How much water would be needed for Noah’s Flood?
A-goddamned-lot
The Noah’s Ark story raises many questions. How could he cram 17,400,000 individual animals on a boat? How could that wooden boat survive the worst storm in history? What did the animals eat? What did they do with all the feculence?
The biggest question might involve the need for such a genocide in the first place, something Ricky Gervais touches on in one of my favorite bits ever. He also poses another question: is god gay?
One question that has annoyed me for years is not as obvious: Just how much water are we talking about? Genesis 7:20 says that the waters submerged the world’s highest mountains under 15 cubits of water. That means that flood covered Mount Everest, which is 29,028 feet tall and getting a bit taller every day, with 22 feet of water.
So I decided to do that math. My math skills are not stellar, but I did a rough, back-of-the-envelope calculation anyway. I had to start out by assuming that the earth is a perfect sphere, it’s not, it’s a bit squished at the poles and bulges at the equator, but this is a fair assumption.
The volume of a sphere is easy to calculate: V = 4/3πr³
The earth has a radius of 3959 miles. Now we need to know the radius of the flood. That’s the earth radius, plus the height of Everest, plus 15 cubits (22ft). So 3959 miles + 29,028 ft +22 feet = 3959 miles + 29050 feet = 3959 miles + 5.5018939 miles = 3964.5018939 miles
If we plug those two radii in to our volume formula, we get the volumes:
259,923,241,564 miles³ for the volume of the earth.
261,008,408,332 miles³ for the volume of the earth at flood.
So, if we subtract the earth volume from the flood volume, we’ll get the volume of water required to fill that space. That’s how much it would need to rain. That turns out to be 1,085,166,768 miles³of rain.
Now, let’s cut that by 25% because land, mountains, etc. occupy some of that volume. All that space would not be filled with water. The 25% figure is generous since oceans, which by definition sit at sea level, cover 70% of the earth and the rest of the earth isn’t nearly as high as Everest. But let’s grant the creationist this small charity.
That means that there had to be 813,875,076 miles³ of rain for the biblical flood. To put that in perspective, the oceans have about 321,000,000 miles³ of water. All the water on earth only adds up to about 332,500,000 miles³.
So for the biblical flood to have happened, the water on earth had to miraculously multiply by about 250%.
Let’s try to put that in another perspective. The Atlantic Ocean is about 80,000,000 miles³.
That means, there needed to be more water than could be contained by ten Atlantic Oceans to rain as much as the bible claims.
One more perspective. There are 5.9978178 x 10^-⁷ Olympic pools in a cubic mile. That means an Olympic pool is about 0.00000059978178 cubic miles. Divide that 813,875,076 miles³ by that decimal and you discover that, for the bible to be true, it would have to have rained the equivalent of about 1.35 QUADRILLION Olympic swimming pools.
This raises one final point, where did all that water go?
I’m beginning to doubt the veracity of the bible.
