When the Deep Burst Open: How Earth’s Ancient Water System Helps Explain the Global Flood
Most people imagine Noah’s Flood simply as rising seas or torrential rain. The Bible gives a different picture. It says the “fountains of the great deep burst open.” That describes a world where enormous reservoirs of water inside the crust failed catastrophically.
For a long time this sounded mythical. But if the Designer generally works within the rules of nature He established, we should look for physical mechanisms. Modern geophysics uncovered something startling: Earth once held far more liquid water at the surface than it does now. The mantle transition zone stores one to three ocean masses of water bound inside ringwoodite (a deep mantle mineral that absorbs large amounts of water) and wadsleyite (another water-rich mineral found at high pressure). These minerals acquired that water as subduction carried hydrated crust downward. This means ancient Earth had not only a great ocean but also massive inland freshwater seas—far more surface water than exists today. Earth was a water-rich planet before much of that water was drawn into the interior.
A wetter planet is primed for catastrophic hydraulic failure. If the crust sat over vast, overpressured reservoirs and if the seals holding them broke, the result matches the Genesis description. Water would erupt upward. Pressure would collapse. Faults would unlock. Effective stress (the stress that actually holds rock in place once pore pressure is accounted for) would drop sharply. Entire crustal blocks could begin to slide.
The surprising part is the speed required. If South America separated from Africa during the Flood year, the average velocity is only about half a mile per hour. That is slower than a walk. A person could stroll beside a drifting continent. The motion is dramatic in scale, not in speed.
The key is water. In rock mechanics, water is the master switch. Pore pressure (water pressure inside rock fractures and grains) reduces friction dramatically. Overpressured basins collapse suddenly. Submarine landslides move mountains of sediment once water lubricates their base. When the right fractures fill with water, the crust behaves like a heavy object sliding across a wet floor.
The hydrotectonic collapse model, developed in the preprint Rapid Continental Reorganization Through Hydraulic Collapse: A Solution to the Heat Problem in Catastrophic Plate Tectonics, describes this process. As the “fountains of the deep” ruptured, the crust formed thick, porous damage zones (regions of broken, fractured rock created during failure) filled with water, sediment, and crushed material. These zones are not flat sliding surfaces. They are dynamic, turbulent mixtures that continually open new space as they deform. That behavior is called dilatancy (a property of granular materials where they expand and open voids when sheared rather than compacting). Experiments show that once shear starts, dilation outpaces closure. Permeability stays high as long as motion continues.
This helps answer the obvious question: what happened to the heat?
People worry that continents sliding thousands of miles must melt from friction. That is true only for dry rock. It is not true in a water-rich, dilatant zone. Water absorbs heat extremely well. A cubic meter of water can swallow millions of joules with only minor warming. And when water circulates through a fractured zone, it carries heat out faster than rock can generate it.
Geology already gives us smaller examples of this. Detachment faults in the Alps, Japan, and the American West preserve minerals that only form when cold water flushes rapidly through rock during motion. They contain pseudotachylites (thin glassy veins created during bursts of extremely rapid slip), which prove that some slip occurred at seismic speeds. They contain cataclasites (rock layers crushed into fine fragments during sudden brittle failure). They contain mylonites (finely layered, intensely sheared rocks) that are later cut by new fractures formed while the shear zone was still active. They show advective cooling (the rapid removal of heat by moving fluid rather than slow conduction) through minerals like chlorite (a green mineral that forms in cool, water-rich conditions) and epidote (a mineral indicating rapid cooling by circulating fluids).
These signatures point to a system that experienced both rapid slip and heavy fluid involvement. That is exactly the environment described in the hydrotectonic model during the Flood year.
Now return to Earth’s water story. Ancient Earth held more liquid water than today. After the Flood year, subduction carried a significant fraction of it downward into the mantle transition zone, where it remains stored. Modern oceans are smaller because much of the ancient hydrosphere is now inside the planet. Earth went from a water-rich surface world to a water-balanced world where the deep interior holds a vast reservoir.
The Flood year is the hinge between those two states.
Seen this way, the Biblical account aligns with a coherent physical event. The deep burst open. Pressurized reservoirs failed. Continents drifted at human-scale speeds. The waters rose, then drained as the crust stabilized. And the centuries that followed saw Earth draw down excess surface water into the mantle, producing the planet we inhabit today.
A water-rich planet can fail catastrophically and hydrodynamically. A drier one cannot. Earth was the former. Now it is the latter. The Flood is the moment that transformed it.
Author: James (JD) Longmire
ORCID: 0009-0009-1383-7698
Northrop Grumman Fellow (unaffiliated research)
Based on: Preprint at Zenodo: https://zenodo.org/records/17663309