It's kind of cool to take Genesis literally. Consider what the earth looked like according to Scripture.... There was a layer of water above the earth, just kind of floating up there. Apparently there wasn't any pollution in the atmosphere on which the water could condense and form rain [...] Polution from the volcano reached the atmosphere, providing something on which the water up there might condense, and fall. "Pollution" (i.e. particulate matter) assists in the formation of rain, but it's in no way essential, and rain will still form and fall in a "pure" atmosphere of just gasses and water vapor. So that explanation is out.
Even rain actually did require nucleation sites to form, an Earth with a 100% pure gas/vapor atmosphere (and it wouldn't be -- dust storms, etc. would "dirty" it in a hurry), then there would still be the issue of the supersaturated atmosphere contacting the "dirty" surface of the Earth, at which point you'd get rapid condensation on surface objects (trees, grass, dirt, people, etc.) and if there had actually been enough water vapor in the atmosphere to flood the Earth, then the Earth would have quickly "dewed" itself into an underwater state like a dehumidifier coil in a sauna.
People lived hundreds of years during that time, typically 500, 600, 700 years. [...] Also interesting to note that people after the flood -- immediately after it -- lived a lot shorter, to maybe 120 or less years. Makes you wonder if that water layer protected people from bad sun rays?
If so then there should be a significant difference in the longevity of people who are housebound than those who spend a lot of time outdoors. There isn't. Nor do long-term prisoners live longer, nor lab animals that spend their entire lives indoors (even in deep basements).
In any case, there's a lot of fascinating scientific consistencies in that part of Scripture.
There may be, but I don't think this is it.
I wonder if great DISPLACEMENT of Earth's waters would result in a universal flood. The water would not fill the ocean and rise over the land too, it would be lifted out of the ocean and poured on the land, taking a year to run back off. A couple of ways this could happen... For example asteroid strikes or the methane crystals in the ocean changing state, or both. Ever hear of the "Carolina Bays"?
I also wonder if we might be looking at a "world wide" flood through a 21st century lens, instead of what they considered "world wide" many thousands of years ago. The Bibical account does emphasize that it was a world wide flood, and that all the high hills were covered- but do they mean a gobal flood in the sense we understand it? The concept of the globe was not widely understood until 1492.
Or maybe it was global in the sense of it effecting every continent, though not necessarily buring all mountain chains with water, just the ones around Mesopotamia. Something wiped out all of the large land dwelling animals in the Americas around 12,000 years ago. That is the same time the caucasian looking skeletons in the Americas go away. The next human skeleltons are from Asian stock. 12K is pushing it back pretty far, but something happened so that old world animals lived on, but large new world animals (and humans) died out.