And the mountains were covered

Genesis 7: 11 – 12: In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, in the second month, the seventeenth day of the month, the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened. And the rain was upon the earth forty days and forty nights.

Genesis 7: 17 – 20: And the flood was forty days upon the earth; and the waters increased, and bare up the ark, and it was lift up above the earth. And the waters prevailed, and were increased greatly upon the earth; and the ark went upon the face of the waters. And the waters prevailed exceedingly upon the earth; and all the high hills, that were under the whole heaven, were covered. Fifteen cubits upward did the waters prevail; and the mountains were covered.

The floodwaters that destroyed the antediluvian world and which covered the highest mountains, has given rise to the question as to what happened to all of that water. The Bible states in Genesis 7: 20 that the water rose 22 feet (fifteen cubits) above the highest mountain peak of Noah’s day, but where did all of that water come from, and where did all of that water go to when the deluge subsided?

The Bible tells us that water came in the form of rainfall and from the fountains of the great deep being broken up by tremendous earthquakes that cracked open the earth’s crust, releasing super-heated, highly pressurized water from inside the earth, which blasted miles upward into the atmosphere. This high-pressure primary water being pumped into the oceans caused the sea level to surge, assisted by the ocean floor being pushed upward and the continents sinking as the earthquakes radically reshaped the world.

If all the glaciers and ice caps in existence today were melted, the oceans would rise approximately seventy metres, yet Mount Everest, which is the highest mountain peak in the word today, rises to a staggering height of 8848 metres above sea level. The reason why the oceans water does not envelop the globe now is because the earth’s surface is uneven, having ocean basins that sit low and continents that sit high. The earth today has some very high mountains and some very deep ocean trenches, but these extremes do not account for a large percentage of the earth’s surface.

If the earth’s surface were even, then there is enough water in the oceans to cover the globe to a depth of about three kilometres. This suggests that during the Flood, the ocean floor moved vertically relative to the continents. In the first half of the Flood, the pre-Flood ocean basins rose and the pre-Flood continents sank down until water covered everything. This by no means implies that the earth’s surface became relatively even, for the ocean basins would have only had to rise enough for the water to cover everything. It must also be remembered that the geographic contours of the earth in the antediluvian world were not as pronounced as they are now, thus the mountains of the pre-Flood world were not as high as the mountains of the world today.

In the second half of the Flood, other parts of the earth’s crust sank, and the floodwaters then flowed off the continents into the newly formed ocean basins. The tremendous movement of the earth’s crust at this time also pushed up new mountain ranges, including the one that is home to Mount Everest, thus all the water from the Flood is in the world’s oceans today.