After reading Visions of Glory, I researched some of the geological possibilities — Earthquakes and water coming up from beneath the ground — the fountains of the deep.
I watched a video about the Wasatch earthquake fault and read about the New Madrid fault. I already knew about the San Andreas fault because I grew up in California and experienced many quakes. My grama had a premonition of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, and she grabbed her babies and hid underneath their big dining table.
In VoG, water shot up from the ground during the Utah earthquake, which means water may exist deep under the surface of the earth. During an earthquake along the Wasatch fault, water may flood the valley from various sources, one being the water underground.
Last month, as we drove to Utah from Northern California — across northern Nevada, I read about Lake Bonneville and eyed the landscape which, sure enough, looked like the bottom of an ancient lake-bed.
Scientists in Alberta Canada have identified a type of diamond that contains ringwoodite which is 1.5 percent water in the form of hydroxide ions — a sign that there is water in the transition zone of the earths mantle. A volcano probably forced the diamond up from 254 to 410 miles below the earth, where this water may be trapped. It isn’t a gorgeous diamond, it’s all beat-up from it’s journey deep below the earth. Plate tectonics explain how these things get pushed to the surface of the earth.
“It translates into a very, very large mass of water, approaching the sort of mass of water that’s present in all the world’s ocean,” (Professor Pearson, lead study author and a geochemist at the University of Alberta in Canada.)
1. Water forced downward
2. Ringwoodite contains water
3. Ringwoodite pushed up by volcanic activity and trapped in diamonds within kimberlite rocks
Source: Professor Graham Pearson, University of Alberta
I also read about the hydroplate theory as an explanation of how the flood may have happened during the time of Noah’s Flood. And how it could happen again.
I just never gave it much thought until Visions of Glory. But Noah’s scriptural account talks about the fountains of the deep, as if there is water below the crust:
In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, in the second month, the seventeenth day of the month, the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened. (Genesis 7:11)
