I was on a hike and read a plaque that said this area used to be completely covered by water. My question is, where did all that water go? Just absorbed into the ground? Evaporated?
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If there were no mountains, valleys, hills or changes in elevation at all. If the entire crust was a perfect sphere, there would be enough water to cover it 1.68 miles deep. Even if you only include the oceans, it’s still 1.62 to 1.63 miles deep. So we’re very lucky that tectonic activity changes the landscape. Fissures can create volcanos, plates crashing into each other push up mountains, both will push water out of the way as they rise.
It also depends on how long ago we’re talking. If it’s Pangaea, that’s only like, a couple hundred million years ago. The atmosphere and climate aren’t going to be insanely far off from what they are right now, but a couple billion years ago, we’re talking proto-Earth where weather would have been unrecognizable. It started off super hot so there would have been an insane amount of water evaporated in the atmosphere. As it cooled down, that rain likely lasted for centuries. There would have been phenomenal flooding. Once the rains finally ceased, a more stable equilibrium could be found where evaporation rate more closely matches rain
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