I have 2 questions that I have been wondering about for some time and would like to know if you have any thoughts on the subject.
During the flood, God destroyed all human and animal life. I am assuming that the sea creatures were not destroyed. If not, why were they spared the judgment? My second question is after the flood civilization would have again started somewhere in the middle east and the people and animals would have migrated from there to fill the earth. The people and animals that inhabited North and South America presumably got here by crossing the bearing straight when it was frozen and migrated south. How did all of the tropical animals of the south American jungles such as the snakes, frogs, lizards etc migrate through all of the cold regions to reach that area. If the regions weren’t cold yet, How did they cross the Bearing Straight?
I have heard arguments that the global flood was global only to the extent that it killed all of the humans and animals associated with them, but that it didn’t kill the animals the God had placed in other locations on the planet, Then after the flood, humans would have been the only ones who needed to migrate throughout the earth. Any thoughts on this?
Genesis 7:21-23 is the passage that explains all of this. A literal reading shows that other than Noah and his family, only fish were left alive, and even the survival of fish can only be surmised by the fact that they weren’t mentioned. It’s likely that they did survive and if so it’s because their gene pool had not been molested, and man’s and animal’s were.
The Bible also hints that the size and location of land masses could have been much different then. For example Genesis 10:25 tells us that the land was divided well after the flood, giving animals plenty of migration time. And though seasons are mentioned in Genesis 1:14, the first mention of summer and winter comes in Gen. 8:22 after the flood. Some believe that pre-flood weather was uniformly sub-tropical but began changing with the collapse of the water vapor canopy that surrounded the Earth at the time of the flood.
Other catastrophic events changed both the Earth’s orbit and inclination on its axis causing further climate changes. These changes are what makes many parts of the world uninhabitable today and they took place long after the flood, some as late as 700 BC when something happened that eventually caused all the calendars of Earth to be lengthened by 5 1/4 days.
In short, the situation on Earth back then was so much different than it is now that we can only speculate as to how things were.