And the waters overwhelmed the earth so greatly that all the tall mountains that were under the whole heavens came to be covered.

Does a local flood fit that description? The book The Genesis Flood observes: “It would not have been possible for water to cover even one high mountain in the Near East without inundating Australia and America too!” The same publication then quotes the observation of well-known Hebrew scholar S. R. Driver:

“It is manifest that a flood which would submerge Egypt as well as Babylonia must have risen to at least 2000 ft. (the height of the elevated country between them), and have thus been in fact a universal one . . . a flood, on the other hand, which did less than this is not what the Biblical writers describe.”

Interestingly, in the United States, England, France, southern Spain, Germany, Russia and elsewhere huge fissures in the earth have been found filled with the remains of large numbers of animals. They include mixtures of bones of the elephant, rhinoceros, hippopotamus, reindeer, horse, hog, bear, and many others. One such cavern near Palermo, Sicily, yielded more than twenty tons of bones for commercial purposes. Often these fissures are located on isolated hills at considerable height where animals would be expected to flee from floodwaters that “kept increasing greatly upon the earth.” (Gen. 7:18) With regard to the variety of animal remains found in one bone cave, the book Earth’s Most Challenging Mysteries asks:

“What made rabbits run into the same cave as coyotes? And an antelope with a wolverine and a grizzly? Bones of the mastodon were found, also a few reptiles . . . The whole mass of bones was covered and preserved by a flood deposit of gravel and rocks.”