Physical Scale
Assuming that there was no magical transformation of the landscape between the time of the Flood and now (which is reasonable, considering the time frame they project), the floodwaters would have to raise the sea-level to height of Mount Everest to be in line with the Biblical description stating that the waters came up higher than the highest mountains. This is around 8.84 km above current sea level. Since the volume of land is small compared to the total volume of water that would be required for such a flood (oceans cover 71% of the Earth's surface and the average height of land is only about 800 meters), an easy calculation shows the amount of water needed to achieve this would be at least
4.5 billion km³. The current volume of the Earth's oceans
combined is estimated at only
1.3 billion km³. This raises the question of where did that much water come from - and more importantly, where did it all
go?
Precipitation
The Flood story states that the flood waters came from rain that lasted "40 days and 40 nights". Rain appears when the atmosphere can no longer support water in the vapor phase, and it becomes saturated. So... what about the amount of water vapor suspended in air needed for the
4.5 billion cubic kilometers of water needed for the flood? The water vapor currently in the air is only around 2-3% on average, with a maximum of 4% limited by temperature and pressure. The change in atmospheric conditions required to support enough vapor for 112 million cubic kilometers of rain per day - about 120,000 times more than the current daily rainfall worldwide - would have rendered the air unbreathable; If the conditions were right for that much water to be in the atmosphere, humans and virtually every other animal would have drowned through the simple act of breathing - as well as turning the Earth into a pressure cooker, with atmospheric pressure at nearly a
thousand PSI, instead of the standard 14.7 or so that we have today.
The atmosphere simply couldn't sustain that much water even under the most extreme temperature and pressure conditions the planet can produce - period. Barring the "goddidit" escape hatch (a tried and tested fallback for creationists everywhere), this is impossible.
Hydroplate "theory", and other nonsense
More recent "theories" (note that I'm using the term as loosely as they do) have seen Creationists try to get around the above issues by either placing the water
underground, positing an ice or vapor canopy
above the atmosphere, having the water being contained in "sealed chambers", or by having comets bring it. This is despite the Bible
not really describing the flood as such - in fact, they have to make a very loose interpretation of the "firmament" noted in Genesis for this to work. They
still ignore several factors, however:
* When placing the water beneath the earth, the only viable method for releasing it is as steam (which proceeds to sterilize the planet regardless of whether or not one is in a giant wooden boat).
* Aside from having
no physically possible method to exist in the first place, an ice or vapor canopy would convert all of its orbital energy into kinetic energy when it collapsed, thereby poaching Noah and all the critters like eggs.
* Cometary impacts on the order needed to provide the water would have been many times the energy of the Cretaceous-Tertiary Extinction Event, making the resultant flood unnecessary in wiping out life on the planet.
Then there's Hydroplate "theory", which is a Creationist hypothesis that Earth once had huge chambers of water sandwiched between the earth's crust and its mantle. It was ironically invented to provide a naturalistic reason to throw naturalism to the winds. (The obvious answer, that a God capable of creating the universe in a single week can conjure the requisite water out of thin air, was apparently not up for consideration.) The hypothesis claims that before the Flood, the Earth's crust floated on a thick layer of water, above the mantle. Walls and tendrils connected the mantle and crust, allowing the inner and outer reaches of the planet to rotate on its axis at the same speed.
According to the hypothesis, the pre-deluge Earth had one super-continent (but not
that one) which covered about 75 percent of the surface. Oceans were really giant lakes (like the Sea of Galilee, the Red Sea, etc). To maintain consistency they are obliged to argue that Earth's mountains rarely reached more than 5000 feet (1524 meters) above what was then sea level and the highest mountain was probably much lower than 9000 feet (2743 meters). When it came time to flood the Earth, God cracked the crust (which allegedly formed underwater mountain ranges like the Mid-Atlantic Ridge), releasing the water like a soft-boiled egg. The subterranean water sprayed upward with such great force that it caused worldwide rainfall for 40 days and 40 nights (and also made comets, lunar craters, and anything else they don't understand).
It goes on to say that the water left its subterranean encasements so quickly that many land masses immediately began to sink, and that these rapidly sinking land masses uplifted other land masses, thus causing deep-sea fossils to appear at the tops of mountain peaks (which Creationists always point to as "proof" of the flood, naturally wanting to wish away the vast amount of evidence for slow-motion tectonic forces taking millions of years to raise mountains from the ocean floor).
In another display of obtuse ignorance, Creationists claim these sudden movements caused the super-continent to develop tectonic ridges and mountain ranges that run parallel to Earth's coastlines. (Naturally, these movements also created the illusion that led scientists to develop the theory of Pangaea.)
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