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The English word "above" is translated from the Hebrew word 'al (al) which is a seriously ambiguous word; viz: 'al has several possible meanings to choose from. It can not only be translated above, but also over, through, on, in, upon, by, concerning, to, touching, according to, against, among, and, as, at, because of, had the charge of, with, of, and than.
The translation below makes a little more sense than the KJV.
. Gen 1:6-8 . . And God said: Let there be space between the waters, to separate water from water. And so it was. God made this space to separate the waters above from the waters below. And God called the space Sky.
In other words; the sky shouldn't be thought of as a divider between two distinct "layers" of water, but rather; simply as a place to store water up off the ground; and it's really a lot. Earth's atmosphere holds roughly 2,900 cubic miles of water in the form of vapor.
To illustrate just how much water that represents: suppose you had a tank one mile wide, and one mile high. What length would it have to be to contain 2,900 cubic miles of water. Answer: 2,900 miles; and the tank would stretch from San Diego California to the Brooks Range in Alaska.
Now supposing we again make the tank one mile wide, but this time only as tall as the Eiffel Tower. How far would a tank of those dimensions containing 2,900 cubic miles of water go? Answer: the Eiffel Tower is 984 feet tall; which is .1863636 miles. So a tank 1 mile wide, and .1863636 miles tall, whose volume is 2,900 cubic miles, would be 15,561 miles long.
If that tank was poked into the Earth, it would go all the way through the planet, out the other side, and keep going for another 7,634 miles into space; which is roughly 31 times further out than a Space Shuttle orbit. Laid South to North, the tank would stretch from Antarctica past Bangladesh to the North Pole and keep going over the pole southwards for yet another 3,151 miles to Minneapolis Minnesota.
But get this: the number of gallons of water in a single cubic mile is:
1,100,956,999,000
That's over 1.1 trillion gallons of water. Multiply those trillions of gallons by 2,900 to obtain the number of gallons in the form of vapor dissolved at any given time in Earth's atmosphere; and you get 3.2 quadrillion gallons which is fourteen zeroes after the 2; and looks like this:
3,200,000,000,000,000
A quadrillion is a thousand trillions. The US national debt hasn't topped twenty trillion yet, and still a good ways off from a quadrillion. God help us if it ever gets to a quad. By then, we'll all be working side by side with child labor in Chinese factories.
Note: global warming isn't as unnatural as some folks would have us to believe; but rather, it's an essential element in our environment. Global warming is the result of two sunlight catchers: gases and water vapor. Some of the more familiar global warming gases are carbon dioxide, fluorocarbons, methane, and ozone. But as popular as those gases are with environmental extremists; they're bit players in comparison to the role that ordinary water vapor plays in global warming. By some estimates; atmospheric water vapor accounts for more than 90% of global warming; which is not a bad thing because without atmospheric water vapor, the earth would be so cold that life as we know it couldn't exist here; not to mention it would never rain.
Cliff
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(just more of the Jer. 17:5 stuff) [I thought that this was the BIBLE STUDY thread??]