to where?????? ok, the rain stopped, yes i understand that some of it would be soaked up, but it has to go somewhere???
It is believed by some that at one point in the earth's "recent" past, the atmosphere was thicker, and had a great deal of suspended water vapor. There is also an opinion that lands were much more level around the earth than they are now, and the oceans were half as deep. It is also known that around the world are great chasms of underground water reserves (The Great plains of the US sit on such a water shed, or Aquafier).
When the Rain came, it was a phenomenon unseen before. But we aren't told if there were earth quakes along with the rain. However, we have seen what a "small" tidal wave can to to the islands in the Indian Ocean, and how long the water remained "inland", and how many it killed (Christmas 2004). And unlike the Smokey mountains of the US (which are very old and worn down), the Rockies are considered very new (and still jagged peaks). That is because the tectonic plates that make the US shoved against eachother there, and formed the Rockies, and raised the overall level of the US over a mile higher than it used to be. Prior to that, the US used to have an inland sea covering most of it from Canada to Mexico, and Utah to Pennsylvania. That "sea" is now gone. And the Oceans dropped twice as deep as they were before.
We know that the continents can shift and lift without notice, as demonstrated a few years back, and the ocean floor only shifted three feet, yet 200,000.00 people died quickly after that.
As an engineer, I understand the properties of water in motion (other wise known as "free surface effect") as well as Newton's law of intertia, as it applies to water in motion.
Rain can't kill, but a raging torrent of water moving at merely several kilometers an hour, and being two to three meters deep, can kill quickly. Further more, water, does not immediately seek it's own level, until the inertial of the whole of the body of water is spent. Again that took days for that little island flood.
From personal perspective, the river I live on is small, about 50 meters across and three meters deep, with a current normally at two knots. One can wade across but it isn't like skipping through puddles. But when the rains hit Pennsylvania hard, the river becomes a torrent, moving at 20 knots and rising seven to 10 meters above flood stage, and expanding from 50 meters to 300 meters in width. Hell I've seen Oak trees, trucks and mobile homes floating with the current at 20 knots.
And it takes several days for that little river to begin to recede, but once it does begin, it recedes quickly (a day or two).
But you don't have to take my word for it. John D. Morris PH, D sums it up nicely:
"We now know, of course, that the earth has plenty of water to launch a global flood. It has been calculated that if the earth's surface were completely flat, with no high mountains and no deep ocean basins, that water would cover the earth to a depth of about 8,000 feet. But is there enough water to cover a 29,035 foot mountain?
The key is to remember that the Flood didn't have to cover the present Earth, but it did have to cover the pre-Flood Earth, and the Bible teaches that the Flood fully restructured the earth. "The world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished" (II Peter 3:6). It is gone forever. The earth of today was radically altered by that global event.
That Flood accomplished abundant geologic work. Eroding sediments here, redepositing them there, pushing up continents, elevating plateaus, denuding terrains, etc., so that the earth today is quite different from before. Today even mountain ranges rise high above the sea.
Mt. Everest and the Himalayan range, along with the Alps, the Rockies, the Appalachians, the Andes, and most of the world's other mountains are composed of ocean-bottom sediments, full of marine fossils laid down by the Flood. Mt. Everest itself has clam fossils at its summit. These rock layers cover an extensive area, including much of Asia. They give every indication of resulting from cataclysmic water processes. These are the kinds of deposits we would expect to result from the worldwide, world-destroying Flood of Noah's day.
At the end of the Flood, after thick sequences of sediments had accumulated, the Indian subcontinent evidently collided with Asia, crumpling the sediments into mountains. Today they stand as giants—folded and fractured layers of ocean-bottom sediments at high elevations. No, Noah's Flood didn't cover the Himalayas, it formed them!
Thus we find the Biblical account not only possible, but also supported by the evidence. A pre-Flood world with lessened topographic extremes could have been covered by the Great Flood. That Flood caused today's high mountains and deep oceans making such a flood impossible to repeat. This is just as God promised, back in Genesis."
Hope that helps.
v/r
Q