Below is the online edition of In the Beginning: Compelling Evidence for Creation and the Flood,
by Dr. Walt Brown. Copyright © Center for Scientific Creation. All rights reserved.
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How Much Water Was in the Preflood Subterranean Chamber?
Today, the water from the preflood subterranean chamber is in three places: (1) in Earth's biosphere, primarily our oceans, (2) in outer space, and (3) still trapped deep under the Earth’s surface.
Salt (NaCl). Before the flood, the subterranean water contained most of Earth’s salt. Russia and Germany have drilled the deepest holes on Earth, 7.6 miles and 5.7 miles, respectively; each contained deep salt water. The German hole contained twice the ocean’s salt concentration. [See page 117.] Surface water cannot seep deeper than 5 miles, so that water must have migrated up from the subterranean chamber—through the sponge-like pockets formed when supercritical water dissolved certain minerals in the chamber’s ceiling. Therefore, about half the water in our oceans came from the subterranean chamber. Of course, this is based on a number of assumptions, such as the preflood surface water contained little salt, and the concentration of salt in the German drill hole represents the salt concentration that was in the chamber.
Deuterium (Heavy Hydrogen). As explained in the chapter on “The origin of Earth’s radioactivity” (pages 387–441), the subterranean chamber was also the source of the deuterium in our oceans and in comets. Comets contain about twice the concentration of deuterium as our oceans; so again, it looks as if half the water in the oceans came from the subterranean chamber. [See “Heavy Hydrogen” on page 312.] Also, without a huge source of free neutrons, we can assume there was little deuterium in the preflood seas.
This does not mean that the subterranean chamber held only half of the 1.43 × 109 km3 of water that is in our oceans, because an unknown amount of subterranean water was expelled into space, and no one knows how much water is still below the Earth’s surface—trapped between the former chamber’s ceiling and floor and in the sponge-like pockets in the chamber’s ceiling and floor. Even today, some of that water is entering the oceans as black smokers—jetting up from the sponge-like pockets in the former chamber floor. [See Figure 57 on page 128.]
Therefore, a lower bound of 0.9 miles could be placed on the average thickness of the subterranean chamber if we took half of today’s ocean volume and spread it over the chamber’s horizontal area, which was roughly the surface area of today’s Earth (5.1 × 108 km2).
However, for simplicity, we will say that it was at least 1 mile thick. It could have been much thicker when one considers (1) how much preflood subterranean salt water could still be trapped far below the Earth’s surface, and (2) how much subterranean water was launched into space. A quick glance at the total mass in Table 44 on page 615 shows that much of that mass could have been water from the subterranean chamber. Many minor factors and complexities need not concern us, because they are dwarfed by both of the above uncertainties.