Great flood - volume and energy content
Great flood - volume and energy content
We're going to do a lot of rounding here, and we'll say at the time Mt. Everest was 24,980 feet tall. That means the water was 25,000 feet deep, world-wide. But how much water is that, really?

Well, let's find out. The earth has a radius of roughly 6,378,150 meters. The depth of the water would add another 7,620 meters to that, making the total radius 6,385,770 meters. This raises the volume of the earth from 1,086,306,981,562,932,930,000 cubic meters to 1,090,205,080,144,169,258,160 cubic meters. That yields a total volume of water of 3,898,098,581,236,328,160 cubic meters, or 1,029,098,025,446,390,634,240 gallons. A gallon of water, weighs approximately 8 pounds (actually slightly more), which yields a total weight for the water of 4,116,392,101,785,562,536.96 TONS (not pounds, but tons).

Not a bad idea...so let's see, the specific heat of water is 334kj/kg.

So first we have to convert the weight of the water into mass in kilograms

4,116,392,101,785,562,536.96 tons of water = 8,232,784,203,571,125,073,920 pounds = 3,734,328,098,596,389,085,845.7979904 kg

So to convert that much water to ice would require 3,734,328,098,596,389,085,845.7979904 kg * 334kj/kg = 1,247,265,584,931,193,954,672,496.5287936 kj - rounding off, we'll say 1.248e+24 kj.

According to http://www.psigate.ac.uk/newsite/reference/plambeck/chem1/p05014.htm:

quote:

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The explosion of one gram of the military explosive trinitrotoluene (TNT) will produce 2.760 kJ
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
So if we divide the number of kilojoules needed to convert the water into ice, by the kilojoules per gram of TNT, we get 451,907,820,627,244,186,475,542.221 grams, or 451,907,820,627,244,186,475.542221 kg of TNT.

That's 497,695,837,695,202,848,541 tons of TNT.

That's the equivalent of approximately 33 quadrillion Hiroshima bombs.

You're right Les - that was impressive.

TNT 4.184Mj/Kg

Hirohsima bomb - 15,000 Ktons