The flood in the Christian Religion is a global flood and not a local flood.

I've attempted to get in touch with my opponent to resolve the confusion that he describes but with no luck. As I only have a few hours left until I forfeit I will post this round now.Any side in a debate is free to take any perspective that they feel will be effective so long as it does not violate previously agreed upon conditions. No conditions are stated in either the resolution or either of the previous rounds. In fact, none have been stated yet. All that has been stated is that I have somehow strayed from topic with no further clarification of the topic or how I have wandered off of it.I don't believe that my line of reasoning strays from the debate topic as my opponent suggests and will leave it for the voters to decide which arguments count. I'm sorry if my opponent is not having the debate that he anticipated but I feel that I have done my level best to address the issue.Origin and Fate of the WatersIn the last round I asked my opponent where the flood waters came from and where they went. A local flood does not have this problem but for a global flood 2400 m deep it becomes an impossibility. All models that I have ever seen kill all life on Earth. Dropping the water from space releases energies that dwarf the global thermonuclear arsenals by several orders of magnitude and is likely capable of vaporizing the Earth's crust and a decent portion of the mantle. Dropping it from orbital ice rings is only half as bad but still sufficient to resurface the Earth. Holding the water in the atmosphere as a "vapor canopy" produces atmospheric pressures and temperatures more suitable to Venus than Earth. Storing the water underground in an appeal to the 'fountains of the deep' is mechanically unstable. Rock is notoriously bad at floating on water. Storing the water as in magma underground is even worse since you have to erupt more magma than water, producing a lava ocean, and all the water exits as superheated steam at about 700 C. Getting rid of the water is even worse.Truly Catastrophic Plate TectonicsAiG's latest attempt to solve this problem is referred to as "Catastrophic Plate Tectonics" [16]. It tries to do in about one year what regular plate tectonics does in a few hundred million years. The results are unarguably catastrophic.First they use a computer simulation to show that runaway subduction occurring "at rates of feet-per-second" to close an old ocean basin, pull apart a supercontinent and form new, warm, shallow oceanic crust. The shallower oceans can't accommodate all the water which either vaporizes and falls as rain or floods the land as a series of tsunamis. The new ocean floor then cools and sinks, allowing the water to return.A few minor problems: - Oceanic plates are about 100 km thick and a few thousand km on a side [17]. Pushing them through water at feet per second is implausible. Pushing them through solid rock at those speeds is utterly ridiculous. - The stresses produced would not only pull the supercontinent apart but would pull the continents into tiny bits of gravel. Friction at plate boundaries produced by continental drift moving at the speed your fingernails grow causes melting [18]. At feet per second we'd expect a blazing wall of plasma along every plate boundary. - Sea-floor spreading governs the rate at which the underlying mantle ascends and the degree to which it melts. Under modern conditions that's limited to about 25% partial melting of the mantle source, producing ordinary ocean floor basalt [19]. During Earth's earlier, hotter geological history as much as 50% partial melting occurred, giving rise to komatiites. Komatiites are lavas we haven't seen on Earth in 2.5 billion years. AiG's catastrophic rates would cause 100% melting, producing volcanic equivalents of mantle peridotites and dunnites, rocks for which geologists have no names because they don't exist. - All the super-heated steam that's going to fall as rain has to shed a whole lot of energy and since water vapor is such an excellent greenhouse gas [20] precious little will be lost to space. The only place for it to go is into the atmosphere, leading to rapid and catastrophic temperature rise and the inevitable steaming alive of all aboard the ark. - Producing an ocean roughly the size of the Atlantic requires a whole lot of lava. About 4000 km wide by 15,000 km long and at least 10 km deep. The gas released by that much lava will render the atmosphere unbreathable. The heat will boil the ocean entirely. The hydrothermal action would release massive amounts of metals into the waters. Given the weird composition of the lava, most of the metal would be iron and nickel. This fluid would more closely resemble the run-off from mine tailings ponds than ocean water. The end result would be turning the world's oceans and all its sea-life into the nastiest mine-waste gumbo imaginable before finally evaporating it completely.Local Branch of the Global Flood" And the dove came in to him in the evening; and, lo, in her mouth was an olive leaf pluckt off: so Noah knew that the waters were abated from off the earth." Genesis 8:11Where did this olive leaf come from? The surface of the Earth has been covered in semi-saline water (or mine effluent) for nearly a year at a depth roughly equivalent to that at the mid-Atlantic ridge. Any tree would have been crushed, drowned, deprived of sunlight and buried by the global sediment layer. Any olive seed would be attempting to sprout in salted sea-floor muck or mine-waste.Thus, we are forced to conclude that either the Bible is wrong or that the flood was a good deal less than global.Rain Falls. Everything Dies.While the land animals may be cozy in the ark, the rest of the world's creatures have been left to weather the storm. All aquatic life will be faced with either too much or too little salt as the ocean waters and the flood waters mix. Anything dwelling on the bottom will also be buried in untold hundreds of feet of sediment. This will lead to the extinction of most life that can't survive living beneath 2400 m of semi-saline water for a year or so. A few seeds and spores might survive but all they'll find are the inhospitable salt wastes left when the flood waters recede. The most notable extinction is the bulk of the plants that produce the majority of the world's oxygen [21].The Armenian Death MarchHaving beached the ark and waited for the flood waters to recede, Noah now opens the doors. The sight that greets him is much like what you would expect if you removed all the water from a great ocean basin. Lifeless muck stretches for as far as the eye can see. No plant grows and the only water is befouled by salt. He now disembarks the animals, of which there are either two or seven of each. Most are not native to Armenia and have a bit of a walk ahead of them, over mountains, rivers and oceans without food or water. Speaking of food, amongst the animals released are the lion, the tiger, the wolverine and the honey badger. You don't need to be an ecologist to see that this situation is going to be very bloody and very brief.Population BottlenecksIf a global flood had occurred, species recovering from just two (or seven) ancestors should show profound signs of a population bottleneck and horrible inbreeding occurring about 4400 years ago. Bottlenecks of this sort are observed in a few rare species that have tiptoed along the edge of extinction [22]. They are not seen in the overwhelming majority of land mammals.Damned ForeignersDuring the 24th century BC: - Mesopotamia had discovered the wheel, pottery and beer [23]. - The Egyptians had built the sphinx and the great pyramids at Giza [24]. - The Minoans were exporting copper, gold, pottery and jewelry from Crete [25]. - The Longshan culture in China was establishing the beginnings of the silk road, exporting lapis lazuli, jade, turquoise and silk as far away as Persia, Egypt and India [26]. - The Indus Valley Civilization had established numerous cities on the border between what is now India and Pakistan. They had advanced trade and agriculture and had invented metallurgy in a society that rivaled the Mesopotamians [27].Every one of these civilizations failed to be extinguished by a global flood at this time.Summary:I have demonstrated that a global flood suffers from the following problems: - Contradictory biblical information. - Lack of a source or sink for the flood waters. - Lack of a global sedimentary layer. - Ice caps on Greenland and Antarctica that ought to have floated away. - Extinction of most life not on the arc. - Ecosystem collapse immediately following disembarkation from the ark. - Lack of a population bottleneck. - The presence of several major civilizations during the time of the flood, none of which were destroyed.These difficulties with a global flood are insurmountable, leaving a local flood as the only plausible explanation for the Biblical flood story.Sources[16] http://answersingenesis.org...[17] http://www.trinity.edu...[18] http://www.sciencedirect.com...[19] http://link.springer.com...[20] http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov...[21] http://www.whoi.edu...[22] http://evolution.berkeley.edu...[23] http://www.ducksters.com...[24] http://www.ancientegypt.co.uk...[25] http://archaeology.about.com...[26] http://books.google.ca...[27] https://www.sscnet.ucla.edu...