>> Here's something I've always found curious. The continents look 
>> like,
>> for the most part, they all sort of fit together. So maybe they 
>> were
>> all fitted together at one point, in a much smaller sphere without 
>> all
>> that water? And then either the water came in the form of a 
>> meteorite,
>> or, more crazily, formed an outer shell (though how it would 
>> sustain
>> itself I don't know) and came crashing down.

> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth

> The planet has always been this size

Probably - and almost certainly so ever since it was this size :-).
Current majority thinking [tm] (CMT) is that 'the Moon' (Luna)  almost 
certainly was torn out of the earth at an early stage by something 
rather large, parts of which probably form part of the end product.

> and water has been there (here)
> since it was cool enough for vapour to condense.

" ... cool enough for vapo[u]r to condense ... " may [will] be more 
complex than may at first appear. When you have a planetary system 
driven by a star only 100 odd million miles away, the condensation 
process is essentially certain not to be as we see it today. This 
leads to the theory that Dave alluded to

> ... (they claim it had NEVER rained before the flood)

While this concept is not necssarily what the biblical account implies 
it does make some sense of it and as a scientific theiry it is not 
without some merit - it certainly has more merit than some scientific 
theories which are currently part of CMT. If we look at Venus a year / 
century / millenia  from now and found that the atmosphere had 
condensed the planetary scientists (should such still exist) wouldn't 
say "that can't possibly have happened" but "we'll have to revise our 
theories", or "ah yes, I was expecting that". ie Some pretty 
unexpected but by no means impossible things happen all the time and 
science's job is essentially stamp-collecting the observations 
(notwithstanding what Rutherord said).

> and where it went to afterward.

When I read Kim Stanley Robinson's utterly incomparable Red / Green / 
Blue Mars trilogy, which has one major sub theme which deals with the 
terra-forming of Mars, it seemed wondrous but wholly implausible. His 
accounts of the vast quantiyes of subterranean water and the means of 
persuading it to return to the surface seemed beyond possibility. 
Subsequent martian discoveries and indications of the presence of 
water indicate that a substantial portion of the water that once lay 
on the martian surface may still be there and may be not too too 
unamenable to the sort of techniques that KSR proposes in his trilogy.

READ Red / Green / Blue Mars if you haven't. I do not expect to ever 
read anything superior in its category in my lifetime - although I'd 
be very happy to.

The mechanisms for Terra and the present situation are very different 
from Mars, but "where it all went" is not so very hard a question to 
answer. It's very largely still there :-). *IF* it was laregly all "up 
there" (and it is "scientifically" possible that it was and if it all 
'decided' to come 'down here' in a chain reaction short term process, 
then I think one might wish to complain that the biblical account 
under-described the event :-).

None of the above says that any of the above is how it happened. BUT 
it does say that to discount things that scientifically could have 
happened (and even things that "scientifically couldn't") is risky for 
a person who is committed to a scientific approach.


> The continents are
> just pool furniture, sort of, floating around on magma

Thats roughly the CMT.
EXCEPT that the pool furniture items crush push each other under the 
surface as they ride over each other continually.

CMT is that all the continents did fit together.
BUT this was not the CMT even 50 years ago fwiw.


        Russell




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