99% of Earth’s fresh water is frozen in the ice caps or underground. We have access to only about 1% of the fresh water.
The biblical Flood involved an extraordinary amount of water. Genesis records that “all the fountains of the great deep were broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened” (Genesis 7:11). If this describes a global event, an obvious question follows: Where did all that water go?
Today, approximately 96.5% of Earth’s water is contained in the oceans and is saline. Only about 2.5% is freshwater. But the location of that freshwater is remarkable. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, approximately 68.7% of Earth’s freshwater is presently locked in ice caps, glaciers, and permanent snow, while another 30.1% exists underground as freshwater groundwater.¹
In other words, nearly 99% of Earth’s freshwater is presently either frozen or underground.
That does not prove a global Flood, but it presents an interesting comparison with a Flood model involving enormous quantities of subterranean water followed by a major Ice Age.
THE FOUNTAINS OF THE GREAT DEEP
Genesis does not describe the Flood as simply forty days of unusually heavy rain. It specifically identifies two major sources of water:
“On that day all the fountains of the great deep were broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened.”
Genesis 7:11
One proposed mechanism for these “fountains of the great deep” is Walt Brown’s Hydroplate Theory. Brown proposed that large quantities of subterranean water once existed beneath portions of Earth’s crust and were violently released as the crust fractured during the Flood.²
The Hydroplate Theory is not accepted by conventional geology, and the details of Brown’s model should therefore be evaluated on their own evidence. Nevertheless, it raises the same question presented by the biblical account: if massive quantities of water participated in a global catastrophe, what happened to that water afterward?
One possible answer involves the Ice Age.
A FLOOD FOLLOWED BY AN ICE AGE
A major Ice Age requires more than extremely cold weather. To build enormous glaciers, two conditions are necessary at the same time: tremendous quantities of precipitation must fall as snow, and summers must remain cool enough that much of that snow does not melt.
This creates an interesting climatic problem. Extremely cold oceans actually reduce evaporation. But warmer oceans produce much greater evaporation and therefore provide substantially more moisture to the atmosphere.
A proposed post-Flood Ice Age model combines warm oceans with cooler continental conditions. Extensive geological upheaval and volcanism associated with the Flood would leave the oceans unusually warm, increasing evaporation. At the same time, volcanic aerosols and dust in the atmosphere could reduce incoming solar radiation over the continents, producing cooler summers.³
Warm oceans would provide the moisture.
Cooler continents would preserve the snow.
Repeated year after year, this could produce rapidly growing glaciers.
THE WATER WOULD NOT NEED TO BE FRESH WHEN IT LEFT THE OCEAN
There is another important point. The water supplying an Ice Age does not need to begin as freshwater. When ocean water evaporates, most dissolved salts remain behind. Water vapor enters the atmosphere, condenses into clouds, and eventually falls as relatively fresh rain or snow.
The process would therefore be:
Ocean water → evaporation → atmospheric moisture → snowfall → glacial ice
This cycle could repeat continuously.
The atmosphere does not need to hold an ice sheet’s entire volume of water at one time. In fact, USGS estimates that Earth’s atmosphere contains only about 12,900 cubic kilometers of water at any given moment, while glaciers, ice caps, and permanent snow contain approximately 24 million cubic kilometers.¹ The same water cycle simply operates repeatedly, transferring water from one reservoir to another.
AN ENORMOUS AMOUNT OF FRESHWATER IS NOW FROZEN
The scale of Earth’s ice sheets is difficult to comprehend.
Greenland is covered by ice in about 85% of its area, reaching more than 11,000 feet thick in places.⁴ Antarctica contains an even larger ice sheet. NASA reports that Greenland and Antarctica contain most of Earth’s glacial ice, with thicknesses reaching approximately 10,000 feet in Greenland and 15,000 feet in Antarctica.⁵ According to the USGS, approximately 24 million cubic kilometers of water are presently stored in ice caps, glaciers, and permanent snow.¹ That represents about 68.7% of all freshwater on Earth. Another 30.1% of freshwater is underground.
So where is nearly all of Earth’s freshwater today? Frozen in ice or beneath our feet.
COULD POST-FLOOD CONDITIONS HAVE PRODUCED RAPID ICE ACCUMULATION?
This is where the question becomes scientifically interesting.
Conventional models explain the great ice sheets through glacial and interglacial cycles operating over hundreds of thousands of years. Snow accumulated, compacted into ice, flowed under its own weight, melted, and accumulated again as climates changed.
A Flood model proposes a radically different starting condition.
Instead of assuming that past oceans, atmospheric conditions, precipitation rates, volcanism, and summer temperatures resembled today’s, it proposes a catastrophic disturbance followed by a period of climatic instability. Michael Oard’s proposed Flood-caused Ice Age model, for example, identifies two major factors: unusually warm post-Flood oceans and extensive volcanic activity.³ Under that model, warmer oceans increase evaporation and snowfall while atmospheric volcanic material helps maintain cooler continental summers.
The warm oceans would gradually cool. Volcanic activity would decline. Eventually evaporation would decrease while summer temperatures increased sufficiently for melting to exceed snowfall. The glaciers would then retreat. This provides a proposed beginning, peak, and ending mechanism for an Ice Age.⁶
WHERE DID THE FLOOD WATER GO?
The question “Where did all the Flood water go?” may therefore begin with a mistaken assumption. The water does not necessarily need to have disappeared.
Water continually moves between Earth’s oceans, atmosphere, ice sheets, groundwater, lakes, rivers, and living organisms.
Some of it would return to the oceans.
Some would become groundwater.
And enormous quantities could be transferred through evaporation and snowfall into continental glaciers and polar ice sheets.
Today nearly 99% of Earth’s freshwater is found in the two reservoirs that dominate this discussion: approximately 69% frozen as ice and approximately 30% underground.
This distribution does not establish that Noah’s Flood occurred, nor does it establish the Hydroplate Theory. But neither is Earth’s present freshwater distribution inconsistent with the basic concept of catastrophic water redistribution followed by extensive glaciation.
Instead, it raises a worthwhile question: Could dramatically warmer oceans following a global Flood, combined with extensive volcanism and cooler continental summers, have produced the enormous quantities of snowfall necessary to generate the Ice Age much more rapidly than conventional models assume?
That question must ultimately be tested quantitatively against the ice itself, including its volume, accumulation rates, internal layering, flow, isotopes, and other physical evidence.
But one thing is certain: the overwhelming majority of Earth’s freshwater is not presently flowing through its rivers and lakes. It is frozen in ice or stored underground.
SOURCES
¹ U.S. Geological Survey, “How Much Water is There on Earth?”
https://www.usgs.gov/water-science-school/science/how-much-water-there-earth
² Creation Science, Walt Brown, “In the Beginning: Compelling Evidence for Creation and the Flood,” Hydroplate Theory
https://www.creationscience.com/
³ Michael J. Oard, “Setting the Stage for an Ice Age,” Answers in Genesis
https://answersingenesis.org/environmental-science/ice-age/setting-the-stage-for-an-ice-age/
⁴ NASA Earth Observatory, “Topography of Greenland”
https://science.nasa.gov/earth/earth-observatory/topography-of-greenland-5118/
⁵ NASA, “The Anatomy of Glacial Ice Loss”
https://www.nasa.gov/science-research/earth-science/the-anatomy-of-glacial-ice-loss/
⁶ Michael J. Oard, “The Peak of the Ice Age,” Answers in Genesis
https://answersingenesis.org/environmental-science/ice-age/peak-of-ice-age/
