CPT Q. 055: What was the lag time from when the steam jets first began and rain reached the ground?
Q. 55. In your response to question 46 you state: “However, the perspective I have been assuming in every paper I have written is the global one. From this global perspective there is but one episode of CPT, one that persists with sufficient vigor for a period of 40 days to produce the violent steam jets everywhere on earth where rapid seafloor spreading was occurring.” Does this not then imply that all rifting must have occurred during the first 40 days of the Flood? Or is there some special feature of early Flood rifting that produces steam jets while later rifting does not? What is that factor? Also, what would be the lag time between steam jets and rain? The Bible tells us that the rain lasted forty days. If it takes one day for water to travel as supersonic steam into the upper atmosphere or higher, and then fall back to earth as rain, then the steam jets would only be operating 39 days. Is that time frame minutes? Hours? Days? Also, if everything took place in the first forty days, does that not contradict your earlier work that discussed the Mesozoic rifting of the Atlantic in terms of later Flood?
Response: Yes, if indeed the intense steam jet activity was limited to first 40 days, this implies that almost all of the rapid rifting likewise was restricted to these 40 days. The speed of the rifting depends of the global strength of the mantle which, as I mentioned above, tends to be either low or high, depending on whether the CPT weakening is on or off. As for how long it takes the rain to appear once the steam jets turn on, that is reasonably easy to estimate. The speed in the core of the jets is supersonic. The speed of the ocean water entrained in the fringes of the jets is likely just below sonic, say, 800 km/hour. Therefore for such water to reach stratospheric height requires only a couple of minutes. For it to fall back to earth at 20 km/hour in the lower troposphere where air density is high means it generally takes less than an hour for it to reach the earth’s surface again.
In regard to my earlier modeling of the Mesozoic/Cenozoic breakup of Pangea, the time scales I showed in these computer calculations were in the range of 40-60 days, which fit well within the 150 days I had in mind at that point for the entire CPT event, an interval that also included the Paleozoic portion of the cataclysm which I was not yet able to model.