Dinosaurs and Man

[Anomalocaris]

---

---

Tell me again about all that water that shot out of the ground, xtian. Still dying to know where it all went.

Providing that I haven't bungled the math, with the earth having a surface area of ~510 km^3, that means there's enough water (from all terrestrial sources) to cover the entire surface area of the earth to a depth of about 2700 meters.

That's assuming of course, that the surface of the earth is uniformly at sea level. Which it isn't - 71% of the planet is covered by oceans with an average depth of ~3900 meters.

There isn't anywhere near enough water on earth to get the job done.

Cue the ad hoc explanations in 1.... 2..... 3.....

I will have to give you a non-ad hoc explanation. There is actually considerable more water on earth than shown in the diagram. The amount shown is a fair approximation of the free water. But at least that amount is also chemically bonded in hydrated mineral in the mantle of the earth. So the notion there is a lot of water under the crust is not quite false. However it is easy to show even if all the water under the crust were to come out, there still wouldn't be enough to cover relatively modest mountain tops like the Rockies, much less the really tall ones like Kilimanjaro, Andies, and Himalayass.

Btw, for all the water in the mantle to come out, there would need to be more than cracks in the crust. There would need to be a complete overturning of the mantle of the earth from the core mantle boundary upwards. If that happened 6000 years ago, the surface of the earth would still be one single ocean of liquid red hot magma now, and remain so for millions of years.

Also, those water would come out at many times the boiling temperature at the atmospheric pressure. So instead of 40 days of rain, you will get 40 days of conditions similar to the inside of superheated water boiler in a power plant, with energy enough to raise the entire ocean previous on the surface to boiling.

The ocean will then also boil away, and you'd be left with a entire surface as one single lake of liquid magma (thanks to mantle overturning to release the water beneath the crust), and an atmosphere 200 denser than ours (thanks the boiling of the oceans due to the heat of the water from beneath the crust).

In other words, releasing water from beneath the crust in quick action would leave earth with atmosphere twice as thick as those of Venus, and liquid magma for surface.