Page 10 - Bible Geography and Near East Studies

Effects of the Flood and the Origin of Nations

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You can imagine the volume of water it took to flood the entire earth! It was massive! During local
rains, we see that a little water can carve gullies into the side of hills and destroy our crops. Can you
imagine what the volume of water twice that of our oceans did to the earth in a short 40-day period?
Also, Noah’s ride in the ark during the first 40 days must have been quite harrowing. I suppose they got
pretty seasick! This great cataclysmic flood must have made a tremendous impact on the mountains,
rivers, and the entire earth. Today, we will look at some of the evidence of geology that points to the
reality of that event.

The Lesson ...

The Effects of the Flood

The flood lasted just over a year (1 year and 10 days). As the sea floor started sinking relative to the
continents, the floodwaters covering the continents began to flow into the oceans. On each continent,
the water flowed away from the higher areas in the middle toward the lower areas at the edges, in a
direction generally perpendicular to the shore. Since the Flood was global, the receding waters would
have produced the same sort of signature all over the world.

The Grand Canyon in the US is an excellent illustration of the rapid
displacement of water. If you look at the photograph to the right, you
might notice that the sides of the Grand Canyon go almost straight up
and down. (In fact, they actually do go straight up and down in quite a
few places along the canyon.) If gradual natural processes of erosion
formed this Grand Canyon, and not Noah's Flood, then the top edge (or
"rim") should be rounded, and not an edge at all, since the gradual
processes of erosion always tend to round out sharp edges, not create
them. In fact, after hundreds of millions of years, these same processes of erosion (which those who
believe "The Story of Evolution" claim formed the Grand Canyon) would have turned any such edges
that might have once existed into gradual slopes. Also note in the picture, you can see that the
sandstone was laid down in various layers, miles deep. This is the obvious result of massive amounts of
water laying down layer on layer over a very short time.

The Grand Canyon is about a mile deep from the rim at the top to the
Colorado River way down at the bottom. Although magnified in this
telephoto image, the Colorado River actually looks very small from the
top rim of the Grand Canyon. From the rim, the Colorado River in fact
looks like a small bluish-black line way down at the bottom of the
Grand Canyon. This tiny little river at the bottom of the Grand Canyon
could not have carved out a huge canyon a mile deep and many miles

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