybe Halo 3 was right.
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Now this is an Ark I can believe in.
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| Was Master Chief actually Space-Noah? |
I don’t know how to answer that, but I do know that we should be open-minded and Teach the ControversyTM.
Sources:
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