Hmmm...I take the Bible as literal, and accept the biblical version of the flood, but the math doesn’t quite add up in this case.
If the surface of the earth is 3/4 covered by water, how can the remaining 1/4 contain enough underground water to fill the rest 3 times over?
Enough to cover the earth 1x? I’ll accept that...
Folks insist on looking for naturalistic explanations for the flood. If Genesis is to be read literally then God suspended His natural laws, performed a mighty miracle, then erased all signs of it.
“If the surface of the earth is 3/4 covered by water, how can the remaining 1/4 contain enough underground water to fill the rest 3 times over?”
There is ‘land’ at the bottom of the ocean. Watch Waterworld.
No one said anything about all of this chemically-bound water being located only beneath the "remaining 1/4" of the Earth's surface (i.e. only under the continents, aka "dry land").
Rather, the Earth's mantle - which is hundreds of miles thick (as opposed to the oceans, which are at most 6 miles deep), and which is located beneath the oceans and the continents - contains so much chemically-bound water that it could (if somehow chemically unbound and transported to the surface) cover the Earth in, say, 20 miles of water.
Regards,
Volume versus area - The oceans cover 3/4 of the earth’s surface area. They don’t comprise 3/4 of the earth’s total volume.
The volume of the sphere beneath the deepest part of our oceans is many times larger than that needed to contain 3 times the volume of those oceans.