How did Fish Survive the Tsunamis of Noah's Global Flood?

A question many people have about the Flood is how did both freshwater and saltwater fish survive? The Flood certainly involved tectonically induced tsunamis that traveled at great speeds and pummeled the land with towering walls of water, and fish are very sensitive to shock.



Fish Fossil, left over from the Flood.

 Obviously, fish weren’t taken on board the Ark. So how did they survive? As a matter of fact, most of them didn’t. Over 95 percent of all fossils are marine creatures. They died and are fossilized by the trillions. Many are buried in great fossil graveyards, tightly packed together, choked with sediments, buried before they had time to decay. Obviously, they didn’t live in the environment in which they died. They were transported by rapidly moving water and then buried in sedimentary deposits. But how could any at all have survived?

In the complex of events and conditions that made up the Flood, certainly there were pockets of fresh water at any one time. Remember, it was raining in torrents, and we can expect that the rain water was fairly fresh. Many studies have shown that waters of various temperatures, chemistries, and sediment loads do not tend to mix; they tend to remain segregated in zones. It would be unlikely for any one area to retain such zones for very long during the tumult of the Flood, but on a worldwide scale, some such segregated zones would have existed at any given time.

There is also the possibility that great amounts of vegetation were dislodged from the pre-Flood continents and remained intertwined as floating mats during the Flood. Many creationists feel that the decay and abrasion of these mats are responsible for our major coal seams, but underneath these mats the turbulence of the surface waters would have been lessened. Perhaps many fish found shelter and nutrition under them, as insects may have on the mats themselves.

We can see that there is at least a plausible answer that can be proposed to such questions. There is no reason for Christians to doubt the truth of the great Flood.

(excerpted from John D. Morris, Fish in the Flood, Acts & Facts May 2011, Institute for Creation Research)

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