Beginning in the sixth chapter of Genesis, the first book of the Bible, Scripture tells about a great flood which destroyed the whole world and about a man who built a ship in which he and all kinds of animals were saved from destruction. The claim of an globe covering flood is incredible. Nothing remotely close to it has been recorded at any other time in human history. The most destructive floods in recent history have covered 100,000 square miles of land. The flood of Noah’s day covered the earth, nearly 197 million square miles. Is there any proof today to support the Biblical claim of a global flood?

The first challenge regarding proofs of the flood is one of interpretation. The facts of certain things are undeniable, but the explanation of those facts is subject to debate. For example, the rocks on the top of Mt. Everest are filled with fossils of animals found in the ocean. How did those dead animals travel over 30,000 feet to the top of Mt. Everest? The answer of many scientists is that the top of Mt. Everest was at one time on the bottom of the ocean, but when the continents bonked into each other the floor of the ocean was pushed u. The scientists who believe in Noah’s flood say those fossils were deposited on top of Mt. Everest by flood waters. This is not meant to say, nor do most flood geologists believe, the earth was covered with enough water to cover Mt. Everest as it stands today. Before the flood the mountains were much smaller than they are now. As the flood came to its end the movement of the earth’s crust formed the mountains by the collision of continents and the uplifting of mountains.

This article will discuss two pieces of evidence for the flood evident in the world today. First, the presence of global sedimentary layers. Sediment is the dirt and debris carried in water. Anyone who does much boating on a river is familiar with how water carries sand and then deposits it when the current slows down to form sandbars. Fossil layers are rock strata formed in definable layers by water depositing smaller grains of material. Look at the wall of a limestone quarry and the rock will be marked by clearly visible horizontal lines made by the deposition of those rocks. The same thing happened on a much larger scale which formed the rock layers that are the basis of the geologic ages. The geologic column is made up almost entirely of sedimentary rocks. That means most of the fossil layers were were laid down by water. The geologic column is made up of layers that cover huge portions of the world. The same layers of rock found in America are also found in the Middle East. For those layers to cover such large portions of the earth there had to be a massive body of water that laid down the sediment on an international scale.

A second evidence for the flood is bent rocks. Rock is too brittle to bend. However, there are two circumstances where rock can bend. Superheated rock on the verge of melting will bend, kind of like lava. Rock will also bend while it is being formed in water. When rock is like wet clay it will bend. When it dries out it becomes rock hard. Bent rocks can be found all over the world. Drive through a mountainous section of America and bent strata will be evident where the roads were cut through the hillsides.

Can it be determined if the rocks were bent when hot or wet? Yes, it can. Rocks heated enough to bend will show changes in their structure that makes it apparent they were superheated. Geologists have determined most of the bent rocks seen today show no signs of being heated. Therefore, they were bent while still wet and soft. The widespread nature of soft, wet rocks speaks to a widespread event which formed these rocks and which kept them saturated while the mountains were forming. Such an event could only be a flood which covered major portions of the earth.

These and other evidences show Noah’s flood to be a plausible explanation for the world we see around us. The Biblical description of the flood provides a reasonable explanation for many of the features found on the earth today. The only eyewitness testimony of Noah’s flood is recorded in the Bible. The wise will believe it.