Temperatures increase with depth inside the earth. Subterranean water about 60 miles below the earth’s surface would have been extremely hot. Wouldn’t all life on earth have been scalded if that water flooded the earth? No. Today’s geothermal heat is a result of the flood. Let’s first understand what made the subterranean water hot—tidal pumping that produced supercritical water (SCW)—a very high-energy, explosive form of water discovered in 1822. (Besides, the expanding fountains of the great deep became very cold. See "Rocket Science" on pages 600–601.)
Tidal Pumping. Tides in the subterranean water lifted and lowered the massive crust twice daily, stretching and compressing the pillars, thereby generating heat and raising the temperature of the subterranean-water. As quartz and certain other minerals dissolved, this hot, high-pressure water increasingly contained the ingredients that would later produce limestone (CaCO3), salt (NaCl), other forms of quartz (SiO2). In a few chapters, you will see why, after the flood, this dissolved quartz petrified some wood and cemented loose flood sediments into sedimentary rocks.
SCW. At a pressure of one atmosphere—about 1.01 bar or 14.7 psi (pounds per square inch)—water boils at a temperature slightly above 212°F (100°C). As pressure increases, the boiling point rises. At a pressure of 3,200 psi (220.6 bars) the boiling temperature is 705°F (374°C). Above this pressure-temperature combination, called the critical point, water is supercritical and cannot boil! Nor will any amount of pressure liquefy the water vapor!
The pressure in the 60-mile-deep subterranean chamber, simply due to the weight of the crust, was about 372,000 psi (25,550 bars)—far above the critical pressure. After no more than 10 years of tidal pumping, the subterranean water exceeded the critical temperature, 705°F. As the temperature rose, the pressure grew, the crust stretched and weakened, and the energy from tidal pumping increasingly ionized the water.
SCW can dissolve much more salt (NaCl) per unit volume than normal water—up to 840°F (450°C). At higher temperatures, all salt precipitates (out-salts). In a few pages, this fact will show why our oceans have so much salt, and how salt domes formed.
SCW consists of microscopic liquid droplets dispersed within very dense water vapor. Hot droplets cool primarily by evaporation from their surfaces. The cooling rate is proportional to their total surface area. The smaller a droplet, the larger its surface area is relative to its volume, so more of its heat can be quickly transferred to its surroundings. Liquid droplets in SCW have an area-to-volume ratio that is a trillion (1012) times greater than that of the flood water that covered the earth’s surface. Consequently, the liquid in SCW cools almost instantly if its pressure drops, because the myriad of shimmering liquid droplets, each surrounded by vapor, can simultaneously evaporate. A typical SCW droplet at 300 bars and 716°F (380°C) consists of 5–10 molecules. These droplets evaporate, break up, and reform rapidly and continually.
This explains how the escaping supercritical liquid transferred its energy into supercritical vapor. How did the vapor lose its energy and cool? Rapid expansion. A remarkable characteristic of supercritical fluids is that a small decrease in pressure produces a gigantic increase in volume—and cooling. So, as the SCW flowed toward the base of the rupture, its pressure dropped and the vapor portion expanded and cooled to an extreme extent. [See “Rocket Science” on page 600.] As it expanded, it pushed on the surrounding fluid (gas and liquid), giving all fluid downstream ever increasing kinetic energy.
As the horizontally flowing liquid-gas mixture began to flow upward through the rupture, the pressure steadily dropped in each bundle of supercritical fluid. This released its electrical ionization energy, and some of each liquid droplet evaporated to become vapor. Within seconds, portions of the flow rose above the atmosphere where the pressure was almost zero. This 10,000-fold expansion was a weeks-long, focused explosion of indescribable magnitude—“splitting” the atmosphere and accelerating much of the water, along with rock and dirt, into the vacuum of space.
In summary, as the flood began, SCW jetted up through a globe-encircling rupture in the crust—as from a ruptured pressure cooker. This huge acceleration expanded the spacing between water molecules, allowing flash evaporation, sudden and extreme cooling, followed by even greater expansion, acceleration, and cooling. Therefore, most of the vast thermal, electrical, chemical, and surface energy in the subterranean water ended up not as heat at the earth’s surface but as extreme kinetic energy in all the fountains of the great deep.As you will see, these velocities were high enough to launch rocks into outer space—the final dumping ground for most of the energy in the SCW. |