Hope I'm okay in posting this here & hope this is in the right forum place (my apologies if not & feel free to move or delete etc.. mods) but purely as an excercise in hypothetical debunking, it occurred to me to ask the following questions : If it rained for exactly forty days and nights continuously :1. How deep would the resultant ocean be? 2. How much water would be required? Is there that much H20 on Earth? How dense would the clouds need to be to not be "rained out" much earlier?3. Would there really be enough to cover even Mt Everest (8850 m /29,000 ft)4. Assuming total cloud cover and constant rain how would that affect the Earth's albedo & thus temperature? (I'm guessing the necessary clouds would soon reflect the sunlight to the point where the Earth froze over entirely in a "snowball Earth" episode and the temperature dropped to a global average well below zero. Supplementary questions 4a. - assuming this happened how many days in would that point be & 4b. if the rain or now snow kept falling, would we reach a minimum temperature & what might that be?)& finally5. By way of comparison, is there any scientific, realistic example of global or near global rainfall, underwhat conditions could this occur and what is the longest & most extensive that a (water) rain / flood situation could feasibly be? Anyone care to do the maths here? (Ashamed to admit my own maths level is pretty lamentable. :-( ) Does anyone know if these calulations have been done & questions answered before and if so are they available on the web or in book somewhere? I'd presume & am pretty sure I'm not the first person to have thought of these questions.Again, no offence or anything is intended purely an excercise in "what-if" hypothetical "mythbusters-style" Great Flood myth debunking.

I'm quite sure I can't answer all of that, but I can answer part of the math part of it for you assuming certain things (because I don't have the info to make it dead accurate) But assuming that the earth is a perfect sphere (which we know it isn't) and that it doesn't absorb any of the water, using the diameter of the earth at the equator (which is slightly more than between the two poles) the volume of the earth is ~1,087,252,514,773 km cubed which I probably could have just found a more accurate number on the web but I did it the more difficult less accurate way, so excuse any 'slight' errors. For the water to cover Mt. Everest it would have had to rain ~2.3 billion (2,263,838,557) km cubed of water. That would be roughly 56.6 million km cubed of water per day. That would be 110,956,814 meters cubed of water for ever km squared of surface area of the earth per day. 4,623,200 m cubed/km squared per hour. Or to get just a little more picky, 77,053 m cubed/km squared per minute. That's just to touch the tip of it, I'm no scientist, but, I'm quite sure that even if all the polar caps melted (which would cause the water to expand) I still don't think there would be enough to do that. But that's the only part I can really help with. Hope that I gave enough info to help you out, or help someone else answer the rest of your questions.

I think that I made a possible mistake in the math toward the end, not sure, but, if someone wants to check my math I promise I won't be offended, it needs to be checked I'm quite sure, if not, I'll do it in a bit.