Gen 7:10 And it came to pass after seven days, that the waters of the flood were upon the earth.
Gen 7:11 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.
Gen 7:12 And the rain was upon the earth forty days and forty nights.
The water for Noah’s flood had two sources:
- The “fountains of the great deep”,the subterranean water chambers(that were responsible for the mist in Genesis 2:6)were broken up;this means that the crust of the earth cracked,and water under high pressure gushed out.
- The “windows of the heavens”–the water vapor canopy above the atmosphere.
Notice that the breaking up of the subterranean reservoirs would mean a lot of geologic upheavals.When the crust breaks open, lava breaks out to the surface.This is what happens in a volcano,but it happened on a much larger scale in the flood.Lava rushing down a mountain slope would suddenly bury large amounts of flora and fauna–that’s just the right criterion for fossilization.Surely enough,large ensembles of plants and animals in awkward positions have been found as fossils.The Bible records that the flood destroyed was global and that it destroyed all non-aquatic macroscopic life outside the ark(Genesis 7:18-24).
There was more to it than only rain that came upon the earth,which is what throws some people off,for they think how can rain cause a flood like that for it would seem like it would have to rain a whole lot longer than it did to cause a flood like that.