Where Did All the Water Go?

And the waters receded continually from the earth. At the end of the hundred and fifty days the waters decreased (Genesis 8:3).

Simply put, the water from the Flood is in the oceans and seas we see today. Three-quarters of the earth’s surface is covered with water.

As even secular geologists observe, it does appear that the continents were at one time “together” and not separated by the vast oceans of today. The forces involved in the Flood were certainly sufficient to change all of this.


The supercontinent that existed before the Flood, according to the catastrophic plate tectonics model. The dark lines denote plate boundaries where continental crust is present or boundaries between continent and ocean where both exist on the same plate.

Scripture indicates that God formed the ocean basins, raising the land out of the water, so that the floodwaters returned to a safe place. (Some theologians believe Psalm 104 may refer to this event.) Some creation scientists believe that this breakup of the continent was part of the mechanism¹ that ultimately caused the Flood.²

Some have speculated, because of Genesis 10:25, that the continental break occurred during the time of Peleg. However, this division is mentioned in the context of the Tower of Babel’s language division of the whole earth (Genesis 10–11). So the context points to a dividing of the languages and people groups, not the land breaking apart.

If there were a massive movement of continents during the time of Peleg, there would have been another worldwide flood. The Bible indicates that the mountains of Ararat existed for the Ark to land in them (Genesis 8:4); so the Indian-Australian Plate and Eurasian Plate had to have already collided, indicating that the continents had already shifted prior to Peleg.

(Reposted from Ken Ham & Tim Lovett, Was There Really a Noah’s Ark & Flood?, October 11, 2007, AnswersInGenesis.org)

(For historical fiction that touches on this topic, see Chapter 41: Jeriah's Choice of The Coming Wrath)

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References

1. Andrew A. Snelling, Can Catastrophic Plate Tectonics Explain Flood Geology?, Answers in Genesis, November 8, 2007.

2. For more details on this subject see chapter 14 Can Catastrophic Plate Tectonics Explain Flood Geology? by Dr. Andrew A. Snelling, in Ken Ham, ed., The NEW Answers Book, Master Books, 2006.