.
● Gen 1:2c . . and Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters.
When that verse is considered with Gen 1:9; it's readily deduced that that
the Earth's surface was completely submerged at first; so that the planet
has been flooded twice in the past; but that was it.
● Gen 9:11 . . I will maintain My covenant with you: never again shall all
flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a
flood to destroy the earth.
Noah needed to hear that so he wouldn't get jumpy the next time it started
to rain really hard in his neighborhood. There is still flooding going on in the
world, but certainly not on the same scale as the Flood.
● Gen 1:6-8 . . And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the
waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. And God made the
firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the
waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.
We can easily guess what is meant by water that's below the sky. But is
there really water that's above it? Yes, and it's a lot! According to an article
in the Sept 2013 issue of National Geographic magazine, Earth's atmosphere
holds roughly 3,095 cubic miles of water in the form of vapor. That may
seem like a preposterous number of cubic miles of water; but not really
when it's considered that Lake Superior's volume alone is estimated at
nearly 3,000.
Our home planet is really big; a whole lot bigger than people sometimes
realize. It's surface area, in square miles, is 196,940,000. To give an idea of
just how many square miles that is: if somebody were to wrap a belt around
the equator made of one-mile squares; it would only take 24,902 squares to
complete the distance; which is a mere .00012644 the surface area.
Some of the more familiar global warming gases are carbon dioxide,
fluorocarbons, methane, and ozone. But as popular as those gases are with
the media, they're bit players in comparison to the role that ordinary water
vapor plays in global warming. By some estimates; atmospheric water vapor
accounts for more than 90% of global warming; which is not a bad thing
because without atmospheric water vapor, the earth would be so cold that
the only life that could exist here would be extremophiles.
How much water is below the expanse? Well; according to the same article;
the amount contained in swamp water, lakes and rivers, ground water, and
oceans, seas, and bays adds up to something like 326.6 million cubic miles;
and that's not counting the 5.85 million cubic miles tied up in living
organisms, soil moisture, ground ice and permafrost, ice sheets, glaciers,
and permanent snow.
To put that in perspective: a tower 326.6 million miles high would exceed
the Sun's distance better than 3½ times.
● Gen 1:9 . . And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered
together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so.
Shaping the earth's mantle in order to form low spots for the seas and high
spots for dry ground was a colossal feat of magma convection and volcanism
combined with the titanic forces of tectonic plate subduction.
At the ocean's deepest surveyed point-- the Challenger Deep; located in the
Mariana Islands group, at the southern end of the Mariana Trench --the
water's depth is over 11,000 meters; which is about 6.8 statute miles
(36,000 feet). That depth corresponds to the cruising altitude of a Boeing
747. At that altitude, probably about all you're going to see of the airliner
without straining your eyes is its contrail.
Africa's Mt Kilimanjaro is the tallest free-standing mountain on earth at
19,341 feet above its land base. If Kilimanjaro were placed in the Challenger
Deep, it would have about 16,659 feet of water over its peak. Were the
tallest point of the Himalayan range-- Mt Everest --to be submerged in the
Challenger Deep, it would have about 7,000 feet of water over its peak.
_