The University of Leicester calculated how many watts it would take to open the Red Sea, and how many newtons to hold it all the time it takes to go from coast to coast, as in the biblical legend.
In the traditional New Year's Eve issue of the journal of the British University of Leicester Journal of Physics Special Topics, physics students analyze from the point of view of science a variety of phenomena familiar to us from books and films. In one of the articles titled Power for a Miracle, physicists turned to the biblical story of the passage of Moses and his flock across the Red Sea. According to the Old Testament, Moses waved his staff, a powerful wind rose, which raised the sea waters like a wall, creating a passage through which the Israelites could go to Egypt.
Physicists have calculated the amount of power it would take to do this. According to them, this is about 5.73 * 1013 watts. For comparison: the power of the rocket on takeoff is about five orders of magnitude less.
They also calculated how much force in newtons would be required to hold the water wall during the passage of the fugitives to the other side. That's 8.63 × 1012 Newtons. For comparison, air presses on each of us with a force of about 2 × 105 Newtons.
The exact place of transition, which is mentioned in the Bible, is still the subject of controversy among scholars. The authors of the work took the passage through the Strait of Aqaba as the main version. Modeling with Google Earth showed that the Israelis had to cross the distance of approximately 19.03 km. The depth of the sea in this place is from 70 to 205 meters. Based on this data, scientists were able to calculate how much power the wind would need to create a passage about 800 meters wide.
To understand how long the wind would have to keep the passage open for about 2.4 million people to pass, scientists took into account the average size of the human body, the minimum distance between people when walking and the average walking speed. In total, it would take 6.46 hours, the physicists calculated.
More details on the calculations can be found in the article in the Journal of Physics Special Topics.